Max Collins - The Pearl Harbor Murders

"What a good idea," Jardine said, then turned to the FBI man, who was already holding open the door. "Agent Sterling, we intend to fully cooperate with your office. If I might ask, why are Mr. Burroughs and his son with you?"

"I had to press them into service," Sterling said, as they allowed Kita to lead the way into the vestibule. "I've been cut off from my office."

"Glad to have your help," Jardine said, nodding at both Burroughs and Hully. "But why do I have the feeling we're still working the Pearl Harada murder case?"

"Help us find Vice Consul 'Morimura,' " Burroughs said, "and you'll find out."

A guard fence separated Pearl Harbor from the two thousand acres of Hickam Field, biggest Army base on Oahu, home of the Army's bomber squadrons. Here, a quarter mile of neatly arranged A-20s, B-17s and B-18s served themselves up to the hungry waves of silver planes. The incessant bombing and strafing-not only of the sitting-duck aircraft but barracks, support facilities and hangars-did not dissuade the men of Hickam from working fiercely to disperse their aircraft, or from fighting back.

Two Japanese-American civilians-laborers employed at the field-helped set up a machine gun and fed it with ammo belts while a boy from Michigan fired away at the diving planes.

Standing near a hangar, Corporal Jack Stanton-one eye slightly swollen, even blackened, from his Hotel Street brawl of the night before-saw the friend standing next to him strafed into explosive splashes of blood, bone and flesh. Horrified, then energized into action, Stanton ran across the tarmac-not even pausing when another bomb blew a khaki-clad soldier in two-and managed to climb up into a bomber.

Stanton began firing the machine gun in the nose of the bomber, its deadly chatter knocking one of the silver planes out of the sky.

But when a Zero swooped down, delivering its own machine-gun fire, the fuel tank ignited and Stanton was trapped in the cockpit, flames all around him, caged in a crackling hell.

Stanton didn't bother trying to get out. As the flames slowly consumed him, he kept firing up at the sons of bitches, and witnesses said his red tracer bullets could be seen zinging skyward, long after flames had encompassed the nose of the plane.

Winging eastward in groups of three, past the Pearl Harbor entry, cutting inland at an altitude of a mere sixty feet, twenty-four torpedo planes threw their supple blue shadows across the Navy Yard and the Southeast Loch, closing in on Battleship Row-where those gray behemoths, the Arizona, California, Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, pride of the Navy, slumbered in the sunlight. In groups of two, coming from the west, sixteen more torpedo planes took a direct route across the island, their targets the ships docked on the far side of Ford Island, as well as those at the Navy Yard piers over the east channel.

Aboard the battleships, barely awake sailors perceived the approaching attack planes as nothing more than specks-but those specks grew ever larger as they zeroed in on the harbor, crisscrossing. Swabbies-like civilians-at first dismissed the planes… crazy Army pilots, damn Navy fliers showboating, ain't that a hell of a drill….

"That's no star on the wing!" a sailor or two, on every ship, would finally say, more or less. "That's a red ball!"

And sailors, scattering like naughty kids caught in some act, yelled, "It's the Japs! It's for real! It's war!"

PA systems barked orders, bugles blared, ships' alarms trilled, and on every vessel in the harbor-130 of them-all hell broke loose, from the startled sailors on deck who had seen the planes "dropping fish" (torpedoes) to the poor bastards sleeping in on Sunday who had to tumble out of their racks, and scurry to then-battle stations, pulling on their clothes as they went.

Five torpedoes, in rapid succession, blasted the Oklahoma, sending the battleship rolling slowly, inevitably to port. Breakfast dishes went flying, shattering, mess tables upended, lockers spilled open, and in the belowdeck barbettes, massive gun turrets tore free from their housings and tumbled grindingly down the slanting platforms, crushing crewmen.

When eleven-year-old Don Morton-frightened by the low-flying, strafing planes-came scooting back home without his brother Jerry, his mom wasn't mad. She just hustled him into their car and they drove down to the landing, where Don and Jerry had been fishing.

No other cars were around, but she honked her horn all the way, and Don thought maybe she was scared, too-they were driving right toward where all the explosions were coming from.

Suddenly Jerry came bursting out from some algar-roba bushes, calling, "Mom! Mom!"

She stopped the car, let Jerry in, and hugged him.

"A man helped me," Jerry said. "He pushed me into the bushes when a plane was coming."

"What man?" his mother asked.

"That man," Jerry said, and pointed to the body of a Marine corporal alongside the dirt road.

Don's mom turned their car around and headed for Honolulu, as explosions shook the world all around them.

Bill Fielder, in the borrowed Pierce Arrow convertible, had a hell of a time trying to get to Pearl. He was crazy with desperation-all he could think of was getting back to his ship!

But it was a slow go. At first the streets were empty, but quickly they became clogged with cars and taxis, as well as emergency vehicles. Bill would whip his car around the jams, whenever possible, riding on the sidewalk if he had to. The sky boiled with black oil smoke, and it seemed like the end of the world-he passed by several water mains that had broken, shooting geysers fifty feet in the air, and people had loaded their cars up with toys and clothes, sometimes with baby buggies or bicycles strapped on the roof, like European war refugees, heading for the hills.

The rolling lanes of the Kamehameha Highway were choked with civiUan cars and taxis piled with servicemen scrambling to get to their posts. It seemed to take forever, crawling toward Pearl Harbor. Finally, when he came over a rise, at the highway's highest point, he got a panoramic view: silver planes skimming over the sea toward battleships, bombs whistling down, dive-bombers howling in on their targets, shells exploding in midair, machine guns chattering, low-flying fighters strafing anything and everything, the harbor a mass of fuel oil, smoke and flames. Even from this distance, the acrid smell of burning and battle seemed to singe his nostrils.

The worst of it was the battleships getting hit so hard-the Oklahoma had already capsized, and the Arizona could be next.

He felt sick-at heart, to his stomach.

"Come on, come on, come on!" Bill yelled, and he laid on his horn-not that honking would do any good. Everyone caught in this jam wanted it to move along just as badly as Bill did. But he was frustrated, knowing that time was running out.

He just wasn't aware how soon.

A bomb hit the Pierce Arrow, obliterating it, and Bill, leaving a charred, flaming husk of an automobile and very little of its driver.

Bill Fielder had just become the first Arizona fatality.

Moored aft of the Tennessee, a massive 608 feet long, the Arizona carried a main armament of twelve fourteen-inch guns, her hull shielded at the waterline by a thirteen-inch thickness of steel, with twenty inches of armor housing her four turrets. No more formidable weapon of war-at-sea was known to man than a battleship such as this.

An armor-piercing bomb hit the ship between its number-two gun turret and bow, punching a hundred-foot hole in the deck, then exploding in a fuel tank below. Within seconds, almost two million pounds of explosives detonated, forming a fireball of red, yellow and black, the ship lifting twenty feet in the air, tossing men like rag dolls, ship's steel opening like a blossoming flower to spread petals of huge red flame.