How we experienced December 7, 1941

At Pearl Harbor, Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Lee Soucy, crewman aboard USS Utah, first heard about Pearl Harbor before the first bombs fell.

He had just had breakfast and was looking out a porthole in sick bay when someone said, “What the hell are all those planes doing up there on a Sunday?

“Someone else said, “It must be those crazy Marines. They’d be the only ones out maneuvering on a Sunday.” When I looked up in the sky I saw five or six planes starting their descent. Then when the first bombs dropped on the hangers at Ford Island, I thought, “Those guys are missing us by a mile.”

“Practice bombing was a daily occurrence to us. It was not too unusual for planes to drop bombs, but the time and place were quite out of line. We could not imagine bombing practice in port. It occurred to me and to most of the others that someone had really goofed this time and put live bombs on those planes by mistake.

“I saw a huge fireball and cloud of black smoke rise from the hangers on Ford Island and heard explosions. It did not occur to me that these were enemy planes. It was too incredible!

“’What a SNAFU,’ I moaned.

“As I watched the explosions on Ford Island in amazement and disbelief, I felt the ship lurch. We didn’t know it then, but we were being bombed and torpedoed by planes approaching from the opposite (port) side.

“The bugler and bosun’s mate were on the fantail ready to raise the colors at 8 o’clock. In a matter of seconds, the bugler sounded “General Quarters.”

“I grabbed my first aid bag and headed for my battle station amidship.”

In Honolulu, Hugh Lytle, a reserve Army officer and the Associated Press correspondent for Honolulu, heard about the attack by phone call. His duty officer called him when the bombs started to fall, ordering him to report to his Army outpost for immediate duty.

Lytle began his war service by disobeying—or, rather, delaying—on execution of the order. Before reporting for duty, he stopped in at his AP office at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, where he filed a brief account of the attack in progress. It would be the first report of the war, and the last for several hours as military censors prevented further dispatches for several hours.

At CBS News New York, Chester Burger, a page boy, recalled: “My job was to change the rolls of yellow paper on the Teletype machines that brought news from the Associated Press, United Press, and the now-long-dead International News Service. If my memory is correct, there were some 11 Teletype printers, clicking away at all hours. They were placed along two of the walls of the CBS News Room, partly surrounding the editors and writers who prepared the radio news broadcasts.
“I shall always remember the sound of the ten bells ringing on the United Press machine to alert us to an incoming bulletin. There were a lot of bulletins in those days, and nobody paid particular attention to one more. I would tear off the bulletins and immediately bring them to the editors’ desk. But this — in my memory, I can hear the bell ringing as I am speaking with you tonight —the bell kept ringing. It rang ten times signifying a “flash.” I had never heard that before.

“Everyone jumped up and ran to the United Press teleprinter. It read: “FLASH _ WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR. 2:26 PM.” Only 46 minutes after the news first reached President Roosevelt, he released the news to the nation. Everyone in the CBS News Room was shocked. Astonished. Believing yet unbelieving. Suddenly, we were at war. Where was “Pearl Harbor”? Oh yes, Hawaii, of course. We were at war with Japan. It seemed incredible. I remember someone saying, “Let’s wait a few minutes to confirm before we go with it.”

In Red River County, Texas, Clarence Raultston remembers listening to the first broadcasts about Pearl Harbor in the mid-afternoon.
“It was a cold, drizzling, foggy day in Red River County,” he recalled, “and after hearing about Pearl Harbor my spirits were very low. I was one-and-a-half months past my 21st birthday and had a good notion about where I was headed. I had a brother just two years younger and we both knew he was in the same boat. The whole nation was in a state of quiet panic.”

The panic had been building for quite some time, but when the war broke out with the attack on Pearl Harbor, a large number of Americans were left scratching their heads as to where, exactly, Pearl Harbor was.

Back then, the World Almanac listed Honolulu as a ‘foreign’ city. In those days, Hawaii local time was 5-1/2 hours behind Eastern time, so that the 6:30am Hawaii sunrise occurred at 12 o-clock noon in Washington, DC. The 90-minute attack didn’t finish until 3 o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern time.

“John Daly [who was soon to become the first television anchor for a TV network that didn’t even exist yet] , was calling Oahu ‘Oh-ha-hu’,” recalled Raultston. “Radio commentators such as Harry Von Zell, Fulton Lewis Jr., Walter Winchell, Elmer Davis, and Gabriel Heater were pronouncing Hawaii ‘Hi Wa Ya’. They talked in shifts for almost twelve hours and I don’t remember any commercial breaks. President Roosevelt made a short statement urging people to remain calm and to listen to his address to Congress the next day.

“There would be no Jack Benny, or Fred Allen, or Fibber McGee and Molly that Sunday night.”

In New York, news was getting out faster but not much so. The President’s own Coordinator of Information, “Wild Bill” Donovan, was at the Polo Grounds watching the NFL New York Giants host the Brooklyn Dodgers. 55,051 fans were packed into the stadium for the 2:00pm kickoff. It wasn’t until deep in the first quarter that Donovan was paged by a PA announcement arranged by Capt. James Roosevelt, the President’s son.

At CBS News in New York, John Charles Daly was making final preparations for the regular 2:30 broadcast of The World Today when the United Press release came in from the White House. He broke immediately into The Spirit of ’41 to deliver a short bulletin, and then followed just minutes later with The World Today broadcast.

CBS had the only regularly scheduled news program on Sunday afternoons on any network, so they were in an enviable position. According to the broadcast standards of the day, interruptions of regular broadcasts had to be cleared with sponsors, but since CBS was broadcasting a news program anyway, they could devote almost a half-hour of coverage to the crisis.

Daly introduced The World Today with a two minute summary of the attack. The NBC Red Network, by contrast, would have H.V. Kaltenborn on the air at 3:15 pm, and the NBC Blue network and Mutual would work with bulletins until their regular news broadcasts in the evening.

During the half-hour broadcast, Daly would bring in Albert Warner in Washington to speculate on FDR’s next move. Bob Trout reported on the British reaction from London. Then, ten minutes into the broadcast, the Japanese struck Manila. CBS correspondent Ford Wilkins was there, but was cut off in his broadcast by US censors. Daly attempted to contact Honolulu but the communications problems were too overwhelming. In fact, no live report from Honululu would be heard on any network until shortly after 4 o’clock, when NBC Red affiliate KGU made a report.

In Chicago, Clark Bane Hutchinson recalled “I was listening to the radio and we were having a house party for all these midshipmen, these 90-day wonders and all.”

The news broke in Chicago around one-thirty local time, or just as Donovan was being paged at the Polo Grounds. “Right in the middle of the [broadcast of the] symphony, they interrupted and talked about Pearl Harbor.”

Hutchinson immediately called Washington, DC. Her father, Frank Bane, was Secretary-General of the Governor’s Conference and a board member of the Office of Civilian Defense. Her parents were scheduled to be at the White House for a two o’clock luncheon.

But the guests were beginning to arrive just as the attack started. They knew nothing and were told little else.

“And I started calling them at 2 o’clock, you know, just frantic,” said Hutchinson, “And I at last got them at 5 o’clock, because they kept waiting for President Roosevelt to come to lunch and at last the butler came down and said, “He will not be down for lunch because something is happening in the East.” And Daddy was thinking that it must be something in the Philippines.”

The Philippines were almost as well known as Hawaii at the time, for the flamboyant former Army Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur, had been retained as head of the Philippine Army as the US territory readied itself for its scheduled independence in 1946 amidst the brewing crises in the Far East. Hawaii was not well known, and no radio network had staff there. The story would be flashed by the wire services, and details would be sketchy because reporters were few and far between on a Sunday morning in Honolulu.

In Washington, the guests continued to mill around the White House, not sure what to do. Lunchtime became suppertime, and the while the President remained upstairs with his advisers, Eleanor Roosevelt was interviewed on the NBC Blue network at 6:45pm.

Scheduled among the White House guests that night were Edward R. Murrow and his wife Janet. Upon hearing the news of the attack, they contacted the White House but, to their surprise, the dinner had not been cancelled, and so they went.

Frank Bane saw the Murrows arrive. But unlike the confusion that confronted the rest of the guests that day, upon their arrival they were escorted upstairs to the family dining room.

The President was meeting with congressional and military leaders, explained Mrs. Roosevelt, and would not be able to join them for supper.

The President, in fact, was contemplating his next moves, and drafting the text of the short address he would make to Congress and which the radio networks would carry.

After the dinner, Janet Murrow departed for their hotel, but Ed Murrow was asked to stay. He joined the President and Bill Donovan, who had made it in from New York, for a midnight meeting with sandwiches and cold beer.

There is no official record of the meeting, but Donovan later remarked that it concerned the public’s reaction to the disaster.

Roosevelt was infuriated at the lack of preparation at Pearl Harbor. There had been considerable awareness of the possibility of hostilities, Roosevelt believed, and yet Admiral Husband E. Kimmel had been caught completely by surprise.

“They caught our ships like lame ducks!” said Roosevelt. “Lame ducks, Bill. We told them, at Pearl Harbor and everywhere else, to have the lookouts manned. But they still took us by surprise.”

The President asked Murrow and Donovan whether they thought the attack would unite Americans behind a declaration of war against the Axis powers. Donovan and Murrow said “yes”.

FDR then read a message he had received from North Whitehead, a British Foreign Office official: “The dictator powers have presented us with a united America.” Roosevelt asked if Whitehead was right. Again he asked, would America support a declaration of war? Again, the two men said “yes”.

The presence of Donovan in the midnight meeting was no surprise. He was Roosevelt’s point man for the government’s gathering and distribution of information.

But why Murrow?

It is surprising because in 1933, when Roosevelt was delivering his ‘fireside chats’ to the American people, Murrow was just out of college and working for a national organization of student governments. By 1937, Murrow had yet to make a news broadcast, his network CBS did not even have a news staff, relying instead on feeds from publicity men and re-writes of wire service stories, which were limited by agreement to no more than five minutes and never aired between 9am and 9pm.

What had happened between 1937 and 1941 is not only the story of Edward R. Murrow, but of the role of the American broadcast anchor. Far more than their print journalist colleagues, the leading anchors of the day —although they were not described as such until the 1950s—were considered to have an understanding of the American public, and a hold on their imagination—that far surpassed anything that had been previously seen in journalism.

Radio was not only immediate, it was personal, and its best practicioners had rapidly mastered the art. Roosevelt knew that the vast majority of Americans would have learned of Pearl Harbor by radio, and they were to hear him the next day on radio asking for a declaration of war against Japan.

(This text is excerpted from Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News, by Jim Lane and Jeff Alan)