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
eduard
9