The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [110]
Meanwhile, an intricate deception operation lulled Allied suspicions, insofar as there were any, about the Fleet’s whereabouts. On 15 November, Special Ambassador Saburo Kurusu arrived in Washington to discuss American demands for a Japanese withdrawal from French Indo-China and official recognition of Chiang Kai-shek. Radio messages were sent to the ‘phantom’ fleet as if it was stationed in Japanese home waters in the Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku islands, knowing that Allied transmitters would be monitoring the frequency of signal. The luxury liner Tatsuta Maru set out on a twelve-day journey to San Francisco, albeit with orders to turn around and return to Yokohama at midnight on the night before the attack. Although the American Army Signal Corps had broken the Japanese Government cipher – codenamed Purple – in the 1930s, by a process codenamed Magic (the equivalent of the British Ultra), it was no help. Nagumo’s fleet sent out no messages, so there was no indication of where it was. Even before Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu requested a special audience with Hull timed for the exact moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew from intercepts that they were going to break off negotiations, but since the message from Tokyo mentioned neither war nor Pearl Harbor, Washington was none the wiser.12 The Administration’s expectation was that the blow would initially fall on British and Dutch possessions in South-East Asia, and possibly the American-controlled Philippines, and nothing from the cryptologists could have prepared them for what was about to happen.
When Nagumo’s fleet reached a point 275 miles north of Oahu, the detailed operation masterminded by Commander Minoru Genda, the planner on board Akagi, was put into action. Genda had studied the British use of aircraft carriers as offensive weapons during the raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940, and Japanese spies on Oahu had provided him with a detailed grid-referenced map of the principal American military assets on the island. Torpedoes with specially adapted fins were developed which could be dropped by bombers into shallow water, as well as newly invented armour-piercing shells dropped as bombs.13 (Because Pearl Harbor was not deep, no torpedo nets had been placed in front of the ships for protection.) The plan provided for a first wave of aircraft to attack the ships and planes at Pearl Harbor from the west at 07.55 hours, a second wave from the east at 08.45 with the same targets, and then, as the Americans were reeling from the destruction of their fleet and air force, a third wave would destroy the massive oil installations and ship-repairing facilities on the island, effectively wiping Pearl Harbor off the map as a functioning naval base and forcing the fleet back to California for the foreseeable future.
At 06.00 (Hawaiian time) on 7 December, the first wave set off and Fuchida guided them unerringly to their target. They reached Oahu undetected because Kimmel had chosen to concentrate aerial reconnaissance on the 2,000 miles of the south-western sector, facing the Japanese Marshall Islands, rather than on the northern approaches. There were only three American patrol aircraft aloft that morning, and none covering the north. The Japanese Kate bombers and their Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero-Sen fighters (Zeros) therefore found seven American battleships moored in a row alongside Ford Island in the harbour and an eighth – the Pennsylvania – in dry dock. For fear of sabotage, the USAAF planes had been packed close together, which made them easier to guard. It also made it hard for the well-trained, veteran Japanese bomber pilots to miss. The anti-aircraft batteries had no ready ammunition, and the keys to the boxes were held by the duty officer. Only one-quarter of the Navy’s machine guns were manned, and none of the main 5-inch batteries was. One-third of the ships’ captains were ashore.14 It was a Sunday morning, after all.
By 10.00 it was all over. Of the eight American