Alternate Generals (21 page)

William Mitchell

Brig. Gen. USAAF

Of course everybody thought he was crazy. The navy fliers had a joke that Billy Mitchell had put in too many hours at high altitude without his oxygen mask. General Short would probably have thought that was a good one, except I don't think he knew what an oxygen mask was.

Short was the commanding general of the Hawaiian Department. He was an old infantryman with so little grasp of aviation that he wanted to take away our ground crews and train them as infantry. Still, Mitchell was obviously keeping his people hard at work, and Short was old-school enough to approve of that.

So Short let Mitchell have a fairly free hand in training his people. He listened to Mitchell's frequent warnings and predictions, though, with the amused indulgence you might give an otherwise gifted friend who happens to belong to some extremely weird religious cult. And he made it plain that there would be no nonsense about long-range recon flights, searching the northern seas for, as he put it, "imaginary Japanese bogeymen."

—Maj. Gen. Richard Shilling,
Pacific Command

5 November 1941

To: Commander in Chief, Combined Fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto

Via: Chief of Naval General Staff, Osami Nagano

By Imperial Order:

1. The Empire has resolved on war measures in early December, expecting to be forced to go to war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands for self-preservation and self-defense.

2. The Commander in Chief, Combined Fleet, will execute the necessary operational preparations.

3. Detailed instructions will be given by the Chief of the Naval General Staff.

SENATOR TRUMAN: General Short, tell the committee your opinion of General Mitchell prior to December nineteen forty-one.

GENERAL SHORT: I considered him an outstanding and dedicated officer. Some of his ideas struck me as rather fanciful, but on the whole I regarded him as an asset to my command.

TRUMAN: Would you say there was friction between the two of you?

SHORT: Not at all. He did have a tendency to push a bit beyond appropriate limits, to try and bypass chains of command. But I put that down to a commendable zeal.

TRUMAN: What about the matter of reconnaissance patrols? Was that an example of, as you put it, fanciful ideas?

SHORT: More an example of his impatience with proper procedures. General Mitchell was preoccupied with the idea of an air attack on Hawaii. He wanted to conduct aerial patrols over the waters surrounding the Islands, particularly to the north. As I explained to him—more than once—offshore patrolling was the navy's responsibility.

TRUMAN: Was the navy in fact flying patrols to the north?

SHORT: I assumed they were. Later I learned otherwise.

TRUMAN: General, are you familiar with the old army saying, "When you assume. . ."?

SHORT: I beg your pardon?

TRUMAN: Never mind. Weren't you aware of the international situation? Did you in fact take any measures at all to protect your command in case of trouble with Japan?

SHORT: Certainly. I instituted a major anti-sabotage program.

TRUMAN: Sabotage? You were worried about sabotage?

SHORT: Hawaii had—has—a large Japanese population.

TRUMAN: Were there ever any cases of sabotage by these people?

SHORT: None. Obviously my security measures were effective.

TRUMAN: So you authorized no patrol flights by General Mitchell? And you had no knowledge that he was making them on his own?

SHORT: None whatever. Naturally I knew his aircraft were going off on long flights every day, but according to him these were merely training operations, meant to give the crews experience in long-range over-water navigation. It was only later that I learned that he and his officers had been falsifying their reports and flight logs. Since the beginning of November they had been flying regular patrols over the northwest sector to a radius of as much as eight hundred miles.

TRUMAN: And this was in violation of your orders.

SHORT: Direct and flagrant violation, sir. I was appalled.

—Hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the North Pacific Incident, March 3, 1947

Captain Mark Rucker was just about ready to call it a day. It was getting late and he was a long way from home.

He was, in fact, about 800 miles northwest of Oahu. That was much further out than the book said he should be; but Rucker's boss had spent his life rewriting the book.

Brigadier General Billy Mitchell had come a long way since the stormy days of the 1920's, but he was still a man obsessed. He was by no means alone in believing war with Japan to be imminent, but he thought he knew exactly where and how it would begin. Any morning now, a Japanese carrier force would come pounding down out of the North Pacific and launch a surprise strike against the U.S. bases in Hawaii. If history was any guide, they wouldn't bother to declare war first.

He had even worked out the route they would take: across the emptiest part of the sea, between the 40th and 45th parallels, out of range of patrol planes from Midway and the Aleutians. East of the International Date Line, they would swing southeast and make directly for Hawaii.

He was so sure he was right that, once again, he was laying his military neck on the line. For over a month, under various pretexts and subterfuges, his B-17 pilots of the 18th Bombardment Wing had been flying regular patrols over the northwest sector. There were too few planes for proper coverage, but Mitchell felt anything was better than simply sitting blind, waiting for the enemy to attack.

He hadn't been entirely dishonest, though, in writing the flights up as long-distance training missions. In the course of these patrols, his airmen had developed a whole bag of tricks for extending the B-17's range. Captain Rucker wasn't seriously worried about getting home. He had been farther out than this, many times.

All the same, Rucker was relieved to see that he was reaching the end of his ten-degree patrolling arc. Time to head for the barn . . . but then his copilot, Lieutenant Ray Agostini, began shouting and pointing off to the north. A moment later Rucker saw it too, a great gray blur against the darkening sea.

My God, he thought. We've got somebody's whole navy up here.

—Walter Lord,
Day of Battle

Admiral Yamaguchi argued that we should maintain air patrols while en route to Hawaii. I opposed this on grounds of security. Should a scout plane encounter an enemy or neutral vessel, the ship might radio news of the sighting, thus warning the Americans of the presence of a carrier force in the North Pacific.

Admiral Nagumo agreed. No planes would be launched until the morning of the attack. However, each carrier would keep six fighters in readiness during the daylight hours.

Late on the afternoon of 5 December, the cruiser
Abukuma
signaled that her lookouts had spotted an airplane off to the south. No one else could see anything in that direction, the sky being quite cloudy. Admiral Nagumo ordered the
Akagi
to launch her ready fighters. The six Zeroes searched the area but found nothing and had to return in the gathering dusk. Meanwhile our radiomen reported no transmission anywhere in the vicinity.

After some discussion it was decided that the alarm had been false. We would proceed as planned. But the incident obviously worried Admiral Nagumo. Later that evening I saw him on the bridge, staring unhappily at the southern sky.

—Capt. Minoru Genda,
I Flew For The Emperor

Captain Rucker was already climbing through the clouds, heading for home, by the time the Zeroes took off. He never even realized they were after him. But he had something else to worry about: the B-17's radio, which had been acting up for hours, was now refusing to transmit at all. He would have to wait till he got back to Hawaii to make his report.

At 2215 the wheels of the B-17 finally touched down at Hickam Field. Rucker's long day, however, was far from over. General Mitchell was waiting at the control tower, as he often did—there was a rumor that the "Old Man" hadn't slept since 1925—and when he heard Rucker's report he fairly exploded. Within minutes, the unfortunate pilot was hustled into Mitchell's car for a wild high-speed run up to Fort Shafter.

Mitchell's ballistic driving style was legendary, and Rucker found the ride even more terrifying than his recent brush with the Japanese. But nothing was as scary as the experience that followed. Less than an hour later the young captain, still in his sweaty flight suit and needing a shave, found himself in a room full of generals and admirals and lesser brass, all of them firing questions at Rucker and arguing among themselves.

Under the grilling, Rucker had to admit that he hadn't gotten a very good look at the mystery ships. He was sure that he had seen at least three carriers and a couple of battleships, with various other unidentified vessels; he believed they were heading southeast.

Admiral Kimmel was frankly skeptical. So was Admiral Bellinger, the navy air commander. Army fliers were notoriously imaginative when it came to ship sightings. If Rucker had seen anything at all, it was probably a Russian freighter. For that matter, Japanese fishing fleets often turned up in those waters, raising questions as to what they were up to.

General Short appeared confused; he was an elderly man and he had been awakened from a sound sleep. He seemed less interested in what Rucker had seen than in what the airman had been doing up there in the first place. That Mitchell had been running a regular system of unauthorized reconnaissance flights, deliberately contravening Short's orders, was far more upsetting than any ship movements. As he later testified, only the lateness of the hour and the uncertainty of the situation stopped him from placing Mitchell under arrest.

Some time after midnight a consensus was reached. At dawn Bellinger's big PBY patrol seaplanes would go check the northwest sector in a proper manner. Just in case they found something, the fleet would go on alert. There was no point bothering Washington until more was known.

As the meeting broke up, Rucker overheard an exchange between a couple of naval officers:

"Well, it's finally going to happen."

"War, you mean?"

"No, no. I mean Billy Mitchell's court-martial. I can't believe it's taken this long."

—Gordon Prange,
Resort to Arms

It was never clear just how the thing was managed. Later accounts and recollections were contradictory and vague. Pilots remembered being awakened in the middle of the night and given a hurried, rather cryptic briefing; air and ground crewmen had the usual enlisted man's memories of working frantically and being shouted at. The one thing everybody recalled was an atmosphere of great urgency and secrecy. Whatever was happening, it was big.

No one questioned for a moment the legitimacy of what they were doing. Even instructions to load the B-17's with live bombs went unchallenged. The armorers were draftees, with a few career NCOs; none were in the habit of questioning direct orders from generals.

As for the pilots, they testified later that it never occurred to them that General Mitchell might be acting without authority. Off the record, most agreed that it would have made little difference. They would, they said, have followed the Old Man to bomb Hell with water balloons.

(Mark Rucker, the only one who knew the truth, was lost in the sleep of the utterly exhausted. Mitchell had ordered him to "go get some rest" and he had been only too glad to oblige.)

The men labored on through the night, swarming over the hulking olive-green bombers by the glare of floodlights, filling the long-range tanks with high-octane fuel, hoisting the ugly fat bombs into the yawning bays, passing up belts of gleaming .50 caliber ammunition. Meanwhile the rest of the Hawaiian command, from General Short to the soldiers at Schofield Barracks, slumbered unaware.

At four in the morning the first B-17 rolled down the floodlit runway and climbed away, its exhausts flaring blue-white against the night sky. It was Rucker's plane; but it hardly needs saying that this time Billy Mitchell was at the controls.

—Martin Caidin,
The Glory Birds

Just before sunrise a radio message was received from Admiral Yamamoto relating the wish of the Emperor that the Combined Fleet should destroy all enemy forces. Officers and men listened joyfully to the reading of the Imperial Rescript. We were filled with firm resolve to justify His Majesty's trust and set his mind at ease by doing our utmost duty in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

After this the fleet began final refueling operation. This was hard and tricky business and very dangerous. Close attention was required to prevent collisions. Also, we were deeply unsafe from attack. Normally our carriers proceeded in double column, first the
Akagi
and
Kaga
, then the
Soryu
and
Hiryu
, lastly the
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku
. Thus all ships could give good mutual protection fire. But during our refueling all ships sailed over a wide surface making room for the tankers to come amongst us. All maneuver was impossible including turning the carriers into the wind to launch planes.

I was standing on the flight deck of the
Shokaku
watching the refueling with Lt. Watanabe. The sky was very cloudy and the wind brisk but the sea was not very rough. Lt. Watanabe said, "This is a sign that Heaven favors our mission."

Just at that time the cruiser
Chikuma
began firing her guns rapidly toward the south. I looked forward and saw twelve large airplanes emerge through the clouds, flying directly towards us in a graceful and resolute manner.

"On the other hand," Lt. Watanabe said, "I could be wrong."

—Lt. Cdr. Kazuo Sakamoto,
Zero Pilot

It was eight-thirty when we found the Japanese. We had been in the air for
hours
—not to mention being up most of the night before
that
—and we were feeling, shall we say, a bit tuckered. But when we broke through the clouds and saw what was waiting for us, everyone became remarkably
alert
.