Firsthand Accounts from the Crew of USS Dale’s Escape From Pearl Harbor

By Michael Olson | MHQ  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Of the many accounts to emerge from the “Day of Infamy,” December 7, 1941, the story of the first ship to escape Pearl Harbor during the attack is relatively unknown. This is surprising given the fact that it represents one of the few success stories from an otherwise disastrous day for the U.S. Navy. USS Dale, the little destroyer that could, managed to dodge torpedoes, bombs, and machine gun fire to escape the Japanese onslaught nearly unscathed and without a single casualty. Here, in the words of Dale’s crew, is a blow-by-blow narrative of action aboard the destroyer on that fateful day:

Cliff Huntley: USS Dale was only about six years old when we first arrived at Pearl Harbor. At that time Dale and our sister Farragut-class destroyers were the cutting edge of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Our job was to get in front of the nation’s trouble, and we tin can sailors were mighty proud of that fact. Those of us who had been on Dale for a while walked with a swagger the new guys just couldn’t step into right away.

Alvis Harris: Along about mid-November, we got orders to go out west of Pearl a couple of hundred miles with our sister tin can, Aylwin, to pick up the SS Komikura Maru with Japanese Ambassador [Kichisaburo] Nomura aboard, who was on his way to Washington, D.C., for peace talks. We escorted the ambassador into Pearl, where he disembarked from Maru and embarked on a Matson liner for the States and his meeting in Washington.

Herman Gaddis: While the Japanese ambassador was boarding the Matson liner, we took up an antisubmarine patrol off Diamond Head. Our orders were to pick up the Matson liner when she left Pearl and escort her to the States. We were all looking forward to liberty in San Diego. But almost immediately we picked up a submarine on sonar that we could not identify and nobody in the fleet would claim. While we were engaged with that sub the Matson liner left Honolulu with another ship as its escort. We missed our trip back to the States, which made us all very unhappy.

We sat on top of that submarine for about three days, waiting for something to happen. The sub would move here and there a little bit, but mostly it just sat on the bottom just off Diamond Head and did nothing. We didn’t know who that sub belonged to, and as we were not at war or anything, there really was nothing we could do. So finally we just backed off and let it go.

When war with Japan became inevitable, the American government sent warnings to all of its military commands and political posts in the Pacific, including those of the Army and Navy in Hawaii. The Americans knew the Japanese were preparing to attack, but had convinced themselves the attack would take place in the Philippines.

Most certainly it would not come at Pearl Harbor. This wishful thinking provided the perfect cover for Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier strike force, which arrived at a point 200 miles north of Pearl Harbor early on the morning of December 7.

At 6 a.m. Nagumo’s six carriers began launching the first wave of airplanes. Months of training were about to culminate in an operation that would commit Japan to a war with the industrial might of the United States.

Harold Reichert: Some mornings, the waters of Pearl Harbor would be so still the seaplane pilots could not see where to land, and so we’d have to send out the motor whaleboat to stir up the water a bit. On mornings like that, you could always pick up the smells of fuel oil mixed with tropical flowers, and after a week or two at sea those smells were mighty inviting. My Sunday morning ritual at Pearl was to sit out on the fantail with a cup of coffee and a newspaper and enjoy the early sun and those tropical airs.

There were ninety-six ships in Pearl Harbor that morning and no reason to expect any trouble. After all, the Honolulu Advertiser I was reading told how Japanese Ambassador Nomura was going to meet with Secretary Cordell Hull in Washington that very morning to talk about peace.

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Sea-Air Operations, World War II

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