At Opana Point Radar Station, set on the highest point on the island of Oahu, two young army privates noticed what looked to be a huge grouping of planes headed for the island. A call was placed around 7:00 a.m. to Lt. Kermit Tyle, who was the morning duty officer, informing him of “many planes.” Tyler, thinking the two were seeing a squadron of American B-17s due in that morning, told them to forget about it. They turned off the radar and went to breakfast. An earlier radar “blip” had also been ignored. A private pilot was up for a quiet and leisurely flight over Honolulu early that morning. Ray Buduick, a lawyer, expected to have the airspace all to himself and his 17-year-old son, Martin. Shortly after takeoff, he realized that his expectations were wrong. All of a sudden, the skies over the island were filled with hundreds of airplanes. “A private plane owner reported he was given a salute of machine-gun bullets by the Japanese planes. His craft was damaged but he managed to land.” A female flight instructor was also aloft, giving a lesson, when she was overwhelmed with hundreds of planes bearing a red flaming ball. A squadron of Japanese fighter planes, being faster than the bombers, arrived at Oahu at 7:30 and orbited the island for 25 minutes while they waited for the slower planes to catch up. On a beach in Santa Monica, a group of sun worshipers was out early playing volleyball when one of them heard something over the radio and tried to catch the attention of the others who were uninterested at the moment in anything other than the outcome of their morning match. The first wave of 183 planes, including dive bombers and torpedo planes on approach to Oahu, continued unmolested and basically undetected. They’d been transported in secret since November 26, at 0900, having departed their home waters of Tankan Bay. The six carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, could deploy hundreds of war planes. They were under the orders of the fleet commander, Isoroku Yamamoto, and the command of Chuichi Nagumo. The massive fleet halted in mid-ocean to refuel on December 3. The standing order was radio silence and, if not recalled by Tokyo, to attack. As they flew over the island, on their approach from the north, over the sugar cane and pineapple fields, they saw no puffs of antiaircraft black smoke in the sky, no airplanes rising to meet their challenge. Realizing they had succeeded in their audacious sneak attack on the American fleet, the code indicating their achievement was transmitted: “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Along the Waikiki beach, some early morning fishermen were out. “Downtown nothing stirred save an occasional bus.” Then came the Japanese planes. “They whined over Waikiki, over the candy pink bulk of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.” A commercial liner just making port from San Francisco slipped into the harbor at Honolulu. Thinking themselves lucky to be witnessing naval war games, what with the planes diving overhead and all the puffs of black and white smoke, “scores of delighted passengers crowding the deck remarked that it was mighty fine of the United States Navy, timing it so nicely with their arrival.” Initial reports out of Hawaii were light. The first bulletin went out over the local airwaves, garbled, not from a military source or official government spokesman, but from a broadcast personality, Webley Edwards, who hosted the popular radio show Hawaii Calls on CBS, which was heard all over the mainland. |
