Twomey - Countdown to pearl harbor: the crucial days before the attack

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2016 by Steve Twomey

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7646-0

ISBN 978-1-4767-7650-7 (ebook)

For Kathleen and Nick

S EVENTY-FIVE YEARS ON, the main actors in this drama are gone. Writing about what they did, and especially what they thought, is therefore a challenge, at least to a journalist who is used to simply asking participants to explain an event. But the attack on Pearl Harbor led to nine official inquiries, big and small, in five years. The resulting thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits form the spine of this book, along with memoirs, oral histories, and personal papers of the participants. The overwhelming majority of quotations are from those primary sources.

Even so, sometimes the civilian or military leaders involved in a conversation or a moment recollected it differently, and sometimes the same person offered varying versions of what he did, said, or thought. When conflicts arose, it seemed logical to weigh the evidence based on whose reputation had the most to gain or lose, and to rely on recollections given soon after the attack, rather than those from several years later.

Finally, this book is not offered as an exhaustive account. Numerous aspects of the attack that preoccupied investigators then, and fascinate some aficionados now, are barely explored, if at all. The focus is, instead, on the core narrative of a day with almost no equal in American history.

Sunday, 7:02 a.m.

T HE DAWN WATCH had been as pacific as the ocean at their feet.

Rousted by an alarm clock, they had awakened in their tent at 3:45 in the caressing warmth of an Oahu night, and had gotten the device fired up and scanning thirty minutes later, a bit tardy by the army schedule. Privates George E. Elliott Jr. and Joseph L. Lockard might have described the tall, spindly gizmo as resembling an oversize rooftop television antenna, if anybody had had a TV then. Radar in its infancy was quirky looking and far from what it would become, but the privates could still spot things farther out than anyone ever had with mere binoculars or a telescope.

Half a dozen mobile unitsgenerator truck, monitoring truck, antenna, and trailerhad been scattered around the island in recent weeks. George and Joes, the most reliable of the bunch, was emplaced farthest north, almost as far north as you can go on Oahu. It sat at Opana, 532 feet above a coast whose waves were enticing enough to surf, which is what many a tourist would do there in years to come. Between the privates and Alaska, two thousand miles away, was nothing but wavy liquid, a place of few shipping lanes and no islands at all. If, for some reason, a ship or a fleet of them ever wished to be alone in the Pacific, it stood a good chance of succeeding in that great void. An army general liked to call it the vacant sea.

The order of the day for the two privates was to keep vandals and the curious away from the equipment during a twenty-four-hour shift and, from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., to sit inside the monitoring van as the antenna scanned for planes. George and Joe had no idea why that window of time was significant, if it was. Nobody had said. No fears of invasion or air raid had been conveyed. Between them, they had a couple of .45-caliber pistols and a handful of bullets. The United States had not been at war during their entire lifetimes, not since November 11, 1918, the day the Great War ended. Besides, Hawaii seemed such a peaceful place to be stationed. The local monthly, Paradise of the Pacific , boasted in its most recent issue that here life is lived as it was meant to be lived, happily, close to flowers and warm surf. Hawaii was a world of happiness in an ocean of peace, it proclaimed. No, the higher-ups had not put George and Joe out there for vigilance. There had been no briefing about tense world events and likely war scenarios. They had put them out there strictly for self-improvement.

I mean, it was more practice than anything else, George said. Often with the coming of first light and then into the morning, army and navy planes would rise from inland bases to train or scout. The mobile crews would detect them, plot their locations, and get better at using the new devices, so they would be ready for war when it came. There was a sergeant, George said, that used to roll us out in the morning by saying, Get up and get out! The Japs are coming! and every once in a while, why, someone [else] would say, The Japs are coming. But it was all in a joking manner.

Joe, who was nineteen and from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was in charge of the Opana station that morning, and worked the oscilloscope. George, who was twenty-three and had joined the army in Chicago, plotted any contacts on a map overlay and entered them in a log, and wore a headset connecting the duo to the other side, the populous side, of the island. Army headquarters was down there, about thirty miles to the southeast, past waves and waves of swaying sugarcane, past fields of pineapple that yielded fifteen million cases of fruit and juice a year, and between the jagged volcanic ranges of Waianae and Koolau, every inch of Oahus six hundred square miles so exotic and alluring to anyone born on the mainland. The naval base at Pearl Harbor was down there, too.

George and Joe had detected nothing ominous during the early-morning scan; only the occasional friendly craft. It was, after all, a Sunday. Their duty done, George, who was new to the unit, took over the oscilloscope for a few minutes of time-killing practice. The truck that would shuttle them to breakfast would be along soon. As George checked the scope, Joe passed along wisdom about operating it. He was looking over my shoulder and could see it also, George said.

On their machine, a contact did not show up as a glowing blip in the wake of a sweeping arm on a screen, but as a spike rising from a baseline on the five-inch oscilloscope, like a heartbeat on a monitor. If George had not wanted to practice, the set might have been turned off. If it had been turned off, the screen could not have spiked.

Now it did.

Their device had no ability to tell its operators precisely how many planes the antenna was sensing, or if they were American or military or civilian. But the height of a spike gave a rough indication of the number of aircraft. And this spike did not suggest two or three, but an astonishing number, fifty maybe, or even more. It was the largest group I had ever seen on the oscilloscope, Joe said. It was, George said, very big and it was very noticeable and it was just something out of the ordinary.