The Real Saint Patrick Behind St. Patrick’s Day

00:00:16
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Up next, the story of the most unexpected event of the twentieth century in a way you’ve never heard it told before. While we all certainly know what happened after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most of us don’t know about the feelings of those calling the shots on the ground and what happened leading up to our terrifying entry into World War Two. Here to share the story is Steve Toomey, author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor. Let’s start this off the story of an individual man.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: His name is Husband Kimmel, and on the morning of December 7, he was supposed to go out and play golf, but about 8 AM, a telephone call led him to leave his house on a small rise above the harbor. It was actually an extinct volcanic rim because this phone call had told him, in effect, to do so. And as he did that, he was watching dozens and dozens of Japanese warplanes pouncing on those ships in the harbor. Those were his ships. He was the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and until that moment he had enjoyed nearly forty absolutely spotless years of service in the Navy. He had succeeded at everything he had done and risen steadily through the ranks. If you ever see a picture of him, he looks exactly like you’d expect an admiral to look. Handsome, impressive, confident. Standing with him in his yard was a neighbor, the wife of one of his officers, who had come out of her home, and together they stood there, and they could see a battleship in the harbor, already starting to tip over. Everything that Kimmel knew about military logic, everything he knew about the Japanese and their ability, was being blown up before his eyes. All the decisions he had made were being nullified. And she said that his face was as white as the uniform he wore. I think that’s one of the most poignant moments in American history. Kimmel was standing there and realized not only was this horrific disaster happening, but it was going to be the end of his career. As it was, you have to remember the Navy was a bigger thing in 1941 than it is now. Newspapers routinely printed stories about people being promoted and changes of command, and people were really aware of these giant battleships with their big guns, and in that harbor took place the most catastrophically unexpected event in American history to that point. It shattered the nation’s sense of itself as a confident, safe, optimistic, superior country, and it shattered the Navy’s reputation as unbeatable. But we have to remember that they didn’t know December 7 was a famous day. It hadn’t happened yet. They had known awareness that along with July Fourth, or November 22, 1963, or September 11, that that would be a famous date. It wasn’t circled on their calendars. And this was the age before satellites. There were no cameras parked up there in the sky looking down, snapping photos. When thirty Japanese warships began silently sailing out of an absolutely obscure bay, cold, snowy, almost no people there. At the far northern fringe of the Japanese Empire, we did not know they had left, because we had no means of knowing they had left. Still, during this period, clues were building that something big was going to happen. We tend to think of Pearl Harbor as this bolt from the blue that the United States was minding its own business, and the Japanese came along and…

00:04:28
Speaker 3: …started World War Two.

00:04:31
Speaker 2: But, in fact, any American paying reasonable attention to the news knew that war with Japan was getting closer all the time, as well as war with Germany. In the Atlantic Ocean, we were already fighting the Germans, even though we were technically at peace. We were escorting British convoys to England, and Roosevelt had given orders to shoot on sight any German ship they encountered en route, and the Germans were replying by shooting at our warships. They had sunk at least two with loss of life in the Atlantic, so people were really attuned to the idea that war was likely to happen, including war with Japan. The Roosevelt administration had been negotiating for months with the Japanese, to put it very simply, to get them to stop attacking countries in the Far East. Japanese had been at war with China since 1937. They had taken over much of French Indochina, and in late November and December of 1941. It was obvious from the reports of consular agents, businessmen, spies, commercial ships on the ocean. It was obvious that the Japanese were moving warships and troop transports toward Singapore, which was a British outpost, a naval base, toward Malaya, towards the Dutch East Indies, towards Thailand, and towards the Philippines, which we owned. That move that movement of troops and warships was so obvious that on November 27, Washington sent a warning about the possibility of war to all of its Army and Navy outposts in the Pacific, and that said war was imminent. In the matter of days, the Army was suddenly out on the streets of Honolulu guarding against sabotage by some of the residents of Hawaii of Japanese descent. There was something else that happened. We listened to what the Japanese Navy was saying to itself. We could hear them talking ship to ship, to shore, shore to ship, and there were dozens…

00:06:56
Speaker 3: …of people whose job was to do that.

00:06:58
Speaker 2: You’d sit there all day with headphones on listening to the Japanese talking to themselves. We didn’t know what they were saying because they were speaking in a form of code. It wasn’t that it was Japanese. It was coded Japanese. But it’s remarkable how just by hearing who is talking to who, you can figure out who’s in charge and who is moving where, and you might even be able to identify certain ships simply because every ship had an address, a phone number, if you will, called a radio call signal, and so if you got enough of those assembled, you could figure out that something might be going on by the volume of talking and who…

00:07:40
Speaker 3: …was in charge.

00:07:41
Speaker 2: The Japanese knew we listened to them, and in order to confuse the other side, you routinely changed everybody’s address, usually every six months. And on November 1, right on schedule, the Japanese Navy changed all of its radio call signals. Then on November 30, something extraordinary happened. All the Navy listeners in Hawaii and also in the Philippines suddenly realized the Japanese had changed their radio call signals again, only a month after they had done it before.

00:08:19
Speaker 3: They had never done that, and that was read immediately as a desire by…

00:08:25
Speaker 2: …the Japanese to really confuse us about something they were about to do. War was extremely close, and we knew it. And not only that, we knew that Pearl Harbor. We had discussed for months that Pearl Harbor might be the subject of a surprise attack before a declaration of war. And to understand that, I want to introduce you to Patrick Bellinger, Naval Air Pilot Number Four, as that suggests he had been around…

00:08:59
Speaker 3: …at the birth of naval aviation back in the teens.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Steve Toomey, author of Countdown to Pearl Harbor. And, of course, we learned that the Japanese were changing up patterns, changing up signals, and this was not a total surprise that the Japanese, well, they were looking to strike at America. When we come back, more of the story of Pearl Harbor, the events leading up to it. Here on our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories and with the story of what happened before bombs and torpedoes dropped at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Day of Infamy. When we last left off, Steve Toomey was about to share the story of Patrick Bellinger, one of America’s earliest airmen. Let’s return to the story.

00:10:02
Speaker 2: He really knew flying, and in March of 1941, Bellinger had co-authored a report.

00:10:10
Speaker 3: And it’s sort of like Michael J….

00:10:13
Speaker 2: …Fox getting into the DeLorean and taking off for the future. He said that when times are tense and we’re not getting along with Japan, it’s possible the Japanese would attempt to move what he called a fast rating force of one or more aircraft carriers into Hawaiian waters, and they would be able to do that without our knowing, and at about 300 miles away from Oahu, they would launch their planes and those planes would arrive over Pearl Harbor, perhaps at dawn, and they would catch the fleet in the harbor, and if that happened, the results would be disastrous. He wrote that again in March of 1941. On November 30, had no knowledge of the war warnings because no one had told him. No one would tell him in the next few days either that the Navy listeners now couldn’t find four of Japan’s aircraft carriers, so the man who had forecast a raid under tense circumstances, didn’t know carriers were missing, and didn’t know the times were that tense, which brings me to the third person I’d like you to meet. His name is Arthur McCollum. Arthur was the Chief of the Far Eastern Section of Naval Intelligence, and he was a most unusual American because he had been born in Japan. His parents were missionaries. He spoke Japanese; he had served in Japan twice as a naval officer. McCollum and even taught the emperor how to dance American style. So the Japanese respected McCollum, and he respected them. That, however, was not the common opinion of most Americans.

00:11:59
Speaker 3: …in 1941.

00:12:01
Speaker 2: Americans tended to think of the Japanese as almost amusingly curious little people who were not particularly creative or innovative. Their weapons were thought to be not too good, their ability with things mechanical was thought to be not too great. They were even thought to have physiological defects that made them lousy flyers. In 1939, an author by the name of Fletcher Pratt, a pretty well-known author, had written this: “The Japanese as a race have defects of the inner ear, just as they generally are myopic. Put them in an airplane, they’re going to crash.” McCollum tried to convince people that no, no, you’ve got it all wrong.

00:12:44
Speaker 3: “They’re actually quite good at what they do,” but he later…

00:12:48
Speaker 2: …said it was impossible to penetrate this mindset because of what he called, quote, “the constant daily drum fire from our press that they are militarily amusing.” In the same vein, there was also a belief that there was an attribute of Pearl Harbor that worked in their favor when it came to defending the island and defending the fleet, and that our attribute was the depth of the harbor. When you drop a torpedo from an airplane, they’re very heavy things, and they plunge quite deeply into the water. If there isn’t enough water, they simply go into the bottom. Our own torpedoes needed considerably more depth than was available…

00:13:34
Speaker 3: …in Pearl Harbor.

00:13:35
Speaker 2: Pearl Harbor was about forty-five feet, and we had concluded, therefore, the ships in the harbor were safe and didn’t need nets strung around them that might catch torpedoes. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that the Japanese, who also knew the depth of Pearl Harbor, rather than simply accepting that as a reality of life, would seek to solve the problem. But they did solve the problem by adding fins to torpedoes, which brings me to the final person I’d like you to meet, Sadao Chigusa. On November 30, he was aboard one of those thirty warships plowing silently across the North Pacific. It wasn’t until a few days before they left that Chigusa not only found out who the enemy was, but where they were going. It’s really remarkable how much debate there was within the Imperial Navy about conducting this attack. Many of the admirals and officers within the Imperial Navy didn’t want to attack the Pacific Fleet. They felt, “If the Americans challenge us after we do all these other things, let them sail towards us. Let’s not sail towards them.” But the Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Navy, a man whose name was Isoroku Yamamoto, insisted that the way to win the war, or at least have a chance to win the war, was to eliminate the only threat to the Imperial Navy that existed in the Pacific, and to do it before the war started in total surprise, hoping to destroy American morale. The objections to that idea, though, were this: how was it possible to keep secret the movement of thirty warships across the Pacific on a mission that would take twelve days? They could be seen at any moment by a commercial ship, an American plane. And the worst part of that is that if they were spotted…

00:15:37
Speaker 3: …they might not know it.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: They might continue sailing directly into an ambush that the Americans had prepared for them.

00:15:44
Speaker 3: …rather than the other way around.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: And the final objection, or an objection, I should say, to the attack was there was no guarantee the Pacific Fleet was going to be there when they got there. Again, it’s the age before satellites. When they set out, they had no way of knowing whether their target would even be there. So when Chigusa found out, “Oh, you’re going to Hawaii,” he thought that was the end of his life.

00:16:13
Speaker 3: He said he…

00:16:14
Speaker 2: …would die, quote, “off Hawaii in the greatest and most desperate battle in our history.” He sent a letter to his parents bidding them farewell. He cut a snippet of his hair, stuck it in an envelope, and sent it to his wife and his children. He was not alone among those men, so when they arrived in the early morning darkness on December 7, they were almost as surprised as the Americans were about to be that they had not been found. They had seen no one. No one had seen them. Chigusa wrote in his diary that it was, in effect, a miracle. “I really couldn’t find any other better expression of our good fortune than the words the grace of heaven and the…”

00:16:58
Speaker 3: …help of God.” They had succeeded.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: Because they had been underestimated. In closing, I’d like to share the moment when all of those problems, when the assumptions that the Americans had made were being eviscerated, and when it became apparent that the Japanese had pulled off this thing that the Americans had thought they couldn’t do. It was a moment late on December 7, in Washington at the Old Navy Department, and a man placed the telephone call.

00:17:31
Speaker 3: The man was named Harold R. Stark.

00:17:33
Speaker 2: The highest-ranking uniformed officer in the Navy. Even the government was having trouble understanding the extent of the damage. And Harold Stark called Pearl Harbor, and he reached an Admiral named Claude Block. Stark did have in his hands the first official report sent by Admiral Kimmel, and I’ll briefly tell you what Kimmel said. He said: “Surprise attack by Japanese damaged all battleships except Maryland.” He said the Arizona was a total wreck; the cruisers Honolulu, Helena, and Raleigh unfit for sea. The destroyers Shaw, Cassin, and Downes…

00:18:17
Speaker 3: …were a complete loss.” But he said:

00:18:20
Speaker 2: “Personnel behaving magnificently in face of furious surprise.” I don’t know if you caught it. But twice in that note Kimmel referred to surprise as if he needed Washington to understand. This wasn’t incompetence; it was treachery.

00:18:38
Speaker 3: So Stark had that.

00:18:39
Speaker 2: Information. But he wanted more, and so he called and reached Admiral Block. Now, all this time since the warning he had sent out, Stark had been under the assumption that the Pacific Fleet had gone to sort of defensive measures and was searching to make sure it wasn’t being approached by the Japanese. And here’s what he said to Block.

00:19:02
Speaker 3: “Did our patrol…”

00:19:03
Speaker 2: “…planes get them before they hit us?” “No,” Block said, and he began to ramble about another topic. But Stark wasn’t going to let this topic go. He asked again: “Can you tell me how many and how far out the search planes were scouting?”

00:19:21
Speaker 3: “No? I cannot,” said Block. “Do you know how many were out?”

00:19:26
Speaker 2: “No?”

00:19:28
Speaker 3: “What sectors they were in?” “No? I don’t. Kimmel knows that.”

00:19:33
Speaker 2: “Well, tell Kimmel, I will be asking him these questions that I want to know how far out they were and in what sectors.” Actually, Block had a pretty good idea about the patrol planes, because he finally confessed to Stark: “The answers will be sad, very unsatisfactory.”

00:19:54
Speaker 3: “They caught us flat foot.”

00:19:55
Speaker 1: A special thanks to Steve Toomey. Also, a special thanks to the U.S. National Archives for allowing us to access this audio. The story of Pearl Harbor and the days and months leading up to it. Here on our American Stories.