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not allowed to be submerged in that area, and we were ordered to attack any submerged submarine we sighted in the restricted zone. We completed our circle, came around, and dropped our two depth charges. The Ward followed its gun attack by dropping depth charges as it went over the spot where the submarine was.
    We reported, “SANK ENEMY SUBMARINE ONE MILE SOUTH OF PEARL HARBOR.” We sent it in code, not by voice, back to our headquarters. We had no indication we were at war but we sent it in Morse code, just as we were supposed to. We got an answer from our base that said, “VERIFY YOUR MESSAGE.” And so we did, and our base told us to remain in the area until further notice.
    We circled there for some time. When we didn’t see anything other than what we had already reported, Fleet Air Wing One sent us a message to resume patrol.

ABOARD JAPANESE SPS I-24TOU
    PEARL HARBOR OUTER PERIMETER
7 DECEMBER 1941
0650 HOURS LOCAL
    Twenty-three-year-old ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, stripped to just a loincloth, sat at the periscope of his midget submarine. Because he had no radio contact with the other SPS boats, he was unaware that one of them had just been sunk. He panned the periscope around to see if the USS Antares, the supply ship waiting outside the harbor, had been given clearance yet to move inside the bay and on to the docks. If the Antares was moving in that direction, then that would mean the underwater anti-sub net was open and Ensign Sakamaki could maneuver his midget sub, submerged below and behind the Antares, to get inside the harbor next to all the U.S. Navy ships at anchor around Ford Island. Sakamaki’s orders called for him to get inside
the harbor and launch his two torpedoes and “sink as many ships as he could,” any way that he could. His orders made aircraft carriers the first priority, then battleships, followed by heavy cruisers. If the American carriers were not there, the Japanese submariners decided that their primary target should be the battleship USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
    It had been more than seven hours since the midget sub had been released from the mother sub some ten miles away, and by now the sulfuric acid gases were building up inside the cramped sub.
    But Ensign Sakamaki had more problems inside his tiny sub than the buildup of toxic gases. Ever since they had detached from I-24, the minisub’s gyroscopic compass—his primary means of navigation—had been malfunctioning. He and his crewmate, Petty Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, had been working for the past several hours to try to repair the gyrocompass but had been unsuccessful. Eager to participate in the attack, they were both growing increasingly anxious that they would not make it inside the harbor before the air attack began, in little more than an hour.
    Sakamaki’s duty was to steer the midget sub, and Inagaki’s job was to operate the ballast and trim valves. Working together, they tried to navigate toward the mouth of the anchorage by recalling the detailed charts of Pearl Harbor that they had memorized while en route across the Pacific from Japan. They, along with the other four midget sub crews, had been required to memorize all the pertinent details and layouts of not just Pearl but four other harbors as well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and perhaps most frightening to the Americans, had they known about it, San Francisco.

USS MONAGHAN, DD-354
    PEARL HARBOR
7 DECEMBER 1941
0755 HOURS LOCAL
    A little more than an hour after the USS Ward sank a sub outside the anchorage, the USS Curtiss , a seaplane tender, and an auxiliary ship, the USS
Medusa , also sighted one of the midget subs—this time inside Pearl Harbor. They immediately sent messages to the USS Monaghan, a destroyer that had just gotten under way. But as the Monaghan got up steam to race toward the new contact, the sky was suddenly filled with planes and all