Tears in the Darkness (5 page)

After the turn of the twentieth century, Japan found itself in conflict with Russia over concessions in Korea, just across the Sea of Japan and strategically important to the Japanese. Most military observers of the day predicted that the Russians would swiftly overwhelm the force Japan sent against them, “The Eagles had . . . already fixed their talons on the carcass,” wrote one British officer. Nippon, however, struck fast, and its troops, as fierce as any the West had ever seen, defeated the mighty Russians at Port Arthur.
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In just fifty years Japan had transformed itself from a feudal overlord-ship into a modern military and industrial state, and now it was ready to share in the swag and booty of empire, to grab territory and force concessions in China and domains south, just as the Europeans had been doing in the Pacific since Magellan's famous sorties in the first decades of the sixteenth century.
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Japanese diplomats, pressed to defend their country's aggression, claimed necessity. Japan had suffered a series of recessions, and by 1929, the year of widespread financial collapse, the economy was faltering. Ultranationalists in government, aided by right-wing army officers, pressed for a military solution. And by 1937, the army had provoked so many military “incidents” on the Asian mainland that they got what they wanted—a full-scale war. By the end of 1938 the Japanese had more than a million troops fighting in China.

Alarmed, America began an economic war of nerves with the Japanese. Using embargoes of vital materials such as scrap iron, machine parts, and aircraft, America hoped to force Japan to pull back from China. When nothing worked, President Roosevelt in July 1941 froze all Japanese assets in the United States, in effect creating an embargo of the commodity Japan needed most—crude oil. And since America was Japan's chief source of oil, the boycott left the Imperial Army and Navy in a crisis.

The Japanese decided to take what they needed, and what they needed was in the hands of the British and the Dutch. War planners in
Tokyo knew well that by striking the East Indies they would provoke Europe's ally, the United States, into a fight. They also knew that they could not defeat the industry-rich Americans; the United States with its vast resources and its capacity to manufacture whatever war matériel it needed would eventually wear them down. Japan's only chance was to win as much as they could as quickly as they could, then sue for peace and the status quo. Keep the Americans off balance for six months, seize the mineral-rich colonies in the southwest Pacific, then set up a ring of defenses to protect their gains.

 

SURPRISE WAS ESSENTIAL.
Surprise had helped Hideyoshi in Korea in 1592 and had carried the day against the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904. Officers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy also knew well the words of the Kendo master Miyamoto Musashi: “You win in battles with timing . . . the timing of cunning . . . a timing which the enemy does not expect.” Surprise leaves an enemy low, outwitted, taciturn. America “will be utterly crushed with one blow,” an Imperial Navy admiral told the commanders of the Pearl Harbor task force at a briefing before the battle. “It is planned to shift the balance of power and thereby confuse the enemy at the outset and deprive him of his fighting spirit.”
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But a surprise attack, a modern coup de main, demanded careful planning, constant practice, strict secrecy, a willingness to sacrifice, and a lot of luck.
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The Japanese have seven gods of good fortune, and on December 8, 1941, these seven kami were with them. The attack on Hawaii left much of the Pacific Fleet burning or at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The surprise sorties against the other targets in the Pacific were stunning victories as well. Still, of all the units on the attack that day, the force with the most luck was the 11th Air Fleet, Sabur
Sakai and his fellow pilots in the fighters and bombers that had soared into the air from bases on Formosa to bomb Clark Field in the Philippines.

The battle plan had originally called for the Formosa squadrons to take off at 2:30 a.m., which would have put them over the target just after first light, roughly the same moment that the Pearl Harbor attack force, some five thousand miles to the east, was diving on Honolulu's airfields and on the battleships of the American Pacific Fleet. But a rare and very unseasonal “thick pea-soup fog” rolled in from the Straits of Formosa that morning. And standing on the tarmac in their flight suits,
Sabur
Sakai and his comrades could not see more than five yards in front of them.

Through the fog came a voice from the loudspeakers on the control tower: “Takeoff is delayed indefinitely,” and with that announcement, every pilot instantly understood that the element of surprise had been lost, for surely the Americans at Clark Field and at the other U.S. bases in the Philippines would have heard of the attack at Pearl Harbor and would be prepared for them, or perhaps the enemy was on its way to attack Formosa and the Japanese airfields there.
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Sakai and his fellow pilots, cupping their hands to their ears and listening for the sounds of American bombers overhead, waited for the fog to lift. Five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock. At last the fog gave way to mist, mist to blue sky, and by eight forty-five, all squadrons were headed south.

The attack was now six hours behind schedule and Sakai was sure “after the long delay . . . [the enemy] would be awaiting us in great strength.”

Just after noon the formation of fifty-three bombers and forty-five Zeros came roaring in from the South China Sea and the Zambales mountains. Below them, on the plains of Pampanga Province, was Clark Field, the main air base of the United States Army Forces in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur's army in the Philippines. When Sakai looked down, he saw “some sixty enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked along the airfield runways . . . squatted there like sitting ducks.”
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The Japanese airman was astonished. Why, he wondered, weren't the Americans in the air, “waiting for us?”

The bombers made their passes first. To Sakai, whose squadron of fighters was circling above, protecting the bombers, the attack on Clark Field looked “perfect.” He watched from his cockpit as “long strings of bombs tumbled from the bays” of the bombers “and dropped toward the targets.” When they hit, “the entire air base seemed to [rise] into the air with the explosions. Pieces of airplanes, hangars, and other ground installations scattered wildly. Great fires erupted and smoke boiled upward.”
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Now the Zeros took their turn. They “circled down to 13,000 feet . . . still without enemy opposition.” Then, with his two wingmen in tow, Sakai nosed over, “pushed the stick forward and dove at a steep angle for the ground.” He picked out two American B-17s sitting on the runway unscathed by the explosions and “poured a fusillade of bullets into the big bombers.”

Later, safely back on Formosa, the Japanese pilots were elated. “Now,” said one, “we have dealt a spectacular blow!” But, overall, they were surprised by their success and “bewildered” by their luck. They told their debriefing officers that they had “found the enemy's planes lined up on the target fields as if in peacetime.” It was almost “as if the enemy did not know that war had started.”
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THE AMERICAN PILOTS
and ground crews were eating their lunch when they heard the drone of planes overhead. Some of them rushed outside and looked up.

A few, veteran pilots mostly, knew immediately it was the enemy, but many on the ground, the uninitiated and unknowing, mistook the formations for “friendlies.” The planes, flying in giant V formations, were perfect in their spacing, their precision, their unerring course, “beautiful,” some men thought, and stirring against the vault of powder blue.
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Then they began to see something strange, something that seemed to be floating beneath the giant Vs: small strips of silver glinting in the sun like tiny pieces of tin foil, “sparkles,” Ben Steele thought. And all at once, they knew—bombs. Suddenly the air raid klaxon began its urgent warnings:
Eah
—
Eah
—
Eah
—

“Japanese!” Ben Steele heard someone yell. “Take cover!”

At roughly 12:15 p.m., the first of some forty-two tons of incendiary and fragmentation bombs started to fall toward the field. Some of the men simply stood there and stared, transfixed by the Vs and the silver sparkles falling from the sky.
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Then the base erupted. A line of explosions advanced across the field, then another line, and another. Each bomb held roughly a hundred pounds of explosive in its warhead, enough TNT to bring down a building, blow up an airplane, blast a hole in a runway twelve feet wide, and turn a flesh-and-blood human being into a spray of red. The men on the south side of the field watched the explosions approach—five hundred yards, three hundred, one hundred . . . a burst of blinding white, a sharp, painful
crack!
followed by an enormous rip, a tearing of the air, then, finally, a deep shudder in the ground, the earth set atremble.

A bomb blast is lethal science, fluid mechanics meant to maim. First, the shock wave, a surge of air that hits a man like a wall of wind, hits him so hard his cerebrum starts to shake concussively in his skull, swelling at first, then hemorrhaging, rivulets of blood running from his
nose and ears, vomit from his mouth. An instant after the shock wave passes, the atmosphere turns hot and dense, high pressure sucking the low pressure from every recess around it, from a man's lungs and ears and eye sockets, leaving him gasping for breath and fighting the feeling his pupils are being pulled from their sockets. Finally, fluid mechanics turns to terminal ballistics as the blast blows apart the bomb's casing, sending hundreds of jagged fragments—pieces of white-hot shrapnel, some no bigger than a pebble, others as big as a brick—slicing into anything in their path.

Q. P. Devore was hit right away.

He had spent the morning sorting armory supplies and at mess call had met his friend Ben Steele for lunch. He ate quickly that afternoon; the fellas in the control tower had invited him up for a look, so he climbed the stairs to the cupola on top of the first hangar to chew the fat with the operations boys and take in the view. All at once a voice came over an intercom: “Enemy bombers overhead.” Devore laughed. Another false alarm. “Hey fellas, I'm going to step out on the stairs for a look,” he said, and he began to descend from the cupola, down the stairs that hugged the outside of the hangar. When he heard the drone of engines, he stopped and looked up. He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the loudest noise he'd ever heard, and just like that, his world went blank.

When he came to, he was on the ground, lying among a litter of empty gasoline drums at the bottom of the stairs. His body ached, his head was thick and heavy. And he kept hearing a voice, faint at first, as if it were far away.

“Help . . . help.”

As his head cleared, the voice grew louder.

“Help me! Please! Somebody help me!”

Devore rolled over and saw a man he knew, a lieutenant from his unit. He blinked and looked again. The man was wobbling, struggling to stand, to get up on the one leg he had left.

A truck stopped nearby and the driver rushed over to the two men. “Let's get this officer to the hospital at Stotsenberg,” he said, and Devore helped him load the lieutenant in the pickup, then jumped in the back.

At Stotsenberg hospital the wounded from Clark Field were everywhere, filling the wards, the halls, the concrete porch in back. When Q. P. Devore arrived with the mangled lieutenant, orderlies were putting men
on blankets on the front lawn, and a nurse pressed Devore into service as a litter bearer, unloading truckloads of hobbled, bleeding, unconscious men. He hefted and hauled, stretcher after stretcher, until a nurse stopped him and said, “Hey, what's the story with you?”