A Boy at War Read online

  The words wavered and seemed as big as alphabet blocks.

  “Read it to me,” his mother said.

  “The Secretary of War—” he read, and it was as if he were in school, aware of the sound of his voice, the words coming out automatically, one after another. “—desires me to express his deep regret that your husband, Lt. Emory J. Pelko, has been missing in action at Pearl Harbor since seven December forty-one. Confirming letter follows. J. A. Ulio, the Adjutant General.”

  “Missing in action,” his mother said. She sat there, lips pressed together, hands crossed and gripping her shoulders. “Missing in action,” she repeated.

  Missing in action . . . that meant maybe. It meant there was still a chance. It meant there was still a little bit of hope.

  But he knew. There was no hope.

  When Adam’s mother told him that the navy was sending all dependent families back to the mainland, his first thought was no, he wouldn’t go. No! He wouldn’t leave his father. He couldn’t. The thought of leaving his father here at the bottom of Pearl Harbor was too awful.

  But where was he going to live? He could hear his mother saying it. How are you going to get along? Who’s going to make your meals?

  He’d live with Davi, sleep in his room. He’d eat with the family, find a job so he could pay them, and he and Davi would go to school together.

  “Mom—” She was packing a trunk, emptying the shelves in the hall closet. “Mom, I’m going to stay here,” Adam said.

  “What does that mean?” She handed him several blankets. “Put these in the trunk.”

  “I’m staying here in Hawaii,” he said. “I want to.”

  His mother became very still. She seemed to grow taller and ominous. “Do you really think I’d leave you here, Adam? Why would I do that?”

  “Why not? You’re leaving Dad.” He hadn’t meant to say it that way. It came out sounding so brutal. And when he tried to explain, he made it worse. “Dad’s here, we’re leaving him,” he cried. “We’re abandoning him!”

  “You know we don’t have a choice. We’re in the navy.” She took the blankets from him and put them into the trunk.

  “Mom—” He started to argue. How were they in the navy anymore? “It’s only because of Dad—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please.” She took him by the shoulders and looked long and hard into his eyes. “What would I do without you?” she said at last. “I would miss you too much.”

  * * *

  They sailed home on a troop ship—navy families, defense workers, and the worst of the wounded men crowded the ship. There were no bands, no banners, and no waving and cheering. The flower ladies were there, as always, selling leis off the backs of their trucks. Adam bought a bunch, and they all wore them.

  He stood with his mother and Bea by the railing, the three of them a little apart from the other passengers. His mother held Bea in her arms. Adam thought of Rinaldi and Brown, and the Marine Sergeant, and the officer with his arm in a sling—where were they now? That day had been like a life apart—a whole life lived in that one day—when the war started. He had gone out in the morning riding his bike down the Kamehamema Highway, and he had come home that night carrying a gun.

  He looked back at the city as they moved out of the harbor. Beyond Honolulu clouds streamed across the Koolau Mountains like long, fat cigars. His father had smoked cigars sometimes, when he was feeling especially good. Adam liked remembering that, and it hurt him too.

  It hurt him to think of his father sealed into that ship. It would always hurt him. People said his father and the other men were heroes who had died at their stations. Heroes who had done amazing things, endured and stood fast. And they had. But when he thought of them down there, when he thought of the way they had died, without a chance even to fight back, it only hurt.

  In the distance Honolulu and the beaches flattened out until the island seemed to be just mountains floating over the sea. “It’s like a dream,” his mother said. “So beautiful and so awful.”

  As they sailed past Diamond Head, the flat, old volcano, people dropped their leis into the sea. It meant you were coming back. Adam let his lei go and watched it drop into the water. Goodbye, Dad.

  In the water the flowers formed rafts of color. For a moment the whole sea seemed to glow, and then it faded.

  Pearl Harbor was the worst single naval defeat in American history. The attack was over in less than two hours, but the war that began that day was to continue for nearly four years. Few expected Japan, a small nation with limited resources, to attack a nation as big and powerful as the United States. The Pearl Harbor naval base, the home station of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was on Oahu, the most populated of the eight Hawaiian islands. It had huge fuel and ammunition depots and was ringed with airfields. One hundred thousand military personnel—army, navy, and marines—were on the Hawaiian islands, whose waters were routinely patrolled by ships and planes. Pearl Harbor was considered impregnable.

  The Japanese attack depended on stealth, surprise, and luck. On November 26 the Japanese attack fleet, which had gathered secretly in the fog-shrouded waters of the Kuril Islands of northern Japan, set sail through the heavy seas of the North Pacific. The fleet included six aircraft carriers and two battleships, as well as support cruisers, destroyers, and supply ships. Had they been discovered, they would have turned back, but despite the thousands of miles of water crossed during the next twelve days, the fleet was never detected.

  The first of two waves of attacking aircraft was launched at 0600. A Sunday morning was chosen because it was the custom for the Pacific Fleet to be on maneuvers during the week and back in port on the weekend. The Japanese attack force consisted of 360 airplanes, including high-level bombers, torpedo bombers, and dive-bombers, as well as 43 Zero fighter planes. The first bombs struck Ford Island at 0755. At almost the same time, every American airfield around the island was attacked. Within minutes the air defense of Pearl Harbor was nearly destroyed.

  When the attack was over, 2,403 American servicemen were dead, nearly half from the Arizona, which sank in nine minutes, trapping more than 1,000 men belowdecks. Including the wounded, but not counting civilian losses, the Pearl Harbor casualties totaled almost 3,500. Japan lost fewer than 100 men.

  Five U.S. battleships were sunk, and three destroyers and three light cruisers were damaged. Japan lost one full-size submarine and five midget submarines that had been probing the waters around Pearl Harbor. The Japanese fleet itself escaped undetected.

  One hundred sixty-four U.S. aircraft were destroyed, almost all on the ground. In addition, one hundred fifty-nine more were badly damaged. Of the twenty-nine Japanese planes that failed to return to their carriers, most were shot down by American antiaircraft guns and the handful of American fighter pilots who managed to get airborne.

  Despite the battle’s one-sided results, the attack didn’t achieve the goal of destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet and immobilizing the American forces. The Japanese failed to destroy the massive fuel reserves or the naval repair yards at Pearl Harbor, so instead of the Pacific Fleet being forced back to the mainland, the damage was repaired in Hawaii. In addition, Pearl Harbor was so shallow that sunken ships that would have been a total loss in deeper water were eventually refloated. It took several years, but in the end the U.S. Navy recovered all but three vessels. Eighty percent of the aircraft were also salvaged.

  More important, the attack was a psychological disaster for Japan. Americans responded with fury to the attack, and “Remember Pearl Harbor” became the rallying cry of the war in the Pacific. The U.S. Navy launched its first attack on Japanese installations less than two months later, and the fleet was on the attack at full strength in six months.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor was made more effective because of widespread American racist attitudes toward the Japanese. Simply put, Americans considered themselves superior to the Japanese in every way. The common view was that Japan would never dare attack the U.S., and if it di
d, the Americans would easily prevail. The American military was less concerned about an air or naval attack from Japan than about sabotage by the Japanese living in Hawaii. At the time of the attack a third of Hawaii’s population, 160,000 people, were of Japanese descent—immigrants who had lived and worked in Hawaii for many years but were denied citizenship, and their children who were born in Hawaii and were American citizens.

  The military view at the highest levels was that in the event of war, Hawaiian Japanese would side with Japan and interfere with the war effort. To minimize sabotage, the army had ordered all American planes to be lined up wingtip to wingtip so they could be guarded more easily. Under attack they were more easily destroyed. In the days and weeks after the attack rumors of sabotage were common.

  On the Pacific coast of the United States the same anti-Japanese hysteria led to mass internments of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry (AJA), most of them American citizens. Citizens or not, on the West Coast families were given a week to dispose of their goods. With numbered tags around their necks, they were packed into trains—the blinds drawn—and sent to ten internment camps in desolate areas, where they lived in prisonlike conditions surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

  A similar call for the internment of Hawaii’s AJA population was raised, but it wasn’t feasible to carry out such an order. Americans of Japanese ancestry were too numerous and too important to the economy of Hawaii. Some arrests were made, but they involved fewer than 1 percent of the Hawaiian AJA population.

  There was not a single case of sabotage by Japanese citizens during WWII. In fact, many young Americans of Japanese ancestry served valiantly in the defense of the United States. When an all-Hawaiian army unit was formed, more than 9,500 men, all AJAs, volunteered, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history. The 442nd fought in Italy and France in some of the fiercest battles of the war. In 1944 the 442nd rescued the Lost Battalion, the 211 survivors of the 141st Army Battalion, a Texas unit surrounded by the Germans. In this operation the 442nd lost 200 men. Six hundred others were wounded, a 60 percent casualty rate.

  The racism that poisoned America’s attitude toward its Japanese citizens also affected another sector of Americans. African-Americans were restricted in the navy to positions in food service and personal care of officers. But Dorie Miller, a mess attendant on the West Virginia, was the first American hero of WWII. He took over machine guns during the Pearl Harbor attack and fought so valiantly that he received the Navy Cross.

  The USS Arizona was never raised, and the bodies it contained remain in the wreck. Today a long white memorial stands athwart the sunken ship to commemorate all who died in the attack. Droplets of oil still rise from the hulk. Some say they are tears.