“Son, I’m a hundred years old and don’t have a lot of time left to waste, so if you want to just learn something about Pearl, you can watch the History Channel for a week and find out all you want to know.
“So let me ask you again,” he added after a short pause. “Do you want to know about what happened at Pearl Harbor or learn from what happened at Pearl Harbor?”
I felt those very sharp blue eyes bearing down on me. I knew from his look that if I just wanted a few cursory memories of what happened on that day, my interview with him would be over. Not that it mattered at all, because I was definitely interested. The old man had sold me. He had a real story to tell, and I was being given a unique chance to hear it. Even as a junior reporter, I knew chances like this were rare. And the respect I gained for him, in the few minutes I had known him, made me want to listen to everything he had to tell me anyway.
It was an easy thing to think that this man could very well lead other men into combat. I imagined if I had known him very much longer and was in the navy under his command, I would have done anything he ordered, even at the potential expense of my own life.
It only took a second for me to make up my mind.
“Yes, Admiral,” I said. “Please tell me about it.”
After airing the story about the Admiral’s one-hundredth birthday and informing my boss about my plans to get a longer Pearl Harbor exposé from the Admiral, I spent the next two weeks being waited on by the Admiral’s daughter while listening to and recording his story.
Their hospitality had no end.
The Admiral mostly talked and I mostly listened. During that time, he conveyed, yet never actually said so, the impression that everything he remembered was as if it happened only yesterday. I couldn’t help but think that some of the things he was saying he had never said to anybody before, yet had wanted to say for a very long time.
Only on occasion would he read from a log or diary of some sort. Several times, when breaking out one of his journals, he would say, jokingly, “Of course the keeping of personal diaries was strictly forbidden for security purposes on ships during the war.” And he “would just have to trust me to not turn him in to the Department of the Navy for breaking the rules.”
He never failed to be articulate and never paused for more than a few seconds to remember some specific detail. I could tell he was paying close attention to actually communicating his story, talking mostly in laymen’s terms rather than technical terms. And a lot of times, I could tell he was tempering a lot of “sailor talk.” But other than that, he held nothing back.
The following is basically a transcript of what the Admiral had to say as he passed it on to me, edited only to remove questions I had asked him, coffee breaks, or other such interruptions.
I feel compelled to also state it has been an honor to have had the opportunity to spend so much time talking with this man. His story fascinated me, as I hope it will fascinate you.
The Surrender: Part One
I didn’t really begin to understand the events of Pearl Harbor until the end of the war when I accepted the surrender of the Japanese submarine I-57. The memory of it stands out vividly in my mind. It was a life-defining moment, even more so than the actual attack or even the entirety of the war itself.
The fact is, I would have never imagined they would be like they were. Prior to actually seeing them, I pictured them in my mind as being beaten and broken, more like animals than men. Or more accurately, that is what I wanted them to be. I had been shooting at them for the last four years, not out of mere anger or self-defense, but instead, out of sheer hatred.
There were plenty of pictures and films of them, the few of them who surrendered, on Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and other such places during the course of the war. They were dirty, half-starved, and terrified-looking—beaten and defeated. Just the way you would want to see an enemy. That’s the price you pay when you have the arrogant audacity to screw with the United States of America. You get screwed right back, and we win. And it served them right as far as I was concerned.
But these weren’t those men. They were clean, shaved, and in their best dress uniforms. And with the exception of one officer and several crewmen to handle the ropes between our two vessels, they were standing at attention on the deck of the Imperial Japanese naval submarine, which was now tied up to the side of my very own ship.
And I hated them for it—even more than I did before. Especially after looking around at my own crew and seeing them in dungarees and khakis, dressed for battle.
“They damn well better be ready for battle,” I said to myself. “The Japs just cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted.” I had already paid too much by not being ready for them.
Now there are times as the commanding officer of a naval vessel that what the admirals and presidents order you to do is distinctly different than what you really want to do. There was no greater example of a time like this in my life than on this occasion.
It was a few days after the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki when I received the orders to proceed to a latitude and longitude that was somewhere to the southeast of Okinawa, to “find, rescue, and accept surrender from” a Japanese submarine.
My instincts utterly revolted. “Rescue them! What the bloody hell happened to killing them?” I thought.
They had their supply lines cut in the days that preceded the atom bombs and the agreement of the Japanese to surrender. A torpedo from one of our submarines sank an enemy sub tender, and as a result, they didn’t have enough fuel to make landfall anywhere, let alone get to the formal surrender point. So we were supposed to find them and tow them back to Okinawa.
Remembering my training at the academy, and not yet willing to set aside my career as an officer, I had to struggle against myself to put in my own discipline and follow the orders.
All of the possible scenarios passed through my mind, including what happened the last time I tried to rescue some of them after the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
I was tempted to not find them and leave them to drift endlessly at sea until they all died of starvation and thirst. That would not have bothered me a bit. How many American sailors did these Nips cause to die, drifting helplessly in the sea after torpedoing their ships?
That’s what happened to several crews of American ships like the Indianapolis for example, except they didn’t even have the benefit of a ship’s deck to stand on. Many of them died in the water, eaten by sharks. For all I knew this might have been the same sub that sank the Indianapolis or torpedoed this very ship earlier in the war.
The light cruiser I was in command of, the USS Buffalo CL-84, and the destroyer assigned to escort us found them right where they were supposed to be. I checked my sidearm just to be sure it was ready. This reeked of a time that I might have to use it.
With extreme caution (to make sure that this wasn’t some kind of ambush by a renegade sub captain), we approached them without incident. No sign of ships other than ours, no sonar contacts, and even better, no torpedo wakes. I wasn’t going to take any chances with my ship that I didn’t have to because there had already been a number of incidents of Japs refusing to surrender and choosing to die rather than follow their emperor’s order to stand down.
As we came around to tie up next to them, I turned to Major Johnson and addressed him. He was a very professional man even among marines; always in order and always to the point. He was in command of the marine detachment on board, and I knew he would feel about the same with this situation as I did. In addition, he was one of the few men on board who could speak Japanese. Right at this time, most of his unit was placed at strategic points all over the port side of the Buffalo, armed with as many thirty- and fifty-caliber automatic weapons as they could hold. And several of the twenty-millimeter guns were trained on the sub as well.