Dawn of Infamy: A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor

by Stephen Harding

On December 7, 1941, even as Japanese carrier–launched aircraft flew toward Pearl Harbor, a small American cargo ship chartered by the Army reported that it was under attack from a submarine halfway between Seattle and Honolulu. After that one cryptic message, the humble lumber carrier Cynthia Olson and her crew vanished without a trace, sparking one of the most enduring nautical mysteries of the war. What happened to the ill–fated ship? What happened to her crew? And was she Japan’s first American victim of the Pacific War?

Based on years of research, Dawn of Infamy explores both the military and human aspects of the Cynthia Olson story, bringing to life a complex tale of courage, tenacity, hubris, and arrogance in the opening hours of America’s war in the Pacific.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Maritime, War, Military History, Military Fiction

249 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2010

About the author

As a defense journalist Stephen Harding covered the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and, most recently, Iraq. The author of seven books and some 300 magazine articles, he specializes in military, aviation and maritime topics."

Reviews

[JD · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book's subject is very interesting and the first half of the book is good where the author goes into great detail as he usually does in his books. He gives great background on the ship, SS Cynthia Olsen, and the men that sailed on her last voyage, as well as the IJN's I-26 and her crew. He explains how the paths of these two ships cross where only one sailed away on the day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After this in the second half of the book he tries to crack the mystery of the timing of attack and the missing crew. In the timing he just uses the available data from the time which makes it clear the attack happened after the start of the bombing on Pearl Harbor, and with the crew he just gives what might have happened to the crew, so it still remains a mystery...

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu…
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress, December 8, 1941.

An ambiguous and now-forgotten line in one of the most famous speeches in American history. That is all the Cynthia Olson rated.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, around the time that Japanese planes were unleashing bombs and torpedoes at the sleeping U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Cynthia Olson, carrying a load of timber from Seattle to Hawaii, was accosted by a Japanese submarine. The ship managed to key a brief distress signal before going dark forever. No other wireless messages were received. No wreckage was ever found. None of the 35 crewmembers aboard were seen again.

The sinking of the Cynthia Olson was overshadowed by contemporary events, and survives today as a historical footnote (and as a piece of misrepresented evidence in certain Pearl Harbor conspiracies). The Oracle of Pearl, Gordon Prange, devoted just two paragraphs to the Cynthia Olson in Dec. 7, 1941, and managed to misspell the ship’s name. In the vast catastrophe of that Sunday morning, the loss of the lumber transport was a minor, if haunting event.

In Dawn of Infamy: A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor, Stephen Harding puts the Cynthia Olson center stage. While I respect his intent, I cannot vouch for the end product. Harding attempts to make a bag of popcorn out of a single kernel, and fails.

The chief issue is that there’s not enough story to support a book. Everything known about the loss of the Cynthia Olson can be comfortably conveyed in a single page. In order to justify a hardcover, of course, you need more a bit more, especially to justify those ever-increasing hardback prices. Harding gets to 189 pages of text, but he does so by adding a lot of sawdust to the flour. He scours the records to find every single scrap of information about the ship, her crew, and the sinking, and he uses every word of that research. The result is an extremely plodding, 189-page trudge.

The first 60 pages are the most difficult to get through. There are chapters devoted to the construction of the Cynthia Olson, a history of the company that owned her, a mini-treatise on the lumber shipping trade, and a section on the captain and crew of the ship. Each of these chapters is an info dump. Page after page of inert fact. The chapter on the ship’s construction, for instance, seems to cover every trip she ever took, along with every cargo (Harding morosely informs us when a cargo manifest has disappeared). Each time the Cynthia Olson (originally named the Coquina) goes in for repairs, or is docked due to a flagging economy, Harding informs us of this fact.

The encyclopedic style continues with the chapter on the captain and crew. Harding gives us every known nugget about Captain Carl Carlsen (yes, Simpsons fans, that is his name) and his crew. At the end of it, though, you have a list of factoids, not a biography. Captain Carlsen never becomes a living, breathing human being. He is just a name and a resume. Harding’s attempts to flesh out the crew also come to naught. He devotes four pages to listing everything he was able to discover about the crew, many of whom were Filipino. The results do not make for gripping reading.

Maximo Ankot Basbas, forty-three, oiler, was born June 5, 1898, in the Philippines. He had served aboard the American President Lines’ President Jefferson. His listed next of kin was his brother, Philmyoita, in the Phillipines. He was an ATS [Army Transport Service] contract mariner…Victoriano Tabayay Pedro, age unknown, oiler, had as his listed next of kin his sister, Macaria T. Pedro, in the Phillipines. He was an ATS contract mariner…Sotero Vequilla Cabigas, age unknown, fireman, had his listed next of kin as his cousin, M. Vequilla, in the Phillipines. He was an ATS contract mariner…

And it goes on like this. You get the picture. Harding scoured the Deceased Merchant Mariner files at the National Archives and used it to pad out a few more pages.

Dawn of Infamy becomes mildly more diverting as the Cynthia Olson nears her rendezvous with Japanese submarine I-26, commanded by Minoru Yokota (who later sank the USS Juneau, killing all the Sullivan brothers, along with most of the rest of her crew). Harding gives us background on the Japanese crew, and her mission patrolling the Aleutians while Admiral Nagumo’s Strike Force headed towards Hawaii.

The sinking itself is patched together from the Cynthia Olson’s distress call, along with Japanese accounts. According to witnesses aboard the submarine, the I-26 stopped the Cynthia Olson with a warning shot, allowed the crew to abandon ship, and then sank the lumber transport with its deck gun.

The latter portions of Dawn of Infamy (which, it should be noted, was previously published overseas as Voyage to Oblivion) is devoted to resolving the mysteries of the Cynthia Olson. Harding belabors three questions, which he treats with such reverence you’d think their answers would reveal the meaning of life itself. The first question is one of timing, and whether or not the sinking of the Cynthia Olson occurred before the first shots fired at Pearl Harbor. The second question is whether news of the attack could have tipped off Pearl Harbor. The final question regards the fate of the crew.

Harding teases these questions just about as long as my patience endured. The answer to the second question, for instance, can be answered in the negative by anyone with the slightest knowledge of Pearl Harbor. To wit: If Admiral Kimmel wasn’t sufficiently warned by the sinking of a Japanese sub in his own harbor, it is highly unlikely he would have been spurred to action by unconfirmed reports of a transport being sunk hundreds of miles away. Harding’s answer to the timing issue (which, as noted above, is important to conspiracy theorists), is straightforward enough, though once again, the answer is simpler than Harding makes it out to be. As to what happened to the crew, well, there is no smoking gun here. The answer is more speculation. Harding claims to have “resolved” these issues, but I think we have differing definitions of that word.

To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, this book is like butter spread over too much bread. It’s awfully thin. When you get down to it, this is a compendium of arcane minutiae, informed guesswork, and constant repetition of the few hard facts that exist about the sinking. This might have made an excellent long-form article. It doesn’t work as a book, even a rather short one.

I expected to like this a lot more than I did. (And my overly generous rating reflects my respect for Harding’s digging). I spent some time thinking how this could be improved. It could have used a stronger, more colorful narrative, but a historical narrative needs to be attached to historical facts, and that seems lacking here.

I suppose another tack would have been to make this a more meditative piece, something moody and ruminative and reflective of the strange fate that put this small ship in the path of a smaller ship on the big ocean in the last moments of peace. Harding isn’t operating on that plane. Instead, he offers the empty phrase-mongering of sacrifice, as though the crew of the Cynthia Olson were willingly giving their lives, when in reality, they had their lives jarringly disrupted by a mid-ocean encounter none of them could have imagined. That is the real power of the Cynthia Olson story. How the vast, almost unimaginable scale of suffering in World War II can be so poignantly encapsulated by the disappearance of a handful of men who woke up in one world, and died in another.

[Sarah - All The Book Blog Names Are Taken · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am wavering back and forth between 3 and 4 stars. Probably closer to 3.5. The beginning was slow, but the history of the ship was necessary, in my opinion. Full review to come.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

+++++++++++

On December 7th, 1941 as the attack was getting underway by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, one of the enduring mysteries of that day was unfolding. An American cargo ship, the Cynthia Olson, was hauling lumber from the Seattle to Honolulu for the Army. Somewhere in between, the ship was fired on by a Japanese sub. After sending off one wireless message about an attack, the radio on board went silent. No one knows for sure what happened to the ship, how long she took to sink, if multiple subs were involved, or the fate of her 35 crew members. While the captain of I-26, the sub who fired on the Cynthia Olsen, has passed away, along with everyone else who was involved (either American or Japanese), we will never know for sure the true story.

"The humble Cynthia Olson - old, slow, and of virtually no military value in the greater scheme of things - was destined to die simply because she was in the wrong place at the very worst of times" (36%).

We can, however, make our best educated guesses based on the information we do have - though unfortunately certain ship logs that might shed light on the mystery have long-since disappeared, reported as destroyed.

Sounds like something we should have learned about in history class right? And we would have, had the full-scale attack on Pearl Harbor not also been happening at roughly the same time. And that is actually part of the mystery. There is kind of a muddle of information that does not make it clear when the warning shot was first fired at the ship. The sub's commander insisted he did not fire the warning shot until 8:00 AM Hawaiian time, when the first wave was to descend on Oahu. However, that may not have been true, and he may have ordered the first shot up to half an hour earlier.

I wavered between three and four stars on this one for a while, and really only because the beginning started off very slow. Truthfully, I even skimmed a lot of that because I wanted to get to the real point of the book. Prior to that though, we are given the entire history of the Cynthia Olson which, while important, made for heavy reading very early on. Given the fact that we really don't have answers, perhaps the back story was included to give some meat to the text, as I honestly do not think there was enough information to really flesh out the story. I think overall this is an important event though. These men deserve to have their stories told, at least as much as we can tell of them, given the information still available. Unfortunately for the men who hailed from the Philippines, with lack of contact information for their next-of-kin or descendants, this story will never really have an ending.

See the rest of my review on my blog: https://allthebookblognamesaretaken.b...

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cynthia Olson was a 2140-ton steam schooner bound from Tacoma to Honolulu on December 7, 1941, carrying a load of lumber, a 29-man crew, and two soldiers. It had been tracked for a day by a Japanese submarine, the I-26, whose captain, Minoru Yokota, had orders to sink US shipping as soon as the war began. The Cynthia Olson encountered the I-26 at 0738 Hawaiian time, which was twenty-some minutes before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor started. The Cynthia Olson's radioman got off a message noting that the attack had begun and the crew had taken to their lifeboats. No one at Pearl Harbor knew of the event.

The I-26 fired forty-seven rounds from its 5.5-inch deck gun, and missed with a torpedo. The last sighting of the crew of the Cynthia Olson was by another Japanese submarine, the I-19, the next day. Caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, a strong but slow clockwise current, the crew wasn't found by the Canadian and American escort vessels that hunted for it, largely because the search box didn't take into account the strength of the prevailing winds and currents. Harding, who wrote another book about the last American killed in the war (See: "Last to Die"), writes well about a sad loss. The I-26 later sank the USS Juneau, and was itself sunk late in the war.

[Jeff Jellets · Rating 3 out of 5]

The humble ship Cynthia Olson -- old, slow and of virtually no military value – was destined to die simply because she was in the wrong place at the very worst of times.

Lost amid the overwhelming carnage of the 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is the tale of the modest commercial steamer Cynthia Olson sunk that same Sunday morning as she crossed paths with a scouting Japanese submarine on the open seas between the U.S. west coast and the Hawaiian islands. The steamer was ferrying lumber and, though she managed a brief distress call, the 33 crew and ship were never seen again.

Historian Stephen Harding applies a very fine mesh as he sieves through American, Canadian and Japanese sources (including eyewitness accounts from the captain and crew of the marauding I-26 sub) to answer the riddles that linger over the grave of the lost ship. First, was the unassuming cargo vessel actually attacked before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor? Second, if so, should her distress call have warned American forces of the impending Japanese assault? And finally, what happened to Cynthia Olson’s crew -- whom Japanese submariners have long insisted they left in the ship’s lifeboats, riding the swells well before the steamer slipped beneath the waves?

Harding’s research is meticulous – beginning at the point the keels were laid on both the Cynthia Olson and her attacker IJN Submarine I-26 and extending well through the tale’s final denouement as investigative reporters and military historians in the 1960s salvage the story of the lost cargo vessel from obscurity and adding a few important missing pieces to her tale. Harding’s conclusions about ‘what really happened’ on the high seas that morning are well reasoned and, for at least this ‘mystery of history,’ the reader closes Dawn of Infamy with at least a plausible solution.

As the author admits, the sinking of the Cynthia Olson is perhaps ‘just’ an historical footnote. But Harding’s rationale for pursuing the tale are both candid and compelling. The end result is ‘good’ history and an honest eulogy for the 33 men who sailed the lumber hauler on her final voyage.

[Terri Wangard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dawn of Infamy traces the history of a lumber transport ship that may have been the first ship fired on by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. The Cynthia Olson was leased to the Army Transport Service to haul lumber to Hawaii for the military build-up in response to the threat of war with Japan.

A Japanese submarine spotted the freighter on December 6 and followed it, waiting to hear the attack on Pearl Harbor had begun before firing on it. Because the transport was unarmed, the Japanese commander made the humanitarian gesture of firing across its bow and allowing the 35 men to abandon ship into their lifeboats.

The men, mostly Scandinavian-born, naturalized Americans and Filipino merchant mariners, were never seen again.

This book offers detailed chapters on the ship’s history, the Oliver Olson Company, the captain and snippets of each man aboard, and the Japanese commander.

The radio operator, an enlisted army man, sent out a distress signal and communicated with a passenger liner heading for the West Coast. Their news was flashed to San Francisco and on to Washington, but the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor quickly eclipsed their ordeal. A Canadian ship did search for them, but found no trace of the ship, flotsam, or the two lifeboats.

Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the lumber ship in her regular Sunday evening radio address, and FDR made a veiled reference to it in his Day of Infamy address to congress. It received much coverage in the press, but soon faded from attention and is today barely known.

Speculation on what happened to the crew settles on them being adrift until they starved or swamped. The opening chapters tended to bog down with all the various histories, but this is an illuminating look at a little-known event from the Day of Infamy.

I received a free copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

[george burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mystery Solved?

Mystery Solved?

Numerous weighty (and often unneeded) tomes are published about the great events of history. Books about less well known and smaller scale events are frequently more interesting. This book is a fine example of the latter category. The Cynthia Olson was a small freighter enroute from the west coast to Honolulu when she was sunk by a Japanese submarine on the morning of December 7, 1941. But was she attacked before the attack on Pearl Harbor? What happened to the crew? In a well researched and ably written book, Mr. Harding provides convincing answers to these questions and also provides much human interest on the way. An excellent piece of work.

[Yibbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a long book about a tragic footnote to the start of WW2. The mystery is not very mysterious. It wasn’t even a mystery at the time. There are certainly questions that we may never answer, but with a little knowledge of the times and circumstances, the fate of the Cynthia Olson’s crew is not hard to settle. Tragic, but not a mystery. By the end, I found myself thinking that the author spent 250ish pages wanting this to be a bigger event than it was.
After every historical fact has been presented, the author recounts the collection of every fact and every interview related to it. Here is where it got a little odd for me. He disparages every interviewer who spoke to the Japanese crew as incompetent and too trusting. Then after attacking them for accepting the word of these Japanese, who he insists must be self-serving. He turns around and accepts the very same testimonies as true, coming to the same conclusions they did. What was the point of all the chapters arguing the contrary point?
Even in the historical account, I found that it wondered from the premise of the story. For example, it traces the lineage of one crew member back about 200 years or so, and the history of the shipping line back to the start of its founder’s father’s career. After it was over, I found myself thinking that I could have learned all the pertinent facts in a long article.

[Doug Trani · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there were partial ratings, I would give this book a 3.5. It is not as well written as most of the books I have rated a 4, but is better than those I typically rate as a 3. Nevertheless, it is an interesting story, even if it was a little long in its presentation. I also have to admit that I rated up to a 4, instead of down to a 3, simply because some of the story took place in my hometown of San Pedro, California. However, I also believe that the book serves as a fitting tribute to the men aboard the SS Cynthia Olson who vanished in the Pacific Ocean without ever knowing why they had been sacrificed as pawns in a much larger story that had just begun to unfold. Was the Cynthia Olson attacked right before, or right after, the surprise raid on Pearl Harbor? Stephen Harding answers the question in "Dawn of Infamy".

[Larry Mikulcik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version of this book and as someone very interested in history's mysteries I found the story quite interesting. The author has provided details that demonstrates significant research from many sources and the impact of the sinking of this merchant ship. He included follow-through from the "where-are-they-now?" perspective regarding the key players in the story. This is always a good way to put a bow on the story. The author was not able to find definitive proof of the ending for the vanished crew, but he does look at the theories and he gives logical explanations about the validity of each of the theories.

[R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting story! It's hard to envision a book about a solitary lumber ship lost on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, but Harding pulls it off.
The corporate history and ownership of the Cynthia Olson takes up much of the beginning of the book, but helpfully provides background about the ship, its owners and the crew. This is also the portion most amenable to accurate documentation.
Necessarily the account of the ship's final voyage relies on more supposition and conjecture. But Harding does well here, threading in information from Japanese sources as well as a variety of US shipping and military angles.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well researched and written account of the loss of a military lumber tender at the start of theHawaii bombings. While definitely stocked with great research detail about the boat and her crew, it certainly keeps your interest in answering the “3 key questions” about her sinking! If you like war novels and mariner history then you will enjoy listening to the book. The narrator was SUPERP and his voice very fulfilling as he provides the very well researched information- give few books a 5 rating- however as a single source war account this one earned it!

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Stephen Harding does something that very few non-fiction writers are able to do. He goes deep into statical and other minor related details and makes it enjoyable to read. He clearly and objectively tells the story from all sides. When he ultimately relates his solutions to the mysteries that remain about the incident, his solutions are simple and believable.

[Matthew Sparling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m conflicted about this book. The beginning was quite good but the last 15% or so was unsatisfactory. It felt almost like the author got bored and just decided to wrap up the book without doing any real research on the fate of the crew and ship after the sinking.

[Mike Fitzgerald · Rating 2 out of 5]

Story finished halfway thru the book. 2nd half could have been summarized in about 3 pages.

[Rafael Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched book with good narrations and insights of what happened to the Cynthia Olson.

[Audiobook Accomplice (Gillian) · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half? DULL! Second half? NOW we’re getting somewhere… Then? Over…?!?
My Full Review

[Kurry Swigert · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems to me that too much time was spent in detailing the history of the ship and the minutiae of the crew’s lives.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot to do about very little. At best an anecdote, of course not for the people involved. The book spends more than half the book setting the story in it's historic context and the history of the people and the ships involved. Some inaccuracies are in the book also. For example he gives a dated May 26 1942 reference to a letter to a widow which references a "Compensation Act" . The problem is the Act was not instituted until December 2 1942. ( I verified the date of the Act and it is correct, so the date of the letter is wrong)

The whole mystery gets dealt with in the last 18 pages and according to the author resolved. It gets resolved through suppositions and assumptions and the reasoning is rather thin.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better books that I have read recently, it describes the little-known sinking of the SS Cynthia Olson on the morning of December 7, 1941 by a Japanese submarine and investigates whether it was the actual first attack of the Pacific war. It also tries to determine what became of the ship's crew, no trace of which have ever been located.

[Mhorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent story...

An interesting story about the first US naval casualty of world war 2 in the Pacific, but a bit too much conjecture to make it really interesting.

[Paula Shreckhise]

Didn't get into this. Will have to read it another time.