Army & Navy – OPERATIONS: Anniversary Report

In the last year of his life, Navy Secretary Frank Knox gave an order to Commander Walter Karig and Lieut. Welbourn Kelley of the department’s Office of Public Relations: “Tell the story of the Navy’s part in this war . . . particularly those early days, when the Japs were having things their own way, and when we had to examine every scrap of information with a microscope for fear it would be helpful to the enemy.” Karig, a reservist and former Washington newsman, and Kelley, former radio scriptwriter and author of a melodramatic novel, So Fair a House, spent months combing combat reports in the Navy’s secret files, interviewing officers who had taken part in those first, mostly disastrous, actions.

Battle Report, Pearl Harbor to Coral Sea (Farrar & Rinehart for the Council on Books in Wartime; $3.50) is the result of Karig & Kelley’s labors. Published this week on the anniversary of the “day of infamy,” Battle Report adds hundreds of details to the public record of the first desperate stage of the Pacific war. At Pearl Harbor:

¶ Young Lieut. William Woodward Outerbridge, worrying about his first command, gave the orders which fired the first U.S. shot in the war. On patrol outside the harbor, in the murky dawn of Dec. 7, he sent his report: his ancient destroyer, the Ward, had shelled arid depth-charged a submarine. His superiors thought it was “impossible.”

¶ The Jap captain of the midget sub who performed the feat of penetrating harbor nets and mapping Battleship Row got the identities of the U.S. warships all wrong, put many of them at the wrong moorings.

¶ One 15-inch armor-piercing bomb smashed through the side of the Vestal and penetrated three decks before it exploded in a metal storeroom. The Utah sank in eleven minutes after the first torpedo smacked her. Another bomb went through the Curtiss’ upper works, made a shambles of the electronic equipment in the radio room, trapped two enlisted men under the radio transmitters, passed through the movie projection room and set fire to the film stored there. A bomb went through several decks of the Raleigh, came out the other side and exploded nearly 50 feet away.

¶ The St. Louis made for open water so fast that, as one junior officer described it: “We didn’t have a bone in our teeth—we were foaming at the mouth.” Captain Charles E. Reordan fought his ship, the Tennessee, while wearing civvies and a straw hat.

¶ One of many heroes of the day was Machinist’s Mate Robert R. Scott, whose station was below decks at an air-compressing machine supplying the 5-inch guns of the California. A torpedo blast ruptured his compartment, and oil and water began to pour in. Scott’s companions got out. Scott yelled: “I’ll stay here and give them air as long as the guns are going.” They closed the door on his compartment to save the rest of the ship from being flooded. Scott stayed and supplied air to clear the gun barrels until he was drowned in his cell.

¶ When the West Virginia was raised from the shallow water into which she sank, a record of tragedy and horror was chalked on one of her bulkheads. The record showed that three men who had been trapped in a watertight compartment had lived from that Sunday morning until the day before Christmas Eve.