Hawaii’s World

By A.A. Smyser

Thursday, December 4, 1997

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Nimitz’s views on
Pearl Harbor attack

AS we near another anniversary, I have a star witness to challenge the idea that what happened Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, was a major defeat for the United States. He's Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the man Washington told to go to Pearl Harbor after the attack, take command of all services and stay until the Pacific war was won.

In 1985, a year before he died, Nimitz wrote longhand answers to questions from William H. Ewing, a former editor of this newspaper, putting his own positive perspective on the attack.

Ewing, who died this year, had been associated with Nimitz in the war and called him "the greatest man I have ever known."

It is commonplace to say the attack unified America to fight in both Europe and the Pacific in a way not possible otherwise. Nimitz agreed but went beyond that to enumerate Japanese errors at Pearl Harbor that "helped very materially to shorten the war" :

They failed to come back for a second day to destroy our shipyard repair facilities.

At a time of great petroleum shortage, they failed to destroy our surface tanks containing 4.5 million barrels of oil, our major reserve for the Pacific. Fifty-caliber incendiary machine gun bullets could have wiped them out.

Had these two things been done our fleet would have been forced back to the West Coast. Underground storage tanks at Red Hill were still months from completion. Nimitz worried every day until they were.

Further: By not attacking our submarine base at Quarry Point, the Japanese left our subs free to sail promptly to the far Western Pacific and start the systematic destruction of Japanese merchant shipping that was a primary factor in their defeat.

We were lucky, too, that the Japanese caught our fleet in Pearl Harbor instead of having sortied to challenge them at sea. We had no aircraft carriers in range for protection. They had six. Their much faster battleships could have controlled the battle. We would have lost our ships and perhaps 20,000 lives instead of the 3,700 or 3,800 who actually died.

Even the devastation to our aged battleships had a bright side. It became easier to get new ships. The men saved from them became the nucleus of crews who made the new ships effective.

Ewing was a Naval Reserve intelligence officer, mobilized to duty immediately after the attack. He was there when Nimitz, wearing too-large khakis, arrived at the Pearl Harbor administration building on Christmas afternoon, 1941, to take charge. Nine days earlier Nimitz had been given his assignment by Navy Secretary Frank Knox but traveled by railroad from Washington to San Diego, before taking a flying boat to Hawaii. He told Ewing he needed the train time to get his thoughts in order.

Ewing referred to the Dec. 25 situation as chaotic -- the harbor still covered with oil and debris, bodies still being picked up, morale low. Nimitz said chaotic was an understatement, that for two months after the attack there was "hardly a day that the situation did not get more chaotic and confused and appear more hopeless."

YET Nimitz was able to pull together the forces under him, help restore self-confidence, and destroy most of the Japanese fleet in an engagement at Midway less than six months after Pearl Harbor.

Nimitz appeared to be a kindly, gray-haired banker-type to Ewing on first encounter, too soft for the job ahead. But the admiral's steely blue eyes later flashed the toughness that led him to order his commanders, who had already suffered 3,000 casualties trying to land at Tarawa in 1943, to take even more rather than fall back from our first foothold against Japanese control of the Pacific.

Ewing later mused that it was a miracle of the war that Nimitz would be pulled from his job as head of the Navy's Bureau of Navigation and be given such a broad command and the simple instruction to stay in the Pacific until he won.