Cruiser (46 page)

US Army intelligence did discover in the final week of November that a large Japanese expeditionary force was moving south from China, although it had no idea that it was heading for Malaya. But the threat was enough to stir the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, to put his commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines on red alert:

WPL 46 meant War Plan 46, which would deploy the US Navy for combat. At Manila in the Philippines, the Commander of US Army Forces in the Far East, Lieutenant-General Douglas MacArthur, received a similar message, as did the Army Commander in Honolulu. But no one had any idea that the carriers of the Kido Butai, under strict radio silence, were carving their long track through the Pacific towards the Hawaiian Islands.

In Singapore, all the lights were on. The deterrent presence of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
in the Far East had been widely publicised. An Asian race could hardly be expected to challenge the Royal Navy, which had ruled the waves since Nelson. It was well known that Japanese pilots, with their narrow little eyes, squinted uncomfortably in daylight and did not fly at night. Their aircraft – as badly made as the cheap Japanese toys that
occasionally appeared in Western stores – would fall to pieces after a year or so.

Blithely unconcerned, the
tuans
and
memsahibs
danced the nights away at the Adelphi or the Tanglin Club, sipped their
stengahs
beneath the circling ceiling fans at Raffles, filled and refilled their plates at the renowned
rijstaffel
buffet of Dutch and Indonesian food so popular on Sundays at the Cockpit Hotel, queued for the pictures at the Cathay cinema, applied bat to ball at the historic Cricket Club on the Padang and flirted with the transvestites in the raunchy stews of Bugis Street. Up country, in Malaya itself, the rubber planters counted the money rolling in from this terrible but most profitable war in Europe. It was business as usual.

As had happened in 1914 and again in 1939, in December 1941 the descent into war had an inexorable momentum. Madness was in the air. No man or nation had the power to stop it. By now, Japan had not one but two ambassadors in Washington: Nomura, the former admiral, and Saburo Kurusu, a career diplomat married to an American.

The Americans missed yet another spurt of diplomatic traffic that should have alerted them. On 2 December, the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue was ordered to destroy all its code books bar one, which would be needed to receive a final message from Tokyo. On 3 December, Tokyo cabled the Japanese Consul General in Hawaii, asking urgently for details of US Navy ships in Pearl Harbor, whether those ships were equipped with anti-torpedo nets and if barrage balloons formed part of Pearl's air defences. The consul replied in detail the next day. All three messages were intercepted in Hawaii and sent on to Washington, where, inexplicably, they lay untouched until someone found them in a file four days after the attack.

Such was the enormity of the destruction and the scale of its treachery, so powerfully does it live in legend and the
American psyche, that most people today believe the attack on Pearl Harbor was Japan's opening act of war in the Pacific. It was not. That niche in history is occupied by a small event now almost forgotten, but an event that would draw HMAS
Perth
and her crew into the whirlwind.

On Sunday 7 December – the date in Australia, South East Asia and Japan – the Malaya Invasion Force was in the Gulf of Siam, steaming through showery weather at a determined 16 knots. Hudson bombers of the RAAF had tracked its progress intermittently, although enough to convince the commanders in Singapore that the Japanese were on a course for Thailand. This was a careful deception and it worked, although it came within a whisker of discovery.

That Sunday morning, at 9 am, the force made a dog-legged turn to the south-west, towards its three landing points on the east coast of the Malayan Peninsula at Patani and Singora in southernmost Thailand, and across the border at Kota Bharu in what is now northern Malaysia. In the afternoon, a long-range Catalina flying boat of the RAF's 205 Squadron lumbered through a patch in the clouds to find the force arrayed across the sea beneath. The Japanese Commander, Rear-Admiral Takeo Kurita, ordered it to be shot down to preserve the secrecy of his new course. The eight men of the Catalina's crew had no time to radio their discovery back to Singapore before enemy fighters bounced them and sent them plummeting into the sea in flames – a fact discovered only after the war. The Navigator of the aircraft was an RAAF sergeant, Colin ‘Ike' Treloar, a 21-year-old from Adelaide. He was the first Australian to die in the war with Japan.

A strong surf met the invasion force as its transports dropped anchor off the three landing sites. It was now well after 10 pm. Clouds covered the full moon and there was, at first, near chaos as the Japanese attempted to send their landing craft through the breakers towards the beaches. On the Thai coast, about half the landing barges capsized, drowning hundreds of soldiers, although the expedition's Commander, the squat and
balding Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, managed to scramble ashore at Singora. His forces met only token opposition from the Thai Army and police.

The surf caused similar troubles for the 5500 troops attempting to land at Kota Bharu – a delay that alerted the Indian Army brigade defending the area and that brought Hudsons of the RAAF's No. 1 Squadron into the attack, bombing and strafing. They sank one of the transports, but by 12.45 am on what was now Monday 8 December the Japanese had penetrated the barbed-wire defences on the beaches and gained a foothold for the advance inland. The stage was set for Yamashita and his 25th Army to drive south to Singapore, the feat that would bring him the nickname The Tiger of Malaya.

Far across the Pacific, to the north of Hawaii, where it was still early on the Sunday morning, the six carriers of the Kido Butai were breasting a heavy swell to turn into the wind to launch their aircraft. The air crews had taken a hot bath, donned
mawashi
loincloths similar to those worn by sumo wrestlers and had eaten a special breakfast of rice and fish. As the flag signal for take-off was hoisted and then dropped at the mainmast of
Akagi
, the first wave of Zero fighters, then the high-level and dive-bombers, and finally the torpedo planes thundered from the flight decks and formed up above the fleet, black silhouettes against a crimson dawn.

On Hawaii's main island, Oahu, it was the beginning of a perfect day. A light trade wind blew wisps of cloud across purple mountains and the green of the cane fields below, carrying the sound of church bells ashore in Honolulu and the pipes of ships alongside in Pearl. Shortly after seven o'clock, at a radar station on the northern coast of Oahu, two privates of the US Army Air Corps were surprised to see a cluster of airborne blips growing on the screen before them, but when they reported it to their headquarters at Fort Shafter they were told not to worry: they could only be friendly aircraft.

Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leading the air fleet, radioed back to the Kido Butai the code words ‘
Tora, Tora, Tora
' – Tiger,
Tiger, Tiger – indicating that the surprise was complete. Fuchida – who, remarkably, converted to Christianity after the war and became a preacher in America known as God's Samurai – recalled the moment in his memoirs:

Eleven minutes after Fuchida's radio message, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, radioed Washington and his fellow commanders, ‘Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.' It was too late. On Battleship Row, where seven great ships lay alongside in lines that formed a perfect target, the first bombs were hitting the USS
California
, then
Oklahoma
,
Tennessee
and
West Virginia
.

Minutes later,
Arizona
sank in a volcanic ball of smoke and flame when a bomb struck a for'ard magazine. Blazing fuel oil spread across the harbour, frying hundreds of men alive. Ashore, almost every American fighter aircraft was destroyed or damaged on the ground. Within half an hour, by 8.25, the pride of America's Pacific battle fleet had been devastated. An hour later, as Fuchida's first-wave squadrons formed up again for the return to their carriers, 18 ships rested on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, including five battleships, and 2386 Americans
were dead. The Imperial Japanese Navy lost only 29 planes and 55 air crew.

Operation Z had been executed to perfection. But there were fatal flaws in its plans. Yamamoto had neglected to order his squadrons to destroy Hawaii's oil reserves and ammunition stores, which would have crippled what remained of the fleet for months. And the three aircraft carriers normally based at Pearl –
Enterprise
,
Lexington
and
Saratoga
– were not there.
Enterprise
and
Lexington
were at sea that morning, and
Saratoga
was at San Diego, in California. They lived to fight again.

As the day wore on, the final parts of Japan's descent upon the Pacific fell into place. US commanders in the Philippines, including General MacArthur, had been aware for four hours of the destruction at Pearl but here, too, was inexcusable confusion. Generals and admirals could not contact each other. Urgent phone calls went unanswered. Orders were given and countermanded. Again, long-range Zero fighters destroyed the bulk of the American aircraft on their airfields. The ground was laid, the theatre prepared, for the conquest of the Philippines. A few hours later, the small American Pacific outposts of Guam and Wake were attacked, and the Japanese began bombing the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

The news of Pearl Harbor spread rapidly to friend and foe alike. In his cabin on board
Nagato
in Japan's Inland Sea, an exultant Yamamoto drank a sake toast with his staff. At the Kyuden, Hirohito solemnly placed his imperial seal on history's most belated declaration of war. Loudspeakers outside in the streets were already boasting of the glorious victory.

Franklin Roosevelt was lunching at his desk in the Oval Office when Admiral Kimmel's signal was handed to him at 1.47 pm Washington time. Calmly, the President telephoned Cordell Hull to inform him of it, just as Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu were arriving at the door of the State Department in what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Hull kept the envoys standing as he pretended, with icy disdain, to scan their document. Then he ripped the two men to shreds
and sent them packing, in words he recounted later: