Short History Of... - Pearl Harbor, Part 2 of 3

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Chaos reigns in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While the true extent of the damage to personnel and fleet is still uncertain, those on the ground work tirelessly to help the wounded. But what is the response of those in charge? What are the stories of servicemen who face incredible odds to save their vessels, retaliate, or flee? And who were the people who risked their lives to save others?  This is episode 2 of a special 3-part Short History of Pearl Harbor. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Professor Phillips O’Brien, author of How The War Was Won; Dr Takuma Melber, author of Pearl Harbor; and Steve Twomey, author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor.  For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's December the 7th, 1941. A beautiful morning on Oahu, Hawaii. The island air smells salty and sweet, and the songbirds are in fine fettle. A pair of long-beaked iwis play outside the window of Admiral Husband Kimmel, the head of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. window of Admiral Husband Kimmel, the head of the US Pacific Fleet. Kimmel smiles as the little red birds settle on his flowers, giving peeps and shrieks of warning. It's nearly eight o'clock already. Kimmel needs to dress for golf. It's a Sunday, supposedly a day of rest, but his phone won't stop ringing. It rings again now and the songbirds take off in alarm. A voice on the line says something that makes no sense.

Pearl Harbor is under attack. There is a long silence. Kimmel looks at the white admiral's uniform that's lying stiffly on his bed. It looks like the ghost of himself. The voice on the line says it again. Pearl Harbor is under attack, sir. Kimmel thanks the caller, puts down the phone, gets into the uniform. Still fastening his buttons, he goes outside onto the lawn.

The residence of the Pacific Fleet commander overlooks Pearl Harbor from a vantage point on the side of a hill. The sky is full of chaotic movement, as though a cloud of insects were buzzing around the port. But it's not a swarm. It's aircraft. Kimmel tracks one bomber as it peels away. He sees the emblem of a red sun, the symbol of the Japanese. Kimmel forgets to fasten his top button. Bombs fall and smoke rises. Water spouts from torpedoes. One of his battleships, spouts from torpedoes. One of his battleships, the USS Oklahoma, turns turtle and starts to sink. Soon, it's belly up in the shallow bay. Sometime later, his driver appears, offering, then insisting that Kimmel get into the car and come to fleet headquarters.

Kimmel follows obediently. They race down the hill towards the so-called submarine building, kerosene and soot thick in the air. From his office, Kimmel rouses himself to action, dispatching warnings to his ships at sea. But soon he's redundant again. Standing at the window in his starched white uniform. He sees a reflection of himself, imposing and pristine and detached, while his men are down in the harbour, screaming and fighting and burning. The bay is shrouded in smoke, and Kimmel has no idea how many of his ships, and more importantly his crew,

are left standing. He cannot watch anymore, but he stands at the window anyway. His mind is elsewhere. He is already answering his accusers. How could the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor? They can't. How can they use torpedoes at Pearl Harbor? They can't. How can you say Pearl Harbor is a safe haven when it's being attacked right in front of your eyes? I can't. None of this is possible, and yet it is happening, and Kimmel can only watch. Then there is a crack and a ping, and Kimmel feels a dull pain in his chest. He puts one hand to his heart. When he lifts it away, he sees a black smudge on his white jacket. A.50 caliber bullet lies on the ground. One of the men, he hardly notices who, of a bullet lies on the ground. One of the men, he hardly notices who, bends down and picks it up.

The man asks if he's alright, and that's when Kimmel realizes that he's been shot. A stray bullet. He recognizes it at once as one of their own, must have arced through the air and, when it had almost run out of velocity, smashed through the window of fleet headquarters and hit the Admiral square in the chest. Kimmel slides his fingers under the stiff material of his jacket and shirt. His chest, right under the spot where his medals are attached, feels a little tender. But the bullet didn't even break the skin Everyone in the command room agrees that it was a lucky escape

But Kimmel disagrees The USS Oklahoma is gone The West Virginia is hit The California burns Even the water is on fire Everywhere Kimmel looks, his men are dead, dying, fighting, and he can only watch. Later Kimmel will say he wished that the bullet had killed him right there and then, in the submarine building, looking down over Pearl Harbour. down of the Pearl Harbor. My name is Paul McGann, and this is part two of a special three-part short history of Pearl

Harbor. It's November the 27th, ten days until the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the submarine building overlooking the port, a message arrives from Washington. This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. Stop. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. Stop. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment. With a few days' warning, there is plenty of time to execute a defensive deployment. But the dispatch is placed into the hands of Admiral Husband Kimmel, the head of the US Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor.

Professor Phillips O'Brien is the author of several books on World War II, including How the War Was Won. You know, Kimmel now, of course, is terribly controversial. Going into the war, he is one of the stars of the U.S. fleet. Kimmel is one of the most successful officers of his generation. He has what is the premier possible combat command in the United States, which is the commander of the U.S. Pacific War. So you don't rise to that point, one, without being politically astute, but also considered to be quite good at your job. He, I think, is quite confident in himself, and that might be one of the problems. Steve Toomey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

and author of the book Countdown to Pearl Harbor. He was a very aggressive commander. He wanted to be aggressive and go after the enemy, which I think it was his downfall here at Pearl Harbor because he was so focused on going out to attack as soon as the war began, and he knew war was coming, that he put as a secondary priority defending himself. But he made a lot of decisions that were based on taking a piece of information and putting the best possible interpretation on it. For example, on November 27th, the Navy Department sent what may be one of the two or three most memorable messages in American naval history, which was this message is to be considered a war warning.

No sentence like that had ever been written in American history, alerting all the commands in the Pacific. Kimmel got this message. It said, watch out, war is going to happen. And you are to execute an appropriate defensive deployment, which I think to any reasonable person says, protect yourself. You need to be ready. Kimmel interpreted that as prepare to take the offensive, prepare to go after the enemy. As messages came in over the next 10 days, he did that frequently with information. He glossed them in a very pleasant way.

The war warning dispatch comes towards the end of a tense year. Relations between America and Japan have been so fraught that a large portion of the U.S. fleet is being stationed at Pearl Harbor in order to effectively police the Pacific. One of the reasons that Pearl Harbor might have been beyond Kimmel's expectations or something Kimmel hadn't fully thought is that Pearl Harbor is a brilliant base. It's an extraordinarily fortuitous base for the United States to have because it takes Pearl Harbor in the sense that it's a very large body of water, deep water. So it absolutely dominates what we can call as the Eastern Pacific, and there's no other base anywhere near the size and scope of Pearl Harbor,

which is why it had become so important. As diplomatic tensions continue to rise, there has been a steady drip of warnings to bases all over the Pacific, including Hawaii. There has been a steady drip of warnings to bases all over the Pacific, including Hawaii. Kimmel perhaps has become acclimatized to the cooling relations between Washington and Tokyo. He comments that if he sent out reconnaissance planes every time he got an alert, he'd have no aircraft left to fight the war. Some of this had to do with the correct usage of his airplanes. He didn't want to use them for reconnaissance.

He wanted them ready to go after the Japanese once the war broke out. It was later, I think, generally agreed that his greatest mistake was not conducting aerial reconnaissance to see what's coming. Admiral Kimmel receives numerous alerts like the infamous war warning. Each dispatch is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but he never puts them together to see the big picture. He learns on December 1st that Japanese consulates around the world are burning secret documents and destroying encryption machines. He assumes this is because Tokyo fears an attack, not because it is about to launch one. He knows on December 2nd

that Japanese naval commanders have changed the call signs of its ships twice in a month. He assumes the Japanese are tightening security, not hiding the true location of its fleet. He knows by the end of the day on December 2nd that his chief intelligence officer cannot trace the radio signals of four enemy ships. These aircraft carriers are now lost. Kimmel assumes the Akagi and the other lost ships must be moored in the Japanese inland sea,

where they are out of range of his trackers. Kimmel does not consider that they could be steaming across the Pacific on radio silence, straight towards Pearl Harbor. One of the lost boats is the Akagi, the ship on which a man named Commander Fushida is making final preparations for his aerial assault. Fushida is making final preparations for his aerial assault. It's four o'clock in the morning on December the 7th, the day of the attack. The USS Ward, an American destroyer, is on patrol to the south of the island.

Its commander is a man named Lieutenant William Outerbridge. He receives a message from two minesweepers who report seeing a periscope poking out of the water. A submarine. They pursue it, but eventually stand down when there are no further sightings. At 6.30am, the USS Ward receives another message. The submarine has been spotted again, only this time it's trying to slip inside the mouth of Pearl Harbor by hiding in the wake of a maintenance ship called the USS Antares that is going into port. Now, Lieutenant Outerbridge goes hunting for the sub. They detect a submersible, and he orders his crew to drop depth charges.

Outerbridge never gets a visual on the target, but when a slick of oil floats to the surface, he knows something was creeping around the entrance to Pearl Harbor. He thinks it may be a Japanese midget sub. At once he calls it in. It takes a while for the message to be decoded by operators on Oahu, but finally, the information reaches the residence of Admiral Kimmel. At 7.30am on December 7th, Kimmel still thinks his day will be dominated by golf, not infamy. When the news of the midget submarine is relayed to him, he shrugs it off. He doesn't believe that a Japanese submarine could come knocking at his front door.

He gets a number of warnings on the day of Pearl Harbor. Most famously, one that we know gets to him when a Japanese midget submarine is seen on the entrance to Pearl Harbor near Oahu on Oahu Island, that there are Japanese forces operating in the region. And he just seems to brush it off as if this isn't that important. Maybe it's a small intelligence gathering operation. So, and again, because it doesn't fit into his pre-existing mindset that an attack on Pearl Harbor is very unlikely to occur. They knew that war was coming. And that has always fascinated me, how you could know so much and still be caught by surprise.

Despite the news about the suspected Japanese submarine, no one sounds the alarm at Pearl Harbor. But the military failings run deeper than Kimmel's own complacency. There's a problem in all military planning called mirror imaging. Mirror imaging is the assumption that the enemy is a reflection of your abilities. If you can't do something, he can't do something. Why? Well, because we're really smart. We're really capable. And if we can't figure out how to do it, they can't either. And so you measure the enemy's capabilities by your own. And that's a dangerous thing to do because it negates the possibility that the enemy is more innovative than you are

and is more strategically aware than you are. And so the U.S. had a thought about, could we ever attack Japan from the sea with a surprise fleet? And the answer was, no, we couldn't sail that far. And if we can't do it, they can't do it. Working into this was this belief that they're not a very skilled group of people. They believe the Japanese are not skilled enough,

not technical enough, not technical enough, not advanced enough. That is the conviction in Washington and at fleet headquarters in Hawaii. But this prejudice is about to go up in smoke. People often think that the United States was sort of minding its business on a Sunday and watching American football games. And then all of a sudden this thing comes out of nowhere and we're in the war. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But everyone, from Roosevelt in the White House to Kimmel in the submarine building, thinks that the first engagement will be in Southeast Asia, most probably the Philippines.

will be in Southeast Asia, most probably the Philippines. In fact, the Japanese have spent the past 12 days engaged in a complex stealth operation to move the largest fleet of aircraft carriers ever amassed, 3,000 miles into the middle of the Pacific. The Japanese deception operations in getting to Pearl Harbor are extraordinarily successful. The Japanese are doing something that no one has attempted before in terms of distance. Japanese deception operations and getting to Pearl Harbor are extraordinarily successful. The Japanese are doing something that no one has attempted before in terms of distance and massive operation. They dispatch their aircraft carriers from Japan days in advance and they emerge, however,

right into the right place. They get into position late on the evening of December 6th. Now, in some ways, of course, we think about Pearl Harbor as this big battle. But what's interesting is the Japanese, they only have 350 aircraft. That sounds like a lot of aircraft, but actually by the Second World War standards, it's a really small number of aircraft. They have 40 torpedo planes among these. As well as the encounter with the Japanese midget submarine, there is also an incident when two junior radar operators spot the incoming Japanese aircraft and alert their superiors. But they are told not to worry about it.

The Americans assume it's a squadron of their own B-17s coming in from the mainland. But it's not. It's 183 Japanese bombers and fighter planes, about to launch a surprise attack. Everyone knows the Pacific Fleet will soon be going to war, but they never consider that the war might soon be coming to them. It's December 7th, 1941. A calm Sunday morning on Oahu. For the American servicemen, the attack on Pearl Harbor comes, quite literally, out of the blue. Those on deck might have heard something.

They might have looked up and seen these aircraft approaching and said, that doesn't look right, why are all the aircraft? approaching and said, that doesn't look right. Why are all the aircraft? The average soldier or sailor would have only heard something when certainly the first explosions occurred. Then once they started exploding, then it becomes a crescendo. So the Pearl Harbor goes from a very quiet Sunday morning to chaos in just a matter of minutes. The attack starts at 7.55 a.m. The attack starts at 7.55 a.m. One of Kimmel's men is Frank Emmond, a musician who played the French horn for the military band aboard the USS Pennsylvania.

He saw events unfold. In our group of battleships, it was our turn to play morning colors. We were in the dry dock and we were overlooking the whole harbor and it was a beautiful morning. Five minutes to eight, we saw a line of planes come in and drop something. I thought maybe some of the tail had come off or something. So I watched it until it hit a hangar over on the air station. And that exploded up in the flames and smoke.

Saw the big red spots on the fuselage of the airplanes so immediately it dawned on us that the japanese were there kimmel arrives on the scene after the bombing is underway but he quickly understands the scale of the attack torpedo bombers roar past the submarine building and drop their weapons on the port pearl harbor's opening is to the south of Oahu, so they're not actually coming, what you might say, directly towards the opening of Pearl Harbor, they're coming from behind it. They're coming from north of Pearl Harbor, from the side of Oahu that is the less developed side. The really developed side of Oahu is the south side of the island where the entrance to Pearl Harbor is. They're coming on the north side of the island.

You might say the quieter side of the island or the less developed side of the island. The Americans are not ready and they go in and they go in in waves. And it's a very extraordinarily well-planned attack that you have four different kinds of aircraft doing four quite different things. And it's quite complex, too. So the torpedo planes go in early. They do their attacks. The dive bombers then come down on the battleships while the torpedoes are going in. And then you have the horizontal bombers, as they're called, the sort of ones attacking

naval vessels and attacking the airstrips in the plane. they're called. They're sort of ones attacking naval vessels and attacking the airstrips in the plane. So you have these sort of the different flights all doing quite different things, really quite extraordinarily well coordinated, considering it's a very short period of time. In the first five minutes alone, before it's even turned 8am, four of Kimmel's battleships are hit. Three torpedoes leave the USS California with gaping holes. A handful of bombs strike the West Virginia, which lists to her port side. The Oklahoma rolls belly up within minutes. One torpedo hits the Nevada, but sailors react quickly to cut it free from its mooring.

The Nevada will not go down without a fight. In many cases, ships are lined up two by two at Ford Island, in the center of Pearl Harbor, along what is known as Battleship Row. But this arrangement means that when one ship takes a hit and starts to list or sink, it drags its partner down with it. The first wave of Japanese aircraft drop bombs elsewhere on Oahu, on the airfields, and even on the town of Honolulu. can't be sure whether you've destroyed all the battleships. The other things you're sort of doing in order, once you take the battleships out of commission, the other things you want to do is, one, make sure that no American aircraft can get up to intercept you when the second wave comes, because you know if you're going to come back for the second wave that the Americans are not going to be caught surprised. So you've got to make sure you've limited their ability to respond.

And then once you've done that, then you go after other naval vessels. So you would say the ranking of targets are battleships number one, counter air number two, other naval vessels number three. Then a torpedo strikes the USS Arizona, the pride of Kimmel's fleet, his so-called unsinkable battleship.

Now, the fate of the Arizona gives an idea of the chaos of the day. For a long time, there was actually, they weren't quite clear what had sunk the Arizona because you're sitting there and there's dive bombers, there's torpedo planes, there's fighters, everyone's flying around, there's explosions everywhere. But the Arizona is hit by a number of airdrop bombs that set off explosions in the Arizona. And then at one point, one of them obviously sets off the Arizona's own powder stores. And that is the real boom, that sort of enormous uncontrollable explosion is when its own ammunition goes up. And that's really the devastating one because that's exploding inside the ship. That's why it can't be repaired.

If you're just hit from the outside and you don't have that internal explosion, you can often be repaired because your internal systems are still workable and you can patch things up. But once you've set off your own powder, it's gone because basically you're blowing the ship apart. The Arizona explodes in a mushroom cloud. The sound is described as a volcano blowing its top. It lifts the 30,000-ton ship out of the water. In a matter of seconds, over 1,000 men perish. The Arizona will never leave Pearl Harbor.

It is still there today on the seabed. At 8.12 am, Kimmel's office sends a message to its aircraft carriers that are, ironically, safe at sea. The communique reads, Hostilities with Japan commenced with air raid on Pearl Harbor. But this is only the first wave. There is more to come. A second wave of aircraft arrive at 9am and rain down bombs and torpedoes. When the Japanese planes from the second wave go, what you're looking at is a lot

of burning fires everywhere. Yes, the skies become quiet. Of course, they don't know if the Japanese are going to come back. Not quite clear whether the second wave is it or not. But for those on the ground, basically you are dealing with men screaming, fires burning. You have warships that are half submerged in the water, parts of them sticking out, parts that have sunk. You have oil slicks burning. You have on the runways, you have all these burning aircraft because they had been parked.

So the Japanese pulling away does not bring an end to the battle in the sense of the chaos. You have to spend most of your time putting out fires and saving people's lives and then trying to save equipment. And that's what people are trying to do in the midst of this chaos. The attack claims the lives of 2,404 US citizens. Soldiers, sailors, civilians.

Japan loses 64 men Even Admiral Kimmel will later say that the Japanese operation was beautifully planned, beautifully executed But there are many reasons why the Japanese are able to devastate Pearl Harbor One is Kimmel's complacency He believes the naval base to be an impregnable safe haven. The other is the Japanese ability to harness technology that will shatter Kimmel's illusions. Oddly, for a major port, Pearl Harbor is quite shallow. At its deepest point, it's even today only about

45 feet deep. That's important for two reasons. It means big ships, which draw a lot of water, have to be careful in there about where they're going. But more importantly, it has to do with whether you can use airdropped torpedoes to attack a fleet that's sitting in water that shallow. airdropped torpedoes to attack a fleet that's sitting in water that shallow. Airdropped torpedoes were one of the principal means by which navies attacked each other. The British had used them in Toronto, Italy, earlier in the war to attack the Italian fleet. And so there was much discussion about whether Pearl Harbor was immune from torpedo attack because it was so shallow. Of course, the Japanese know about the unique geography of Kimmel Stronghold.

They have a spy, Takeo Yoshikawa, who poses as a secretary to the Japanese consulate while exploring the island. He sends photographs and maps to Tokyo. Back in Japan, military commanders know that its Type 91 torpedo is the best in the world, but even that device will not work in such shallow depths. Type 91 torpedoes weigh almost two tons. When dropped from an aircraft, they hit the water at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour.

For the attack on Taranto Harbor, Italy, the British modified their torpedo design using a wire fixed to its nose. The wire plays out from a barrel attached to the aircraft, and this line prevents the device from entering the water at too steep an angle. The British design showed that it could be done, But Taranto Harbor is deeper than Pearl Harbor. So the Japanese take the evolution of its torpedo one step further. Already, Japanese engineers have modified the Type 91 device with a simple wooden fin that bolts onto the tail of the bomb.

This stabilizes it. But now technicians attach smaller fins to the nose of the torpedo. These are called gyroscopically driven ailerons. They prevent the bomb from rolling as it flies through the air. In turn, the smooth flight means the tail rudders can tip up the nose of the torpedo when it hits the water. And so, in theory at least, the torpedo won't bottom out. The Japanese call their torpedoes gyōrai, which means thunderfish. Aerial torpedoes are koku gyōrai, or thunderfish in the sky.

What they had done, though, is the Americans actually, when they went into the harbor, it's a very large harbor, kept the battleships quite closely moored together in a narrow channel. That was done for protection. And one of the views was there's no way you could actually drop torpedoes in a very narrow channel. Torpedoes are the weapons that drop from a plane into the water, and then they operate like a submarine torpedo in that sense. They propel themselves through the water into the water and then they operate like a submarine torpedo at that sense they propel themselves through the water into the ship now the normal assumption was you would need a significant amount of water distance to safely drop the torpedo have the torpedo in a sense orient itself function and run at the proper depth to hit a battleship. So that's why the coordination of the attack was really quite something.

You needed to have these torpedo attacks go in in a way that very few Americans, probably no Americans, thought were really possible, and very few had, but the Japanese thought it was worth the risk. The Japanese Thunderfish torpedo is a marvel of modern warfare. Its yaw limit, that is, the amount to which it veers to the left or right, is accurate to 1% of the target. Its warhead is powerful enough to sink a battleship, and it can be released from a height of 20 meters and at high speed, which is good news for the pilots who are dropping them, as they are less likely to be shot down.

good news for the pilots who are dropping them, as they are less likely to be shot down. Considerably more Japanese aircraft would have been lost at Pearl Harbor without this modification to the Type 91 torpedo. Later, Admiral Kimmel claims that the modified Type 91 torpedo is a device to which all the brains in our own Navy department who had been seeking such a solution, had been unable to arrive at. And yet, on June the 13th, 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel is warned about Japanese thunderfish. And everyone thought Pearl Harbor had immunity in that sense, that it was too shallow. But in the summer of 1941, Washington said, you know,

the enemy is making improvements in the shallowness of torpedoes. You should not assume that your harbor is immune from that. Kimmel pretty much ignored it. He didn't change anything as a result of the fact that he now had a harbor that was perhaps not as protected as he thought. And leaping forward on December 7th, the vast amount of damage done to the fleet was done by airdrop torpedoes that didn't bury themselves in the mud, but ran across the harbor

and into the sides of eight battleships. There is one simple technology that Kimmel could have employed if he'd taken the threat seriously. Since the end of the 19th century, warships have been fitted with torpedo nets. Their benefits are well understood, and Kimmel has made sure that the mouth of Pearl Harbor is protected by two lines of torpedo nets. But they are not deployed on December 7th.

Again, this is because Kimmel believes that his Pacific fleet needs to be ready to leave port quickly, perhaps to go to war against the Japanese in the Philippines, never considering that in fact he needs to protect the vessels against attack. And he didn't put up nets around the ships that would have stopped or caught or exploded some of the torpedoes. Well, he simply didn't take seriously the risk that the ships faced in the harbor from this particular kind of weapon. And so a combination of American oversight and Japanese foresight bring about the devastation of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, the United States will award 51 Navy Crosses for gallantry in the aftermath

of Pearl Harbor, along with 15 Medals of Honor. December 7, 1941 was a day of infamy, but also astonishing bravery. While Admiral Kimmel is looking forward to a day of golf on December 7, 1941, some of his sailors are planning to go to church. Some are sleeping off the excesses of Saturday night, but many are on duty. One man who is at his post bright and early is Doris Miller. Known as Dory, he is a third-class messman on

board the USS West Virginia. The duties of a messman include making beds and shining the shoes of officers, or, like Dory, working as a cook. And African Americans in the U.S. armed services in the Second World War and before were given the most menial positions. They were basically used to support troops. They did the grunt work. They were the janitors. They were the logistics people, or in this case, they were cooks. They were deliberately segregated from white troops. They were not given, you know, sort of premier combat positions. Doris Miller is the grandson of slaves. He grows up in Waco, Texas,

where he drops out of high school to help support his family. In 1939, he joins the Navy, and two years later, is on board the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. He's age 22, and the ship's heavyweight boxing champion. Like all African- American messmen, Dory is not allowed to receive specialist training such as signals or engineering.

Crucially for his role in the events of December 7th, the Navy has not seen fit to train Dory to fire a gun. The battle station of a messman is in the hold of the ship's magazine, where he is simply required to pass ammunition to the gunners. So this is exactly where Dorey runs to just before 8 am on December 7th, when the West Virginia is hit by a torpedo. In the minutes that follow, the battleship is struck by another five Thunderfish and begins to sink. When Dory finds the magazine compartment flooded, he dashes to the signals deck, where the ship's commander, Captain Mervyn Sharp-Bennion, is mortally wounded.

Doris Miller needs all his strength to carry the injured captain to a safer place, where the commander can receive medical attention. He then runs onto the burning deck. He's a cook in one of the large battleships, the USS West Virginia, and it's a situation where when all hell breaks loose, and it really does, the West Virginian is one of the heavily damaged

early battleships in the war, Miller reacts remarkably to this. Without any training whatsoever, he starts manning an anti-aircraft gun. So my guess is he watched other sailors use this, and he's intelligent, and he knows from watching how they might work. But the first time he fires an anti-aircraft gun in his life is on the West Virginia Battle of Pearl Harbor. And he shoots down, I think, at least one plane that we can pretty much be verified. The moment he takes over firing this anti-aircraft gun, and his actions are so heroic that he's given the Navy Cross, which is the highest award for valor the U.S. Navy gives out.

That award will later be presented by Colonel Nimitz, Kimmel's replacement. Doris Miller will later say that he didn't know anything about firing a machine gun. He just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. He mans the gun until he runs out of ammunition. Then Dory lifts injured men from the burning waters and only abandons ship when the captain is pronounced dead. He is one of the last three men to leave the sinking ship. There is time for many acts of heroism

during the short attack on Pearl Harbor. The USS Nevada is tethered to Ford Island that morning, one of the few ships to stand alone, rather than lined up in pairs. When the first wave strikes the port, her crew jump to their battle stations like a well-oiled machine. Admiral Kimmel displays many failings on this day, but there is no doubt that his sailors are well-drilled, thanks to his training. The Nevada starts firing back at the incoming bombers. At 8.40am, the ship is hit by a torpedo, but the crew has the satisfaction of instant revenge when the plane that dropped the Thunderfish is shot down by their own gunners.

As she is the only ship in port who is able to detach and set sail, the commander of the Nevada decides to make a stand. I can't tell the story without getting a little choked up sometimes about what happened on the one battleship that was able to get underway, the USS Nevada, whose captain was not on the ship at the time of the attack, but it was simply subordinates who knew that the only way to save yourself is to be in motion. You can't be a sitting target.

And the ship was on fire. They were trying to get out of the harbor to save the ship and avoid being totally destroyed, and they didn't make it. They had to run the ship aground because otherwise it was going to block the channel that served the harbor. It's just such an act of heroism. The sailors aboard other sinking battleships cheer and wave as the Nevada staggers across the bay, flag flying, fatally wounded, shrouded in smoke, and taking hit after hit from Japanese bombs above and below water.

She doesn't make it to the open sea, but her bravery encourages Kimmel's troops to fight to save other ships. The move probably saves the Nevada in the long run, and she ends up beached in shallow waters. But 60 crew members are killed, and her commander loses a leg in the action. and her commander loses a leg in the action. While Pearl Harbor takes the brunt of the bombing, the airfields are coming under fire too.

With most of the Hawk fighter planes parked on the runway at Hickam and Wheeler Fields, where Kimmel's counterpart, Lieutenant General Walter Short, thought that they would be safe from sabotage. It's impossible for most pilots to get airborne, but several managed to get aircraft into the skies, flying straight into the maelstrom. One week before the attack, the 47th Pursuit Squadron is moved to an auxiliary airfield 11 miles from Pearl Harbor.

Two of its pilots, Kenneth Taylor and George Welch, spend the night of December 6th in a late poker game. They are rudely awoken at 7.50 a.m. on a Sunday by explosions, machine gun fire, and the news that two-thirds of the U.S. aircraft parked at Wheeler and Hickam fields have been destroyed. Without waiting for a command, or considering that they will be two fighters facing a swarm of hundreds, Taylor and Welch take off in their tomahawks. The pilots are still wearing their tuxedos. In the dogfight that follows, Taylor shoots down two Japanese planes, dogfight that follows. Taylor shoots down two Japanese planes, but gets injured by shrapnel.

Both men survive. After a long night of gambling, this time they really beat the odds. But there is one pilot whose luck runs out before his bravery. Pilot officer Ishii Saburo completes his bombing raid on Oahu and sets off back to base. It's 230 miles to his aircraft carrier, called the Soryu or Blue Dragon, a flight time of around an hour. Somehow, perhaps his instruments are faulty, he gets lost on the way. Saburo radios the ship, asking for a location. The radio operator receives the message in horror. He has his orders. No outgoing messages.

For 12 days, radio silence has kept the fleet hidden and protected. Of course, US naval intelligence is scanning the airwaves. Any outgoing message from the aircraft carrier would be like sending up a flare. The pilot Ishii Saburo sees only the vast vacant ocean as he desperately circles, hoping to spot the Japanese fleet and come into land. He understands what is at stake, and he accepts his fate. He cannot lead the Americans to the Kido Butai. The radio operator is in tears as he receives Saburo's final message.

My plane is lost, says the pilot. I'm turning round to destroy myself. The Japanese military records show that Ishii Saburo is lost on his return to the Sōryū. But the majority of the Japanese squadron arrive safely back on the Kido Butai. While Kimmel is left to count the cost, for the Japanese it's all over by lunchtime. Dr. Takuma Melba is a Japanese-German academic. When the aircraft returned to the carriers, it was landing on an aircraft carrier quite difficult. And we know that there were parties going on on the ships.

So big relief, of course, feeling of big relief. I think they were, of course, also happy that they've survived the operation. And not only that, each and every single pilot who returned survived the operation. So not only this was not limited on the individual perspective, so to speak, but also that the majority of the whole military personnel involved in the Pulau Hapa attack survived the attack. So they understood immediately that this was a big success. And then, of course, we have also to keep in mind, so the report of Fujita at the end of the attack,

that's what he reported to Yamamoto in the end and to Tokyo, that the result was better than it was actually. For Admiral Kimmel, overlooking Pearl Harbor from the submarine building, the result is apocalyptic. The sinking of his fleet, the slaughter of his men, the death of his career. It's barely lunchtime,

but the sky is dark under plumes of black smoke. Carcasses of seaplanes smolder on Ford Island. In the water, the upturned hull of the Oklahoma looks surreal, like a great whale. The safe haven of the lucky clover-shaped port is an inferno. The keys are lined with dead and injured sailors, many suffering horrific burns. And worse, people are screaming about men trapped inside the ships, which are filling with smoke or water. Admiral Kimmel, in his stiff white uniform, can only watch. I have to imagine that this was the most crushing moment of his life.

He had never failed in his career, never failed. And he was witnessing the catastrophic destruction of all of his assumptions, that the Japanese would do something this crazy, that they had the capability to do it, and that all the warnings he was getting had been directed at him, not necessarily at others out in the field. And there's really nothing for him to do. He doesn't man a gun. He doesn't have to issue orders to shoot back because they were already doing that. He was simply a spectator. The

submarine building is directly across a channel from Ford Island, which is an island in the middle of the harbor and to which the battleships were all tethered. He could just look straight out and see what was happening. In some ways, it was heroic what he was seeing, that these ships, which had been on Sunday morning in a sleep, took almost no time at all to start shooting back. No one gave orders to do it. They knew they had to do it. shooting back. No one gave orders to do it. They knew they had to do it. And so he was watching all this training that he had insisted upon kick in, that they were trying to defend themselves. And it's at that point that a spent bullet, probably fired by an American gun, came through the window on the second floor and hit him in his chest. And this is when he supposedly said,

I wish it had killed me. I think he knew his career was over. It's a terribly tragic moment. You just feel for the guy on a strictly human level. Kimmel's men have paid the ultimate price. But by 10 a.m., the Admiral knows that his glittering career has sunk along with his fleet. A message sent to naval communication in Washington reads simply,

Air raid. Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill. If only Kimmel had listened to his own advice, and applied it to all those warnings that he received in recent weeks, the ones he ignored, or glossed over, or assumed were aimed at someone else. If only he had thought, this is not a drill. Pearl Harbor is a moment where I think American hubris at its superiority, I think American hubris at its superiority, some of that racially tinged,

was exploded by, literally, by torpedoes and bombs. The self-cheerleading of so many in America was exposed as ridiculous. This was an extremely formidable enemy that had far more technological prowess than we assumed. As the dust settles over Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel writes an update for Washington. All battleships, apart from the Maryland, are damaged, including the Arizona, which is a total wreck. The cruisers Honolulu, Helena, and Raleigh are unfit for sea. Three destroyers are at complete loss.

But Kimmel writes, personnel behaving magnificently in face of furious surprise attack. He dispatches his remaining fleet to hunt down the Japanese armada. Kimmel has two aircraft carriers that were at sea during the attack, and seven heavy cruisers, plus some surviving aircraft. They spend the rest of December 7th scouring the seas that surround Pearl Harbor. But the Kido Butai is long gone. Next, on this special short history of Pearl Harbor, the news plunges President Franklin D. Roosevelt into the conflict he did not want. A war that comes too soon and on two fronts. The Japanese military rides a wave of success while its people suffer.

And their decision to turn tail and run from Pearl Harbor proves to be a mistake that has far-reaching consequences. Pearl Harbor is actually such a disaster for the Japanese. It's such a short-term victory with devastating long-term consequences. It is an extraordinary thing to have pulled off Pearl Harbor, but all it's doing is signing the death knell of the Japanese Empire. That's next time on Short History Of.