Lieutenant Commander Tom O’Connell looked out at the Pacific, enjoying the fresh sea breeze that cleared the morning fog from his head. Far out at sea, the USS Northampton was on maneuvers, part of the USS Enterprise carrier task force commanded by Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr.
O’Connell watched the sharp bow of the cruiser cutting through the blue waters. The bow wave rolled out across the otherwise calm surface of the sea. The ship and its crew were far enough away from the rest of the task force that they felt all alone out here, which was a feeling that the young officer enjoyed, but that was also a little daunting. The United States mainland was at least two thousand miles away. Tokyo? Another four thousand miles.
The cruiser should have been back at Pearl with the rest of the fleet, but they had put to sea for yet another training cruise. So here they were, many miles from base, the sharp bow cutting a wake through the blue Pacific.
Although the cruise had its own rewards, such as this moment staring out at the Pacific with a hot mug of coffee in hand, it meant that the crew and officers had missed out on a weekend of shore leave. He doubted that there was any place on earth as lively as Oahu when all the ships were in port.
But things weren’t all bad. In fact, he had gotten into a good poker game last night. Considering that he had won twenty dollars, he supposed that he had come out farther ahead than he would have during a night on the town.
Being a good card player not only helped pass the time, but it had been something of a necessity for supplementing his meager salary over the years. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1933, barely hanging on as the peacetime navy cut officers during the Depression era, then getting married and starting a family on paltry pay.
He was fortunate that his parents, both Irish immigrants, had become fairly well off back in Cambridge and weren’t about to let their grandchildren starve. But the poker money helped.
“Don’t look so smug, you damn card shark,” said Lieutenant Smith, approaching with his own mug of coffee in hand. The hot coffee managed to steam in the morning air. The very fact that they had a few moments to themselves to enjoy the view and their coffee indicated that this was a very relaxed cruise. “Just because you won twenty bucks off me, you don’t have to stand there grinning like the Cheshire cat.”
O’Connell laughed. “You can win it back from me next time. At least you can try.”
“You must be one lucky Irishman is all I can say.”
Even coming from Smith, who didn’t mean any harm by it, the Irish remark was a little galling. The United States Navy officer corps was very much a WASP club that was hard for an Irish Catholic with an ethnic name to break into, even as an Annapolis graduate. O’Connell was sensitive to that. Then again, he knew that Smith was just giving him a good-natured ribbing.
Despite the headwinds he sometimes faced in his naval career, O’Connell didn’t regret the choice that he’d made. After graduating from Cambridge High and Latin at the top of his class, it had come down to deciding between Harvard, which had been almost literally in his backyard, or Annapolis. Although his parents had some money and could be proud of what they had accomplished after coming to America without a dime to their names, they were far from being wealthy.
The young son of immigrants had been under no illusions about his chances of fitting in with the Boston Brahmins who populated Harvard. He had decided on a free education at the United States Naval Academy.
No matter where you went to college, it still made you a member of the elite, educated class — scarcely 1 percent of all Americans held a college degree in 1941. O’Connell had heard that fact somewhere, and it still awed him.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll buy you a beer when we get back to shore,” O’Connell said with a grin.
They stood in companionable silence, drinking their coffee and gazing out to sea. The calm seas made drinking coffee on deck relatively easy, which wasn’t always the case when the Pacific was really rolling. They nodded at the chaplain, who came by, preparing for the Sunday-morning service.
Gazing across the Pacific, they noticed smoke rising in the distance, in the direction of Oahu. The island itself was too far away to be visible.
“Is that coming from Pearl?” O’Connell asked, puzzled. He couldn’t think of anything on Oahu, other than the navy complex, that could be on fire and produce that much smoke.
“Maybe they’re burning off the sugarcane.”
“I don’t think so,” O’Connell said. On occasion, there had been big fires when the old sugarcane was burned off by the plantation managers, but this looked different. “Look at that smoke. It wasn’t even there a minute ago.”
Indeed, the smoke was thick, black, and heavy, rising in massive columns from multiple sources. Oil smoke, not burning cane. Even this far out to sea, it was an incredible amount of smoke.
“You know what? I think that is Pearl,” Smith agreed. “What the heck is going on?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” O’Connell said, just as puzzled.
Just then, the call sounded for general quarters. What had been a calm, even relaxing, Sunday morning aboard ship dissolved in a flurry of action as sailors poured out of the hatches and ran to operate the cruiser’s guns. Except for the thick pillar of smoke on the horizon, it all still felt like a drill, considering that the sea and sky surrounding them looked as empty as ever.
O’Connell stopped another officer rushing past, hurrying to tug on his flotation vest and helmet. More sailors streamed toward the big guns and to the antiaircraft batteries, taking their stations.
“Hey, Jimmy, what’s happening? Is this another drill?”
“Hell no, this isn’t a drill,” said the officer whom O’Connell had stopped. The man looked almost frantic. “Don’t you see the smoke?”
“Sure I do, but that’s way the hell over there. Besides, doesn’t anybody know it’s Sunday morning?”
“Tell that to the Japs. They just attacked Pearl Harbor.”
At O’Connell’s elbow, he heard Smith choke on his last swig of coffee. He took one last swig of his own coffee, then hurled the mug into the sea and ran to his post.
The ship that had been so sleepy only minutes before had now come fully alive. The drills that they had run through so many times meant that the call to action went smoothly, but this time there was a new urgency. This time it wasn’t a drill. This time it was for real.
Next to a battleship, a US Navy cruiser was one of the most powerful vessels on the sea in terms of sheer firepower. Designated as a heavy cruiser, Northampton was just a hair over six hundred feet in length and was armed with nine 8-inch guns, four 5-inch guns, torpedo tubes, and several antiaircraft batteries. If she gave you her full attention, you’d notice.
The United States Navy was relatively small, and most of the Pacific Fleet had been at Pearl, Northampton being a notable exception. Considering that WWI had been mostly fought in the trenches by the time the United States got involved, the navy hadn’t seen any real action since the days of Commodore Dewey and the Spanish-American War. That had been four decades ago.
As for the attack on Pearl, nobody knew any details. Rumors flew around the ship. They heard everything from the attack being an air raid, to a naval bombardment, to a full-on invasion of the Hawaiian island. What was actually happening was anybody’s guess. The sailors and officers scanned the skies and the horizon, expecting at any moment to see enemy planes or the silhouette of the Imperial Japanese Navy fleet.
More troubling was the thought of a Japanese submarine prowling these waters, waiting to launch a torpedo at the cruiser. Northampton and her crew weren’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with anything on the sea, but it was hard to fight an unseen enemy like a Jap sub.
The base at Pearl Harbor had been attacked, but it was frustrating that there was nobody to strike back against, which was any red-blooded sailor’s natural inclination. It was like a punch had been thrown out of the dark, and there was nobody to punch back against.
“Here we are on a goddamn cruiser and there’s nobody to fight,” O’Connell grumbled.
Instead, there was only the clear blue Pacific stretching all the way to Japan. He thought about that for a moment. He knew that the distance to Japan was nearly a tenth of the circumference of the earth from this spot. Had the Japanese somehow managed to cross that vast distance without warning and attack Pearl Harbor? That was a long arm, all right. He had the uneasy thought that even the West Coast might be within striking distance now.
“I don’t see any Japs,” a sailor muttered.
“Keep your eyes open,” O’Connell snapped. “They’re out there somewhere.”
But try as they might, all they saw was the distant black column of smoke, growing darker by the moment, rising ever higher into the blue sky.
O’Connell realized, the war that everyone had talked about finally seemed to be happening.
In New York City, newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle stood at the hotel window and looked down at Fifth Avenue. He couldn’t hear the people from up here, but he could sense their excitement in the way that they scurried about the street. He’d already heard the news on the radio, and the newsroom had already called.
“It was only a matter of time,” he said. “It’s war. It’s what Roosevelt wanted, and now he’s got it.”
“Against the Japanese?” asked his wife, Jerry, taking a drag on her cigarette. Both of them smoked like fiends, and their hotel room seemed to have a permanent fog of tobacco smoke. Overflowing ashtrays littered the dining room table, bedside tables, and coffee table, right beside a few empty mugs and glasses, some holding the dregs of old coffee, others that smelled of bourbon or gin.
“Against the Japanese and the Germans, both at the same time,” Pyle said, sucking deeply on his own cigarette. “It’s a world war. Gee, we haven’t had one of those since the last war that was supposed to end all of the others. The Great War. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
It was a natural question, but one that was fraught with tension.
Pyle had worked himself to the bone as a reporter, seemingly always traveling or always on the job, working all the time, which created tension at home. For the last several months, he had been in London, covering the Battle of Britain. He had recently returned to the United States to spend more time with Jerry, who had been unwell.
“What am I going to do?” He repeated the question, pondering the answer. “Well, maybe I’m not too old to be a sailor.”
His wife snorted at the very idea of her husband in uniform. “You a sailor? Ha! I’d like to see you do a push-up.”
“Very funny,” he said, without taking any offense. “The navy might not have me as a sailor, but I can still go to war. Cover the war, I mean.”
“Will they need you?”
“Believe me, generals don’t go to war without an army of journalists to take their picture and write down their quotes.”
“If you want to write about the war, then you’d better hurry,” she said. “This war might be over by next week.”
Pyle shook his head, looking down at the street. People hurried to and fro, scrambling to buy the latest edition of the newspaper, with the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor plastered across the front in headlines so big that Pyle could almost read them from their hotel room.
As a journalist, he probably knew more than most of the people down there about the coming war. America and the other democracies of the world were like a little island, surrounded by despots. In Europe there was Hitler and the Third Reich, intent on creating a new empire. A lot of Americans had wanted to stay out of the fight, figuring that it was Europe’s problem, not ours. America had already paid its dues fighting in the Great War. If England and Europe had gone and broken that peace, that was their problem.
It was troubling that not all Americans even disagreed with Hitler. An organization called the Bund had even staged huge rallies in support of National Socialism, right here in New York. Of course, many Americans also had German heritage and were proud to see Germany doing so well economically. For FDR, war against Germany was a tough sell.
But the Japanese were a foreign power that Americans could easily vilify and hate. By striking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had also shown that someplace like Seattle or Los Angeles could be next.
President Roosevelt had wanted America to get into the war. For the president, Ernie knew, the Japanese attack was like a gift.
In the street below, he could see that the news had stirred everyone up like a nest of ants poked with a stick. Already, men were eager to get into uniform — and even some women were asking about how they could sign up as nurses or join the Red Cross. He felt a lump in his throat, prouder than ever to be an American.
Pyle took another deep drag on a cigarette. “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Darling, this war is going to go on for years. Thousands of people are going to die. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe even millions.”
She shuddered visibly. “And you want to be part of all that?” she asked, although deep down she thought that she already knew the answer.
“It’s what I do,” he said. “This war is going to be America’s greatest chapter. Anyhow, somebody needs to tell the story, and that somebody might as well be me.”