December 8th, 1944. Gen. George Patton, commander of the 3rd Army fighting the Nazis in Europe, ordered the Chaplain of the 3rd Army, James H O’Neill, to compose a prayer asking Almighty God to alleviate the harsh weather that had plagued the army in its advance towards Germany. Chaplain O’Neill composed this prayer:
“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression of wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations”
The weather cleared the following morning and remained clear for a full week, allowing the 3rd Army to advance and allowing the Air Force to cover the troops on the ground. General Patton awarded Chaplain O’Neill a Bronze Star and had 250,000 copies of the prayer printed and distributed to all of the soldiers in the 3rd Army.
A copy of the prayer distributed to the soldiers of the 3rd Army. Photo Courtesy of The-American-Catholic.com
The sun rose revealing another beautiful morning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The American Naval Station at Pearl began to bristle with activity. Sailors were getting ready for breakfast, some transitioning from their overnight watches, while others without posted duty were tying to get in a few extra hours of sleep, or preparing to spend the day at one of Hawaii’s famous beaches. None of them were aware that a massive Japanese armada with hundreds of warplanes was fast approaching their base.
In November of 1941 most of the United States Government had realized that war with Japan was inevitable. The United States had cut off Japan’s oil imports due to the Japanese invasion of mainland China. For years Japanese troops ravaged Chinese cities, and unlike their Nazi counterparts who had attempted to hide their atrocities from the rest of the world, Japan had no such intentions. News reels of the day depicted in horrid detail the murder of countless millions of Chinese civilians. Millions more were raped and tortured. Most horrifically, even infants were targeted, though those wretched stories I will not detail.
American code breakers had been deciphering Japanese diplomatic messages for months, and they were well aware that the Japanese ambassadors were stalling for time. They knew that a large Japanese fleet had put to sea. What they didn’t know was that fleet wasn’t preparing an assault on some far-flung outpost in the south Pacific, they were steaming towards Hawaii intent on sinking the mighty US Pacific Fleet as it lay at harbor.
Approximately an hour before the attacks, an American destroyer patrolling the outer harbor found and sunk a Japanese midget submarine and reported the incident to headquarters, but for unknown reasons the base wasn’t put on alert. Not long after, two young American radar operators picked up the signals of a “large flight” of planes approaching the harbor and reported this to the duty officer; he mistook it for a flight of B-17 bombers known to be en route and told them not to worry. Just before 8am, as the United States Navy band was playing the Star Spangled Banner, the first Japanese wave struck.
One of the first bombs to strike pierced the deck of the battleship USS Arizona, penetrating and detonating her gun magazine. The explosion lifted the large warship completely out of the water and killed more than 1000 sailors. The USS West Virginia and Oklahoma were struck with torpedoes, dozens of smaller ships were strafed and bombed. Not far away, hundreds of American warplanes tightly packed on their runways to deter saboteurs, were destroyed without ever leaving the ground. Hundreds of sailors were burned, floating in the harbor as they watched their ships being destroyed and friends die. But they were still putting up a fight.
Dorie Miller, a ship’s cook on the West Virginia and a heavyweight boxing champ, was aiding his Captain, Mervyn Bennion, who had been mortally wounded but still issuing orders and refusing medical treatment. When Bennion died in his arms. Miller, who had never fired a gun before, immediately rushed on the deck, manned an AA gun, and blazed away at the Japanese onslaught heedless of the danger. On land, Lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor, who had been preparing to spend the day at the beach, rushed to a small airfield while still wearing their beach clothes and manned p40 fighters, bringing them into the fray against swarms and Japanese planes, somehow managing to shoot down 7 enemy aircraft. Perhaps most impressive were the brave men of the USS Nevada. Though only a small crew was onboard, they decided that if the Nevada was going to go down, she was going to go down swinging. The skeleton crew, in a heroic effort of seamanship, miraculously got her underway. As she steamed from the harbor with her guns blazing and the Stars and Stripes whipping high in the wind, hundreds of embattled sailors in the harbor wept and cheered at the sight, a gallant reminder that the US Navy was still a fighting force in the Pacific.
A second Japanese wave continued the carnage, bombing supply depots, airfields, and strafing barracks and other command facilities. In 90 minutes 19 American ships were sunk or badly damaged, more than 300 warplanes damaged or destroyed, more than 1100 sailors badly wounded, and more than 2300 killed in the surprise attack. The following morning, President Roosevelt, when addressing Congress, famously referred to the attacks as a “Date which will live in infamy…”. With an unprecedented show of solidarity, in less than one hour war was declared on Japan.
The attack was a Japanese tactical victory… and a strategic disaster. Japan failed to destroy the vast American fuel depots and repair facilities in Hawaii, and perhaps most importantly, none of the American aircraft carriers were in port at the time of the attack.
Unfortunately for the United States and her forces spread across the Pacific in dozens of outposts, the Japanese were not finished. The day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, even as President Roosevelt was addressing the nation, Japan was conducting raids against American positions from Midway Island to the Philippine’s where General Douglas MacArthur was woefully, some would say criminally, unprepared. Still, that underequipped and outnumbered force held out for 2 months, buying enough time for America to regroup and get back into the fight. But it was on tiny Wake Island, a thousand miles from nowhere in the vast Pacific that Japan first came to the realization that the United States of America wasn’t about to just roll over and play dead.
The same armada that attacked Pearl Harbor, while on its way back to Japan, dispatched a task force to deal with the outpost on Wake Island. At the time, Wake was manned by a battalion of Marines and a detachment of civilian contractors there to construct an airfield in the hopes of turning Wake into formidable thorn in the side of Japan manned with squadrons of fighters and bombers and a regiment of Marines. Unfortunately, that relief would never come. A force of 700 Japanese troops, a cruiser, several destroyers, and a squadron of fighters attacked Wake. In less than an hour the Marines sank a Japanese destroyer, 2 troop transports, and severely damaged the cruiser. The Japanese, expecting an easy victory, limped back to the horizon. The next day Japan renewed the attack and received the harsh welcome. But the small contingent of Marines could not keep up the fight much longer; there were too few and they had suffered too many casualties. An overwhelming force of 5000 Japanese troops landed on the island and the Marines were reluctantly ordered to surrender. Though it was a disheartening defeat, it was a precursor of things to come for the Japanese army and their future dealings with the United States Marine Corp.
Meanwhile, MacArthur’s force in the Philippine’s was surrounded on the tiny island fortress of Corregidor. That embattled force, outnumbered 5 to 1, almost out of food and ammunition, and rife with tropical diseases such as malaria and dysentery had no choice but to surrender. Those men, weak and diseased, were cruelly marched nearly 80 miles through dense jungle. Thousands died from disease, starvation and dehydration, or they were simply murdered by the sadistic Japanese army. Those who somehow survived were placed in hellish Japanese prison camps that would make any Nazi death camp commandant proud. Prisoners were denied food, water, and were beaten nearly to death daily by vile Japanese guards. Those who were still strong enough to work were placed in slave labor camps. All in all, more than 10,000 of those who made the Bataan Death March would die before the end of the war.
The tide began to turn at Midway Island, another lonely outpost in the middle of the Pacific. American code breakers and discovered that Japan was launching a massive surprise attack against the outpost. The American Navy positioned its Aircraft Carriers north of the island, waited for the Japanese to launch its bombers, then sent its planes in search of the Japanese carriers. Within an hour 4 Japanese carriers, all of which had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attacks, were at the bottom of the ocean along with hundreds of Japan’s most experienced pilots. It was a stunning victory that sent shockwaves through the Japanese military chain of command. The Japanese navy would never recover.
But the beginning of the end of Japan’s hopes for imperial glory occurred at Guadalcanal on the Solomon Islands. Japan had plans to establish an airbase on the island to gain control of the southern Pacific and its rich resources as well as eventually invade Australia. The First Marine Division was dispatched to stop them.
The Marines first took control of the unfinished airfield and Navy Seabee battalions completed the construction. Japan attempted time and again to retake the airfield, and time and again they were thrown back. For months the Marines endured nightly bombardments by Japanese battleships, and nearly every day the Japanese army would assault the airfield, but the Marines held on. The US Navy fought desperate battles to keep the Japanese navy at bay. Dozens of ships were lost and thousands of sailors were killed, but they still managed to hold on. Japanese losses continued to mount, and by 1943 Japan’s worst nightmare came to fruition: the American war machine was operating at full capacity.
Back in the United States, the shock of the Pearl Harbor attacks soon gave way to outrage. Millions enlisted in the armed forces, and millions more flocked to the factories, and the vast American industrial complex converted those factories from the production of appliances and automobiles to the production of the weapons of war. Finally, the beleaguered 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal was not only receiving a steady stream of supplies, they were also being reinforced by newly trained troops ready to fight. They finally had the men and equipment needed to go on the offensive, and that is exactly what they did.
Japan underestimated the ferocity of the United States Marine Corp at Guadalcanal, and it cost them dearly: 85,000+ troops dead, more than 50 warships sunk, and the cream of the Japanese military, more than 1500 planes lost and their pilots killed. Millions of dollars in supplies and equipment were lost. After the Guadalcanal campaign, Japan would never again mount an offensive, they had lost far too many planes, ships, and experienced troops. For two more years they would be chased across the Pacific, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers. By the middle of 1945 much of their navy was at the bottom of the Pacific and their air force a shambles, so they resorted to suicide attacks to keep the fight going. The United States time and again requested their surrender, and time and again Japan refused. Finally, with no end in sight, in early August of 1945, the President of the United States, Harry Truman, ordered the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands were killed instantly as both cities were vaporized, a frightening display of the might, and wrath, of the United States.
Today, Pearl Harbor is once again a peaceful tropical paradise. The USS Arizona still rests at the bottom of the harbor, a hallowed resting place for many of its sailors, a memorial to their sacrifice, and a reminder to the citizens of the United States…and her enemies…that we will never forget what happened.
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