St. Louis Post-Dispatch
December 6, 2002 Friday Five Star Lift Edition
SECTION: NEWS ; Pg. A1
HEADLINE: ST. LOUISAN SAW OPENING SHOTS - BY US - ON DAY OF INFAMY
BYLINE: Bill Smith
Then, sometime around 6:40 a.m., crew members on the Ward spotted what appeared to be a tiny periscope following the Antares past the anti-torpedo nets closing the harbor entrance. The destroyer fired once, missing its target.
As the Ward moved closer, Gatewood could see it plainly in the light of early day.
If it was a submarine, and it certainly looked like one, it wasn't like any submarine Gatewood had ever seen.
The second shot, Gatewood said, was a dead hit on the conning tower projecting above the water's surface.
"I remember the gun captain saying he used that gun like a squirrel rifle," Gatewood said.
Later, the U.S. armed forces would learn that the two-man mini-sub was one of five that tried to get into the harbor ahead of the Japanese air attack, hoping to fire torpedoes into the fleet.
For more than 60 years, the sinking of the sub was a topic of spirited debate among military historians, some of whom doubted the reports from the sailors aboard the Ward. Only when scientists finally discovered the submarine in 1,200 feet of water earlier this year - a single hole through its conning tower - did the controversy end.
Finally, there seemed to be irrefutable evidence that the Ward had fired America's first shot in the Pacific war.
"Why didn't they just ask me?" Gatewood said with a smile. "I was there."
After the sub sinking, Gatewood said he remained in the radio room for more than an hour trying to make his message to headquarters understood.
"This is not a drill," he repeated.
Shortly before 8 a.m., Gatewood received another message.
"We are being bombed."
Gatewood rushed to the Ward's bridge and looked into the sky.
"Too busy to be scared"
"The planes were every place," he said. "You could see the meatballs," he said, a reference to the rising sun symbols on the bombers.
"I was too busy to be scared," he said. "I've looked back at this so many times. It was like sitting watching a movie."
For the most part, he said, planes were ignoring the smaller, poorly armed Ward in favor of the big battleships in the harbor.
Gatewood said he never saw the bomb that found its way into the stack of the battleship Arizona, but he saw the aftermath.
"There was one of the most tremendous towers of flames you had ever seen," Gatewood said, "and then it collapsed in the middle and went down."
It's still hard, he said, to think back to the ships going down, men struggling in the oil-filled harbor, the smoke, the fire. . . .
"Chaos," he said. "It was pretty much chaos.
"We fired a couple of shots, but we didn't hit anything."
None of the men aboard the Ward suffered serious injuries in the attack.
For 61 years, Gatewood says, he has heard the questions again and again. Why was the fleet never alerted of a potential attack after the sinking of the submarine? What happened? Who is to blame?
Gatewood says that blaming anyone would be unfair.
It was peacetime, he says. At Pearl Harbor, at least, there was no reason to believe Dec. 7, 1941, would be anything other than "just another normal Sunday morning."
The regular radio operator at headquarters was not on duty, leaving an untested yeoman to struggle with decoding a message that seemed to make little sense.
"All that happened was we had seen and sunk a submarine sometime after 6:20 in the morning," Gatewood said.
"Who could have expected 200 enemy planes to fly over at 8 o'clock?"
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Events surrounding sinking of a Japanese midget submarine near Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
3:42 a.m.: The officer on deck of the minesweeper Condor spots what appears to be a submarine and notifies the destroyer Ward. Radio operator Maury Gatewood is awakened and called to the bridge. A two-hour search finds no sign of the sub.
6:37 a.m.: Ward crew members spot what appears to be a submarine trailing the Antares as it heads into Pearl Harbor.
6:34 a.m.: The Ward bears down on the submarine.
6:45 a.m.: The Ward's first shot misses but the second strikes the sub. The submarine begins to slow and sink.
Shortly after 6:45 a.m.: Gatewood receives a message to be sent to naval headquarters and begins transmission. The initial transmission is sent from the telegraph board shown above.
Approximately 7:50 a.m.: Japanese air attack begins on Pearl Harbor.
by Editor on December 10, 2002 at 6:47 PM