Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk

I wouldn't have wanted be standing directly across from BB row while the Kates were coming in if the ship's aa batteries had been alerted.

I feel like I'm Han Solo, and you're Chewie, and she's Ben Kenobi, and we're in that bar.
Member Texas Thread Mafia.

Sig art by rogueusmc

quote:

The five mobile radar stations on Oahu were to close their practice hours at 7:00. Four of the five shut down promptly. At Opana, Private Elliott asked his operator, Private Lockard, to stay on longer for more plotting instruction. From 6:45 to 7:00 they had tracked a lone blip close in, and had duly reported it to Fort Shafter, where it was yawned off. It was one of the float planes reconnoitering ahead of Fuchida's first wave.

Elliott was at the screen at 7: 02 when he observed "something completely out of the ordinary." Taking over, Lockard plotted the flight they had picked up. It was at the edge of their reach-137 miles and nearly due north, then 132 miles, then ...

Lockard telephoned Shafter; the operator could find no one on duty. A few minutes later, someone called back. It was the watch officer, Lieutenant Kermit A. Tyler, a fighter pilot in the 78th Pursuit Squadron. The early morning hours, especially on Sunday, were dreary; he was looking forward to going off duty at eight. Because a bomber-pilot friend had told him that KGMB played music through the night when mainland flights were expected, to help them home in on Hawaii, he had flipped on his car radio en route to duty just before four, to cut through the quiet. Sure enough, there had been music.

The blips he was seeing, Lockard told Tyler, suggested "an unusually large flight~in fact, the largest I have ever seen on the equipment." The phenomenon was now less than 130 miles away, three degrees east of north.

Tyler sounded relieved. The B-17 s from California were on course..

"Well," he assured the Opana crew, "don't worry about it." In the paradise that was Oahu, everyone or nearly everyone lived in a haze of immunity from attack. By then it was 7: 15 and the blips had closed to 88 miles. Lockard wanted to shut down but Elliott, insisting, "It is a fine problem," wanted to stay at the dials. He was posting a new and shorter distance every three minutes. By 7:30 he posted 45 miles.

-----


Lieutenant Commander Kaminsky was keeping busy. In between his dialing skeptical Navy brass, the Ward managed to get a message to him at 7:20. Outerbridge had intercepted a suspicious small boat in the defensive zone. ''We are escorting this sampan into Honolulu. Please inform Coast Guard to send cutter [to] relieve us of sampan." The sampan's crew had improvised a white surrender flag, which struck Outerbridge as odd. Kaminsky continued telephoning.

En route to the Coast Guard station, the Ward encountered what looked like another undersea object three hundred yards away. Outerbridge ordered five depth charges released. Deckhands thought they saw an oil bubble rise to the surface and burst, but the water was seething with the explosions.

In his minisub, Ensign Sakamaki "heard an enormous noise and felt the ship shaking." He hit his head against something and was knocked out-his "first contact with war." Quickly regaining consciousness, he saw "white smoke" in the sub and turned away from the harbor so that he could check for damage. He noticed none, and Chief Warrant Officer Inagaki, his crewman, was unhurt; Sakamaki felt the blast and pressure of additional depth charges, and the sub rocked. He knew from having surfaced earlier that there were old four stacker destroyers above him. "I did not want to waste my torpedoes on those destroyers .... The depth charges fell near us but not as close as the last time. I had to speed up again and turn the ship."

No one at 14th Naval District headquarters thought of telephoning their Army counterparts about the Ward's encounter, nor had the Navy learned anything about Lockard's radar blips.

Readiness was scarce on Sunday morning. The 300-mile air patrols from Oahu maintained by Admiral James O. Richardson until December 5, 1940, had not been continued by his successor, Admiral Kimmel, because the pilots protested seven-day-a-week duty, and Patrol Wing headquarters complained that air reconnaissance was wearing out its sixty PBYs. Three-quarters of the 780 AA guns on ships in the harbor were unmanned altogether, and only four of the Army's 31 AA batteries were in position-without ammunition, which had to be returned to depots after practice, as it was allegedly "apt to disintegrate or get rusty." Most ammo was stored remote from the guns, often locked up by someone with a key who was nowhere nearby. Especially on weekends.