What follows is a series of excerpts forming a narrative from Winston Groom's superlative book 1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls that brings to life the unfolding scene on that dark day at sunny Pearl Harbor from so long ago.
In the middle of all this a stirring spectacle unfolded. The USS Nevada, whose crew at the beginning of the attack had stood at attention while “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played and they were being bombed and machine-gunned, had somehow raised enough steam to get underway – the only big ship that did so. Her senior officers were all ashore but there was an experienced reserve officer aboard, Lieutenant Commander Francis Thomas, who took charge. He knew next to nothing about handling anything as big as a battleship but Chief Quartermaster Robert Sedberry did and by some miracle, or a series of them (it normally took four tugboats to free a battleship from a mooring and set her straight in the channel), the Nevada came on, so as not to remain a sitting duck for the Japanese. She was seriously afire amidships and had a hole blown into her bow the size of a house, but out of the smoke and flames and crash and gloom of the battle she emerged into the bright morning sun full speed ahead, her American flag snapping in the breeze. Men onshore stopped whatever they were doing and gaped at this sight to behold. Many wept tears down their grimy, oil-stained cheeks and a great cheer arose all along Battleship Row, for to see the Nevada headed for the open sea, all her guns blazing at the Japanese planes, meant there was still a fighting U.S. Navy left in the Pacific.
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Commander Fuchida’s dive-bombers had already climbed high in the sky for altitude while his torpedo bombers had descended and circled so as to come in low from the southwest, that is, the ocean side of Pearl Harbor. The American battleships were moored in line two by two alongside Ford Island, which is in the center of the harbor. It was almost eight A.M., time for morning colors, and aboard the USS Nevada bandleader Oden McMillan had just raised his baton to begin playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Some of the bandsmen were puzzled to see large flights of planes diving down toward the battleships at the opposite end of the island, but McMillan concluded it must be some kind of army air corps drill and with a wave of his baton the band struck up the National Anthem. Almost in the same moment he heard explosions at the far end of Battleship Row.
One of Fuchida’s torpedo bombers skimmed across the harbor and launched its torpedo at the Arizona, just astern of the Nevada, as McMillan’s band was finishing the first stanza, then swooped up right over the Nevada’s fantail, where the American flag was being raised. The Japanese tail gunner let loose a burst of machine-gun fire on the musicians, who continued to play the anthem. No band members were hit, but the American flag was suddenly shredded. Other sailors on deck, momentarily confused, stood at attention, their right arms still raised in salute.
According to Walter Lord’s account of the attack, “McMillan knew now, but kept on conducting. The years of training had taken over – it never occurred to him that once he had begun playing the National Anthem, he could possibly stop. Another strafer flashed by. This time McMillan unconsciously paused as the deck splintered around him, but he quickly picked up the beat again. The entire band stopped and started again with him, as though they had rehearsed it for weeks. Not a man broke formation until the final note died. Then everyone ran wildly for cover.”
As the first torpedo bombers came in, some Pearl Harbor personnel waved at them before they realized who they were. Recreational fliers in small light planes out for an early Sunday spin were bewildered, then terrified, as they realized what these huge flights of foreign warplanes meant. Great geysers of water shot into the air as Fuchida’s torpedoes splashed into the harbor on their way toward the U.S. battleships. Meantime, at Wheeler and Hickam Fields and other U.S air bases, the American airplanes - lined up in rows per the anti-sabotage instructions of General Walter Short – were being systematically wrecked and turned into burning infernos on the runway.
All of this only took a few minutes. In his home in the hills overlooking Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, had been in the process of dressing for a golf game with his army counterpart, General Short. But by then the duty officer had phoned with the news of the destroyer Ward’s attack on the Japanese sub. Kimmel canceled the game and began redressing in his navy whites to attend to the situation from his office when the phone rang again with the frantic news that Pearl Harbor had just come under Japanese air attack. The admiral rushed outside, his uniform jacket still unbuttoned and flapping, just in time to see the first explosions. He dashed next door onto a neighbor’s lawn, which had a better view of Battleship Row. There he encountered Mrs. John B. Earle, wife of the Fourteenth Naval District’s commander’s chief of staff. The two of them gaped appalled at the unfolding spectacle. The sky was completely filled with Japanese planes and Kimmel instantly recognized this as no casual raid but a full-scale assault. The booms from the torpedo and bomb explosions began to reach their ears. Suddenly the battleship Oklahoma seemed to shudder and then slowly roll over in the shallow harbor until only its bottom was visible.
“It looks like they’ve got the Oklahoma,” Mrs. Earle remarked, awestruck.
“Yes, I see they have,” Kimmel told her, his face now a blanched mask of horror. He was experiencing a naval commander’s worst nightmare, as his fleet was being destroyed before his very eyes.
Then the battleship Arizona seemed actually to lift out of the water and an enormous flash of fire and smoke mushroomed above her forward decks; slowly she began to list and settle, and kept on settling. In that instant eleven hundred U.S. sailors perished. One of the big Japanese sixteen-inch naval shell bombs had hit the Arizona’s deck forward of the turrets and penetrated four decks below into the powder magazine. The ship blew up. The concussion was so stupendous that it blew sailors off of the other nearby ships into the water; it sucked up all the air in the area, actually stopping the engines of cars and military vehicles onshore rushing to or away from the scene; it blew people down inside of their own homes and offices, and even Fuchida, the Japanese air leader circling high above, felt his plane rock and roll. Battleship division commander Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and the Arizona’s skipper, Captain Franklin Van Valkenburg, had been standing on the bridge and were incinerated by the blast. Kimmel’s staff car roared up from nowhere and the stricken admiral jumped in and set off for his Pacific Fleet headquarters. By the time he got there the first wave of attack was reaching its most pitiless crescendo: bombs, torpedoes, and machine-gun fire from dive bombers and fighters filled the air; great billows of smoke from burning fuel oil obscured much of the harbor; and added to this was the constant roar of American anti-aircraft guns, which had finally begun coming to life.
Kimmel stood watching from the window of his War Plans office calm but grim-faced, with teeth clenched. Like the Oklahoma, the Arizona had gone down. The explosion had broken her in half. The battleships California and West Virginia had also begun to settle to the bottom. For the moment there was little Kimmel could do. The now famous message had already been dispatched to Washington and other naval commands: “Enemy Air Raid Pearl Harbor. This Is Not A Drill.” Suddenly a spent .30-caliber machine-gun bullet smashed through the window and hit Kimmel on the chest before dropping to the floor. The admiral looked at it, picked it up, and said to one of his staff members, “It would have been merciful if it had killed me.”
Aboard the sinking West Virginia, which had taken six or seven torpedoes in her port side, Captain Mervyn Bennion had been disemboweled by a shard from the Arizona when it exploded. He lay on the bridge perfectly conscious as his ship was gradually engulfed in fire, inquiring how the fight was going. At some point his officers decided to move him to a safer spot and for this agonizing task they recruited a large black cook, third class, named Doris Miller, who was the West Virginia’s heavyweight boxing champion. Captain Bennion died a short while later and Doris Miller, who knew nothing about weapons or weaponry, went out to a machine-gun station and in no time was “blazing away as though he had fired one all his life.”
Two young army fighter pilots, Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch, had planned to spend their Sunday at the beach. When they saw the runway wreckage at Wheeler Field they jumped into a car and rushed off to a little grass landing strip about ten miles away where there were a few P40 fighters parked. Soon they were in the air and loaded for bear. Before it was over they racked up seven of the eleven Japanese planes shot down that day by the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Among the most startled people that morning – and that included everyone – were the pilots and crews of the big four-engine B-17 bombers who arrived at Pearl Harbor at the height of the attack. The twelve planes had flown fourteen hours straight from the West Coast with skeleton crews, their machine guns still packed in Cosmoline, listening to the soothing Hawaiian music on the radio guiding them in. They had just about enough gas to make land when they arrived on the scene of the carnage. Japanese fighters, whom the crews first thought were U.S. Army planes, suddenly attacked them. Hickam Field, their designated landing spot, was mostly ablaze with burning aircraft. One B-17 somehow made a landing with three Japanese Zeros on his tail, blazing away at him. Others followed but the rest scattered for the other airfields on Oahu. One managed to land on a golf course, another on a twelve-hundred-foot grass strip half the size of what it took to safely land a B-17.
At 8:40, a half an hour after the attack had begun, there was a fifteen minute lull, and then the second wave of 153 Japanese planes arrived. Pearl Harbor was so enshrouded in smoke by then that it was difficult to find targets, so many Japanese amused themselves by shooting up anything and everything. They strafed private homes, churches, hospitals, mess halls, groups of men, and, for target practice, speeding automobiles and trucks. One army ambulance received fifty-two bullet holes. What the Japanese did not do – and in hindsight this was one of the few blessings of the Pearl Harbor raid – was to destroy the huge fuel-storage tanks containing millions of gallons of precious fuel oil; nor did they destroy the vast naval repair shops and facilities. This oversight allowed the United States military to go on the offensive almost immediately after the attack.
