well together.”
Short smiled. Time would tell on that.
“I’m to leave Hawaii as soon as possible,” Kimmel continued. “That means Admiral Pye will be in charge until Nimitz gets here. Along with defending Hawaii with what we have left, he will be sending his damaged ships to California for repair.”
Short was surprised. Admiral William Pye commanded the battle line, most of which was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. “I didn’t know any could travel.”
“Maryland and Tennessee are relatively undamaged and will depart as soon as possible. The engineers say we may have to dynamite West Virginia to free up the Tennessee, but that’s acceptable since the West Virginia is so badly damaged she may not be salvageable. As to the others, only the Pennsylvania is capable of departing anytime soon. She survived the first two assaults fairly unscathed, but bombs from the last attack destroyed her forward turrets. Burning oil from the storage depot flowed down and around her in dry dock and caused additional damage, although not to her power plant. She will leave as soon as we can make certain she’s seaworthy.”
The departure of the remnants of the battle fleet disturbed Short. Even though Halsey had returned with the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown, Short was not comfortable that their protective shield would be long term. Halsey wanted to cruise the Pacific and search for Japanese ships, and not use the fleet to protect Pearl Harbor, which Short felt was imperative.
This was something else to take up with Kimmel’s replacement.
General Short was thankful he had the Hawaiian Division to protect the island from invaders. So what if he had lost most of his airplanes? The invasion, if it came, would be fought on the ground, wouldn’t it? After all, the Japs couldn’t take Hawaii without landing on it, and he longed to come to grips with the little yellow bastards.
Even though it hadn’t materialized, he was still concerned with the possibility of sabotage and, as military governor, had begun rounding up some of the more radical among the Japanese community. He couldn’t imprison them all, as General DeWitt was going to do in California. That wasn’t practicable, since the Japanese represented almost half the population of the islands, but he could defang any rebels among the Japs in Hawaii by arresting the leaders of any potential revolution.
Hell, even if he were to intern all the Japs in Hawaii, he wouldn’t have enough men to guard them all.
“Tell me, Admiral, have you uncovered any evidence of sabotage or espionage, other than the spying done by the Japs from their consulate?”
“No,” Kimmel said. “And that’s quite a surprise, isn’t it?”
Damn, Short thought. His intelligence people hadn’t found any either. General Marshall, the army’s chief of staff in Washington, would be second-guessing him like a son of a bitch for having focused on potential sabotage that hadn’t occurred. In hindsight, he thought he knew why nothing had happened. In order to keep the attack a secret, the Japs in Tokyo hadn’t told their cohorts in Honolulu about it. That made sense and told him that sabotage could still occur, although what was left to destroy? The fleet was gone, as were the planes, and the Hawaiian Division was armed and on guard. Hell, the soldiers almost hoped some local Jap would try something. One sergeant had said exactly that to Short and added that he’d blast the Jap’s ass back to Mount Fuji.
Marshall would understand that he’d done his duty, wouldn’t he? Short swore silently as he agreed with Kimmel’s comment about the war warning messages being so damned ambiguous. Who would have thought the Japs, or anyone else for that matter, were capable of sailing a fleet across the Pacific and striking without any warning at all, and without anyone even noticing them? Since then he had ordered additional patrols by his remaining planes and had begun working with Kimmel on coordinating those patrols with naval planes and then sharing the information. Should they have done that sooner? Probably, he thought.
“You got enough oil for your ships?” Short asked. He was well aware of the extent of the fuel loss and what it implied. He was, however, curious as to what Kimmel would admit.
Kimmel sighed. “We’re gonna need help, and fast. Halsey’s ships are guzzling it like there’s no tomorrow, and the three movable battleships will need to have their tanks topped off before they can depart. Frankly, General, we’re suspending all but the most essential patrol operations until we get resupplied. As much as I’d like to humor Halsey, we just can’t afford to have him running around chasing Japs and burning oil at this time. Christ, we lost four and a half million gallons of it that morning, and we have no way of replacing it, or storing it even if it was replaced.”
This confirmed to Short what his own intelligence people had found out. It did not strike him as unusual that he had used army personnel to spy on navy operations. He was disturbed because the events of Sunday had conclusively proven that a fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor wasn’t much use to anyone. Someone had better get some oil to Pearl Harbor so the navy could get out and do some fighting.
Short considered himself fortunate that he had sufficient aviation gas for the planes he had remaining. He also had the eight B-17s that had flown in on December 7, although several had been damaged in the fighting. If the Japs came again, he would use these superweapons, the so-called Flying Fortresses. Time would tell if they were as effective as they were supposed to be.
At least, he reminded himself, he hadn’t lost a fleet, only a few planes. Planes could be replaced fairly quickly, but battleships took years to build. Poor Kimmel. Poor bastard.
CHAPTER 3
There was silence in the War Room of the White House as the litany of disasters was enumerated. Guam had fallen, and it was only a matter of time before isolated and outnumbered Wake Island would be conquered. The Japanese had landed in the Philippines, and the combined American and Filipino forces were falling back in disorder in the face of the Japanese onslaught.
Nor were the Americans alone in their agonies. The British in Malaya had been invaded, and the Japanese were driving through what had been considered impassable jungles to the city of Singapore. Hong Kong was surrounded and besieged, and, like that of Wake, its fall was inevitable. The British, in their haste to shore up the defenses of Singapore, had suffered a naval defeat almost on a level with the disaster at Pearl Harbor when the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese planes.
As a result, there were no Allied capital ships in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii. The Japanese had at least ten carriers in that area to America’s two, although a third carrier was en route. The Japanese had a dozen battleships operating in the Pacific, while the Americans had only four, and these were in West Coast waters, nowhere near the scene of the action.
For the time being at least, the Japanese possessed overwhelming naval strength in the western Pacific.
To further complicate matters and drain America’s still limited resources, the Nazis had declared war on the United States and had commenced U-boat operations along America’s eastern shore. Shocked American civilians now saw oil tankers burning off the shores of New Jersey, and U-boats were rumored to be moving up the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers.
That the Chinese had followed with a declaration against Japan and Germany was considered a mixed blessing at best. While China had been fighting Japan for years, her army was considered corrupt and inept. Numerous other countries had followed America’s lead and declared war against the Axis, but they were small nations and would have little impact in the coming struggle.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt swiveled his wheelchair and looked at Admiral Ernest King. King, irascible and blunt, had just been named chief of naval operations. He replaced Admiral Harold Stark, who had been the navy’s senior officer at the time of Pearl Harbor. Stark’s reputation was in decline as some of the blame for Pearl Harbor had fallen on him.
King paced angrily, like a bear in a cage. Roosevelt smiled slightly. “I envy you.”
King stopped and blinked in surprise. “Envy me what, sir?”
“Your ability to pace like that. It must help you relieve your frustrations. Me? All I can do is rock back and forth in this confounded chair. If I feel really energetic, I can sort of sway a little.”
King flushed and sat down. “Sorry, sir.”
Two of the three others in the room chuckled. The exception was the army chief of staff, General George C.
