The Miracle Of Our Escape

Narrow Margin by Which Japanese Were Kept Out of South Pacific Territories

r J I HE United States authorities are now 1 —very wisely—making no attempt to conceal the extent and character of the disaster which overtook the Allies when the Japanese treacherously attacked Pearl Harbour early on Decem ber 7. A book by Blake Clark, “Remem ber Pearl Harbour!” has been published in USA and extracts from it, reproduced in July “Reader’s Digest,” give a startling picture of what happened.

Even yet, no one can explain why the Japanese did not succeed in their plan to completely smash Pearl Harbour base and paralyse America’s naval and air power in the Pacific. Their dawn attack took the Americans completely by sur prise. The destruction and • confusion were so great that, if the air attack had been followed up smartly by a naval attack and a military landing, Hawaii might have been lost, and the fate of the South Pacific Territories and Aus tralasia would have been sealed.

The Japs, despite their great initial success, blundered; and that blunder will lead, ultimately, to their defeat and destruction.

Here are extracts from the ghastly story of Pearl Harbour: — PEARL Harbour, the United States’ largest naval base, was the real objective, but before it could be attacked the Japanese had to disable the airfields which are an essential part of its defences. The army’s Wheeler and Hickam airfields, the navy’s air base at Kaneohe, and the marines’ incompleted air base at Ewa are all within quick flying time of the Harbour.

The Japanese tried to ground every plane we had. They approached from two directions simultaneously. The method of attack on each field was the same. While low-flying planes dropped well-directed bombs on hangars, other planes sprayed the long, orderly rows of aircraft on the ground with incendiary bullets.

The mustard-yellow planes flew low into Kaneohe Bay, one behind the other, no more than 50 feet above planes that lay anchored in the bay. A hundred yards away were two boats of young sea men, passing each other, the shifting crews of the anchored planes. The Jap anese opened up. Machine-gun bullets made a wide lane of geysers that led straight to the boats and the anchored planes. The planes went up in flames.

A few of the boys escaped.

The Japanese flew to the end of the

bay, made a loop and came back, head ing straight for bombing planes on the ramp and strafing them mercilessly. They came back again.

Heedless of the strafers, gun crews rushed out to salvage machine-guns from the burning planes and set them up.

Streams of fire converged upon the attackers. For 15 or 20 minutes this strafing attack kept up, the line of planes going continuously up and down, cross ing each time directly over the planes on the ramp.

During the lull which followed, men commandeered all available cars and drove them to staggered positions on the field so that if enemy planes tried to land they would crash on the cars. Civi lian employees helped put out fires and manned bulldozers to push burning planes away from the hangars.

Twenty minutes and the Japanese were back. They dropped a tremendous bomb on one hangar. They shot power ful bullets into the hurrying people on the ramp. One bullet went through a concrete wall a foot thick.

Everywhere the gallant fighters answered back, but the attackers were

flying fast and were hard to hit. Two planes were brought down.

The rest flew on toward the Marine Base at Ewa. Here the first wave con centrated fire on grounded aircraft.

During the momentary lull which fol lowed, marines rushed out and dragged unburned planes off the runway, and mounted free machine-guns on them.

The second attack was more vicious than the first. There was no protection; can non and machine-gun fire churned the ground. Yet the men stuck to their guns, pouring a stream of fire at each Japanese plane as it dived past.

Throughout the attack every man carried out his emergency duties. The marines distributed the ammunition, cleaned and serviced the guns, and got in telling shots at the enemy. Moving vehicles were special targets of attack, yet drivers of ammunition trucks and ambu lances made their trips to every part of the field without looking first to see if the sky was clear. Usually it was not.

THE first wave of bombers to arrive over Hickam Field chose as its objective the quarter-mile row of planes drawn up in front of the hangars in orderly formation. Ignoring the mer ciless strafing, the men of Hickam worked furiously to disperse the planes. Some faltered and fell, but others took their places.

In the second and most destructive raid, two rows of high-flying bombers dropped heavy demolition bombs directly

on the most populous section of Hickam Field. For what seemed a full minute after the bombs landed nothing hap pened. Th<sn the mess hall (large enough to house six basketball courts), the guard house, the fire station, the huge bar racks, and an immense hangar all seemed to rise intact from the ground, poise in mid-air, and drop back to the earth in fragments.

The third wave came strafing. Now ground defences were going full blast and accounted for several raiders. Green men acted like veterans, time and again dash ing out under fire and taking over machine-guns whose operators had just been killed.

On the apron opposite the hangars a

lone man kept up a steady stream of fire irom a .30-calibre machine-gun which he had set up in the nose of a B-18 bomber.

An enemy plane flew low, and turned the bomber into a flaming death-trap. The lone fighter did not even try to get out.

Long after the leaping flames had envel oped the nose of the plane, spectators saw the red tracer bullets from his machine-gun mounting skyward.

ALL that happened at the airfields was only a prelude. The attack on Pearl Harbour itself lasted from 7.55 a.m. to 9.15 a.m. There were prob ably 150 Japanese planes—torpedo planes, strafers, dive bombers, and high-altitude bombers. In the spacious waters were battleships, cruisers, destroyers, mine layers—all the types of ships that the US Navy boasts. Every Japanese plane seemed to have its objective selected in advance, for they separated and each went to attack a specific warship.

Horizontal bombers, flying at about 12,000 feet, dropped armor-piercing bombs almost simultaneously on the battleship “Arizona.” One sped straight down the funnel and blew up the ship’s forward magazine. Instantly torpedoes joined the bombs and the forward part of the ship blew up. Bodies flew 300 feet into the air, hurled about as tiny particles are whisked aloft in a fire. The after-part of the ship shook as if it would fall apart like a stack of cards. There was a great swishing sound as fire and smoke pushed up through the seams of the deck.

All over the harbour men were leaping from decks and portholes of burning ships, sliding down the hulls as boats capsized. But hundreds were caught in their compartments.

The attackers did not get off un scathed. One destroyer had just downed four planes when its chief radioman got a good contact on his listening appara tus . “Submarine!” They manoeuvred for the attack and dropped two depth charges; then two more. A large oil slick appeared and bubbles covered the sea for 200 feet.

Suddenly another contact was reported, apparently a submarine heading for a cruiser nearby. The destroyer made an emergency turn and losed another pair of depth charges; another oil-slick. They had sunk a second submarine.

WE learned in Honolulu that Sunday how narrow the dividing line is between the soldier and the civilian in wartime. Soon after the bombing started, a call came in to the headquar ters of the Hawaii Medical Association.

It just said, “Pearl Harbour! Ambu lances! For God’s sake, hurry!”

Within 20 minutes, doctors and volun teer workers had stripped the insides of over 100 delivery trucks of every descrip tion, equipped them neatly with previ ously-prepared stretcher frames, and were speeding to the scene of action.

Women of the Motor Corps in every available car were carrying men to Pearl Harbour. The three-lane highway was an inferno. Army trucks, official and unofficial emergency waggons, ambu lances, Red Cross cars and hundreds of taxis rushing officers and men to their battle stations screamed up and down the six-mile road. The Motor Corps women were equal to the task.

The army wounded were taken to Trip ler Hospital.

One bomb had made a direct hit on a mess hall while three or four hundred aviators were having breakfast. Maimed and bleeding, they poured into Tripler.

Surgeon King put in an emergency call to all the doctors of Honolulu: “Surgical teams, quick!”

Then occurred one of life’s breath-tak ing coincidences. At that very moment virtually every surgeon in Honolulu was listening to a lecture on war surgery delivered by Dr. John J. Moorhead, of New York. The audience departed in a body for Tripler.

The Attack on the Philippines

JT is not generally known that the * Japanese made a similarly crippling surprise attack upon American air forces in the Philippines, a few hours after the attack was launched on Pearl Harbour.

The following is from a despatch pub lished in America on April 10: THE fate of Luzon and Bataan was sealed just before 1 p.m. on Decem ber 8 (some ten hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour).

Our main bomber force was lined up on Clark Field, 40 miles north of Manila, with the crews awaiting orders to take off and bomb Japanese air and naval bases on the island of Formosa. Most of the pursuit planes. were at nearby Iba Field.

The pursuits and some bombers had been aloft during the morning but had returned to the ground for orders. While these instructions were being issued, the Japanese struck.

Fifty-four heavy bombers roared over Clark Field at 10,000 feet, raining explo sives on the grounded planes, runways and hangars. Iba Field was simultane ously bombed.

Eighty-six Japanese Zero fighters came in their wake and strafed the planes, ground forces and anti-aircraft batteries in low-level atacks. Some planes were saved, but the main strength of our air force was gone.

On December 10, about noon, the Jap anese attacked Cavite naval base (near

Manila) with devastating success. With out anti-aircraft or pursuit interference, their bombers criss-crossed the naval base for severe,l hours.

The first bomb hit the power plant, the second a fire station. Damage was wide spread, casualties were heavy and the Asiatic Fleet thus lost its sole effective base in the Philippines.

AS early as February 5, our soldiers were eating only rice and mule meat, their own pack animals. Occasion ally they were fortunate enough to bag wild pig or water buffalo, but these were few and far between. Every day our men grew more under-nourished, more exhausted from lack of food and sleep, but despite their exhaustion I never heard a complaint from them.

Their heroism is all the more glorious because they knew by now that the efforts of the War Department to bring them relief and supplies were doomed to failure.

Our forces on Bataan collapsed because they were physically exhausted. Day after day, week after week, the Japanese had fresh troops which they threw in lavishly. Our men had no such periodic relief.

Our positions were constantly shelled with heavy mortars. The detonations made it almost impossible to sleep. The men were in rags; tattered trouser legs were cut off to make shorts; shoes were in shreds from the heavy underbrush; socks were unheard of after the first few weeks.

During the last few weeks on Bataan the disease rate ran up as the drug supplies ran out. Hospital No. 2 had been keeping its patients down to 3,000 by discharging 200 to 300 daily and treating them as out-patients. At Hospital No. 1, where there were 450 beds, the number of patients jumped to 1,500 in the last three days. The patients had malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, beriberi and scurvy. There was little quinine after March 1.