Archive for the ‘War In The Pacific’ Category
Wake Island was an American outpost in the central Pacific. Wake is a coral atoll, made up of three islands. Wake Island itself is the largest, and forms two sides of a triangle. Peale Island and Wilkes Island extend the two arms of Wake Island. The three islands are tiny – only 2.5 square miles in area, but their location in the central Pacific gave them a strategic significance far beyond their size. The Marshal Islands to the south and most of the Marianas islands to the west had been in Japanese hands since the First World War, when they seized them from the Germans.
It had been annexed by the United States on 17 January 1899, but did not gain its first permanent settlement until 1935, when Pan American Airways built a small village and a hotel to service their flying boats. Wake Island became one link in Pan American’s China Clipper route, between Midway and Guam.
As tension rose in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy decided to construct a base on Wake Island. Work started in January 1941, but was incomplete when the Japanese attacked. Despite this, the first permanent garrison, just under 400 men from the 1st Marine Defense Battalion, arrived on 19 August. The airfield was ready to take aircraft by December, and on 4 December twelve Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats from Marine Fighting Squadron VMF-211 arrived on Wake. The air base was usable but not complete. There were no revetments to protect the aircraft from bombs. The island’s radar was still at Pearl Harbor. Commander W.S. Cunningham had 449 Marines (including pilots) to resist any Japanese attack.
His first problem was that Wake Island was within range of Japanese bombers based in the Marshal Islands. The Japanese plan took advantage of that, using land based bombers to support a small naval force (no battleships or carriers were involved) carrying just under 500 invasion troops. This fleet left Roi, in the Marshal islands, on 9 December, the day after the first bombing raid against the island.
That raid struck on 8 December, the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor (Wake is on the other side of the international date line, so the date is one day ahead of that on Hawaii). The garrison of Wake Island had received a warning from Pearl Harbor at 6.50 am. Lacking radar, it was decided to keep four of the Wildcats in the air. This saved them from destruction. At noon thirty six Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers attacked the airfield. Visibility was poor, and the four Wildcats in the air failed to spot the Japanese aircraft. Seven of the eight Wildcats on the ground were destroyed. VMF-211 lost 23 men dead and 11 wounded. No Japanese aircraft were lost. The next day a second, smaller, bombing raid met with less luck, losing two aircraft in combat with four Wildcats. The island was subjected to almost daily air raids for the rest of the battle.
The Japanese invasion fleet, under Admiral Kajioka, arrived off Wake Island early on 11 December. The attack went disastrously wrong. Despite the air raids, Wake Island still had teeth. A gun battery at Peacock Point on Wake Island scored direct hits on the Yubari, Admiral Kajioka’s flagship, forcing it to withdraw from the bombardment. Another battery on Wilkes Island did even better, destroying a Japanese destroyer, the Hayate, the first Japanese warship to be sunk by the Americans. Admiral Kajioka decided to withdraw. Before his force could escape, the remaining Wildcats launched an attack on his fleet. Two cruisers were destroyed, and a second destroyer, the Kisaragi, destroyed by a direct hit on depth charges stored on her deck. The Japanese had lost around 700 men. The naval bombardment of Wake had only caused four American casualties, none fatal. However, two of the four airworthy Wildcats were forced to crash land. Only two were left.
Wake was not left entirely to its fate. A relief force, led Admiral “Black Jack” Fletcher on the U.S.S. Saratoga, had been dispatched from Hawaii. However, its progress was slow. On 22 December the force was still 515 miles from Wake Island, and then had to spend a day refuelling. The next day the second Japanese invasion fleet reached Wake. The relief force was ordered back to Pearl Harbor.
This was a much more powerful force. Admiral Kajioka had been reinforced with two fleet carriers, the Soryu and the Hiryu. This meant that the attack would have fighter cover. The invasion force was now over 1,500 men strong. Two old destroyers were to be beached on Wake to allow the troops to land.
On 22 December the last two Wildcats were lost in combat with Zeros from the carriers (one in combat, one had to crash land due to damage suffered). During the entire battle, the Wildcats had shot down at least 20 Japanese aircraft, mostly land based bombers, but including at least two Zeros.
Before dawn on 23 December, the second Japanese attack went in. The two destroyers ran aground, and although one was destroyed by gunfire, by dawn 1,000 Japanese soldiers had landed. They quickly occupied the southern wing of the island, capturing the now-useless airfield. The situation was clearly hopeless. The marine commander, Major James Devereux, was now isolated on the northern part of Wake Island, and outnumbered by at least two to one (probably by more). With no hope of victory, Cunningham was forced to surrender.
Wake Island remained in Japanese hands for the rest of the war. The garrison finally surrendered on 4 September 1945. During the war they had been subjected to frequent bombing raids, and had been blockaded since 1944.
The first Japanese attack on Wake Island was the only amphibious attack to be repulsed by shore based guns during the Second World War. Even if the Japanese had landed, they were at best equal to the Marines in numbers and may well have been repulsed. The second invasion was on a much larger scale, and demonstrated how vulnerable the isolated American islands were in the Pacific. However, the Marine garrison had offered the first sustained resistance to the Japanese whirlwind that swept through the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. They offered a rare example of success, which was a great boost to Allied morale in the dark days of early 1942.
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Researchers think they have found the remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that probably fired on U.S. battleships on Dec. 7, 1941.
The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row.
That could settle a long-standing argument among historians.
Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery. But a variety of new evidence suggests that the fifth fired its two 800-pound torpedoes, most likely at the battleships West Virginia and Oklahoma, capsizing the latter. A day later, researchers think, the mini-sub’s crew scuttled it in nearby West Loch.
The loch was also the site of a 1944 disaster in which six tank landing ships preparing for the secret invasion of Saipan were destroyed in an ammunition explosion that killed 200 sailors and wounded hundreds more.
When the Navy scooped up the remains of the so-called LSTs and dumped them outside the harbor to protect the secrecy of the invasion, it apparently also dumped the mini-sub’s remains, which were mingled with the damaged U.S. ships.
“It’s not often that a historian gets a chance to rewrite history,” said marine historian and former Navy submariner Parks Stephenson, who pieced together the evidence for the television program “Nova.” “The capsizing of the Oklahoma is the second most iconic event of the attack. If one submarine could get in in 1941 and hit a battleship, who knows what a midget sub could do today. Iran and North Korea are both building them. It’s very worrying.”
Stephenson and his colleagues have put together a convincing chain of circumstantial evidence, but it is just circumstantial, said Burl Burlingame, a journalist at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and author of “Advance Force: Pearl Harbor.”
“There is a good chance that this is the Pearl Harbor midget, but I don’t think the case is closed on it,” Burlingame said. “At this point, it is not hard evidence.”
The two-man, 80-foot-long sub in question does not have a name of its own. Each of the five subs in the attack was carried by a conventional submarine and took its name from the mother boat. It is thus called the I-16-tou — tou being Japanese for boat. Powered by a 600-horsepower electric motor, the sub could reach underwater speeds of 19 knots, twice as fast as many of the U.S. subs of the day.
The three pieces of the sub were found during routine test dives between 1994 and 2001 by Terry Kerby, chief pilot of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory’s submersibles Pisces IV and Pisces V. But Kerby and others assumed they were a part of a war trophy that had been captured by allied forces at Guadalcanal or elsewhere, towed back to Hawaii and scuttled.
Stephenson got involved in 2007 because he was looking for the fifth Japanese mini-sub.
In 1941, a crewman on the I-16 had received a radio call from the I-16-tou at 10:41 p.m. on Dec. 8 reporting the success of its mission. That indicated to Stephenson that the mini-sub had found a calm place in the harbor and hidden until the next night before surfacing and sending the call.
The crew members would have then scuttled the craft because they could not get it out of the harbor. The West Loch would have been a good location to hide, but researchers could find no trace of the boat there.
A diver who had been looking for the mini-sub suggested that Stephenson talk to Kerby, who sent him pictures of his find.
“As soon as I saw the bow section with the distinctive net cutter, I knew that we had found the fifth midget sub,” Stephenson said. The Japanese navy modified net cutters on the subs for specific missions, and the one on the wreck was identical to those on the other mini-subs.
No torpedoes were found on the wreck, and evidence suggests that they were not present when the boat was sunk. A newly declassified photograph taken by a Japanese plane during the attack appeared to show a mini-sub firing a torpedo into Battleship Row. A report to Congress in 1942 by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz describes an unexploded 800-pound torpedo recovered after the battle. That’s twice the size carried by the torpedo bombers.
That torpedo was apparently a dud that missed the West Virginia.
But an examination of the remains of the Oklahoma shows that it apparently had underwater damage much larger than that associated with aerial torpedoes. An underwater blast would have caused it to capsize, Stephenson said. “Otherwise it would have settled to the bottom upright,” like the other sunken ships.
The 1944 disaster at West Loch occurred on May 21 as the Navy was preparing to invade the Mariana Islands in Operation Forager. The Navy clamped a top-secret classification on the incident to keep it from the Japanese, and few records are now available. What is known is that it was crucial to clear out the debris because the loch was by then the site of an ammunition dump.
Records from the salvage ship Valve showed that it was brought into the loch during the cleanup and its 250-ton crane was used for an undisclosed reason. Stephenson thinks it lifted the I-16-tou, but there are no records to confirm that.
The remains of the mini-sub were then dumped three miles south of Pearl Harbor along with those of the LSTs, to be found by Kerby 50 years later.
Bulkheads on the wreck are sealed, so researchers don’t know whether the mini-sub crew was trapped. But a map taken from one of the other mini-subs showed the location of a safe house in Pearl City, Hawaii, suggesting the crew might have scuttled the boat and escaped.
The “Nova” episode describing the search for the I-16-tou will air Jan. 5.
By Thomas H. Maugh II
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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The December 7, 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy’s battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire’s southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.
Eighteen months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese agression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable.
By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.
The U.S. Fleet’s Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World’s oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7 December. Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya.
These great Japanese successes, achieved without prior diplomatic formalities, shocked and enraged the previously divided American people into a level of purposeful unity hardly seen before or since. For the next five months, until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May, Japan’s far-reaching offensives proceeded untroubled by fruitful opposition. American and Allied morale suffered accordingly. Under normal political circumstances, an accomodation might have been considered.
However, the memory of the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor fueled a determination to fight on. Once the Battle of Midway in early June 1942 had eliminated much of Japan’s striking power, that same memory stoked a relentless war to reverse her conquests and remove her, and her German and Italian allies, as future threats to World peace.
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