Sunday in Hell, page 69
POINDEXTER15
The president, who, under the circumstance, gave his verbal approval on the phone, later that day asked the U.S. Attorney General, Francis Biddle, for his legal opinion regarding Governor Poindexter’s action. On 9 December the attorney general responded after reviewing and quoting the pertinent paragraphs in the statutes, stating in the final paragraph of the letter, “I believe that the action taken is appropriate…”16
The declaration of martial law, still a controversial subject to this day, was believed by many to have been made without the president’s knowing the full implications of the decision and his approval. Specifically, author Gwenfread Allen, in the book Hawaii’s War Years, 1941-45, stated on page 36:
The governor, in accordance with law, notified the president by radio that he had declared martial law and suspended the right of habeas corpus. President Roosevelt radioed his approval on December 9. (But the governor said nothing in his message about the Army assuming judicial functions, and copies of the controversial proclamations evidently were not sent to Washington until 1943. It is doubtful whether the president saw them, even then.) [Emphasis added.]
While President Roosevelt might not have seen the copies of the proclamations, he was clearly made aware that martial law included the military governor’s assumption of the Territory’s judicial function. Attorney General Biddle’s 9 December opinion, addressed to the president and sent to the White House along with the proposed message reply to Governor Poindexter, stated in the next to last paragraph:
I am advised that a Military Governor and an Associate Military Governor have been appointed; that all civil courts have been suspended until further notice; that a Commission to advise the Military Governor, consisting of Governor Poindexter, the Territorial Attorney General, the Mayor of Honolulu, and a prominent businessman, has been designated; and that the United States Attorney and a member of the Provost Marshall’s staff have been designated military prosecutors.
The president initialed “O.K. FDR” below the attorney general’s signature block, and on 9 December the message formally approving the governor’s action was dispatched at 4:02 p.m. by U.S. Government cable:
HONORABLE JOSEPH B. POINDEXTER,
GOVERNOR, TERRITORY OF HAWAII,
HONOLULU, HAWAII.
YOUR TELEGRAM OF DECEMBER SEVENTH RECEIVED AND YOUR ACTION IN SUSPENDING THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS AND PLACING THE TERRITORY OF HAWAII UNDER MARTIAL LAW IN ACCORDANCE WITH U.S.C., TITLE 48, SECTION 532 HAS MY APPROVAL.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Again, before the message was dispatched, the president wrote his initials, “FDR”, enclosed in quotation marks, next to his name.
On the same day, Attorney General Biddle sent a memorandum to President Roosevelt, with an accompanying draft censorship bill, proposed to be sent to Congress. The draft bill was in response to direction from the president to Mr. Biddle a month earlier to form a committee “to consider War Censorship and make an appropriate recommendation to you.”17
As a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor censorship in Hawaii was already in effect, as Governor Poindexter and the Territory Secretary learned when the governor placed his call to President Roosevelt. Censorship was just one of many martial law ordinances proscribed on Oahu and throughout Hawaii on 7 December. One of General Short’s priorities for action was saboteurs, and their potential for aiding possible landings of Japanese troops.
Potential Saboteurs Taken Into Custody
At noon the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu was placed under guard. Breakfast was served at the Consulate at 8:30 a.m., and the Consul-General was still unaware of the attack. In At Dawn We Slept, Gordon Prange recorded what happened at the Consulate that morning:
One of the Star-Bulletin’s reporters of Japanese ancestry “begged…to be allowed to go out on the street and cover the news.” Riley H. Allen, the editor, feared the young man “might be shot or locked up.” Then Allen “finally decided that we would send him out to the Japanese consul and bring back what news he might find there.” This reporter was probably Lawrence Nakatska, who dropped by the consulate that morning in search of a story.
Like so many others on Oahu, the consulate’s members had anticipated a leisurely Sunday. [Consul General Nagao] Kita and [and his deputy Otojiro] Okuda had an engagement to play golf with a friend. At about 9:00 [native Hawaiian guide and chauffer Richard Masayuki] Kotoshirodo, hearing the distant thundering, walked the short distance from his abode to the consulate “to find out what all the commotion was about.” He discovered Kita, Okuda, and others of the staff already assembled, looking worried. [Takeo] Yoshikawa, [a trained intelligence officer who was Japan’s top spy in Hawaii], appeared shortly, in shirt sleeves, hair mussed and clothes wrinkled. He remarked that it was a “noisy morning.” He wanted to go up to the heights to see what was happening, but Kita forbade him to leave.
Kita refused to admit to [the reporter] Nakatsuka that a Japanese attack was in progress, let alone make a statement about it. The reporter hurried back to his office for a copy of the day’s extra and brought it to Kita as evidence. The blazing headline WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES was Yoshikawa’s signal for action. He and [Sainon] Tsukikawa [the secretary of the code room], dashed for the code room, where they began to burn material furiously.
After leaving [General] Short’s headquarters, [Lieutenant Colonel George W. Bicknell, [the Hawaiian Department’s chief intelligence investigative officer], arrived at his office downtown, where he found his people issuing ammunition and small arms. [Robert L.] Shivers, [the head of the FBI office in Hawaii], was there, astonished and “scared all the way through,” like almost everyone else. He and Bicknell wanted to pick up Japanese suspects immediately but were unable to do so because the provost marshall could not provide the necessary trucks and MP guards. This delayed the plan for several hours. “Bob Shivers and I were running around like two wild Indian dogs,” Bicknell recalled.
At about 1000 or 1100 Shivers asked Police Chief Gabrielson to put a guard around the consulate “for the protection of the consul general and the members of his staff and the consular property.” Gabrielson turned the assignement over to Captain of Dectectives Benjamin Van Kuren and Lieutenant Yoshio Hasegawa. When they and a few colleagues arrived at the consulate, they found uniformed police officers with sawed-off shotguns already on guard. Kita stood in the driveway at the rear of the building, holding the Star-Bulletin extra.
Van Kuren and his men trooped in through the back entrance. In the code room the police “found a wash tub on the floor” in which the Japanese were burning documents. The police also salvaged a brown “bellows type envelope” full of undestroyed papers. They brought their find to the FBI, which in turn gave it to Naval Intelligence…to work on.18
The police seized five burlap sacks of torn papers, plus the envelope of untorn papers.
The consul, finally convinced of the attack, gave his last newspaper interview in Hawaii just before the guards were posted. He warned Japanese residents to be calm and law abiding.19
Immediately after martial law was declared, Army Intelligence, assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and police began arresting residents considered dangerous. Because one third of the total population in the Islands was of Japanese ancestry, internal security in case of war with Japan had long been a matter of official concern. Cards had been prepared with the names and addresses of Japanese suspects, and were divided among thirteen squads of officers. Within three hours after the declaration of martial law, nearly all the Japanese suspects considered most dangerous were in custody at the Immigration station.20
There would be more taken into custody the next day, as security agencies, augmented with additional volunteers, expanded the net to include Caucasian suspects - practically every German and Italian alien in Hawaii, with the exception of the aged and infirm. Members of the San Jose State football team volunteered to assist police, and several participated in arresting Japanese aliens. A San Francisco member of the San Jose squad, a former Lowell High School player, Hans Wiedenhoefer, told of working with the police.
Next day we joined the police force, were given steel helmets, arm bands and riot guns, and assigned to various police posts for eight hour shifts along with regular members of the force. I was working with a Hawaiian policeman when we got a call to raid a place which had a powerful short wave radio set in it. It was pitch dark, there wasn’t a light and you couldn’t see the front of your nose.
We closed in and found the radio equipment all right but four fellows we were supposed to nab weren’t there. Apparently, two of them had been tipped off because we found a note from them warning the other two to beat it.
The Hawaiian policeman told me I had better stay there and keep watch and then he left me. For a few minutes my knees knocked pretty hard, and when I heard somebody fooling around a window in the next room I just rushed in there, aimed and took a shot.
He said he couldn’t tell whether he hit the target but he said it felt pretty good to see several policeman come rushing up after he fired. Later, Wiedenhoefer and Gray McConnell, in company with a regular policeman, made four arrests.21
By the end of the day on 8 December, 482 persons were in custody on Oahu - 370 Japanese, ninety-eight Germans, and fourteen Italians.22
Evacuations to Safer Areas - The Prelude to Seaborne Evacuations
Before the attack was over, many women and children rushed in automobiles from military installations to the comparative safety of Honolulu. Throughout the day and night, trucks and busses of the evacuation committee of the Major Disaster Council moved others from Army posts and from nearby civilian areas. At 1730 hours the 25th Infantry Division Artillery commander ordered area commanders to prepare all families for evacuation from Schofield Barracks to Honolulu, that trucks were on the way.23 About 4,000 evacuees were housed at Hemenway Hall at the University of Hawaii and at ten public schools designated by the evacuation committee, while some evacuees moved in with friends. At Waipahu, 500 hundred crowded plantation club houses, the Hongwanji School, and public schools, while 100 were taken in to private homes. A total of 2,100 volunteers, including many public health nurses, social workers, teachers, Red Cross aides, and recreation workers, assisted in the evacuation.24
The field commanders at Hickam and Wheeler, Colonels Farthing and Flood, had all women and children evacuated. Some had already departed on their own in private automobiles seeking the comparative safety of Honolulu or other outlying areas. At Hickam a loud speaker blared, “Get all women and children off the base.” Ira Southern and others helped search the houses and found women and children under beds, outside, or already preparing to leave. They boarded Honolulu Rapid Transit Company busses and trucks provided by the evacuation committee of the Major Disaster Council. Some evacuees moved in with friends. The remainder stayed at the University of Hawaii’s Hemenway Hall, at public schools designated by the evacuation committee, in private homes of families who had volunteered to house them, and at other places such as plantation clubhouses and Hongwanji School in Waipahu.25
John M. Sardis, a civil engineer who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, and his wife Sherry, lived in a housing area near Hickam Field. The terrible destruction at Hickam and in Pearl Harbor brought them fear, rumor and great uncertainty. The military informed them they had to evacuate to a safer area the afternoon following the attack. They took a few personal belongings and went to Kamehameha School in a convoy of private automobiles, escorted by the military. On arriving at the school they settled into a boys’ dormitory room and John was sent back to work to begin inspecting damage on Hickam. Rumors were immediately pervasive, the first one being “Japanese paratroopers had landed.”
On Monday following the attack, they were permitted to write messages to families on the mainland to inform them “we were OK.”
One oddity which struck John when he began assessing damage at Hickam, was the Japanese had repeatedly dive bombed the baseball field adjoining the Fire Station - a matter of considerable curiosity. John was certain the Japanese believed that an underground fuel storage area lay beneath the baseball field. He knew plans had originally been to locate the tanks there, but were finally installed elsewhere on the airfield. He was equally certain Japanese agents had been active on Hickam, and events later proved him correct. A map of Hickam was found on the body of a Japanese pilot, and it indicated the fuel storage area was underground, beneath the baseball field.
Sherry and John stayed at the school approximately two weeks. Husbands went to work each day. The wives asked to do volunteer work with the Red Cross. They were told the Red Cross had run out of bandages, and the wives received instructions on what size to cut up sheets to use as bandages for the wounded. They didn’t use the phones, and generally stayed in doors at night - blacked out. John’s movement by car at night was limited, and he drove the first night with a piece of blue cellophane covering the top half of each headlight. Afterward, consistent with martial law orders, he painted both headlights blue, except for a small horizontal slit across the middle of each one.
All entertainment stopped, schools were ordered closed until further notice, school seniors and juniors patrolled the school grounds without arms, patrols were everywhere, and military convoys were on the streets every day, moving troops back and forth. During that two weeks Sherry was asked if she wanted to be evacuated to the mainland, and she politely refused telling them “No, she wanted to stay on the island and support her husband and the war effort as long as he worked there.”
At the end of the two weeks, they were permitted to return to their house. The military had appropriated their quarters but took them back to move their personal belongings to another set of quarters. In spite of it all, she remembered the experience as one of close cooperation, working together, and the strong feeling of doing something important for her country.26
Approximately 2:00 p.m. the Red Cross came to the officer’s quarters of Lieutenant Robert Littmann, the communications officer on the Oglala, which had capsized that morning. Lieutenant Littmann, having seen he could do nothing when he arrived at the dock where Oglala lay, went toward the Naval hospital where he had seen a Japanese airplane crash. While he was gone, the Red Cross came to evacuate his wife, son, daughter Peggy, and Peggy’s aunt and her family, by school bus, from their officers’ quarters to the Honolulu YMCA.
When they arrived, the YMCA was bedlam. Swarming with wives and small children, many deeply worried about their husbands’ and fathers’ safety, they wondered what would happen to them after being uprooted from their homes and taken to an unfamiliar location. After about two hours, Peggy’s father came to the YMCA to take the family home. Women anxiously gathered around him, asking about their husbands. There was little he could tell them. When his family returned to their quarters, they covered the windows with tar paper to black them out, and he painted the car headlights with blue lacquer. It would be February before Peggy, her mother and brother would return to the mainland.27
At Schofield Barracks, the Army surgeon, Dr. Leonard Heaton, entered additional recollections in his diary for the long, tortuous day of 7 December:
…I got Sara Dudley [his seven year-old daughter] to the hospital in the morning -the only place for her because all the women and children were being corralled in the 19th Infantry barracks and she was sick. I checked on them and they were comfortably situated in Ward 16. We heard various rumors from time to time thru the day, i.e., two Jap carriers sunk, 15 Jap troop transports off Barbers Point, etc. A confusion of ideas and statements. I was awfully tired having operated straight thru all day…
And in his 8 December entry, he referred to the evacuation of families from Schofield Barracks, logged in the 25th Division Journal, “…All the women were taken to Honolulu during the night…”28
Troops on the Move
Hawaii’s presumed impregnability had vanished in two hellish hours. The inability to locate and counterattack the Japanese strike fleet heightened fears of another air raid and a follow-on landing of troops. Having severely crippled American air and naval forces in Hawaii, not only had the Japanese Navy stripped away the islands’ aura of impregnability, they created a new strategic equation that reverberated to the highest levels of the American military establishment and government. Both the Hawaiian Islands and the mainland’s west coast could possibly be in the Japanese crosshairs.
The Japanese onslaught of 7 December almost severed the American lifeline to the Philippines, which, along with Wake, Guam and Midway Islands came under attack the same day. The lines of communication to Australia were also in jeopardy. To complicate the problem handed the Americans, the Japanese Navy ringed Oahu with submarines, moved submarines across the sea lanes from Hawaii close in to the west coast, placing nine on patrol near key harbor entrances. A by-product of the attack was near-frenzied war hysteria that was absent sufficient facts and filled with rumors, which swept the mainland, and particularly gripped the west coast. The reaction was amplified by the military’s release of unconfirmed reports and rumors, and the news media’s unwitting, yet sometimes questioning complicity in the same practice.
As a follow-up to the defenders’ stinging losses, had the Japanese launched a successful third strike, they could have done enormous strategic damage, far more than they achieved with the first and second wave. If they mustered enough force to strike the fuel storage tanks, docks, harbor repair facilities, and power generation plants, the United States’ lines of communication and supply to Australia and all other forward bases would have been more severely limited if not severed completely. If the enemy struck hard and did little else but destroy the storage tanks, an immediate fuel crisis would have occurred, at least temporarily forcing the entire Pacific Fleet back to the mainland’s west coast. There were no other significant sources of fuel oil in the islands.
