Posted on 12/18/2016 11:53:38 AM PST by Retain Mike
'Leaning on that Old Whistle Cord'
Proceedings Magazine - December 2016 Vol. 142/12/1,366 By Captain Gordon I. Peterson, U.S. Navy (Retired)
A Navy veteran-turned-civilian machinist at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard had “the unusual presence of mind” to sound the air raid alarm 75 years ago, never thinking he was witnessing one of the most cataclysmic events in history.
Rudolph E. Peterson—Uncle Rudy to me—left home before dawn on 7 December 1941 to report for duty as the watch engineer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard’s Power Plant No. 2, Building 149. Located south of the Naval Air Station on Ford Island, the Navy Yard faced “Battleship Row.” From the power plant’s second-story “turbine floor,” Rudy could see the light cruiser USS Helena (CL-50) at her berth. The minelayer USS Oglala (CM-4) was moored outboard of the Helena. In a later interview with reporter William W. Russell of The New York Times, Rudy said that soon after arriving at work, “I was having trouble with a low-pressure valve. I remember looking at the clock, which stood at 6:30 a.m., and wondered if we could get the plant back in operation on schedule that afternoon.” Little did he know what would unfold in less than two hours.
The first wave of Japanese carrier-based aircraft began to cross Oahu’s western coast at approximately 0740. They began their attack on U.S. Pacific Fleet ships and installations at Pearl Harbor several minutes before 0800, shattering what had been a quiet Sunday morning.
When the attack began, Rudy went from the power plant’s ground floor up to the turbine floor so he could look beyond the Helena. As he related in The Times: “I went to one of the windows and looked across the seaplane hangars at Ford Island about 2,000 feet from our building. At first I could see nothing but smoke. I called one of our men to the window as a plane came swooping down over the hangars dropping its bombs.”
Rudy’s initial thought was that a large fire was raging out of control and that aircraft were being used to drop fire-retardant chemicals to suppress the flames, which had been practiced at the base during a recent exercise. “The fire must be too hot, and they’re dropping chemicals from the air,” he told a man next to him. Rudy alerted another watch engineer to monitor pressure in the fire mains controlled by the plant’s large saltwater pumps. He quickly realized, however, that what was transpiring was something entirely different from an exercise—and far worse.
Japanese aircraft soon began attacks on the Helena and Oglala. “I suddenly realized I was looking at a plane coming directly toward the power plant,” Rudy recalled. “A bright shining object dropped sleekly from the fast-moving plane into the water, and I knew it was a pickle [torpedo]. The plane banked sharply, and two meatballs [circular red Japanese insignias] stood out on the wings. There was a tremendous explosion, and the bow of the Helena raised out of the water. A naval officer in his white dress uniform was running along the dock trying to reach his ship, and when the explosion came he went down in a cloud of smoke and a flood of salt water.”
Acting without an order to do so (which was contrary to standing orders to await a command), Rudy pulled the cord on the power plant’s steam whistle to signal an air-raid alarm. As he noted during a radio interview on the Mutual Network, broadcast on 3 April 1942: “I don’t know how long all that took—just a few moments, I guess—but the next thing I knew I was leaning on that old whistle cord.”
The first wave of attacking aircraft concentrated on the largest Navy warships, especially the battlewagons on Battleship Row off Ford Island’s southeastern coast. Some minutes after 0800, a fourth bomb struck the USS Arizona (BB-39) forward of turret two near the ship’s bow.
Within approximately 90 minutes, the last Japanese aircraft in the second wave of the attack had completed their deadly missions and were winging their way west to Japan’s Combined Fleet and their waiting aircraft carriers far to seaward.
Back in Central Oahu
At the same time Rudy was experiencing the horrific attack at Pearl Harbor, his family also came face-to-face with the war at their home in Wahiawa when Japanese aircraft attacked Wheeler Army Airfield. Uncle Rudy and Aunt Viola’s house was roughly three miles from the airfield in central Oahu. They normally would have attended church that day, but with only one family automobile, this became impossible when Rudy was assigned to work Sunday morning.
As Rudy’s daughter, Carol, recalled, “December 7th is vivid in my mind. Grammie [Rudy’s mother, Irma] and I were outside hanging up washing on the clothesline. We heard whizzing noises. Our neighbor came over on the run, told us Pearl Harbor was being bombed, and said to get inside our house. We could see smoke rising in the distance from Pearl Harbor.” The neighbor brought a radio along so they all could listen to the first news broadcasts of the attack. Viola was inside the house at the time. She heard sounds of firing and a siren, but nothing out of the ordinary. “I did not think it strange since we often heard it because we were so close to a rifle range. I thought it was practice, but there was a definitely different sound—a ‘zing’ as the firing went on,” she said years later.
After her mother-in-law and daughter ran into the house, Viola was shocked by their description of the attack and reports that ships were being sunk at Pearl Harbor. “I was dumbfounded that such a thing could happen,” she said. “Looking out the window I could see smoke billowing up from Pearl Harbor. I knew that what she had told me was true, but still felt that it couldn’t be.”
Carol remembers how her mother filled all of their home’s sinks and the lone bathtub with fresh water. “My mother also took the mattresses off our beds and carried them to the safest room in our house—the narrow hallway in the center of our home. This was our ‘safe room.’” During the hours that followed, the radio was their link to the day’s unfolding tragedy.
They were, of course, concerned about Rudy’s safety, but also that of his younger brot her, Gordon, and sister, Jean. Gordon was a chief machinist’s mate assigned to a ship stationed at the Navy’s submarine base and naval station at Coco Solo, Panama. Jean was a student nurse on Oahu at the time but was not injured in the attack and helped care for the wounded at the Army’s Schofield Barracks in Honolulu.
Rudy Returns Home
Radio news broadcasts reported that employees at Pearl Harbor would be spending the night on the base. However, later that day, Rudy was authorized to return home. “I was surprised when my husband came out,” Viola said. “I rushed out to greet him when I saw the car. Daddy was shaking. I could see bullet holes in the fender. He was dumbfounded the Japanese could penetrate our defenses. Having served in the Navy, he had implicit faith in the ability of our men to protect us. He had a great deal of confidence in the Navy, so it took a while before he realized what was happening.”
Before the fires were extinguished at Pearl Harbor, Wheeler Field, and other facilities attacked by the Japanese, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper published a special “1st Extra” edition on Sunday with its initial reporting on the attack. The banner headline, “War! Oahu Bombed By Japanese Planes,” consumed the entire upper half of the front page. The newspaper’s preliminary reports on the numbers of dead and wounded—6 known dead and 21 injured being treated at an emergency hospital—did not begin to tell the extent of the death and destruction that had ensued. “Seeing those great warships going down and the loss of their men really hurt,” Rudy recalled later.
Life was never the same in Hawaii during the war years following the attack. Carol’s elementary school, located near Wheeler Army Airfield, had been strafed by attacking planes and was closed until it could be repaired. Military personnel with families who were living in housing at Pearl Harbor had to find other residences on Oahu, because thousands of new civilian workers reported to the Navy Yard in 1942 and 1943, and the Navy provided housing for them. “I remember a friend of my mother’s was in the Navy,” Carol recalled. “He and his family had housing at Pearl Harbor, but they had to leave. They stayed with us.”
Within weeks of the attack, Hawaii’s Territorial Office of Civil Defense published and distributed an Air Raid Precautions Manual as a planning guide for self-protection in the event of another Japanese attack. Black-out directives were issued and enforced by “block wardens.”
“At some point,” Carol continued, “we had to go to the fire station for tetanus shots and other injections, and to be fingerprinted. We were also assigned an air raid shelter—there was the real fear that the Japanese would attack again.” She and other school children were issued gas masks and required to carry them to school in cases slung over their shoulders.
A Wartime Footing
Rudy and other shipyard employees at Pearl Harbor worked around-the-clock after the attack, surging to a 24-hour-a-day operating schedule. The first priority was the recovery of the remains of sailors entombed on sunken or heavily damaged ships. Most of the ships were progressively salvaged and repaired. All but three were raised and repaired, returned to service, and made important contributions to the ultimate defeat of Axis forces in the Pacific and Atlantic. The battleships Arizona and Oklahoma (BB-37) were too badly damaged to be repaired, and the target ship ex-Utah (BB-31) also was deemed unsuitable for salvage.
“Horribly battered ships with dead men aboard came to the Yard from forward areas for major battle repairs,” the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard’s Command History notes. “Men work long, hard hours with little sleep and little recreation. Battleships came up from the bottom of Pearl Harbor; new warships from the mainland shipyards came in for supplies and ammunition; repair records were broken as the work of keeping the Fleet ‘fit to fight’ went into high gear.”
The repair of the heavily damaged aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5) following the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 was a telling example of the devotion of the shipyard’s workers to the demanding tasks at hand. The carrier had been so heavily damaged in battle that it was initially estimated to require weeks of repair work after she arrived at Pearl Harbor on 27 May. However, mindful of the need to return the ship to the fight for the anticipated Battle of Midway in early June, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the new commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, ordered repairs to be completed in just three days. Thousands of shipyard workers swarmed over the ship and completed the work—on time.
The shipyard’s build-up continued into 1943. “The Navy Yard grew to mammoth proportions both in personnel and in additional work, storage and housing facilities,” the Yard’s Command History documents. “One of the world’s largest drydocks (Drydock No. 4) was started; buildings mushroomed; new docks and berths were constructed; annexes were added to the Administration Building; barracks and temporary housing facilities filled every available piece of land around Pearl Harbor.” By June, the yard reported that employment reached 24,000 workers. The scars from the 7 December attack were largely erased. The shipyard played a critical role in modernizing and repairing Pacific Fleet ships and craft until final victory over the Empire of Japan in September 1945.
Reflecting on the events of 7 December 1941, and the years of war that followed, Viola Peterson later reflected: “It’s a day I’ll never forget. I’m just thankful that he [Rudy] was safe and that Gordon came back.”
Captain Peterson, a naval aviator and public affairs specialist during his Navy career, is a 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and flew more than 500 missions with the Seawolves of HAL-3 during the Vietnam War. For six years, he served as military legislative assistant to U.S. Senator James Webb (D-VA).
I didn't post the URL, because the article was on the member side, so I copied it entirely.
Interesting perspective. Everyone should remember that the Japanese have never formally apologized for the manifold war crimes & atrocities they committed against the Allies and their Asian neighbors before and during WWII. The genocidal actions are glossed over in their school texts, and there are many in Japan, younger generations included, who feel they did nothing wrong because they were forced into war by the U.S. All bullsh*t, of course.
Thanks.
Well, the Japanese textbooks are telling a (half)-truth there:
- The US embargo on Japan of 1941 WAS in fact an act of (cold) war any way you look at it.
- However, the reason for that embargo by the USA against Japan was Japan’s unprovoked (hot) war against China and elsewhere in Asia.
- FDR was indeed trying to provoke the Japanese so that he could get into the US into the war and save Europe from Hitler (the Pacific being a decidedly second tier theater).
Once the war got going, only about 20% of our war resources went into the Pacific, and that was more than enough to defeat Japan, a second-rate power.
FDR’s main and primary goal was always stopping Hitler, but since Hitler would nto provide a pretext for the US to join that war, their allies in Japan would have to do.
And they did. If they had listened to the Japanese Army’s advice, and left the US alone, Japan might still be in China and Korea.
I have run into American liberals online that believe the same thing.
One has to wonder how much FDR’s European policy was about stopping Hitler and how much about helping Stalin take over as much of Europe as possible. FDR was consistently toeing Stalin’s line on almost any point of contention.
I loved the PI. I found the people to be very warm and friendly; to this day I go out of my way to greet Filipinos that I happen to meet in Tagalog. I couldn't understand then or now how one group of people could be so cruel to them.
Several years later, I got an assignment to Japan. I couldn't look at a Japanese man that I assumed to be in their 40s or 50s and wonder if he was one of those unspeakably monstrous people who lopped off the heads of innocent civilians or our GIs from Bataan. Not surprisingly, I was never able to form any kind of friendship with any Japanese person.
My Dad was also a civilian machinist at Pearl during the bombing. He never talked about it much.
ping for later
About 20 years ago, I read where the libs in Seattle got together and set up a monument to a 12-year-old Japanese girl who was killed when we bombed Hiroshima. Naturally, the opening day was done on the anniversary of the bomb dropping. There was a really weepy “Bad America” tone to the whole article, trying to lay a guilt trip on the rest of us.
I wrote the reporter and asked her when they were going to erect a monument to a 12-year-old Hawaiian girl who was killed in the Pearl Harbor attack.
She wrote back that “she was unaware there were any civilian casualties at Pearl Harbor.”
So help me, I wanted to bang my head against the monitor.
Well, he was committed to forcing Great Britain into divesting her empire after the war, and he hewed his policy to help that come about. That was a tragedy for Britain, and much more so for her former colonies, which were thrown into independence (and decades of indigenous corruption and warfare).
While the British Empire would have eventually devolved, WW2 and its aftermath speeded up the process, much to the detriment of the newly independent countries, for the most part. Most were not yet ready for full independence.
So refusing to sell something to someone is an act of war?
Nonsense.
OK. Let’s remove this from its time context and do it a pure academic exercise.
Country A has been the sole provider of certain crucial elements to Country B, which is completely dependent on these elements for its national security;
Country A has traditionally eschewed foreign meddling, hence it has been providing these elements to Country B for a decade, during which Country B has been engaged in a long draining war against a technologically inferior, but much larger, opponent.
Country A suddenly changes its policy and stops providing these elements to Country B, which has no other source for these elements.
Country B is hence left with two options:
a. Withdraw from its war and lose everything gained thereby, along with its plans for being the dominant power in its region; or
b. Secure those elements from sources that are currently controlled by, or allied with, Country A (which means war with Country A);
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see which course of action is the most likely to be taken by Country B in that scenario. That doesn’t mean that course is morally justified (but I would argue that foreign affairs have always been, and always will be and should be seen as power struggles - bringing subjective “morality” into the equation only clouds one’s judgment), but it does leave Country B very few options - the first one is tantamount to capitulation, while the second one at least seems to offer a chance of victory.
An outsider looking at this scenario will inevitably come to the conclusion that Country A is either:
1- being led by complete morons for not seeing what its sudden embargo on Country A will lead to, or that
2 - Country A in fact wants a war with Country B but does not want to be the first one to declare it. So it has manipulated Country B into starting it.
In which case Country A’s protestations about being unfairly and unprovokedly attacked ring, shall we say, somewhat hollow.
The above scenario describes EXACTLY what the relationship between Japan and the US was leading to the Pearl Harbor attack. FDR provoked that attack (although he was sure that the Japanese would strike the Phillippinnes, not Hawaii).
History is written by the winners, of course, but that fact is that the “trigger” that started the war in the Pacific was in fact armed (if not pulled) at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as much as in Tokyo.
Them’s the historical facts. Perhaps disenchanting, perhaps embarrassing, perhaps inconvenient - but TRUE.
Japan had a number of other countries it could have bought oil from if it had not already ticked them off by being a bunch of murderous SOBs.
When people refuse to do business with you because you are a murderous SOB it is not their fault. It is yours.
And that is the FACT JACK!
Once again you are allowing your views of “morality” (hence: emotion) cloud your judgment so that the point I am making is sailing right over your head.
I’ll try it again: FDR knew he was provoking a war with Japan when the US imposed its embargo.
We may agree that this was a good and necessary thing because allowing Japan to turn Asia into its colony was against our interests (which of course IT WAS), and that the US HAD to join the war in Europe - some way, any way - in order to stop Hitler (which, on balance, I would agree with);
but it also leads to the conclusion that FDR had American blood on his hands at Pearl Harbor.
The US was not an innocent that was the victim of a “dastardly attack” at Pearl Harbor; the US knowingly chose to push Japan into attacking us, then exploited to the max the happenstance of that attack being made on American soil ahead of an actual declaration of war for purely propaganda purposes.
Hence FDR’s immortal speech to Congress on December 8 1941 sounds a little bit hollow in retrospect.
When the war ended, Gen. MacArthur gave Col. Ishi and is butches a pass for being tried as war criminals as long as all his data was turned over to the US Army's Chemical warfare Corps.
Also, as the war ended, Tokyo sent all POW camps a message to kill all their prisoners before the allied armies could liberate them. The Great Raid [30 January 1945] on the POW camp at Cabanatuan, Luzon, Philippines was conducted by the 6th Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerrillas. The raid liberated 522 prisoners, including Bataan Death March prisoners. Only 2 Rangers were killed, 4 Rangers wounded, and 2 prisoners died from complications of their captivity. Between 530 to 1,000 Imperial troops were killed and 4 tanks knocked out. The 2005 movie, The Great Raid, faithfully documents this operation.
Regarding Unit 731 - The other part of the reason why the US gave these war criminals a “pass” was that Col Ishi (who I believe later on became the 2-star Inspector General of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces after the war) withheld their biological weapons from elements in the Army that wanted to use them against Americans.
A terrible monster he was, yes, but pretty smart - he knew that if he did release these weapons to be used against the US he would be greasing the end of a rope when the war ended. Instead he kept making up excuses why the biological weapons were not ready when he was asked to provide them.
Like it or not that decision likely saved some American soldiers’ lives. MacArthur was a pragmatic man, and giving them a pass in light of the above (plus the turning over of all their data) was a bargain that was his to make. Not popular in China, to be sure, but who of us today has the moral authority to question him, who was “on the ground”?
War is a dirty business, and lots of decisions are made that look suspect when viewed with rose-colored 20-20 glassesfrom the comfort of a wealthy nation that is at peace.
The Great Raid was quite a movie. That was the first one I saw Dale Dye’s name listed on the credits as a consultant.
I have a 2,000+ word essay and four letters extracted from that about dropping the atomic bombs. I have included chemical warfare and the certain fate of our prisoners in the essay.
The Japanese had drafted able citizens 17-60 years old into the Peoples Volunteer Corps and Home Defense Units to assume infrastructure duties of army units and stay behind invaders for suicide missions using light weapons, biological agents, and explosives. Civilian soldiers were to stay behind advancing Americans to infuse pathogens into food and waters sources, to release infected animals and insects into American compounds, and to infect themselves with choleras and plaque germs.
I have a 2,000+ word essay and four letters extracted from it on the subject of dropping the atomic bombs. The following passages from it come to mind.
Because their own searing combat memories penetrated current realities, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall would pursue any alternatives rather than procure countless American deaths in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults matching the D-Day landings.
The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some incestuous moral orthodoxy.
All able Japanese citizens served as soldiers or as civilian militia (17-60) and awaited the decision of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy. With such a national unity committed to waging a savage total war, the atomic bombs were no longer indiscriminate or disproportional.
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