On December 26, 1941, a confidential report crossed the desk of the Chief of Naval Operations from the commander of submarine squadron four at Pearl Harbor. It was a dull document, built to be dull—plate thicknesses, tank capacities, the voltage of a battery, photographs with arrows inked onto them, and translations of every scrap of paper found inside a captured enemy submarine. It was headed “Japanese submarine number 19. ”
Less than twenty-four hours after the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy found itself with its first prisoner of war, and it had no procedure for one.
There were no prisoner of war camps, no interrogation sections, and no worked-out plan for what to do with a captured sailor. The entire office of naval intelligence had exactly one Japanese-American officer, a Honolulu man named Douglas Wada, the son of a shrine builder, hired years earlier because he could handle the language and move unremarked through a city where more than a third of the population traced its family to Japan. That was the sum total of American readiness for prisoner number one. Word came Monday morning that a Japanese submarine was aground on the reef off Bellows Field at Waimanalo on the eastern shore of Oahu.
A corporal of the 298th Infantry, David Akui, walking the beach on guard duty, saw something in the surf he first took for a turtle. It was a man with no clothes on. He was tied up and handed over to the FBI before the Navy had any say in the matter. The Navy’s contribution to the questioning was Wada, working alongside an Army captain who ran the translation section of the local counterintelligence detachment.
Between the two of them, they represented most of the Japanese language capability the American armed forces could put in a room that week. They got nothing. The prisoner gave his name and rank—23 years old, out of the 60th class of the Naval Academy—and then asked to be killed, or given the means to do it himself. He said his honor had gone into the ground.
In the weeks that followed, in a cell on Sand Island, he pressed lit cigarettes into his own cheeks. The Navy turned to the boat. The salvage party from the submarine base found the wreck in better shape than expected. Army aircraft had bombed her on the 8th and missed, but the near misses had done the salvage crew a favor by breaking the hull free of the reef and letting her drift inshore.
The net cutter at her bow was smashed, the propellers and rudder damaged. Beyond that, she was whole. The salvage crew climbed inside, removed the demolition charge sitting in the after battery compartment by hand, in the surf, without knowing what state it was in. Then they rigged a jury mast, built a sled out of heavy timbers, borrowed an Army tractor, and hauled seventy-eight feet of enemy warship up the sand.
She came apart into three sections because she had been designed to come apart into three sections. By the end of the week, the newest secret weapon in the Imperial Japanese Navy was sitting in a shed at Pearl Harbor with Americans crawling through it. One question hung over the whole investigation. Number 19 had carried two torpedoes and fired neither one.
Every account of why traced back to the reef. The boat had struck coral repeatedly and her bow was crushed. That was the explanation her captain himself believed, and it was the explanation the Americans started with. Whether it was correct took several weeks and a set of wrenches to settle.
In the meantime, they measured everything. The hull was quarter-inch cold-rolled mild steel. There was no engine of any kind aboard—no diesel, nothing to charge the batteries from within. The boat was a battery with a shell around it, holding 192 volts.
When the battery went flat, the vessel was finished. The periscope was a near copy of the American pattern, with a nameplate giving the maker and a date of May—seven months before the attack. The directional gyro sat beside the compass with a luminous card, and the Americans identified its ancestry by looking it up in an engineering textbook from 1932. There was air purification gear and enough soda lime aboard for two men to breathe for seventeen hours.
Then came the paper. Everything with writing on it went to the intelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet. Among it was an American hydrographic chart of the approaches to Pearl Harbor marked up in Japanese. The berths of the major American warships were drawn on it, along with the positions of the coast defense guns.
Running through the anchorage was a track past Ford Island and out again, with times of arrival written against points along its length. Alongside the chart was an attack log: 1500, sighted Oahu. 1615, sighted the light at Barber’s Point. At 1815, the ships in the harbor were listed as five battleships, three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, with four more light cruisers and five destroyers over in Honolulu Harbor.
That count was broadly right, and it had reached a two-man submarine at sea on the evening of December 6. Somebody ashore had been counting hulls and sending the totals out. A naval intelligence officer put the finding plainly: all the necessary data to facilitate a submarine attack was in Japanese possession. Warnings went to installations along the West Coast within days.
Sakamaki gave his questioners nothing for months. But his boat held no opinion about what it admitted. The translators kept going, and the deeper they went into the boat’s own notebooks, the stranger the picture became. Number 19 carried a list of twenty-five numbered faults written down by her crew before the mission.
An emergency valve was leaking air, the oil pump was leaking oil, the water pressure valve was no good, there were air leaks at the horizontal rudder connection, the depth gauge adjustment would not turn, two interior light globes were missing, and item 25 was a big water leak. A machine history kept while the boat rode across the Pacific on the back of her mother submarine logged battery charges by the hour through the third week of November. Eleven days before the attack, two men were nursing a boat that leaked. The captain’s last entry belonged to December 7.
He set down that he had many recollections of childhood, that he would shoulder one important mission that day and sink the enemy’s warships, and that the torpedo tubes he was carrying were the pick of the navy and the work of tens of thousands of his countrymen. The Americans translated the lot, filed it, and then took those tubes apart. The two barrels ran vertically in the nose, one above the other, eighteen feet long. The launch arrangement was a chain of air-operated interlocks running back to the control room, built so that one action could not happen before another had.
In the middle of that chain sat a screw sleeve in the valve bonnet, a mechanical stop that shut off the line to the stop cylinder while the impulse tanks took their charge. The examiners found that sleeve in the closed position. With it shut, no impulse air could reach the firing valve. The valve could not lift.
Nothing was ever going to leave those tubes. Both torpedoes carried gyro settings of zero, and the depth dial stood at five meters—the torpedoes sat ready for a shot behind a mechanism that could not open. The report says only that the stop was found closed and that this prevented firing, and that the captain was understood to have tried the tubes and failed. It never says when the screw went down, whose hand turned it, or whether the hammering on the coral shifted it.
When Sakamaki wrote his own account after the war, he put the failure down to the wrecked nose, which is what he had believed on the day. Two explanations, one document, and no line anywhere reconciling them. The rest of the disposal was administrative. The torpedoes went to the naval ammunition depot on the western side of Oahu.
The radio went to the fleet radio officer. The prisoner stayed in his cell on Sand Island for roughly two and a half months, a space he later described as about ten feet by ten, and he kept asking to be allowed to die. The answer kept coming back no. At the end of February, he left Navy hands for good, went to California, spent a short spell at Angel Island, and rode a train to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, arriving March 9.
He was the only Japanese prisoner there, and he stayed the only one for almost five months. The boat had a busier war than her captain. She went to the mainland in September 1942, and at Mare Island the Navy rebuilt her into an exhibit. Narrow windows were cut along both sides, dummy air flasks, a false periscope, caps standing in for the warheads, and two mannequins in Japanese naval uniform posed at the controls.
Admission was a war bond or a stamp. She traveled through two thousand towns in forty-one states over the next three years. At Belen, New Mexico, on a January afternoon in 1943, she stopped for a scheduled hour. A quarter of the town turned out to look at her, and better than three thousand dollars in bonds changed hands before she left.
Kiyoshi Inagaki, the second man aboard, came ashore three days after his captain, dead. A Japanese-American Guardsman covered him with a blanket. Of the ten men who went out in the five submarines, nine died. Japan promoted them, decorated them, and hung their photographs together.
The group portrait shows nine faces, and a tenth place with nobody in it. The Navy struck Sakamaki’s name from its rolls. For the length of the war, he did not exist in the country he had gone out to fight for. Kazuo Sakamaki went home in January 1946, joined Toyota, ran its Brazilian subsidiary, and refused for decades to discuss any of it.
He died in 1999 at the age of eighty-one. In 1991, he walked into a museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, and stood in front of his own submarine for the first time in half a century, and wept. The submarine is still there.
The report is still on file, all of it, including the sentence about a firing valve nobody opened.