HISTORY

Harbor, the American forces were, as one

newspaper later termed it, “caught with their

pants down” by the Japanese on December 7,

1941. The American Army and Navy commanders

in Hawaii had received a “war warning” from

Washington, D.C., on November 27. But lacking

respect for Japan’s military capabilities and an

appreciation of the destructive power of a modern attack from the air, they decided that the

greatest threat to Pearl Harbor was from local

sabotage. Accordingly, they had ordered fighters

and bombers moved out of the protective dispersal areas around their airfields to be bunched up

on the hangar lines, where they would be easier

to guard. They ordered no increase in aerial reconnaissance missions, and they placed the

battleships moored at the Ford Island piers on

Condition 3, which called for partial manning of

anti-aircraft batteries while roughly a third of the

ships’ crews were allowed shore leave. The radar stations were on minimum manning by inexperienced or completely untrained personnel.

And on Saturday, December 6, all non-essential

Army personnel at Wheeler Field had been given

the weekend off. There was a big dance at the

officer’s club that night.

The devastation begins

At 5:55 a.m. on December 7, Lt. Cmdr. Mitsuo

Fuchida’s strike force – D3A Val dive-bombers

and B5N Kate torpedo bombers escorted by A6M

Zero fighters – began launching from six Japanese carriers about 200 miles due north of Honolulu. An Army radar station on the north coast

of Oahu spotted the incoming formation just over

an hour later, but the pursuit officer on duty mis-

took the plot for a flight of B-17s due to arrive

from California that morning and told the station

to ignore it. Much has been made over the years

of the failure to sound the alarm, but in fact 40

minutes’ warning would have made little difference in the 14th Pursuit Wing’s ability to defend

Pearl Harbor. For on that morning, the bulk of the

fighter force was a toothless dragon, the guns of

many P-40s and P-36s at Wheeler Field having

been removed for safe keeping in a locked area

of the main hanger. The time required to reinstall

and load the guns, combined with the slow climb

rate of the planes, would have rendered the warning moot.

At 7:55 a.m. Fuchida gave the order to attack. Lt.

Akira Sakamoto’s Val dive-bombers immediately rained down their bombs on the installations

and flight line of Wheeler, then began strafing the

field. For 20 minutes they circled in a counter-clockwise direction, shooting up anything that

looked like a worthwhile target. Later, a flight of

Zeros from the second wave of the attack strafed

Wheeler again. Fortunately, thick, black smoke

rising from the burning American planes shielded the aircraft of two squadrons at the west end

of the flight line from view, and most of them survived the attack.

Vain resistance

Lts. “Cyclone” Davis and “Gabby” Gabreski were

among several pilots of the 45th PS at Wheeler

who got airborne too late to catch the withdrawing Japanese attackers. But 14 Army fighter pilots did manage to engage the enemy on December 7, flying a total of 18 sorties. In nine sorties,

P-36 pilots were credited with confirmed victo-

Photo: Bruce K. Holloway

ace in the European Theater, but he considered

another pilot in his 45th PS flight, 2/Lt. Emmett

S. “Cyclone” Davis, the P-40’s master. On 26 February 1940, Davis had been one of 30 pilots who

made Army history when they flew their P-36s

off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise for delivery to Wheeler Field, the first such

launch of Army fighters from a carrier. In 2001,

he recalled his pre-war service in Hawaii: “I was

first assigned to the 6th PS/18th PG, then a few

weeks later I was transferred to the 45th PS/15th

PG. When I was assigned to the 45th, the squadron operations officer was 1/Lt. Woodrow ‘Woody’ Wilmot. He was one of the more experienced

pilots who had been part of the P-36 pilots sent

from Selfridge Field, Michigan. He was a superb

pilot, and he took me under his wing and taught

me all of his clever and skillful maneuvers.”

“New pilots arrived shortly after I did, Gabreski

being one of them. He and I practiced dogfighting

many times in 1941. He became very good and

could beat most of the other pilots, but he never

became fine-tuned enough to defeat me. At night

when the pilots met in the officer´s club, dogfight

challenges were issued, and I tried to accommodate most of them. That was at the time when

someone made an offhand remark about going

to fight the ‘Cyclone,’ and that nickname has remained with me throughout the rest of my life.”

Davis and Gabreski were typical of the several hundred Army fighter pilots who were honing their skills in the skies over Hawaii as war

clouds grew darker in the fall of 1941. But when

the Japanese attack finally came, only a handful

of them would get a chance to fight back.

For all the military hardware defending Pearl

P-36 assigned to Major Ken Walker, 18th PG commander, heads a line of P-26s at Wheeler Field, Hawaii, in 1940.

INFO Eduard - December 2021

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