Hawaii Chronicles III: World War Two in Hawaii from the Pages of Paradise of the Pacific

I Prelude to War in the Pacific

I E Prelude to War in the Pacific Only a decade after the U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i in 1898, Congress authorized construction of a naval base at Pearl Harbor. From this strategic bastion the relationship between U.S. naval strength and American foreign policy would be demonstrated in the Pacific. As U.S. Adm. Alfred T. Mahan phrased it, “one of the functions of force is to give moral ideas time to take root.” The island of O‘ahu was destined to become the best defended fortress on the Alaska-Hawai‘i-Panama defensive perimeter. In 1907 Fort Shafter became the first permanent post for federal troops in Hawai‘i, and 234 men were stationed there. Two years later Schofield Barracks was established near Wahiawa.Troop strength rose to about 600 men. During the First World War the number of soldiers increased to as many as 12,463. But after the armistice, the size of the force was reduced to fewer than 5,000 men. Events in Asia during the next decade, however, brought about another military buildup in Hawai‘i. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, quit the League of Nations in 1933, and opened undeclared war against China in 1937. On December 12 of that year, Japanese planes strafed, bombed, and sank the American gunboat Panay as it attempted to evacuate American and British officials from Nanking, China. Two crewmen were killed. A week later the infamous Rape of Nanking began. Signs of impending war with Japan were ominous and civilians in Hawai‘i began to prepare for that inevitability. Beginning in 1939 an annual blackout exercise to coincide with military maneuvers was conducted in Honolulu.And in Kailua and other rural areas near military installations, civil defense units were established. In 1940 an emergency disaster plan was adopted. Honolulu women began making surgical bandages and dressings. The local Red Cross gave first-aid classes, formed a Women’s Motor Corps, and made plans to establish a blood bank in Honolulu. The following year, Consolidated Amusement Company presented the Red Cross with its first ambulance. The seven sugar plantations on O‘ahu organized a Plantation Provisional Police Force in July 1940, and members began firearms instruction at the Honolulu police range. So valued was this paramilitary force that its 562 men were asked to participate in Army maneuvers . Troops in Hawai‘i then numbered about twenty-five thousand. That number would grow to nearly forty-two thousand in 1941. Schofield Barracks had become the largest Army installation under the American flag. The primary mission of the troops there was to defend Pearl Harbor from Japanese raiders or invaders—and saboteurs and assassins. Fear of what Hawai‘i’s Japanese population would do in the event of war with Japan had preoccupied military planners. Various plans were proposed, including taking local Japanese “hostages.” In August, fingerprinting and registering of aliens was begun. A year earlier, the FBI had reopened its Honolulu office to investigate possible sabotage and espionage. Civilians, too, worried that Japanese nationals in Hawai‘i would act against them. At cocktail parties a joke was told: A nervous haole woman asks her Japanese maid if she would kill her mistress if Japan attacks Hawai‘i. “No,” the maid replies, “that’s the gardener’s job.” John F. B. Stokes, a retired ethnologist from the Bishop Museum, expounded on his belief that Japan had infiltrated the Islands with saboteurs, and that Hawai‘i had become a base for Japan’s ambitions in the Pacific. At the close of the year a five-man Espionage Bureau was established in the Honolulu Police Department. Police Lt. Jack Burns (later an elected governor of Hawai‘i) was assigned as the liaison between the police and the FBI. In a plebiscite conducted at the 1940 election, 67 percent of Hawai‘i voters called for eventual statehood for Hawai‘i. On November 22, Governor Poindexter drew the first number in the Hawai‘i draft lottery. In December, the Navy activated the new Ka -ne‘ohe Naval Air Station. Construction of another air base, to be the largest in the Pacific, on twenty-seven hundred acres at Barbers Hawai‘i Chronicles 12 Point was underway.The editor of Paradise commented:“Not since the wars of conquest, when Kamehameha the Great consolidated the island group . . . has conflict reared its head so close to this archipelago . We heard ominous echoes during the First...