Sunday, December 7, 1941. Japan attacks the West.

This is, of course, the "day that shall live in infamy", the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  The attack was an extremely skillfully executed naval/air raid designed to take out the U.S. Navy in the Pacific while the Japanese launched invasions throughout the western South Pacific.

For that event, we link in our entry from   Today In Wyoming's History: December 7

1941  US military installations were attack in Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese Navy bringing the US formally into World War Two.

It was a surprisingly warm day in Central Wyoming that fateful day.  The high was in the upper 40s, and low in the lower 20s.  Not atypical temperatures for December but certainly warmer than it can be.

Events played out like this:

0342 Hawaii Time, 0642 Mountain Standard Time:  The minesweeper USS Condor sighted a periscope and radioed the USS Ward:   "Sighted submerged submarine on westerly course, speed 9 knots.” 

USS Condor

0610 Hawaii Time, 0910 Mountain Standard Time:  Japanese aircraft carriers turn into the wind and launch the first attack wave.

0645-0653:  Hawaii Time, 0945-0953 Mountain Standard Time:  The USS Ward, mostly staffed by Naval Reservists, sights and engages a Japanese mini submarine first reported by the USS Connor, sinking the submarine. The Ward reports the entire action, albeit in code, noting:  "“We have dropped depth charges upon sub operating in defensive sea area" and “We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges upon submarine operating in defensive sea area.”

 USS Ward

At this point in time, most Wyomingites would be up and enjoying the day.  A large percentage would have gone to Church for the Sunday morning and have now started the rest of their Sundays.

0702 Hawaii Time, 1002 Mountain Standard Time:    An operator at the U.S. Army's newly installed Opana Mobile Radar Station, one of six such facilities on Oahu, sights 50 aircraft hits on his radar scope, which is confirmed by his co-operator.  They call Ft. Shafter and report the sighting.

 0715 Hawaii Time, 1015 Mountain Standard Time:  USS Ward's message decoded and reported to Admiral Kimmel, who orders back to "wait for verification."

0720 Hawaii Time, 1020 Mountain Standard Time:  U.S. Army lieutenant at Ft. Shafter reviews radar operator's message and believes the message to apply to a flight of B-17s which are known to be in bound from Califorina.  He orders that the message is not to be worried about.

0733 Hawaii Time, 1033 Mountain Standard Time, 1233 Eastern Time:  Gen. George Marshall issues a warning order to Gen. Short that hostilities many be imminent, but due to atmospheric conditions, it has to go by telegraph rather than radio.  It was not routed to go as a priority and would only arrive after the attack was well underway.

0749  Hawaii Time, 1049 Mountain Standard Time:  Japanese Air-attack commander Mitsuo Fuchida looks down on Pearl Harbor and observes that the US carriers are absent.  He orders his telegraph operator to tap out to, to, to: signalling "attack" and then: to ra, to ra, to ra: attack, surprise achieved.  This is interpreted as some as Tora, Tora, Tora, "tiger, tiger, tiger" which it was not.  Those who heard that sometimes interpreted to be indicative of the Japanese phrase; "A tiger goes out 1,000 ri and returns without fail.” 

0755 Hawaii Time, 1055 Mountain Standard Time:  Commander Logan C. Ramsey, at the Command Center on Ford Island, looks out a window to see a low-flying plane he believes to be a reckless and improperly acting U.S. aircraft.  He then notices “something black fall out of that plane” and realizes instantly an air raid is in progress.  He orders telegraph operators to send out an uncoded message to every ship and the base that: "AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NOT DRILL"

0800 Hawaii time, 11:00 Mountain Standard Time.  B-17s which were to be stationed at Oahu begin to land, right in the midst of the Japanese air raid.

0810  Hawaii Time, 11:10 Mountain Standard Time.  The USS Arizona fatally hit.

 USS Arizona

0817 Hawaii Time:  11:17 Mountain Standard Time.  The USS Helm notices a submarine ensnared in the the antisubmarine net and engages it.  It submerges but this partially floods the submarine, which must be abandoned.

 USS Helm

0839  Hawaii Time.  1139  Mountain Standard Time. The USS Monaghan, attempting to get out of the harbor, spotted another miniature submarine and rammed and depth charged it.

 USS Monaghan

0850 Hawaii Time.  11:50 Mountain Standard Time.  The USS Nevada, with her steam now up, heads for open water.  It wouldn't make it and it was intentionally run aground to avoid it being sunk.

USS Nevada

0854  Hawaii Time.  1150 Mountain Standard Time.  The Japanese second wave hits.

0929 Hawaii Time.  1229 Mountain Standard Time.  NBC interrupts regular programming to announce that Pearl Harbor was being attacked.

0930  Hawaii Time.  1230  Mountain Standard Time.  CBS interrupts regular programming to announce that Pearl Harbor was being attacked.

0930 Hawaii Time.  1230 Mountain Standard Time.  The bow of the USS Shaw, a destroyer, is blown off.  The ship would be repaired and used in the war.

 Explosion on the Shaw.

0938 Hawaii Time, 1238 Mountain Standard Time.  CBS erroneously announces that Manila was being attacked.  It wasn't far off, however, as the Philippines would be attacked that day (December 8 given the International Date Line).

10:00 Hawaii Time, 13:00 Mountain Standard Time

The USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on this day.

1300 Hawaii Time.  1600 Mountain Standard Time.  Japanese task forces begins to turn towards Japan.

A third wave was by the Japanese debated, but not launched.

Wyoming is three hours ahead of Hawaii (less than I'd have guessed) making the local time here about 10:30 a.m. on that Sunday morning when the attack started..  The national radio networks began to interrupt their programming about 12:30.  On NBC the announcement fell between Sammy Kaye's Sunday Serenade and the University of Chicago Round Table, which was featuring a program on Canada at war.  On NBC the day's episode of Great Plays was interrupted for their announcement. CBS had just begun to broadcast The World Today which actually  headlined with their announcement fairly seamlessly.

The attack on Pearl Harbor so strongly dominates this day that it's easy to forget that other things occurred on it, although much of the history worth events of this day are likewise associated with the Japanese assault on Western powers.  Japan also launched an invasion of British Malaya, declared war on the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada New Zealand and South Africa, and bombed Midway Island.

Panama declared war on Japan.

It's not too much to ask why did Japan do it?  In retrospect the Japanese assault, while initially successful, seems so fanciful as to be obviously doomed from the onset.

The reason are surprisingly difficult to discern.  

Japan had committed itself, of course, to war in China and in spite of years of effort it had never been able to digest the giant country or to defeat either of the two claimants to national supremacy there. The recognized government, the Nationalist, had proven incapable of defeating Japan to date, but they fought the war much more effectively than they've generally been credited with.  If not winning, they really weren't losing in 1941 either.

The war in China had almost been accidental in some ways, but it demonstrated how deeply militarized Japan had become.  In essence, the war commenced because Japan's occupation of Korea and portions of Manchuria were irreconcilable with China's sovereignty.  Neither China nor the Soviet Union could really tolerate Japan's obviously imperial presence in the region.  Japan's presence there was purely colonial, and in a way it differed very little from Germany's presence in 1941 on the Russian steppes.  Japan had a large and growing population, and it had a concept of settling a portion of that population on lands that it regarded as suitable for them, views of the occupants of that land notwithstanding.

Japan's invasion of Manchuria inevitably lead to clashes with the Chinese Nationalist, and Soviet, armies. For its part, the Japanese army in Manchuria operated nearly independently.  Ultimately clashes with the Chinese lead to full-scale war and an invasion by Japan of China.

While Japanese offensive operations were initially successful, ultimately China was too vast and too populous for the Japanese to defeat.  The Chinese Nationalist held on, first with German and Soviet material help, and then with American and Soviet help  The United States, sympathetic with the Chinese Nationalist started to put in place economic boycotts against Japan, fully aware that Japan could not continue to function without access to foreign raw materials.  That made it plain to the administrations in both nations that Japan would have to go into diplomacy with the Chinese, or launch a war against the United States.  In spite of the seeming obstacles of the latter, the Japanese did not back down and in fact expanded into French Indochina when the German occupation of France made that practical.

The Japanese Navy itself was a major factor in Japan's launching strikes against the West.  A major world navy, it had not seen significant combat since the Russo Japanese War and was involved in intense rivalry with the Japanese Army.  In spite of being bogged down in a quagmire against China, the Japanese Army saw a future war against the Soviet Union as being both inevitable and desirable, contrary to the views of some latter-day historians who assert that the Japanese Army did not have that in mind.  It very much did, but did not view it as practical until China was defeated.  The Japanese Navy, however, which was extremely dependent upon foreign oil, saw a quick sharp strike and series of invasions as a way for Japan to secure the raw materials it needed.

The oddity of that view is that it required the United States to acquiesce to defeat.  In spite of some comments from within the Japanese Navy that suggest that it never regarded that as realistic, it did.  The thought was that taking out the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor, including its aircraft carriers, would render the United States defenseless and that after Japan invaded the Pacific territories it wished to take, the United States would sue for peace.

It was completely unrealistic.

In Europe, Japan's co-combatant, now that Japan had entered the war, Germany, issued its Nacht and Nebel, i.e., "night and fog" decree.  The order authorized the disappearance of dissidents.  This introduced a new element of terror into German repression, although by this point things were pretty terrifying as it was.  

Germany had, of course, on this day find itself in a situation which it had sought to avoid.  Japan, a member of the Axis powers, had brought the United States into the war as a full combatant and, moreover, Japan had entered the war in a fashion which had no immediate apparent benefit to Nazi Germany.  The Germans were already faced with full-scale American material support to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and the US was already fighting an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic.  The Japanese assault guaranteed that US forces would now soon be fighting the Germans on a much amplified level, but no Allied forces would be drawn away from their war against Germany.  The Germans had hoped for a Japanese attack on the USSR, which by this time was no longer on the immediate Japanese horizon.

Rommel withdrew his forces ten miles back from the Gazala line at Tobruk.

Closer to Home:

I actually have a pretty good idea of what my parents experienced on this historic day.

My father's family, this being a Sunday, would have gone to Mass and would have been at St. Agnes in that city.  If my parents later habits are any indication of those of their parents, they probably went to the early Mass, which was often quite early in those days.  It would have been a Latin Mass, of course, those being the only kind there were, but it would have been the "low" Mass, rather than a "high" Mass.

My father was an altar server in Scotsbluff, so he may have served that day.  I don't know the answer to that.

When I was young, we usually went to breakfast after Mass, and prior to the late 1960s the pre Mass fast was stricter.  I doubt that my grandparents took all their kids to breakfast, however, but I'm sure that something would have been done for a family of six, including parents and children, for a communal breakfast.  That probably basically took things into the mid-morning.  What did they do after that?  Well, I'm not certain.  Again, they may have planned to go duck hunting that afternoon, but I don't know.

My father mentioned that a lot of people learned about the attacks, which happened right about noon local time, while listening to a broadcast of a football game on the radio.  Given that recollection, I suspect that's how he learned of them.

C-Span on how Americans learned of Pearl Harbor.

Across the country, radio broadcast started interrupting their regular programming with short, and non-specific, announcements that Pearl Harbor was under attack.  That's pretty amazing, really, as it means that the press was reporting the event only 40 or so minutes into it.  WOR 710 in New York was the first to announce anything, at 2:26 Eastern time.  That was an interruption of a football game, so perhaps that's what my father was referencing in general.  NBC and CBS in general followed at 2:30 Eastern time on their shows, at least one of which was a news program.  A summary of the radio broadcasts, complete with audio, is here on the website Radio Days.

Even if they didn't hear it on the radio, somebody they knew would have, and the calls would have started.  By late in the day the evening newspapers, and every mid-sized city had one, would have had an issue out on Pearl Harbor being attacked.

They would have gone on to a larger Sunday dinner, most likely, with the news of the day being the ominous talk of the table.

In Quebec, where my mother's family was, they would have started the day much the same. With a larger family (six children still at home, one in the Canadian Army overseas in the UK) they would have gone to Mass, but my guess is that it wouldn't have been the first one of the day.  While you'd think that I'd be able to easily determine which church they went to, it appears that the church's in St. Lambert have been rebuilt since that time, so I don't know.  My guess is that they probably collectively walked to Mass and then went home to some sort of late morning meal.

My mother used to state that on Sundays the family often went somewhere together, and often by car.  Perhaps that's what occurred on this day, a drive to the country. But it was December and their finances were tight so perhaps not.  Perhaps it was just a day at home  At any rate, they wouldn't have received the news until around 2:30 at the earliest, if anyone was listening to the radio, which in a large family, somebody likely was.  Even if they were not, they too would have received calls shortly thereafter, and there would have been a late date newspaper.

They too would have gone on to talk of the news, but my guess is that the focus would have been much different.  By this date in 1941 Canada had been at war for two years, and while it would soon be losing some troops in the Pacific, in the Commonwealth there was a general sense of relief that the United States was now entering the war.