Sunday in Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute

By Bill McWilliams

The author of A Return to Glory constructs a compellingly detailed and panoramic history of the fateful day that ushered the United States into WWII.

Using long-established historical records and contemporary journals, as well as recently released wartime documents, Bill McWilliams has created a brand-new minute-by-minute narrative of the Day That Will Live in Infamy. Told from the points of view of dozens of characters, from generals and admirals and politicians and diplomats down to deckhands and private soldiers and innocent civilians at all levels, this panoramic overview of one of the most traumatizing and shocking events in American history puts the reader in a position to understand the big picture of strategy and tactics, as well as the intimate details of what the chaos, violence, and presence of death felt like to people immersed in the surprise of an armed attack on American soil.

December 7, 1941, was a turning point in the history of the United States, which had been teetering on a decision between isolationism and intervention. One might argue that every US military engagement since then has been affected by what happened when America learned that it could not stand by and watch war among strangers without potentially becoming involved—whether we wished to or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497602373

Bill McWilliams

Bill McWilliams, a 1955 graduate of West Point and Air Force officer, flew 128 combat missions in Vietnam. A resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, he is also the author of A Return to Glory and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

Book preview

Love…

FOREWORD

Sunday in Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute, is a fresh, new, meticulously-researched history that takes us through America’s first fierce and most disastrous battle of World War II. Set in the historical context of the preceding ten years of the Great Depression, we see clearly our nation’s steadfast hold on isolationism, and the rise of the 20th Century’s new totalitarians, leading to the shattering Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Told by the people who lived its events, the attack abruptly thrusts us into the midst of war and all its powerful cross-currents of emotion. Then comes the bitter aftermath, and America’s first dark days of struggle in the great, wide Pacific, where the fury began and as Admiral Nimitz related, uncommon valor became a common virtue, inspiring a nation. In reading this history we learn anew why the words sacrifice, love, faith, patriotism, and Remember Pearl Harbor, will forever reverberate through American history. In Sunday in Hell, we become acquainted with two brothers, both 1939 graduates of the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis) who room together aboard the Pacific Fleet’s USS Tennessee. On board Tennessee in Puget Sound Navy Yard, the younger brother and a Marine reserve officer’s daughter meet and begin a magnificent journey, while America lurches toward the cataclysm that forever changes the world. Throughout separate voyages to Hawaii on the Tennessee and the beautifully-appointed ocean liner, SS Lurline, we sail with them in the summer of 1941 into the relaxing, tropical warmth of the islands, as the winds of war blow ever-stronger.While Tennessee is engaged on rigorous Pacific Fleet training cruises, we learn of the growing tension between the Japanese Empire and the United States, sense the fury about to be unleashed and witness the last desperate efforts to avoid war.Every aspect of the attack on Pearl Harbor is viewed from a wide range of locations, vantage points and perspectives:

On the bridge of the destroyer USS Ward, when her crew fires the first shots of the Pacific war at a Japanese midget submarine.

Inside the cockpits of eighteen Douglas Dauntless (SBD) dive-bombers from Scouting and Bombing Squadrons Six, as they launch from the carrier Enterprise.

From the first moments of the crushing blows on military airfields throughout the island of Oahu to the savage attacks on the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor.

With the attacking fighter pilots, torpedo and dive bomber crews in action over Pearl Harbor.

At the airfields while a small band of Army Air Force fighter pilots courageously scramble into the air against overwhelming odds.

In the rush to battle stations with ships’ crews, beside men performing uncommon acts of courage, heroism and valor, as they fight to save their shipmates, themselves, and their ships.

And among the stunned, initially uncertain, and disbelieving civilian populace in Honolulu.

The attack’s aftermath in December 1941, with its numerous reverberations on Oahu, the continental United States, across the wide Pacific and around the world follows. Three weeks replete with never told, seldom heard, or incomplete stories including the controversial declaration of martial law in Hawaii, and the immediate detaining of more than 400 suspected Japanese spies and sympathizers. Plus the aerial and sea hunt for the Japanese strike force while responding to the aggressive enemy submarine activity. Sunday in Hell will tell in vivid detail the inspiring responses of military and Hawaiian civilian populations filled with history that will shed new light on the events of 7 December 1941. This book will strengthen Americans pride in their nation as seen through the hearts and minds of those who lived it. For readers of all ages, from high school through retirement, the book brings a deep look into a generation whose sacrifice will echo down through the ages. It is the premier story of American citizens that quite literally saved civilization and our nation’s hard won freedoms, when the new totalitarians of the twentieth century stalked the earth.

Thomas B. Fargo

Admiral,

USN (Ret)Former Commander,

U.S. Pacific Command (2002-2005)

AUTHOR’S EXPLANATION

Readers will see both traditional civilian and 24-hour military time keeping in this history. As an example, on board a company-owned ocean liner, a typical morning clock time will normally be expressed as 9:25 a.m. or 9:25 in the morning. On board a Navy combatant such as the battleship Tennessee, or in an Army unit war diary, the same time will be expressed as 0925 hours. At 9:25 p.m., in the evening, military time will be 2125 hours.

The Japanese flew three different types of carrier aircraft during the 7 December air raid. For ease of reading the aircraft will carry the nicknames given them later in the war. The Nakajima Type 97 BN2 carrier attack aircraft, which flew as a torpedo bomber and horizontal or level bomber in the attack, during 1942 was given the nickname Kate by the Allies. The Aichi Type 99 D3A1 carrier bomber, primarily employed as a dive bomber by the Japanese, in the same 1942 period earned the nickname, Val. The Mitsubishi Type 0 A6M2, fast, highly maneuverable, heavily-armed fighter, was alternatively nicknamed the Zeke, or Zero later in the war.

All Japanese names in the narrative, diplomats’ names, ship and submarine commanders, airborne attack leaders, and crewmembers of ships and aircraft, are displayed in the Western convention. That is, the first and family names are reversed from what is normally expressed in the Japanese culture and language.

For readers unfamiliar with Navy, Army and Army Air Force terms and jargon, there are on the spot explanations throughout the narrative, with one exception. The terms frame 88, frame 104, or frame 175, or other frame numbers will be in Chapters 5 and 6. Frame numbers assist in describing ship damage and where, more precisely, Japanese torpedoes struck ships the raiders successfully attacked.

To visualize the meaning of frames and frame numbers, imagine a ship in the process of construction, with no steel plates yet attached to its main members, or frames to form its complete hull. The ship’s keel is the main bow to stern longitudinal structural member, at the ship’s bottom, underlying the entire ship’s construction. The keel is literally the ship’s backbone.

Frames are the vertical cross-members attached to the keel and spaced at intervals, numbered progressively higher from bow to stern, and with the keel’s length, give the ship its size and shape - as well as provide the framework for walls, or bulkheads, which are used to compartmentalize the vessel. Frame 1 is closest to the ship’s bow and its highest numbered frame is closest to the ship’s stern. The total number of frames increase with the lengthening of the ship.

PREVIEW

In 1930, Albert Einstein wrote in What I Believe. A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer lives are based on the labors of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. For the people whose lives and deaths are recorded in the events described in this book, for this work and what was attempted in its writing, no words could better express my gratitude for all that was given by so many. Without the long ago labors of some, and without the assistance of so many others willing to give of their time and energies in the past seven years, this work would have been impossible.

One book above all others referenced in the bibliography helped in providing a springboard and roadmap to another lens through which Pearl Harbor might be viewed. For this work and its authors I write a deep and sincere thank you. Gordon W. Prange, whose thirty-seven years of research culminated in At Dawn We Slept, The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, died in 1980, before his marvelous work was published. In consonance with his wishes, two of his former students, Dr. Donald M. Goldstein and Chief Warrant Officer Katherine V. Dillon, USAF (Ret.), collaborated, and continued the massive job of editing his multivolume manuscript totaling more than 3,500 pages into the classic it has become. Particularly valuable was the work’s deep insight into Japanese plans and objectives, the thorough analysis of strategic and tactical errors and omissions, the thinking on both sides of the attack plan and execution - and the personalities of key leaders and participants on both sides. In no other source could be found the straightforward summary of the American government’s and military’s investigations and boards of inquiry into the Pearl Harbor disaster.

Through the lenses of the foregoing book, and seven others described in the acknowledgements, emerged yet another, complementary view of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. From hundreds of sources come the words and voices of men, women, and children on Oahu that day, at sea and in the air, on the receiving end of the Japanese attack.

From Pearl Harbor’s Pacific Fleet, Oahu’s military and civilian airfields, Army posts and forts, and the numerous other targets of opportunity swept up in the horror-filled assault. From the attack’s brutal realities and chaotic, shattering aftermath come stories seldom if ever told. From the island’s populace, tourists in Honolulu and civilians in outlying towns and farming areas. From passenger liners at sea, a freighter under attack by a Japanese submarine before the air raid began. From Navy task forces at sea, and Pan American Airways’ Clippers en route, the great passenger-carrying flying boats of that era - come the words and reactions of people abruptly engulfed in war’s violent, deep, crosscurrents of emotion.

This is America’s and The Territory of Hawaii’s entrance into World War II, the humiliating, thunderous surprise and fierce first battle, the final lurch into the worldwide maelstrom. The surprise began amid ever-increasing tension, almost quietly, early on a Sunday morning.

On board the minesweeper USS Condor, a short distance outside Pearl Harbor at 0342 hours the morning of 7 December, Ensign Russell C. McCloy, Condor’s Officer of the Deck asked Quartermaster Second Class R.C. Uttrick, the helmsman, what he thought about something in the darkness about fifty yards ahead, off the port bow. Uttrick peered through binoculars and said, That’s a periscope, sir, and there aren’t supposed to be any subs in this area. This was the first contact, the day’s prelude to the first shots and first blood of the Pacific war, signaled at 0650 hours by radio from the destroyer USS Ward, the sinking of a Japanese midget submarine just outside the entrance to Pearl Harbor.

At 0605 hours Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Carrier Striking Force, from approximately 220 miles north of Oahu, had begun successfully launching their first attack aircraft, 183 planes. Thirteen minutes later, from approximately 200 miles west of Oahu, Admiral William F. Bull Halsey’s Task Force 8, three cruisers and nine destroyers led by the carrier Enterprise, returning to Pearl Harbor - launched the first of 18 Douglas Dauntless Scout and Dive Bombers (SBDs) of Scouting Squadron Six (VS-6). Destination, Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor, on Ford Island.

At approximately 0830 ship’s time, 0730 hours Hawaii time, en route to San Francisco on a northeasterly course, the SS Lurline’s Chief Officer, Edward Collins, stopped by the radio shack to have a chat with the officer of the watch, Tiny Nelson. Nelson was listening intently to communications traffic. Only a minute or so elapsed when Nelson began writing out a message on his typewriter. As he was listening and typing he called Collins’ attention to read it. The message was an SOS, the international emergency signal from the 2,140-ton steam schooner SS Cynthia Olson, a flag-bearing American merchant vessel carrying a load of lumber, bound for Honolulu. She was approximately 300 miles off San Francisco, under attack by a surfaced submarine, later identified as Imperial Japanese Submarine, I-26. The last message from the freighter to the Matson Navigation Company’s ocean liner stated she was under torpedo attack.

At Naval Air Station Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu, Aviation Machinist Mate Third Class Guy C. Avery was in his bunk on the sun porch of a bungalow when he heard the sound of a lone plane quite near the house. It passed and returned. To hell with the Army, Avery thought. Every day is the same to them. But the sound of the engine was different, and roused his curiosity. He reached the window in time to see Zeroes [Japanese fighter aircraft] just beginning to fan out over the heart of the station and opening fire promiscuously. He shouted to his sleeping comrades, The Japs are here! It’s war! To which one man replied, Well, don’t worry about it Avery. It’ll last only two weeks. Avery checked his watch. It was 0748.

From Major Leonard D. Heaton, physician and surgeon at Schofield Barracks’ Army Hospital. Writing in his diary the night of 7 December:

The best and happiest days of our lives went up in the smoke of Pearl Harbor, Wheeler Field, and Hickam Field today. I wonder if, when and how they will ever return. I was standing with Capt’s Bell and [Harlan] Taylor in front of my quarters about 8 o’clock this day. We were about to get in the car to pick up Col. Canning and thence to Queen’s Hospital to attend a lecture by Dr. Jno. Moorhead of N.Y. who has been talking of traumatic surgery. We hesitated before entering the car because our attention was called to the great number of planes in the air and some very loud distant noises. Soon one plane came quite close to us and in banking to come down our street I distinctly saw the rising sun insignia on his wings. Soon he was coming down the street with machine guns blazing away at us. We rushed into the house.

And later, after working tirelessly among four surgical teams throughout a long, bloody day into early evening, struggling to save lives, he added, …Such wounds!! - eviscerations of brains, neck, thorax, abdomen - traumatic amputations, etc. No burns of any consequence…

Surgical teams at Schofield Barracks treated 117 wounded that day. Thirty-eight of them died, most having arrived with fatal wounds.

Adjacent to Schofield Barracks, at Wheeler Field, in the first moments of the attack, Private Wilfred D. Burke, an aircraft armorer in the 72nd Pursuit Squadron, looked up to see an approaching Val dive bomber. It was the first time I had ever seen a plunging dive bomber and it was an awesome sight. Nothing in warfare is more frightening. Hurtling down on us was the dive bomber being followed by another, while six or seven more were in echelon awaiting their turn. The leader pulled out right over us in a spectacular climbing bank. We could clearly see the rising sun of Japan on his wings and fuselage. In the succeeding minutes he saw firsthand the true horror and devastation caused by the attacking Japanese aircraft.

East from Ford Island, across Pearl Harbor’s main channel, at the Navy Hospital, [nurse] Lieutenant Ruth Ericson saw sights and heard sounds she would never forget. …The first patient came into our dressing room at 8:25 a.m. with a large opening in his abdomen and bleeding profusely. They started an intravenous and transfusion. I can still see the tremor of Dr. [Commander Clyde W.] Brunson’s hand as he picked up the needle. Everyone was terrified. The patient died within the hour. Then the burned patients streamed in… A total of 546 battle casualties and 313 dead were brought to the Navy Hospital before the day ended.

The navigator on the battleship USS West Virginia, Lieutenant Commander Thomas T. Beattie, wrote days later:

[The Captain and I] went out on the starboard side of the bridge discussing what to do. During all this time extremely heavy bombing and strafing attacks occurred. The ship was constantly shaken with bomb hits. The Captain [Mervyn S. Bennion] doubled up with a groan and stated that he had been wounded. I saw he had been hit in the stomach, probably by a large piece of shrapnel, and was seriously wounded. He sank to the deck, and I loosened his collar. I sent a messenger for a pharmacist’s mate to assist the Captain. Just then, [at a time fixed as 0808], the USS Arizona’s forward magazine blew up with a tremendous explosion…

Aboard Arizona moments after the explosion Ensign James Miller could see nothing but reddish flames outside. The sound powered phones went dead, power to the [#3] turret failed, and all lights went out…He stepped outside the turret to see what the conditions were on the quarterdeck. He was stunned. I noticed several badly burned men lying on the deck and saw Ensign Anderson, who had been Junior Officer of the Deck, lying on the deck with a bad cut on his head. What he actually saw was almost beyond comprehension, and was described by another Arizona survivor.

…There were bodies…I’d seen them from above, but it didn’t register clearly until I got down on the quarterdeck. These people were zombies…They were burned completely white. Their skin was just as white as if you’d taken a bucket of whitewash and painted it white. Their hair was burned off; their eyebrows were burned off; the pitiful remains of their uniforms in their crotch was a charred remnant; and the insoles of their shoes was about the only thing that was left on these bodies. They were moving like robots. Their arms were out, held away from their bodies, and they were stumping along the decks…

By the time Arizona exploded, the battleship Oklahoma, struck on her port side by four torpedoes was already listing approximately 40 degrees, rolling slowly, relentlessly toward her death, trapping hundreds of men below decks, including Chaplain [Lieutenant], Father Aloysius H. Schmitt. The following week, he was to transfer to duty on shore. He helped save five men by lifting and pushing them through a porthole on the starboard side, while other men outside pulled them through - but lost his own life.

Standing outside the porthole helping pull men to safety was Marine Private Raymond J. Turpin of Waterloo, Alabama. He joined in the frantic rescue effort after it began, and carried a lifelong memory of Fr. Al. When the five men were safely out of the rapidly filling compartment, he reached for the Chaplain’s hand in a second desperate rescue attempt. Fr. Al declined, saying, Someone tried earlier to pull me out and I couldn’t get through. I’m going to see if there are any others needing a way out. He never returned.

Deep in the bowels of Oklahoma, Utah, and all ships hit during the torpedo attack, the struggle to survive was immediate. Chief Water Tender, L.C. Bickley, whose station was in Oklahoma’s engine room:

…the word was passed to man all battle stations. I went to #2 Fireroom Pumproom and was starting pumps until water came in through the air ducts and flooded pumprooms. The hatch to #2 Pumproom was down [closed] and I couldn’t get it up, so I dived and swam to #1 Pumproom and out. The lights were out and I couldn’t see where the two men went that were with me. I got to H Division living compartment and water started coming in so I went out through a porthole in the wash room after the ship rolled over, and was picked up by a motor launch and put ashore in the Navy Yard. The only word I got over the phone was to get ready to get underway.

Many men were lost in the lower [ammunition] handling rooms of turrets. Falling 14-inch shells killed and injured a great many. About 125 men remained in an air pocket in the shipfitters shop, but when the space was opened up, water rushed in as air rushed out. Only one man of this group saved himself by swimming to the Chief Petty Officer pantry on the third deck and out through an open porthole…

On the west side of Ford Island, at 0812 hours, between the time of the Arizona explosion and the capsizing of Oklahoma, the heavily listing target ship Utah - formerly the pre-World War I, thin-plated battleship of the same name - snapped her mooring lines and capsized, the victim of two torpedoes in the first moments of the attack. One man marked her death with his valor, at the cost of his own life. Courage and valor were the companions of many that day.

Lieutenant (jg) Hart D. Dale Hilton in [SBD] plane 6-S-7 with Radioman/gunner Second Class Jack Leaming in the rear cockpit, led Enterprise’s plane 6-B-5 on the scouting mission in sector 120 degrees, which took them well south of Pearl Harbor. The first indication of trouble was the terse, excited message, DON’T SHOOT! THIS IS AN AMERICAN PLANE! The first, puzzled reaction by Dale Hilton and Jack Leaming was radio silence had been broken. About a minute later came another transmission… Get out the rubber boat, we’re goin’ in!

Aboard the cruiser New Orleans, below decks, in the mix of crewmembers, low light, flashlights, periodic darkness, sweating, undoubtedly much swearing and the occasional jolt of heavy AA fire above, Lieutenant Edwin F. Woodhead, who was in charge of the ammunition line during the attack, remembered, I heard a voice behind me saying ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ I turned and saw Chaplain [Lieutenant Howell M.] Forgy walking toward me along the line of men. He was patting men on the back and making that remark to cheer them and keep them going. I know it helped me a lot, too.

Less than two days outbound west northwest of Hawaii, Task Force 12’s aircraft carrier Lexington, the guide for ten other ships in the task force, steamed toward the island of Midway. Rear Admiral John H. Newton seemed somewhat less concerned about the growing international tensions and Japanese threat in the Pacific, though Task Force 12’s mission was to deliver 18 aircraft from Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 231, to Midway. His outlook changed abruptly, however, by the time Officer of the Deck, Ensign Joseph Weber, entered a note in the Lexington’s log: …0830 Received signal from CinCpac, ‘Hostilities with Japan commenced with air raid on Pearl.’ Commenced zigzagging with standard zigzag plan…

On board Enterprise, Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant John O.F. Dorsett noted in the carrier’s log: …0900 On radio orders from SecNav, executed War Plan against Japan in view of unprovoked air raid on Pearl Harbor at 0800 this date. 0904 Commenced zigzagging…

In San Diego, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga arrived from overhaul at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Seattle, Washington, and stopped all engines at 1120, 0920 hours Hawaii time. The Officer of the Deck, Ensign John P. Aymond, made three more entries in the log, before writing: 1144 War has been declared with Japan; air raid Pearl Harbor…

From their apartment on Oahu, near Waikiki, Joey Border, 21-year old wife of Ensign Bob Border, assigned to the battleship Tennessee, started writing a letter home:

Dec. 7 – Sunday

Dearest Family –

Here it is. We’re at war with Japan and Hawaii is in the middle. I don’t know if you’ll ever receive this letter, but I hope that when you do, all this mess will be over. This morning the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was Bud Marron! a dr. on the Tennessee, who called to tell Bob that all naval officers were to report immediately. We couldn’t quite believe it until we turned the radio on and there it was Oahu is being attacked by enemy planes – please keep calm. Bob dashed out to Pearl Harbor. I hope he made it. Bombs have been falling at irregular intervals – one just hit about 5 blocks from here. I could hear the planes and the constant boom of the antiaircraft guns – the sky is dotted with puffs of smoke. Hickam Field is in flames and in that direction one can see the black smoke. Parachute troops have landed. Not many people have been killed – about 6 so far. A Japanese plane flew low over the streets of Wahiawa, machine-gunning everything and everybody. The Kaneohe Air Base is partially in flames and one of the main water lines has burst. A few are excited, but for the most part, everyone is calm. The radio stations have gone off the air, coming on for only official announcements. I am writing this from time to time throughout the day…It’s sad, but I couldn’t think of anything to say this morning when he left. All I shouted was – Have fun. I love you. I know it won’t be fun and he knows I love him…If any nasty Japs come around here, I have some very good butcher knives which I can use to good advantage…

Joey didn’t complete her letter until the next day, and life became worse, much worse as this day wore on. She marked her envelope Clipper, and Pan American Airways’ Philippine Clipper, still bearing sixteen bullet holes from the 7 December Japanese attack on Wake Island, carried her letter as far as San Francisco, where it arrived on 10 December.

Chapter 1

The New Totalitarians

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount.

And the tigers are getting hungry.

Winston Churchill

On board the Matson Line’s formerly luxurious SS Lurline the last days of December 1941, she earned the nickname of Mighty Mouse from the ship’s crew and passengers. The Lurline’s passengers included wounded, tourists, military dependents, non-essential government employees and their dependents, and civilian contractor employees’ dependents being evacuated from the island of Oahu to the West Coast following the Japanese Empire’s 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor. She was the spark for the women she called the "Tennessee twelve," wives whose husbands were crew members aboard the battleship USS Tennessee. Largely through the grapevine, and later from her personal observation of the event, the twelve learned the Tennessee had slipped out of Pearl Harbor with the battleships Maryland and Pennsylvania on Saturday afternoon, 20 December.

Unknown to her and the Tennessee twelve, the destroyers Tucker, Flusser, Case, and Conyngham preceded the three battleships out of the harbor, with orders to provide them a screen against attacks by Japanese submarines.

Departing under the greatest possible secrecy and designated Task Force 16 in sealed orders handed to Rear Admiral William S. Anderson, who was the Senior Officer Present Afloat and task force commander on board Maryland, the ships’ sudden departure from Pearl Harbor created a stir. The Tennessee wives could only speculate as to their husbands’ destination.

From 26 to 31 December Lurline sailed in Convoy Number 4032, one of the United States’ earliest, World War II Pacific convoys, accompanied by two more Matson Line ships, the recently government acquired SS Matsonia, and the US Army Transport Monterrey, acquired by the Army in July 1941. Escorting the three Matson Line ships were the Pacific Fleet’s Task Group 15.6, light cruiser USS St. Louis and two destroyers, Preston and Smith. Sailing through waters patrolled by Japanese submarines surrounding Oahu and near harbor entrances off the mainland’s West Coast, Lurline, her sister ships and escorts, were moving at 17 knots, sometimes zigzagging, under equally tight secrecy and radio silence. No electronic signals of any kind to be sent ship to shore. Destination, San Francisco - a fact none of the passengers and nearly all the crew members knew. As was the case with Task Force 16, the movement of Convoy 4032 was highly classified.

Days and nights were tense, ships darkened. During daylight hours, when the weather and seas permitted, two Curtiss SOC Seagulls, catapulted off the St Louis, patrolled in planned patterns ahead of the convoy, searching primarily for submarines lying in wait, or the presence of Japanese ships or patrol planes launched from submarines or ships. Twenty-four hours a day, lookouts on board all the ships in the convoy constantly eyed the rough, wintry waters’ surface with binoculars for tell tale signs of submarines, while destroyers aided their searches with hydrophones or SONAR, a relatively new electronic device in anti-submarine warfare. Life jackets in hand or worn by passengers and crew were mandatory on board the three Matson ships.

It’s said that dynamite comes in small packages, and indeed, at five feet tall in a natural honey-blond, energetic, vivacious, smart, and determined woman, it does. Mary Joleen Joey Border lived the example. She was there, in Honolulu on 7 December, a barely twenty-one year old bride of less than five months that fateful morning. And now, here she was, back on the Lurline three months after she sailed on the same ship from San Francisco to Honolulu, to join her handsome, Navy officer husband, Ensign Robert Lee Bob Border - a 1939 United States Naval Academy graduate and crew member on the battleship Tennessee.

Joey and Bob had met in the junior officers’ wardroom on Tennessee while the great ship named for the Volunteer State was in port at Puget Sound Navy Yard in December 1940. Bob’s older brother, Ensign Karl Frederick Border, who was his Academy classmate, was also his shipmate and roommate aboard Tennessee when Bob and Joey met. The world was aflame in Asia and Europe when they met, and their story was one among millions in a much larger story, a catastrophic event which swept up their lives and shook the world.¹

The nine years preceding December 1940 were tumultuous. Growing in power, the 20th century’s new totalitarians relentlessly pushed the world ever deeper into crisis. In the Far East, war began in September 1931 when Japan, ruled for five years by Emperor Hirohito, used the pretext of a minor incident on the South Manchuria Railroad to invade and annex Manchuria. Five months later Japan proclaimed the puppet state of Manchukuo. Having occupied Korea since President Theodore Roosevelt’s arbitrated settlement of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, they used the peninsula as their base to seize Manchuria.

Then, in 1933, the same year Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took the oath of office as the 32nd president of the United States, the Empire of the Rising Sun seized more of North China while the weak, divided nation, most of her provinces ruled by warlords, was mired in an expanding civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists. As the conflagration in Asia spread in the two years preceding 1933, the League of Nations debated, while in Japan, by terror and political pressure, the military took complete control of the government.

The Rise of Nazi Germany

In 1932, on the other side of the world, Germany’s electorate accorded a new, dominant status to the rapidly growing National Socialist Party, Adolph Hitler’s Nazis. Preying on the bitterness and disillusionment wrought by crushing reparations demanded by the Allies after Germany’s World War I defeat, and economic collapse under the governing Weimar Republic, the Nazi Party appeared to offer Germans new hope. Though receiving only a third of the total, the Nazis, with fourteen million votes, had become the largest political party in the nation. Hitler previously vowed to rebuild the Nazi Party and achieve power by constitutional means. In January 1933, he achieved the last of his two goals when the former World War I general and aging president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler Germany’s Chancellor. The next month, the Nazis used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to jail, beat and torture the Communists wholesale. They also gagged other political parties.

In the six years following his January 1933 accession he smashed democracy, dispossessed and ultimately liquidated Germany’s cultivated Jewish population, and crushed party dissidents through terror or sometimes outright murder. He silenced the General Staff, seized the economy, and assumed direction of foreign policy. The rich Saarland, temporarily removed by the Allies from German administration after World War I, voted to rejoin the Reich.²

In September 1933, the Nazis held the first of their annual, giant Nuremberg rallies with their attending, huge, uniformed throngs - which assembled to carefully selected, inspiring martial music and the triumphant entry of the dictator, the likes of which the world had never seen. Filled with exciting pageantry and fervent, electrifying appeals to national pride, the rallies were the catalysts for renewing the glories of a Germany once again aggressively reasserting itself on the world stage.

In October 1933, claiming Germany was not given equality with other nations, Hitler took his country out of the League of Nations and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. By the end of the year, Hitler was Fuhrer, his ambition only temporarily satiated. In March of 1935 Hitler revealed a German Air Force already existed, and he provided for a peacetime army of thirty-six divisions.

In the United States - Isolationism

While events were spinning out of control in the Far East and Europe, the democracies struggled to extricate themselves from the strangle hold of economic collapse which followed the panic that engulfed America’s Wall Street beginning 24 October 1929. The Wall Street disaster was felt throughout Europe, and on 11 May 1931, in the year Japan occupied Manchuria, Austria’s powerful Credit-Ansalt Bank collapsed. On 21 September, England abandoned the gold standard. World trade dwindled. Wages shrank fantastically, and Europe’s growing number of unemployed workers joined the ruined middle class in following the Fascist, National Socialist and Communist movements, which thrived on despair.³

In the United States during the decade of the 1930s isolationism reached an all-time peak. It was the period for being cynical about war and patriotism. The commonly accepted belief was America had become involved in the First World War because we had been naive dupes of shrewd British and French propaganda. In the search for scapegoats for war guilt, the Senate’s Nye committee investigated munitions makers, offering Americans these merchants of death as another conventional wisdom for the cause of war. The theme became a myth making the rounds in America’s conversation, Arms manufacturers deliberately fomented wars to increase the markets for their wares.

When the sound of aggression wafted across the oceans - from Manchuria, Ethiopia, and Spain - and began disturbing the populace, America insulated herself with neutrality laws, forbidding trade with either side in the conflict. It made no difference that our neutrality laws always seemed to harm the victim more than the aggressor. We thought we were safe. That was what mattered.⁴

By 4 March 1933, the day Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in following his November election defeat of Herbert Hoover, and little more than a month after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, twelve million Americans were unemployed. Roosevelt came in on promises of immediate relief, recovery and improvement. His makeshift New Deal grew in a curiously effective way, revitalizing the economy. He lowered tariffs, repealed prohibition, relieved pressure on the farmers, revalued gold, and initiated vast public works projects to take up the employment slack. Exuding self-confidence and galvanizing national faith, he brought a number of competent, imaginative men into office, and in his famous First Hundred Days concocted a new style and direction in Federal Government that would do more to change life in America than in any administration since Woodrow Wilson.⁵

On 25 January 1933, prior to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge and President Roosevelt’s inauguration, a gleaming, white, luxury liner steamed through the Golden Gate on her first voyage into San Francisco Bay. Built by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company at their Fore River Plant in Quincy, Massachusetts, and launched in 1932, the Matson Line’s SS Lurline was the third of the company’s three magnificent passenger liners. Her two Matson Line sister ships, SS Monterey and SS Mariposa, built in 1931, were already in service. Captain William Matson, founder and President of the Matson Navigation Company, named the first two Lurlines for his daughter, and though he died in 1917, her name was carried on this third magnificent liner. The splendid, fast ship was entering service between San Francisco, Australia and New Zealand.⁶

The SS Lurline arrives in San Francisco on 25 January 1933, at the end of her maiden voyage. NPSSFHMML

On 25 February the first United States aircraft carrier specifically designed for the purpose, the USS Ranger (CV-4), was christened at Newport News, Virginia, by Mrs. Herbert Hoover, whose husband was defeated in his bid for reelection to the presidency the previous fall. The U.S. had three other carriers, the Langley (CV-1), Lexington (CV-2), and Saratoga (CV-3), but they were ships that had been converted for use as carriers.⁷

Fascism’s Rise to Power

In 1933 Italy, Fascism was thriving under Benito Mussolini, who formed his first Fascist Party cell in 1919. By 1922, the same year Berlin arranged the Treaty of Rapallo with Moscow, and the German Army's General Hans von Seeckt had already established secret training and arms manufacturing inside Russia in the Soviet towns of Lipetsk, Saratov, Kazan, and Tula; Mussolini’s black-shirted bully boys had so cowed the Italian government he was able to make himself dictator. A new breed of tyrants had arrived on the world stage, complete with the presence of Josef Stalin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.⁸

Totalitarianism was antithetical to everything democracy stood for, with its police state controlling the economic, political and cultural lives of its citizens. But until well into the 1930’s, most Americans worried only about Communism. Many openly expressed admiration for Mussolini, who had made the trains run on time, while Hitler was a man with a comical mustache who headed only a minority party and held no position of political power.⁹

In 1935 the United States was still struggling to overcome the disastrous effects of The Great Depression, but the population, hungry for good news, seemed hungry for even the illusion of good news if real progress couldn't be found. Economic gains registered in 1934 appeared to produce a heady effect on the nation.¹⁰

The appearance of economic progress sparked disagreements of all kinds. Labor and capital battled in a no-holds-barred brawl. President Roosevelt’s New Deal suffered a stunning setback when the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. Anti-administration forces then had effective ammunition to use against the New Deal, accusing it of being un-American, Bolshevistic, communistic, and socialistic. Major and minor rebellions among Democrats in Congress destroyed Party unity, making it difficult for the President to maintain control of his own supporters. In short, the nation was feuding.¹¹

While the feuding continued, on 6 May 1935 the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was instituted under the authority of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, which passed on 8 April. On 11 May the Rural Electrification Administration was established by executive order to build power lines and finance electricity production in areas not served by private distributors. The Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act on 27 May, declaring it unconstitutional, invalidating the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The Court’s decision implied any government attempts to legislate prices, wages, and working conditions were unconstitutional.¹²

At the 61st annual running of the Kentucky Derby on 4 May, Omaha, with jockey Willis Saunders aboard, won with a time of 2:05. Omaha and Willis Saunders continued their amazing performance by winning the 60th annual Preakness Stakes on 11 May, in a time of 1:58 2/5, and the 67th Belmont Stakes in 2:30 3/5 on 8 June. While Omaha and his jockey were making history on the racetracks, on 24 May, in major league baseball, the Cincinnati Reds and Philadelphia Phillies played the first night baseball game before 20,000 fans at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1. On 13 June, James J. Braddock won the heavyweight boxing championship on points in 15 rounds over Max Baer, an amazing comeback by a man considered all washed up by sports writers.¹³

So-called proletarian novels reflected conflicting social forces at work given impetus by The Great Depression. The upsurge in this form of novel found a receptive audience, and sparked the founding of a left-wing book club. The trend extended to the theater, the most conservative of the literary-based arts, and Clifford Odets electrified audiences with his glorification of the little man. Imaginative artists discovered American primitivism, which was stimulated by interest in African art. The Federal Music Project employed 18,000 musicians and sponsored thousands of free concerts. The film industry produced a plethora of epics such as Mutiny on the Bounty, A Tale of Two Cities, and one of the finest films of all time, The Informer. Beginning 16 August the nation mourned the loss of the renowned humorist, writer, and film star, Will Rogers, who died with the internationally known, world-traveling aviator, Wiley Post, in an airplane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska.¹⁴

Founded in 1845, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, accepted its ninetieth graduation class as Plebes - freshmen - in July 1935. Among the young men entering with the Plebe class were the two brothers, Karl Frederick Border, age 19, and Robert Lee Border, age 17. They were the sons of Captain Lee S. Border, USNA class of 1905. Entering her freshman year in high school, in Minneapolis, Minnesota was 14-year old Mary Joleen Springer, the daughter and only child of George and Charlotte Florence Springer. The paths of Bob and Karl Border, and Joey Springer would intersect five and a half years in the future, at the Puget Sound Navy Yard.¹⁵

In spite of increasing turmoil and international violence fomented by tyrants in Europe and the Far East, America held firm, rock like, continuing to insulate itself from the growing danger. With the great Atlantic and Pacific barriers to keep the wolves at bay, there was safety and comfort in tending to the nation’s domestic needs.

President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on 14 August 1935. It established a Social Security Board to supervise payment of old-age benefits, such payments to be determined by the amount of money earned by recipients before their 65th birthdays. On 8 September a powerful demagogue in Louisiana and national politics, Senator Huey Long, was assassinated in the corridor of the state capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr.¹⁶

Japanese Aggression and Hawaii’s Growing Importance in the Pacific

In the Territory of Hawaii the United States armed forces had long been present, having recognized the importance of Hawaii to military strategy even before annexation to the Union in 1898. American military and naval establishments in the islands grew gradually, with Army strength fluctuating between 13,000 and 15,000 in the decade leading to 1935. Japan’s campaign of aggression in Manchuria beginning in 1931 gave impetus to improvements in existing posts and establishing new defenses.

In 1935 the Army reorganized its forces in Hawaii, and the War Department gave the islands priority among overseas garrisons in the posting of soldiers and distribution of munitions. The Army also established a Service Command, in part to deal with civilian problems in the event of war, and placed more emphasis on the role of civilian Hawaii in a Pacific conflict. Studies and military exercises envisioning war in the Pacific made clear wartime problems in Hawaii would markedly differ in three fundamental respects from the problems confronting the continental United States.

First, Hawaii was remote from sources of supply and would be affected by shortages of shipping space. A priority matter for the newly created Service Command was the food supply. Hawaii had historically depended heavily on the mainland for its food supply, a problem evident in World War I. The Service Command addressed the annual meeting of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) on the security aspects of agricultural diversification, and the same year the HSPA appointed a diversified crops committee. The primary purpose of the committee was to explore the economic possibilities of crops other than sugar, but its studies and experiments took new directions as the international situation deteriorated. A shipping strike in 1936-37 would further emphasize Hawaii’s vulnerability to limited ocean transportation.

Second, one-third of Hawaii’s population was Japanese, approximately 155,000, and among them was an older alien group of 35,000. The remaining 120,000 were American citizens by birth, many holding dual citizenship due to legal complexities. Third, Hawaii was more than 2,000 miles nearer any Pacific front than the continental United States, clearly implying the islands were both an important point of defense, and a vital stepping stone to American operations in the far reaches of the Pacific.¹⁷

Additionally, major factors in the importance of the islands’ geographic location would be the consequences of their loss. Their seizure by the Japanese would place an aggressive enemy astride America’s primary sea and air routes to the Far East, effectively severing a major trade and supply line to outlying Pacific posts. Further, Hawaiian air and sea installations under Japanese control would provide them an advance base from which to strike the mainland.

In the period 1931-35, another factor was at work heightening the importance of Hawaii as an American bridge to Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. In November 1931, Juan Trippe, the visionary founder of Pan American Airways began to establish extensive international mail and passenger service to the Caribbean and then to South America using three S-40 flying boats, the first of two four-engine flying boats designed by the Russian genius Igor Sikorsky. The S-40, with a range of 1,000 miles, could carry 50 passengers in relative comfort. Sikorsky’s nearly three-times-longer-range S-42 entered Pan American passenger service to South America in August 1934. But Trippe’s visionary drive didn’t end with South America. He turned toward the Pacific to expand mail and passenger service.

Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh first convinced Trippe to seek the most efficient route, along the coast of Alaska to Japan, a distance of about 2,000 miles, but diplomatic troubles with the Soviet Union and Japan forced Trippe to consider alternative routes. Straight across the ocean from California to Hawaii, then to Midway Island and Wake Island, an uninhabited lagoon in the Western Pacific, was the most obvious route. From Wake Island, the route would be to Guam, and then finally to Manila in the Philippines. Though the U.S. Postal Service expressed only lukewarm interest in mail service along such routes, Trippe pressed ahead with his plans. In 1935, Pan American built airfields on Midway, Wake and Guam, and ran test flights across the Pacific using the S-42.

The Sikorsky S-42 flies over the towers of the not yet complete Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, departing for Hawaii on its 16 April 1935 survey flight. PAAR/UMLSCF

The Martin M-130 China Clipper over the port of San Francisco. PAAR/UMLSCF

For the initial mail service flights, Pan American used the Martin M-130 flying boat, a thoroughly modern plane equipped with state-of-the-art navigation systems and a range of 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers). Modeled like a hotel, with broad armchairs and full meal service, it could carry as many as 52 passengers. Trippe dubbed the first M-130 the China Clipper, though in truth, Pan American landing rights were limited to the British colony of Hong Kong, on the south coast of China.

While the Italian Army was seizing Ethiopia in far away North Africa in October of that year, Pan American Airways was planning to begin mail service across the Pacific with the China Clipper, on 22 November 1935. With much fanfare the graceful flying boat took off from San Francisco and flew to its new Pearl City base in the Middle Loch of Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, then on to Manila in the Philippines, with additional stops in Midway, Wake, and Guam. After 59 hours and 48 minutes of flight across the international dateline, and six days en route, the China Clipper berthed in Manila on 29 November.¹⁸

While American’s Pan American Airways was opening up mail service to the Pacific and Far East, on 3 October 1935, a modern day Roman Caesar and renegade socialist turned Fascist, Benito Mussolini, sent his Army into Ethiopia. In December 1934, anxious to prove his new Fascist Troops, he had provoked a skirmish at Walwal, near the Ethiopian border. Although Emperor Haile Selassie appealed for help to the League of Nations, The League had been virtually condemned to failure in 1919, when the United States Senate defeated President Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to lead the nation into the world organization. Wilson had envisioned the League as an international forum to resolve issues and end war. Finally, the League could do nothing in 1935 because the remaining Great Powers refused to intervene. The war in Ethiopia lasted only six months but was marked by terrible atrocities.¹⁹

In 1936 events across the Atlantic and Pacific continued along the path of ever-deepening crisis. At the beginning of the election year, Democrats closed ranks and party leaders hailed the advent of good times. However, bad times continued for farmers when another scorching drought created a vast dust bowl and sent thousands westward in search of fertile land. On 2 March, Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, which replaced the Agricultural Adjustment Act, previously invalidated 6 January by the Supreme Court. The new measure provided benefit payments to farmers who practiced soil conservation in a cooperative program to replace soil-depleting crops with soil-conserving crops.

Critics of the New Deal stressed the fact the national debt had been increased to twelve billion dollars since Roosevelt took office, while supporters countered with statistics of their own: an increase of thirty billion dollars in annual income. Labor warfare continued and unions discovered a new weapon in the sit-down strike.

While Hitler’s Nazi regime continued to extend its reach and influence, the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Germany, would be the last the world would see for twelve years. At the 5-11 February Winter Olympics, the United States’ team won two gold medals and placed fifth in the unofficial team scoring behind Norway, Germany, Sweden, and Finland. At the 5-16 August Summer Olympics, the U.S. won 20 gold medals and placed second in the unofficial team scoring, behind Germany. The star of the summer games was the U.S. Negro athlete, sprinter Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals - a stunning setback to Hitler and his Nazi Party’s master race, and a step forward in black Americans’ long struggle for racial equality in the land of the free.

On 7 March, between the winter and summer games, Hitler sent his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland and began to fortify it. The Allies did nothing but mumble. Next he sent agents into Austria, and began to subvert that mountain nation of 6,500,000 people.

On 9 May the German Zeppelin Transportation Company’s dirigible, Hindenburg, completed the first scheduled transatlantic dirigible flight, landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The craft, 830 ft long, 135 ft in diameter, and propelled by four 1050 hp Daimler Benz Diesel engines, had a range of 8,000 miles.²⁰

The Spanish Civil War: Europe’s Proving Ground for World War II

On 18 July the Spanish Civil War began, the wildest, bloodiest, and most heart-rending of the lesser conflicts leading toward a much larger conflict. Germany, Italy and Russia tested tactics, weapons and commanders after a handful of well-financed right-wing Spanish generals, headed by forty-four-year-old Francisco Franco, led a military revolt against the weak republic. Communist and liberal groups throughout the world joined to support the Republican militia, while Fascists and conservatives backed Franco. The Germans sent tanks, planes and 10,000 men to support Franco, the Italians 75,000. The Russians sent planes, tanks, and ammunition to the Republican forces, and some of their best officers, operating under aliases.²¹

As was written in C.L. Sulzberger’s The American Heritage Picture History of World War II, Spain aroused infinite passions and came to represent, in some weird prevision, the ideological fanaticism of World War II, so soon to explode. Before their own bodies and souls were torn on far greater battlefields, millions of people were caught in the emotional and symbolic vortex.

In October 1936, while the brutal, bitter Spanish conflict raged, Britain, France, and the United States maintained strict neutrality, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini reached the agreement that created the Rome-Berlin Axis. Not surprisingly, Franco was victorious and then joined the Rome-Berlin Axis.²²

In the same month, Pan American Airways inaugurated its first passenger flights across the Pacific, the largest ocean in the world, by carrying nine travelers round-trip from San Francisco to Manila, the route on which the first stop would always be the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Each passenger paid more than $1,400, an astronomical sum at that time. Soon after extending service to Manila and Hong Kong, Juan Trippe began pushing for routes to Australia and New Zealand. Though the British refused to grant landing rights to Australia, New Zealand was more cooperative. Pan American’s Clippers would begin regular passenger services to New Zealand in March 1937, flying via Kingman Reef south of Hawaii, and American Samoa.²³

In America’s 1936 general elections, the New Deal received a huge vote of confidence. The Democrats increased their gains to three fourths of the seats in both Senate and House of Representatives, and President Roosevelt won reelection in a landslide.

Among books published in 1936 was the blockbuster novel, Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, which sold 1,000,000 copies in six months, and in 1937 won the Pulitzer Prize; Further Range by Robert Frost, which included the poem Two Tramps in the Mud Time; and The Big Money by John Dos Passos, the third novel of his U.S.A. trilogy, which included The 42d Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). The foremost American dramatist, Eugene O'Neill, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.²⁴

As 1937 began, the worst of the Depression seemed over. The New Deal entered a period of transition in which its measures lost much of their emotional impact. Voices were increasingly raised against the program despite administration attempts to press ahead. The inauguration of President Roosevelt on 20 January 1937 marked the first time the presidential inauguration was held on that date, and in less than a month, the President began efforts to change the composition of the Supreme Court.

On 5 February, after informing congressional leaders at a special Cabinet meeting in the morning, he sent a message to Congress at noon recommending revision of statutes governing the judiciary. Although the purpose was ostensibly to provide more efficient and younger judges in all federal courts, the President was charged with attempting to pack the Supreme Court, which in the past had invalidated hard sought parts of the New Deal legislative program. The following July the Supreme Court Bill was effectively killed when it was voted back into committee.

The American response to the conflicts exploding around the world was increased isolation. On 1 May the United States’ Neutrality Act of 1937 went into effect, a law which further tightened the 1935 Act and prohibited the sale of arms to belligerents. The false sense of security the Act brought to America would later prove more detrimental to the nation’s natural democratic allies than it would to totalitarians then stalking the earth.

On 6 May, the same day the nation heard the first coast-to-coast broadcast of a radio program, the dirigible Hindenburg was destroyed by fire at its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Herbert Morrison conducted the program, which aired the Hindenburg disaster. The huge lighter-than-air-transport burst into flames and fell to the ground in a few horrifying seconds, marking the virtual end of transportation by dirigible. Six days later Americans heard the first worldwide radio broadcast received in the United States. Listeners heard the coronation of King George VI of England. On 27 May the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California was dedicated.

In sports, War Admiral, with jockey Charles Kurtsinger aboard, won the 63rd annual Kentucky Derby on 8 May, with a time of 2:03 1/5. A week later the two repeated victory in the 62nd running of the Preakness Stakes in 1:58 2/5. Their third in their triple crown triumphs came on 5 June in the 69th Belmont Stakes, with a time of 2:28 3/5. On 22 June Joe Louis won the world heavyweight boxing championship when he knocked out James J. Braddock in the eighth round in Chicago. At the Wimbledon tennis championship in England, J. Donald Budge won the men’s singles title. In the fifth annual baseball All-Star Game on 7 July, the American League defeated the National League 8-3, the League’s fourth win. In Davis Cup tennis, Americans won the championship on 27 July, defeating Great Britain four matches to one. On 31 July-1 August the yacht Ranger successfully defended the America’s Cup, winning four straight races from the British challenger Endeavor. In October the 34th annual World Series was won by the American League’s New York Yankees, four games to one, over the New York Giants.

In August the first signs of a new recession became apparent when a wave of selling hit the stock markets. After Labor Day, the retreat sharpened, and many stocks fell rapidly. By 19 October, a demoralized market had reached the largest number of transactions since 1933. In late summer, as the market slid, Congress passed and the President signed the National Housing Act, which created the U.S. Housing Authority for administering loans to small communities and states for rural and urban construction.

The American people were deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War. While the government took no official position on the conflict, a considerable portion of the public gave highly emotional support to the Loyalist, antifascist side. Hundreds of volunteers went to Spain, where they joined the Loyalist armies.²⁵

Japan’s Special Undeclared War

While the Spanish Civil War and Axis powers in Europe drew American attention to the east, to the west across the Pacific, Japan, in what was dubbed a special undeclared war brought much of Northern China and the Yangtze valley under control, pushing as far as the Wuhan cities. As Chinese resistance stiffened, Japanese blows became more widespread. Invading armies took the coastal cities and territories first, then moved up the rivers and spread inland. Begun in July 1937, the fighting in The China Incident lasted until November 1938.

Just after midnight in the early morning hours of 11 December 1937, one of the world’s most luxurious cruise liners, the Dollar Line’s SS President Hoover, ran aground on Hoishoto Island (now Green Island) off the east coast of the Japanese colony of Formosa. The Hoover was evacuating Americans from the Far East as a result of mounting tensions and the renewed Japanese offensive in China. She ran aground while en route south on the east side of Formosa, from Kobe, Japan to Manila in the Philippine Islands. With 503 passengers and an inexperienced crew of 330 on board, she was proceeding at night in unfamiliar waters, skirting her normal route and the port of Shanghai. To compound the ship’s navigation hazards leading to the accident, the Japanese had turned out all their coastal navigation lights.

After firing flares, sending an SOS, approximately twelve hours of futile attempts to free the ship, and an apparent worsening situation, at low tide, 1 p.m., Captain Yardley ordered the passengers evacuated to the nearby shore. The early SOS alerted the US Navy in Manila and the destroyers Barker (DD-213) and Alden (DD-211) were ordered to speed to the Hoover’s assistance. At dawn on the 11th, the German freighter Prussia, arrived but there was nothing she could do. At 3 p.m., as the passenger evacuation was beginning, the Japanese heavy cruiser IJN Ashigara and an unidentified Mutsuki Class destroyer appeared on the scene to observe and protect the Hoover.

All the passengers

Reviews for Sunday in Hell

[Guy Cabell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book is an excellent history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving out no detail that I can think of. It also covers much of the immediate aftermath in Hawaii and the western USA. One could say that there is perhaps too much detail, but that's something that should be left to the judgement of the reader. The book is unfortunately hampered by very poor editing - numerous misspellings, identification of USS Niagara as Niagra, USS Tautog as Tuatog, and identifying people by incorrect names, including one Medal of Honor winner.