Pearl Harbor Quotes

“It is little remembered that there was a second Pearl Harbor. Ten hours after being alerted to the first, Japanese planes struck Clark Field in the Philippines, destroying one hundred and two planes, including all but three of General Brereton’s B-17s. He had pleaded with MacArthur to attack Japanese air bases in Formosa. MacArthur replied through his aide, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, that he had been ordered not to make “the first overt act.” What was Pearl Harbor if not an overt act? Brereton demanded. While the debate went on, the Japanese, at first delayed by fog, hit near high noon, finding MacArthur’s planes nearly lined up in rows like the shooting gallery it was. “What the hell!” roared Air Corps chief Hap Arnold when he heard about it. • • • • • At 1458 in Honolulu, Tadeo Fuchikami finally made his delivery of Marshall’s alert to the “Commanding General” at Fort Shafter. It was thrown in a wastebasket without carrying out the request to pass it on to the Navy. “For a while I thought the Day of Infamy had been my fault,” Fuchikami mused many years later. Then I realized I was just one of the sands of time.” The Pearl Harbor attack had left eighteen warships sunk or damaged, including five battleships, and one hundred and eighty-eight planes destroyed. The raid killed two thousand four hundred and three Americans. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes and fifty-five fliers. Kido butai returned home with three hundred and twenty-four surviving planes.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“At Pearl Harbor, the second wave of the attack delivered another body blow from 0915 to 0945. Then the attackers flew off to the north. Opana radar, which had been turned back on at 0900, tracked the planes north but the Army didn’t tell the Navy which was sending its remaining planes looking for the carriers to the south and west. Fuchida was the last to land at 1300. He, Genda and others argued strenuously but futilely with Nagumo to renew the attack. The crucial oil tanks had yet to be hit. With them gone, the remaining American fleet would be powerless. But the admiral was adamant. Kido butai turned for home.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“Daniel Inouye, a nisei senior at McKinley High School long before he became a U.S. senator, furiously pedaled his bike to help at an aid station. He looked up into the sky and said to himself: “You dirty Japs!” On cruiser San Francisco an engineer came topside to join Ensign John Parrott. “I thought I’d come up and die with you.” Rear Admiral William Furlong stood on the bridge wing on Helena. A gunner called: “Excuse me, admiral, would you mind moving so we can shoot through here?” An officer playing golf went into a sand trap after his ball to find a soldier there shooting a rifle into the air. A bomb blew off a comer of a guardhouse. The inmates rushed out to help set up a .50 caliber machine gun. The phone rang in a Hickam hangar and someone reflexively picked it up. The caller wanted to know what all the noise was about. Kimmel stood in a window at his headquarters as a spent bullet tumbled in the window and hit him on the chest, smudging his whites. “It would have been better if it killed me,” he said. Down the hall Layton, Kimmel’s intelligence officer, caught sight of Admiral Bye who the day before had said the Japanese would never attack the United States. He was wearing a life jacket, his whites smeared with oil, staring wordlessly into the middle distance. “Soc” McMorris appeared: “Well, Layton, if it’s any satisfaction to you, we were wrong and you were right.” •”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“The most murderous hit and — unluckiest — of all was the armor piercing bomb that struck battleship Arizona near her No. 2 turret at about 0810. The bomb crashed through the deck as Genda had designed it and exploded into a fuel tank. Fire flared for seven seconds before reaching 1.7 million pounds of explosives. Arizona leaped into the air and settled fatally fractured into the mud with more than one thousand of its crew instantly killed with it. Some two hundred of them were later taken ashore and laid on the lawn in front of officers’ bungalows, their blood soaking the grass red.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“Fuchida was to give two signals: “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger) if surprise had been achieved, then fire a flare indicating this. That meant the torpedoes were to be launched first before smoke and fire obscured the targets. But he thought his flare had been missed by some. He fired a second. The dive bombers misinterpreted this as indicating the Americans had been alerted and nosed down towards their targets.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“The day after the Martin-Bellinger report, on April Fools Day if anyone noticed, ONI alerted all naval districts that “. . . past experience shows the Axis Powers often begin activities . . . on Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays of the country concerned . . . . Take steps on such days to see that proper watches and precautions are in effect.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“the end of 1939, Japan’s oil stocks had stood at fifty-five million barrels, enough to fight for eighteen months. Sixty percent of oil imports came from the United States. Japan’s islands produced only twelve percent of the iron ore needed; the rest came from Manchuria with its hostile Russian neighbor. But the Japanese military remained split between those favoring a strike north against the hated Communist Soviet Union or south to grab the resources of Southeast Asia. The United States fleet remained an obstacle to both strategies. The navy stuck to its war plan of an ambush of the U.S. fleet in home waters. That way Japanese gunships could carry more guns and less fuel. But carrier admirals such as Yamamoto would need more oil to fuel far-striking carriers and their planes. The hawks itched for action in either direction. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo disclosed his strategy to a dovish colleague, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye, who believed Japan should adhere to its Naval Treaty obligations. “You’re a fool,” chided Nagumo. “I thrust with a dagger up under the ribs, and that would be it. . . .” Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union June 22, 1941, put blood in the water. Yosuke Matsuoka, now foreign minister, counseled: “When Germany wipes out the Soviet Union, we can’t simply share in the spoils of victory unless we have done something. We must either shed our blood or embark on diplomacy. It’s better to shed blood.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“The Japanese navy had first drafted a contingency plan for war with the United States in 1907. Japan’s basic strategy called for luring the American fleet westward from its West Coast or Hawaii bases, sniping at it with submarines as it approached until ambushing it with overwhelming force as it neared the Home Islands. America’s counter-strategy, embodied in a series of Plans Orange, finally stipulated a series of land fortresses across the Pacific to Guam and the Philippines bound together by a fleet always superior to Japan’s.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“The Washington conference agreement was signed February 6, 1922. It limited capital ships to thirty-five thousand tons, carriers to twenty-seven thousand tons, guns to a maximum bore of sixteen inches. As if to show there were no hard feelings, the United States, Britain, France and Japan agreed to respect the status quo under the mandates of the League of Nations.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“On another level, by the Root-Takahira Treaty of 1908, Japan and the United States agreed to support the status quo in the Pacific as well as the independence and “integrity” of China and maintaining the “Open Door” to international trade there. The Japanese interpreted the pact as de facto recognition of their predominant influence in Korea and Manchuria. Japanese expansionism took a more direct form with the outbreak of World War I. Japan, which had had a treaty with Great Britain since 1902, immediately seized Germany’s concessions in China. Shortly after, Japanese forces took Germany’s island possessions in the Pacific: Palau, the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshalls. While Europe clawed at its vitals in the stalemated trenches of France, Japan in 1915 sought to strengthen itself on the Asian mainland with the humbling Twenty-One Demands upon China. These would have made China all but a Japanese protectorate and given the Empire a free hand in southern Manchuria even to Mongolia. China, beset by Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, had no recourse but to submit.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“By the tum of the century thousands of Japanese had migrated to the Hawaiian Islands and the West Coast of America. They came for opportunity, for new starts. By 1908 there were sixty thousand Japanese in California but they encountered the same racism earlier migrants from China had faced. American resentment focused on the willingness of Japanese immigrants to work for lower wages. West Coast labor organizations organized Japanese and Korean Exclusion League. The idea of a “Yellow Peril” flood of Asians had resurfaced. In 1906 the San Francisco school board ordered all Orientals into a separate school. By a subsequent “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Japan agreed to curtail migration to the United States. But face had been lost for a proud and ancient people.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“Some twenty-three hundred miles away Major General H.H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps, had traveled to Hamilton Field near Sacramento to personally see off a flight of thirteen B-l 7s destined for MacArthur in the Philippines by way of Hawaii. The first leg to Hickam Field took fourteen hours, so the big bombers flew with only four-man crews and were unarmed. One of the pilots objected. At least they ought to carry their bomb sights and machine guns. Arnold said they could be put aboard but without ammunition to save weight. So the bombers could home in on its signal, Major General Frederick L. Martin, head of the Hawaiian Air Force, had his staff ask station WGMB in Honolulu to stay on all night. Sure thing, general. Another night of ukuleles and Glenn Miller drifting out across the Pacific courtesy of the U.S. Army Air Corps. When Lieutenant Colonel George W. Bicknell of Army intelligence heard about it, he blew up. Why tip our hands whenever we have planes coming in? Why not keep WGMB on the air every night? One of those who caught the station was Lieutenant Kermit Tyler on his way to work the graveyard shift at the radar coordinating station at Fort Shafter. Must be planes coming in from the States, he told himself.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“On December 2 Yamamoto signaled the silent fleet the final go-ahead: “Climb Mount Niitaka.” Mount Niitaka was the highest point in the Japanese Empire. Revealing of what Japan had become, it was not in that nation at all. It was on Formosa, won by war with China in 1895.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“No one was more aware of what a gamble kido butai was than its brilliant creator, Admiral Isoroku Yamamato. He had no illusions about Japan’s chances in a war with the industrial power of the West. But his patriotism, his intellect, his love of gambling had all been challenged. If his more headstrong colleagues must go to war, and if they intended to do so by seizing the oil of Dutch Indonesia and rubber of British Malaya, then the only way to succeed was by neutralizing the might of the U.S. Navy on the Japanese flank. And the only way to do that was by surprise. It was, as it turned out, a grave miscalculation, one that Yamamoto did not live to see realized. Commander Kikuichi Fujita of the cruiser Tone foresaw the consequences graphically: “I think this sortie is going to be like going into a tiger’s lair to get her cubs.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor

“The Army anti-aircraft unit that protected Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor was actually stationed fifteen miles and a ferry ride away at Camp Malakole. Daily they carted the guns in and reassembled them. On December 7 the men were given a day off. Indeed, only one-quarter of the anti-aircraft guns at Pearl Harbor were manned, only four of the Army’s thirty-one batteries. For fear of sabotage and because it “was apt to disintegrate and get dusty,” the ammunition was in storage under lock and key. It was often hard to find who had the keys. Particularly on weekends.”
― Associated Press, Pearl Harbor