Oahu, Hawaiian Islands

“His dying words to me were “Why did that crazy Navy plane
strafe me?” I hope he heard me say  It was the Japs.”
                                                                                              Corporal Robert J. Frye,  Wheeler Field

There was no warning.

Twenty seven Aichi “Val” dive bombers had bombed the ordered rows of planes at Wheeler Field and fighters began to strafe from a loose counter-clockwise formation. All 60 new P-40s were a burning shambles. Lt. Philip Rasmussen ran to the flight line in his pajamas and found himself watching the P-40s exploding and cooking off like oversized firecrackers. Men of all ranks tended wounded and dying, tried to save planes and equipment, or just tried to fight back somehow. Downwind under dense black smoke, a handful of older P-36s somehow remained undamaged. Soldiers wrestled them into revetments and worked like demons to fuel and arm them. It was very dangerous work. Gasoline ignites easily, and the only belted ammunition was in a burning hanger with live rounds cooking off!  But a group of soldiers whose names are now lost to history armed and fueled 4 obsolescent P-36s in the middle of the attack.  Lt. Lewis "Lew" Sanders picked Lieutenants Othneil Norris, Phil Rasmussen, and John Thacker to accompany him. As he led them out, Norris searched for a better fitting parachute, and Lt. Gordon Sterling just climbed into his plane. Handing his watch to a mechanic, he said “See that my mother gets this. I won't be back”. The planes took off downwind  through the smoke around 0850.

At 11,000 feet, Fighter Control vectored them toward Bellows Field. Sighting eleven planes below at 6000 feet, Sanders signaled to engage (wondering what happened to Norris), and they dove. Sanders left a plane smoking and falling off, 360ed to clear his tail, and saw Sterling shooting at a plane in a near vertical dive. A Zero split S-ed onto Sterling's tail and Sanders then got on his. Sterling's P-36 and his target fell blazing and his pursuer dove, trailing white smoke. When Sanders pulled out of his dive, there were no planes to be seen, only sky and water.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen had shot up a "Val" dive bomber, and was set upon by two Zero fighters. He survived by ducking into a cloud. Thacker couldn't get his guns to work and made toothless dry runs at the enemy. They got wise and damaged him; he flew inland to escape. Sanders got on the tail of another fighter and as they climbed, he  found himself being badly outmaneuvered. He was somehow able to disengage with a newfound respect for the highly nimble Zero.  Intelligence would later try to tell him the Japanese had no aircraft so maneuverable, but Lew Sanders had just been there and done that! He had  survived a major violation of future US fighter doctrine:

don't go one on one and try to outmaneuver a Zero!

Rasmussen defied gravity and flew back with over 500 bullet and cannon holes in his plane: it was scrap. His landing looked  like a stunt pilot doing the drunk act at a state fair. He asked for another plane. Still wearing his pajamas under his flight suit, he had some fight left, but there wasn't another plane for him. Sanders made two more flights that day, dodging friendly fire both times, but the Japanese were gone.

After the war, it was learned those Japanese planes were from the carrier  Soryu.
One limped 200 miles back, but was too damaged to repair, and was deep-sixed.
One crashed in Kaneohe Bay.
Another, badly leaking fuel, tried to rendezvous with submarine I-74
and, like Lt. Sterling, was never seen again.
Still another crash landed on remote Niihau. The pilot tried to start a mini uprising.
He was  killed on December 14th, ending the Niihau incident.

14 Army pilots engaged the attackers including Kenneth Taylor, George Welch, and Harry Brown. They were credited with 10 victories and a probable 11th by Lt. John L. Dains who was shot down and killed by friendly fire. Most sources say  the Pearl Harbor Strike Force force lost 29 planes and 55 aircrew. This isn't quite correct. Rarely mentioned are 19 more jettisoned due to extreme battle damage, waiting for Robert Ballard, deep in the Pacific.

 

For the record:      Army  planes in Hawaii on December 7th, 1941.   Fighters  (all types)              149   Bombers  (all types)               72   Total                                            221  LOSSES aircraft  type  destroyed  B-17 -----------18 B-18 ----------- 22 A-20 ------------ 7 P-40B ---------- 62 P-40C --------- 10 P-36 ----------- 23 P-26 ----------- 9 Total ---------141 (Source:  The Roberts Commission)  -------------------------------------------------       (The US Navy and Marines lost about  87 more airplanes)

Lieutenants  Lewis "Lew" Sanders, Philip Rasmussen, Kenneth Taylor, George Welch, and Harry "Available" Brown (left to right) shot down 9 Japanese attackers on  December 7th, 1941. Sanders, Rasmussen, and Brown scored 1 each in obsolescent P-36s.  Flying newer P-40s, Welch got 4 kills,  Taylor 2 . Sanders' and Rasmussen's futures lay with the 318th Fighter Group.  Plane in background  is a P-36 Hawk at WheelerField.

But they were 14 planes against 368. The toll was 2,396 dead including 1,177 on USS Arizona. Another  1,168  wounded. 68 civilians dead. 12 warships sunk or beached with 9 more damaged. About 228 planes were destroyed and many more damaged; almost all on the ground.  Of those dead, 647 are co-mingled under 252 identical markers, too mangled to identify, in the Punchbowl  (The National Cemetery of the Pacific).

The Army Air Forces had 221 combat planes on Oahu that Dec. 7th, with 102 being overhauled for shipping to the Philippines. Now,  141 were wrecks. The Navy had also been badly mauled.  When the Japanese Strike Force returned, possibly to invade Hawaii, how could anyone oppose them? The fleet was gutted, burning, and fouling the waters in Pearl Harbor. Wheeler Field had only 15 flyable aircraft, and the other major fields had all been hit hard. As night descended, shots rang out all night as trigger happy sentries called out the password, then fired before anyone could possibly reply. And everybody had some kind of weapon. It was a scary end to a scary day.

December 8th was cold, gray, and rainy, and the Americans were shocked, stunned, and a bit scared. But there was much work to do and little time. They had to get ready! The Japs were coming! The wrecks were bulldozed off the runways and flight lines. Cannibalization and improvisation became the orders of the day.

One P-40B needed a propeller, but of the only two in the bone yard, one had a bullet hole, and the other was .25 inch out of line. So much for zero defects. That plane flew again with a bullet holed prop. Crews made one combat ready plane out of two or three or more. Would there be enough time? At Wheeler Field, the ground crews didn't sleep for a week! Two days later, Wheeler Field had 45 flyable aircraft. By Dec. 20th, 61. One P-40 had so many bullet holes in it that the ground crew swore they could hear it whistling over it's engine noise. By months end, there were 80 flyable aircraft at Wheeler Field alone.  A lot of the planes looked like patchwork quilts, but they were flyable, dispersed, and combat ready. The crews at Hickam, Bellows, Ewa, and elsewhere worked similar miracles. With facilities and equipment as badly shot up as they had been, miracles they were.

After a month of backbreaking effort, with fresh reinforcements arriving from the states, the soldiers of the Hawaiian Air Depot would have welcomed another attack and chance at the enemy.  "Remember Pearl Harbor" was something more visceral and tangible then just a wartime propaganda slogan to those who had been through the attack and survived. They had started December 7th at peace, seen their planes destroyed on the ground, and cleaned chunks of their buddies off the tarmac afterwards with flat shovels and brooms. That was personal. The fear and desperation of December 8th had been replaced with focused anger.

They were ready for some payback.

The Japanese offensive of Dec. 8th (Tokyo time) was and remains a remarkable feat of arms. It's objective was the capture of Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and their resources. In the first 24 hours, every major installation and base that stood in the way was attacked. It took 70 days to capture Malaya and Singapore and 6 months to take the Philippines, but success was assured with those first 24 hours. It would take almost 3 years to undo most of the results.  In the Philippines, hours after hostilities, General MacArthur's air arm was destroyed on the ground.  Guam fell on the first day  in the Marianas. After a scrappy fight, so had Wake Island. It's defense was inspired, but they couldn't hold past December 23rd. Singapore and Hong Kong were doomed. The US Navy Far East Fleet became "The Fleet the Gods Forgot": the fate of some US ships and their crews wasn't learned until years after the war. MacArthur  holed up on Corregidor with his army slowly starving on Bataan. Tens of thousands of US troops went into a black hole: the Americans wouldn't learn of the Bataan Death March and the hellish treatment of the POWs for almost 2 years. The oil rich Dutch East Indies  and Malaya fell: all their vital rubber, oil, and silk sources fell into enemy hands. Long Beach, California and Astoria, Oregon were shelled by  Japanese subs. There was no good news for months. At it's height,  Japan would occupy or control almost 1/7th of the globe including Attu and Kiska Islands in Alaska.  The American air forces (what was left of them) would begin the war stretched thin on defense from Midway Atoll and Hawaii, to Christmas Island and the Phoenix Islands, and on to Australia.  The road ahead would be long, hard, and occasionally very bloody.

It was a bad, bad way to go to war.

 

Oahu, Hawaiian Islands	Canton,  Phoenix Islands	Saipan,  Marianas Islands	Ie Shima, Ryukyu Islands
Unsung Heroes	Loose ends, Feedback, Etc.	Links	Pacific Maps