Down to the Sea (47 page)

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All ship speeds are given in knots, a nautical unit of speed; one knot equals approximately 1.16 miles per hour.

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Five inches refers to the width of the barrel; 5-inch guns were the largest weapons on World War II destroyers. U.S. cruisers were armed with 8-inch guns, older battleships with 14-inch guns, and newer ones with 16-inch guns. The largest ship guns on Japan's mighty
Yamato
-class battleships were 18-inch guns. The bigger the gun, the heavier the projectile it can fire, the longer the range, and the greater the destruction upon impact. A bigger ship, therefore, could disable or sink a smaller surface ship in battle before the latter came in range to fire its guns.

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On December 7, 1944, three years to the day after firing the opening salvo of World War II,
Ward
was taking part in the invasion of Leyte when attacked by several Japanese planes, one of which made a suicide dive into the old destroyer. When the resulting fires could not be controlled,
Ward
's crew abandoned ship. To prevent
Ward
from falling into enemy hands, she was ordered sunk. Carrying out the task was the destroyer
O'Brien
(DD-725), whose skipper, William W. Outerbridge, watched from the bridge as
O'Brien
's guns sank his first sea command.

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Owing to “unexplained and almost incredible laxness,” the gate to the antitorpedo net at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, which had been opened at 4:58
A.M.
for the entry of two minesweepers, was not closed until 8:40
A.M.
—in spite of
Ward
's report two hours earlier of attacking an intruding submarine near the harbor entrance. None of the five two-man Japanese midget submarines—launched by full-size submarines a few miles off Pearl Harbor—assigned to sneak into the harbor and sink ships succeeded in their mission. All were lost or captured, three of them without firing a torpedo. One small sub beached on Oahu, and a surviving crewman was taken prisoner.

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Recruit training in the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard is called boot camp. In the Army and present-day Air Force, it is known as basic training.

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The U.S. Navy soon discovered it had devoted insufficient practice to nighttime tactics. In contrast, the Japanese practiced night actions “on a scale unheard of in other navies,” most of which avoided night warfare at all costs. As a result, the initial nighttime engagements of the war favored the Japanese, as in the opening months of the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942. By day, the U.S. Navy controlled the seas around Guadalcanal. By night, the waters were controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which when it came to night fighting was “still a couple of semesters ahead of the U.S. Navy.” It took the U.S. Navy time to disseminate the necessary training and equipment and to learn how to fight effectively at night.

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Approximately forty antiaircraft shells from U.S. guns fell on Honolulu during the attack, including one that landed on the porch of the governor's mansion. Rather than explode in the air among enemy planes, the shells detonated on impact, with tragic consequences in some cases.

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Tom Stealey never learned the fate of his fellow civilian workers who boarded the ship on December 5, 1941, for Wake Island, one of the loneliest atolls in the Pacific, some 2,300 miles west of Honolulu. The Japanese bombed Wake on the same day as Pearl Harbor and, in spite of a heroic stand by Wake's defenders, captured the island two weeks later. In addition to 470 military personnel, 1,146 civilian workers at Wake became prisoners of the Japanese. The Wake POWs were so brutally treated—98 civilian workers were killed in one mass execution in 1943—that after the war the Japanese Army garrison commander was convicted of war crimes and executed.

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Shaw
survived to fight another day. After temporary repairs were made at Pearl Harbor, the destroyer sailed to San Francisco, where the work—including installing a new bow—was completed.
Shaw
returned to service with the Pacific Fleet in fall 1942. The destroyer saw extensive action during the war, earning eleven battle stars.

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Nearly twice as many Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor as died in the first twenty-four hours of D-Day following the Normandy invasion, during which 1,465 U.S. servicemen were killed.

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Ranking thirteenth in the class of 1904 was Husband E. Kimmel, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Thereafter, Kimmel was immediately relieved of his command (replaced by Chester Nimitz) and placed on the retired list in March 1942. Halsey later said although he knew the disaster would be formally investigated, he never would have “guessed that the blame would fall on Kimmel” because his Annapolis classmate did not deserve “any part of it.”