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the explosive charge failed to work as advertised and the sub did not self-destruct and sink. Worse still, Inagaki either drowned or committed suicide, and the exhausted Sakamaki, injured from the coral and sick from the poisonous fumes that had filled the submarine, barely made it ashore, where he finally collapsed, unconscious.
    The next thing he recalls is a Colt .45 automatic pistol being held against his head by an American soldier, yelling at him in English to get up. The soldier holding the pistol was Corporal Akui of the Hawaii National Guard. He had just made Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial Navy, the first Japanese prisoner of war.

    SECOND LIEUTENANT STEVE WEINER, US ARMY
Bellows Field Communications Shack
Pearl Harbor
7–8 December 1941

    Early Sunday morning, just as the attack began, there was a four-engine plane that buzzed our field. Now, Bellows Field is just a short strip, used for gunnery practice for P-40 fighter planes. And when this plane passed over, we thought it was the Navy, but they didn’t have four-engine planes. Moments later, there was a crash. A B-17 trying to land on our strip had overrun our runway and crashed into the ditch at the far end. Those of us that were in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] got dressed quickly, ran down to the plane, and found that the crew was semi-hysterical. They had been shot up—some of them were bleeding, and you could see where the plane had been shot at.

    We asked them, “What do you mean, you were attacked? Who attacked you?”
    And while we were trying to make sense of the situation, a flight of Japanese fighter planes came in and started strafing us, and we all ran for cover. I ran to the operations shack, where there was a space between the floor and the ground. I stayed there until the attackers left.
    After the attack, the armory was opened. None of us had carried arms before, but now we could take whatever we wanted. We each took .45s and M1 rifles, but there was no loose ammunition for the rifles. All they had were bandoliers for the .30-caliber machine guns, but the shells fit the rifles. So we wrapped bandoliers around us.
    We were advised to pair off, dig a foxhole, and be prepared for hand-to-hand combat. By late afternoon I paired off with a young pilot from Texas. He was greener than me, and neither of us had ever fired a gun. So it starts to rain, and it was a miserable time, and we’re sitting commiserating with each other—how it might be our last day on earth. He was sitting on my right, and because it was raining he took out his handkerchief to wipe his rifle, and he fired it across my lap. And I almost became a Pearl Harbor Purple Heart recipient on the first day of the war!
    Later, after dark, we were sitting in the foxhole, and we saw two figures walking toward us from the ocean, about a hundred yards from where we were. When they got close enough, we saw that one was Corporal Akui, who had been stationed at the end of the runway. He was a member of the Hawaiian National Guard, leading a prisoner who was nude, with the exception of a loincloth. The corporal turned him over to us.
    I asked, “Where did you get him?”
    Corporal Akui said, “He walked right out of the water.”
    I think he was happy to turn him over to us. We, in turn, were looking to turn him over to a higher authority, so we took him to the operations shack. We sat him down and could see that he had been in the water for a number of hours. His skin was all wrinkled and he looked distressed, so we put a blanket around his shoulders and gave him some water and crackers. We tried to get some intelligence but he was defiant. He just
looked from one face to the other, and we realized that we weren’t getting anywhere with him. We decided that two young second lieutenants with no experience in interrogation weren’t likely to get this guy to talk.
    After an hour of attempted interrogation we realized we weren’t