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An article written by a journalist onboard a Clipper flying boat flying to Hawaii's Pearl Harbor in 1940.
Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 243, 12 October 1940, Page 1
PLAYGROUND WITH GRIM ASPECT
SUDDENLY someone said, "Destroyers ahead!" and we all saw them. They were five, steaming in a row, each with a bone in its teeth and a seething ribbon of wake behind. They changed direction, and the ribbons lay curled on the flat blue.
In a few minutes there were more destroyers, and then a cruiser and then a ship towing a target. This was our first sight of the vast aggregation of naval might which, in the view of many people, now keeps the seething Pacific from boiling over. We were to see more of it.
Two or three hours later, in the afternoon of the day we had left Canton Island, land lifted out of the distance —land with rain clouds clinging to its height, but leaving clear one bold, jutty headland.
"Diamond Head," said one of the radio officers, off-duty and yarning with us in the Clipper's smoking cabin. "Pearl Harbour straight ahead." Diamond Head and Pearl Harbour! They carried a sort of distantly thrilling association, like Balik Papan and Sandy Hook.
Pearl Harbour
The great winding waterway of Pearl Harbour lies behind a narrow sea entrance, widening and turning on itself in deep bays and inlets that make it seem like a pirates' haven. We had lost-most of our height by the time we reached the land that almost encloses the harbour, and we could recognise the type of the Douglas B-18 bombers that were lined up, 40 or 50 strong, in front of the big hangars at the Army's Hickam Field.
There was no need for anyone to explain that we alighted short over the land, almost at the mouth of the harbour, because of a Navy regulation. Anyone could see that the navy would not want to have passengers of any nationality flying low over those miles of warships.
For there were miles of them. Destroyers stacked together in batches of five; light cruisers, in twos and threes; heavy cruisers; and from one inlet rose the fighting tops of seven of America's proud "battle wagons."
Watching Europe, hastening prediction of supplies for Britain, multiplying its own defences, the United-States wants above all things a politically tranquil Pacific. This has never been shown more clearly than in recent official statements by the Secretary of State (Mr. Cordell Hull) emphasising America's interests in preserving the status quo in French Indo-China and the Netherlands Indies. Only one thing gives such statements meaning—sea power. And American sea power in the vast Pacific depends primarily on that ocean's most powerful fortress - Honolulu.
The writer, who called twice at Hawaii when be flew to the United States and back recently, describes in this article from the "Melbourne Herald" what a visitor can see of America's power based on the islands.
We taxied, I suppose, eight miles. On the shores of the harbour were tall palms, vivid hibiscus and flamboyants. On the waters was the greater portion of America's investment in seapower—so many billions of dollars worth, so much hitting power, that anyone within range of it must think twice before taking a risk.
Ramps rise from the waters to hangars. What the hangars hid I cannot guess, but the ramps flaunted the most astonishing display of naval air strength that has ever been assembled in the world.
When Dr. Richard Archbold's Guba was here, before her Indian and Atlantic Ocean crossings, we thought she was a big flying boat. Indeed, she is. She can carry a number of men and a quantity of armament for about 4000 miles.
Hundreds of Planes
On those ramps her sister-ships did not look big; there were too many of them. They were lined up close together, rank after rank, splashed with vivid yellow paint that would call aloud to search planes after a forced alighting. There were dozens, scores, nearer 200 than 100, of them. And with them one or two bigger, boats, new development types to replace the PBY's some time in the future.
All had flown the 2500 miles from the mainland to get there. The United States Navy uses these flying boats as a scouting screen. When it goes out, it follows in their wake. Fanning ahead, flying tight parallel courses, the PBY's see what goes on at sea, and that is something the commander of a fleet is always anxious to know. They are probably the best reconnaissance craft in the world.
Close behind us a huge shape loomed, flat-topped. '"Yorktown," said someone. It was the first aircraft carrier we had seen, the only one, at that time, in harbour. The others were moving about the seas, carrying on what are officially manoeuvres, but what, in fact, amount to a sort of "nerve peace." When units of the fleet leave Pearl Harbour, as they seem to do whenever there are reports of something stirring in the Orient, there are plenty of watchers to flash that bare fact across the ocean, in some secret code.
Pleasure and Business
Honolulu is an "aloha" town, in the cause of the tourist traffic that supports the elegant and costly shops along Waikiki, that fills the 50-dollar-a-day suites in the magnificent hotels, that keeps a large proportion of the population busy in the service trades. You have to be quick to avoid being garlanded with leis. It is also a sugar and pineapple town. Your car drives for miles along roads between the high rustling cane that is worth £15,000,000 a year.
Near the wharves the huge pineapple of the Dole Company, high on a metal tower, dominates the scene as a £12,000,000 a year product should. Honolulu is also an Asiatic town. On your way from Pearl Harbour to Waikiki you drive through streets that might have been lifted out of Kobe or Tokyo, and even in the more exclusive quarters you will find shops with Japanese signs.
The Japanese, as well as thousands of people of other races, were brought in to work in the sugar plantations, as many of them still do. To-day, 155,000 strong in a total island population of 414,991, they are a real problem. Only 35,000 are officially aliens, but the Americans suspect that the interests of many of the island-born Japanese are not those of America. Certainly, after the little Japanese boys and girls—charming-looking kiddies—have finished for the day with the United States school, they go to a Japanese school, theoretically to learn only the language of their ancestors, but also, the military people believe, to learn that the Emperor of Japan is their God.
What to do on "M-day," when war plans go into effect —if "M-day" ever comes—is the Government's problem. One suggestion is that the white American citizens would be withdrawn to the mainland, leaving 60,000 Hawaiians and Hawaiian half-castes, 30,000 Portuguese, 7000 Puerto Ricans, 28,000 Chinese, 7000 Koreans and 52,000 Filipinos with the Japanese and the Army and Navy.
The Asiatics, it is held, would last longer than whites because their standard of living is lower, and if the islands were cut off they would make the limited food supplies of sorts that cannot be grown go further. Specialising in pineapples and sugar, the islands are far from self-supporting in other foods.
The possibility of war dominates Hawaiian life, for Honolulu, aloha town, sugar town, Asiatic town, town of beautiful palms and great shade trees and streams from the mountains, and surf and sun, is primarily a defence post.
Our host drove us through a suburb that looked like a model city, peaceful and calm, but which was in reality a military encampment. He pointed out to us, from the top of a peak, the heavily-gunned forts at Diamond Head and along the coast, and told us of the secret ammunition stores hundreds of feet within the rock of Oahu.
Off Waikiki, and further along to Pearl Harbour, stood two guard vessels, always on duty. In a park near our hotel were sandbagged anti-aircraft gun-posts, and a long row of aircraft sound locators. All day, all night, the air rang with the vicious whine of American military planes. Lazily above the surf, a fighter rolled in a perfect aerobatic display. Over Pearl Harbour a towing-plane ran out its target at the end of a quarter-mile of cable, and the attackers poised thousands of feet above.
A big flying boat came in, touched down, as another went off. At night I saw a dozen searchlights playing on the base of the clouds that almost always hang low on the green mountains.
The army and navy do not commit themselves on this. They explain that the islands are well adapted to defence, that more money is going into them every day, and the extra cent the American smoker now pays for each packet of cigarettes is finding a home in Honolulu.
Millions are going into Hickam Field, soon to be the home of 400 planes. More millions are going into Pearl Harbour, already estimated to have absorbed about £25,000,000.
Current upkeep costs of naval ships and planes, together with the highly mechanised army force of more than 20,000 stationed near Honolulu, run into millions more. Defences are worth more than could normally be bought with all this because Nature helps, army officers point out. Reefs surround the islands, every opening is charted, the gunners in tin forts ask no better sitting shots for their shells, some of them 10-inch, than ships attempting to attack in such restricted waters.
You will hear, in Honolulu, of the chain of United States defences that is growing along a wide arc out from Alaska into mid-Pacific, touching at Midway Island, where what was once a tiny Pan-American base has grown to a settlement of some hundreds of permanent residents—nearly all military—and at many another island until its southern end rests on Samoa.
You will hear of formation flights of PBY flying boats to Canton Island and out across the Northern Pacific route. As several influential men explained it, there are two reasons for the heavy spending on the Hawaiian group. Firstly, the islands constitute a from line of defence against any attack that might be made on the American Pacific coast. San Francisco and Los Angeles appear to be almost entirely undefended, but in fact they are not- —they are more than 2000 miles inside the prepared positions from which the American fleet would advance to meet any attack from the west.
Secondly, America regards peace In the Pacific as a most desirable feature of world politics, essential to the maintenance of her considerable investments in the Orient and of the supplies of tin and rubber which must reach her industrial machine across that ocean. The Americans hope that their expenditure on fortifying Hawaii, and the presence there of almost the entire fleet, represent the premium on an effective insurance policy against a great Pacific war.
What type of Pacific aggression would send the United States fleet out to battle, no one knows —not even the United States Government. But in the American view, this uncertainty is not a bad thing, since it is a huge variable in the equation by which any possible aggressor must reckon his chances of success; while it is a variable, the Americans believe, military moves in the Pacific are too much of a for any nation to risk its future on.
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