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).
Yes, my father spent two years in the Pacific with the 31st Infantry “Dixie” Division during WWII. He was reluctant to say much of anything about his wartime experiences. I didn’t know until a few years before his death that he had been awarded two Bronze Stars...and I learned that from reading his division battle book.
I am no FDR supporter, but I take issue with your statement that he was intentionally provoking Japan in order to get America into the war. Nothing in my study of military history as a Naval officer reveals this. FDR did want US involvement, but he was looking at fighting the Germans and Italians, not the Japanese.
I was Navy and visited the PI many times during multiple deployments to the Western Pacific. I too have a warm spot in my heart for the Filipino people. Received jungle survival training from tough-as-nails Negritos who fought against the Japanese (Naval aviator). My father was with the 31st Infantry “Dixie” Division and was on Mindanao keeping the Sons of Nippon bottled up & starving in the interior and preparing for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.
That was a day for heroes.
I addressed all of this in my earlier posts. A lot of this is conjecture, but reasonable conjecture based on the evidence. By Dec 7 1941 the question was not if Japan would strike, only where. And boy they did surprise us with the answer to that question.
That may be overstated by the use of the words "trying to provoke". It may be splitting hairs but I would say he expected japanese aggression against some western power, the US, British or Dutch.
The Dutch East Indies was most attractive because of the oilfields and rubber plantations desperately needed by Japan and blocked by the US led embargo.
In the larger sense there was a feeling in Roosevelt's administration that US involvement in the european war was inevitable and he was already involving the US in defacto war there with convoy escorts and lend-lease.
Your other assessments are right on the mark. The war with Japan was a second front taking a backseat to defeating Germany. Accordingly the resources were proportionate until the battles of Iwo Jima and then Okinawa. Okinawa in particular was less of an Island assault and more like a classic seige in the european style of fighting.
If the Pacific war progressed to the invasion of Japan, the resources would have more evenly matched those expended in europe against hitler.
Oh, that’s a great Story.
You are quite right about the need to invade Japan - it would have been a bloodbath, and the A-bomb saved countless millions of lives, 90% of them Japanese.
The other option would have been to simply blockade Japan while conventionally bombing them into the Stone Age, which would also have led to the deaths of uncounted millions of Japanese from starvation.
But the invasion was set, it was going to happen in 1946 if the A-bombs didn’t force surrender, and the Japanese of all people ought to be the ones most grateful that they did so.
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.
IMO, the Japanese decision to "Make America bleed" (no more Banzai attacks, just dig in and fight to the last - Okinawa, Iwo Jima) played a large part in the decision to drop the bomb. Western enemies, when all was lost, sensibly surrendered.
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.
My thoughts also, and I posit that question to the "Bad America" types, i.e. The Democratic Party would have been destroyed if it became know that the U.S. suffered tremendous casualties because we didn't drop the bomb. I dared them to get up in front of an auditorium of people whose relatives were fighting the war and tell them that a lot of them were going to die "because it is inhuman to use this bomb." No takers.
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.
The Internet if full of sources as to that - arming women with bamboo spears, teaching children how to roll under a tank and detonate their suicide bomb, ad nauseum.
A great sidebar I often use with these people contains this (gleaned from books I have read):
1) A U.S. State guy was talking with his Japanese counterpart after the war, who said "We surrendered because we didn't know how many more bombs you were going to drop." The U.S. guy said, "We dropped the only two we had." The Japanese guy replied, "If we had known you had only two . . . " and then changed the subject.
2) A Japanese General was giving a pep talk to his troops, along the line of "Yes, things look really bad now, but if we redouble our efforts, we will win." This was AFTER the Nagasaki bomb.
One quote I use from Truman who contemplated increasingly dire estimates caused him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.
Here are most of the references I have so far for the essay. Hell to Pay is probably the best book about what American losses could have been. A better understanding of Hirohito and Japan can be found in Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, and Hirohito.
Partial bibliography:
Hell to Pay, D. M. Giangreco
The Atomic Bomb and the End of WW II, The National Security Archive
Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, David Bergamni
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring, Gordon Prange
The Secret Surrender, Allen Dulles
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix
Hirohito, Edward Behr
A quote by film director Akira Kurosawa illustrates the transformation of that generation of Japanese people, who before were resigned to the slogan “Honorable Death of a Hundred Million”.
“When I walked the same route back to my home (after the Emperor’s broadcast), the scene was entirely different. The people in the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. If the Emperor had made such a call (to follow the above slogan) those people would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it….In wartime we were like deaf-mutes.”
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb,
Robert K Wilcox
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
Potsdam Declaration
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/P/o/Potsdam_Declaration.htm
Battle of Okinawa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
Cornerstone of Peace (Okinawa)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_of_Peace
Over 240,000 names recorded including 14,000 from the U.S.A.
Battle of Saipan
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-saipan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saipan
Battle of Iwo Jima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima
Normandy landings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_Landings
The Battle of the Bulge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
Battle of Berlin Facts
http://www.worldwar2facts.org/battle-of-berlin-facts.html
Japan geography: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/geography/Indonesia-to-Mongolia/Japan.html
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html
Okinawa redoubt was about 100 sq mi
Allied POWS Under the Japanese
http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/rg331-box%201321-jap%20pow%20camps.htm
Military prisoners were 34,000 in Japan, 70,000 outside Japan, and 112,000 civilians. There were already 142,000 Anglos and Pilipino victims of criminal killings.
Statistics of Japanese Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources*
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
As a tactic of administering conquered lands, the Japanese had murdered 6 million Asians from 1937 to 1945.
A GREAT phrase that encapsulates the dilemma - one I plan to use later on.
Thanks for the links, will check 'em out.
Dale Dye (General Kreuger) starred as Col. Mucci’s (Benjamin Bratt) boss that gave the green light to the raid. I thought the movie was very well done. It was very non-PC because the Japanese are shown as the murdering butchers they really were and not some Hollyweid version.
There was a small group of Negritos who had been living for some time, just off base. They used to hunt just outside the wire. These little guys supported themselves by bow hunting small game and earned small change from the Air Police by patrolling their AOs. These people are prehistoric. I assume they’re still outside the wire, keeping the world safe for democracy.
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