Authors: Oliver L. North

War Stories II (5 page)

BOOK: War Stories II

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ABOARD USS WARD

PEARL HARBOR
7 DECEMBER 1941
0645 HOURS LOCAL

After relaying what he had seen up on the bridge, Ken Swedberg busied himself at his gun station. At 0653, Commander Outerbridge transmitted a message to the commandant, 14th Naval District: “WE HAVE ATTACKED, FIRED UPON AND DROPPED DEPTH CHARGES UPON SUBMARINE OPERATING IN DEFENSIVE SEA AREA. STAND BY FOR FURTHER MESSAGES.”

The crew of the
Ward
, though all Reservists assigned to an aging destroyer, had been trained well and responded quickly.

As Ken Swedberg correctly surmised, the four-inch shell fired by the
Ward
's number-three turret had not traveled far enough to arm. But even without exploding, the shell had done its damage. The round that hit the
conning tower killed the Japanese skipper and the sub took on water. After sinking the Japanese midget sub, the
Ward
's crew continued to salvo depth charges into the harbor, assuming correctly that there were probably other submarines in the waters.

The PBY patrol plane that Ken Swedberg had seen from the deck of the USS
Ward
was being flown by Lieutenant (jg) Bill Tanner, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from San Pedro, California. He was a graduate of USC and had joined the Navy in 1938, had trained in Pensacola, Florida, and had been stationed in San Diego until his squadron had ferried their twelve PBYs to Kaneohe Bay, on the northeast coast of Oahu, earlier that year. Tanner had responded to the radio calls from the
Antares
and the
Condor
and was flying over the area where the sub was last sighted. In the gray dawn of the morning, Captain Tanner thought he saw something and banked his plane for another look. His stomach fluttered a little when he spotted the subsâat least two, maybe three of them, in waters belowâscarily close to the ships anchored just beyond the anti-submarine net,
inside
Pearl Harbor. He dropped smoke signal flares into the water where he had spotted the midget subs and then radioed a message to the air base telling of his discovery.

Tanner turned his PBY around and headed back to the spot where he had dropped the smoke containers. He readied his plane for dropping depth charges on the target to try to sink the enemy subs that he'd discovered in the Hawaiian waters.

A PBY plane like the one that detected the midget subs.

CAPTAIN WILLIAM (BILL) TANNER, JR., USN
Navy Air Recon PBY
Pearl Harbor Patrol Area
7 December 1941
0630 Hours Local

The PBY was a very slow, cumbersome airplane, but it had great range. It had a crew of eight and two engines, and was a seaplane used for long-range reconnaissance. They flew on patrol about 700 or 800 miles and returned. They were not fighter airplanes; it was strictly reconnaissance, but we had guns if we were attacked.

On the morning of 7 December, it was our turn to fly patrol, and as a matter of fact, it was the first real patrol that I had flown as a command pilot. I had just been made a patrol commander the week previous. I took off before dawn, along with two other airplanes, one flown by Fred Meyers and another by Tommy Hillis. We flew out of Kaneohe Bay on the north side of the island of Oahu, around Barber's Point, turned east, and flew south of Pearl Harbor, with the island about two miles offshore. Then we veered slightly to the southeast and followed the line of the islands of Maui and Lanai toward the big islandâabout a hundred milesâand then we'd turn, and return on a parallel course twenty miles further to sea. That's what I was supposed to do. The other two airplanes had slightly different patrols, to the north and east of where I was.

I saw it, and the copilot saw it tooâwhat looked to be a buoy in the water, but a moving buoy. We had never seen anything quite like it. There was no question in our minds that it was an enemy submarine. It looked like it was on a course directly heading toward Pearl Harbor. We looked off to the left and saw the
Ward
steaming toward the object. We were too close to do anything about arming bombs, so we dropped two smoke signal flares on the object to help the
Ward
close in on it.

We turned left to circle and come back and see what was happening, and as I turned the airplane, the
Ward
was firing at the submarine. From
what we could tell, it looked like the first shot went high, and the second shot I thought was high because I saw it splash in the water behind the submarine.

There was no question that it was an enemy submarine because our subs were not allowed to be submerged in that area, and we were ordered to attack any submerged submarine we sighted in the restricted zone. We completed our circle, came around, and dropped our two depth charges. The
Ward
followed its gun attack by dropping depth charges as it went over the spot where the submarine was.

We reported, “SANK ENEMY SUBMARINE ONE MILE SOUTH OF PEARL HARBOR.” We sent it in code, not by voice, back to our headquarters. We had no indication we were at war but we sent it in Morse code, just as we were supposed to. We got an answer from our base that said, “VERIFY YOUR MESSAGE.” And so we did, and our base told us to remain in the area until further notice.

We circled there for some time. When we didn't see anything other than what we had already reported, Fleet Air Wing One sent us a message to resume patrol.

ABOARD JAPANESE SPS I-24TOU

PEARL HARBOR OUTER PERIMETER
7 DECEMBER 1941
0650 HOURS LOCAL

Twenty-three-year-old ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, stripped to just a loincloth, sat at the periscope of his midget submarine. Because he had no radio contact with the other SPS boats, he was unaware that one of them had just been sunk. He panned the periscope around to see if the USS
Antares,
the supply ship waiting outside the harbor, had been given clearance yet to move inside the bay and on to the docks. If the
Antares
was moving in that direction, then that would mean the underwater anti-sub net was open and Ensign Sakamaki could maneuver his midget sub, submerged below and behind the
Antares,
to get inside the harbor next to all the U.S. Navy ships at anchor around Ford Island. Sakamaki's orders called for him to get inside
the harbor and launch his two torpedoes and “sink as many ships as he could,” any way that he could. His orders made aircraft carriers the first priority, then battleships, followed by heavy cruisers. If the American carriers were not there, the Japanese submariners decided that their primary target should be the battleship USS
Pennsylvania,
the flagship of Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

It had been more than seven hours since the midget sub had been released from the mother sub some ten miles away, and by now the sulfuric acid gases were building up inside the cramped sub.

But Ensign Sakamaki had more problems inside his tiny sub than the buildup of toxic gases. Ever since they had detached from I-24, the minisub's gyroscopic compassâhis primary means of navigationâhad been malfunctioning. He and his crewmate, Petty Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, had been working for the past several hours to try to repair the gyrocompass but had been unsuccessful. Eager to participate in the attack, they were both growing increasingly anxious that they would not make it inside the harbor before the air attack began, in little more than an hour.

Sakamaki's duty was to steer the midget sub, and Inagaki's job was to operate the ballast and trim valves. Working together, they tried to navigate toward the mouth of the anchorage by recalling the detailed charts of Pearl Harbor that they had memorized while en route across the Pacific from Japan. They, along with the other four midget sub crews, had been required to memorize all the pertinent details and layouts of not just Pearl but four other harbors as well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and perhaps most frightening to the Americans, had they known about it, San Francisco.