War Stories II (6 page)

A little more than an hour after the USS
Ward
sank a sub outside the anchorage, the USS
Curtiss
, a seaplane tender, and an auxiliary ship, the USS
Medusa
, also sighted one of the midget subs—this time
inside
Pearl Harbor. They immediately sent messages to the USS
Monaghan,
a destroyer that had just gotten under way. But as the
Monaghan
got up steam to race toward the new contact, the sky was suddenly filled with planes and all hell broke loose around them.

As Japanese aircraft dropped bombs and torpedoes, strafing the American airfields, barracks, and fleet, only one SPS midget sub penetrated the harbor. It launched a torpedo at the
Curtiss
, which by now had also been severely damaged after a Japanese plane had crashed into it. Despite fighting fires inside her hull and defending against other aircraft, the crew of the tender replied to the torpedo attack with a salvo of gunfire that scored a direct hit on the sub's conning tower.

The underwater missile intended for the tender missed and struck a dock at Pearl City. But the torpedo's wake alerted lookouts on the USS
Monaghan
. With anti-aircraft guns blazing at swarming Zeros, the destroyer, belching black smoke to hide it from the aerial attack, charged at the minisub, which then fired its second torpedo at the bow of the oncoming American vessel. The shot went wide, and seconds later, the
Monaghan
rammed the sub at high speed, crumpling its stern like a discarded cigarette. For good measure, before clearing the blazing harbor, the
Monaghan
dropped depth charges on the damaged sub. She sank quickly into the mud at the bottom of the anchorage.

By the time Commander Fuchida's second wave of aircraft reached Pearl Harbor, the
Monaghan
had joined the
Ward
and several other U.S. combatants—including the cruisers
Phoenix
,
St. Louis
, and
Detroit
, and destroyers
Tucker
,
Bagley
,
Dale
,
Henley
, and
Phelps
—outside the anchorage. There they joined in the attack on two other SPS midget submersibles—one of which was detected and believed sunk by depth charges after it fired its torpedoes at the USS
St. Louis.
Though never confirmed, a fourth midget sub was initially presumed to have been sunk about a mile outside the harbor during one of several depth charge attacks by American destroyers that ensued during the afternoon of 7 December and the morning of the following day.

Yamamoto's misgivings about the SPS attack were proving to be well founded. But for one of the midget sub skippers, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the attack would prove to be the most ignominious event of his life.

By the night of 7 December, the sole surviving midget sub, piloted by Ensign Sakamaki, was in dire straits. Its gyrocompass inoperable and
batteries nearly depleted, the sub drifted east until it ran aground on a coral reef off Bellows Field late that night. Sakamaki and his junior officer, Inagaki, were forced to abandon ship. Before doing so, they set a detonator on an explosive device to keep their sub from falling into American hands. Then they swam for the shore, fewer than a hundred yards from where the sub ran aground. Unfortunately for the hapless Sakamaki, the explosive charge failed to work as advertised and the sub did not self-destruct and sink. Worse still, Inagaki either drowned or committed suicide, and the exhausted Sakamaki, injured from the coral and sick from the poisonous fumes that had filled the submarine, barely made it ashore, where he finally collapsed, unconscious.

The next thing he recalls is a Colt .45 automatic pistol being held against his head by an American soldier, yelling at him in English to get up. The soldier holding the pistol was Corporal Akui of the Hawaii National Guard. He had just made Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial Navy, the first Japanese prisoner of war.