Pearl Harbor | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

April 15, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Jack Roosevelt Robinson

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” (Jack (‘Jackie’) Roosevelt Robinson)

He was born on January 31, 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, the fifth, and last child of Mallie and Jerry Robinson. (In 1936, his older brother Mack won an Olympic silver medal in the 200-meter dash (behind Jesse Owens.))

Jackie was a four-sport athlete in high school and college; during a spectacular athletic career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA,) he had starred in basketball, football, track, and baseball (and became the first student to earn varsity letters in four sports: football (1939 and 1940,) basketball (1940 and 1941,) track (1940) and baseball (1940.)

After exhausting his sports eligibility, Jackie decided to leave UCLA before attaining his degree, despite his mother’s objection, because he wanted to repay her for supporting him during his college career.

Jackie found a job in the winter of 1941 in Honolulu, where he played in the semipro Hawaii Senior Football League for the Honolulu Bears, who had joined the league in 1939 as the Polar Bears or the Hawaiian Vacation Team. (Ardolino)

Unlike the other three teams, the University of Hawaii Rainbows, the Na Aliis (Chiefs) and the Healanis (the Maroons,) the Bears signed their players to contracts, giving Robinson a paying sports job. (Ardolino)

He was paid a $150 advance (deducted from his salary,) a fee of $100 per game, a bonus if the team won the championship and a draft-deferred construction job near Pearl Harbor.

He arrived to great fanfare as the league’s all star, had some superb moments, but succumbed to a recurring injury and faded in the last games.

He stayed at Palama Settlement, rather than with the team in Waikiki (the hotels barred him entry because of the color of his skin.) (PBS)

Their first exhibition game was in Pearl Harbor. Jackie left Honolulu on December 5, 1941, just two days before the Japanese attacked. He was on the Lurline on his way home when Congress formally declared war. He was shortly thereafter inducted into the Army.

Stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was originally denied entry into Officer Candidate School despite his college background. Intervention by a fellow soldier, boxing great Joe Louis, who was also stationed at the base, managed to get the decision reversed. (Swaine)

While in the Army, he had an incident similar to Rosa Parks – on July 6, 1944, Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.

He was with the light-skinned wife of a fellow black officer, and the two walked half the length of the bus, then sat down, talking amiably. The driver, gazing into his rear-view mirror, saw a black officer seated in the middle of the bus next to a woman who appeared to be white. Hey, you, sittin’ beside that woman,” he yelled. “Get to the back of the bus.”

Lieutenant Robinson ignored the order. The driver stopped the bus, marched back to where the two passengers were sitting, and demanded that the lieutenant “get to the back of the bus where the colored people belong.”

Lieutenant Robinson told the driver: “The Army recently issued orders that there is to be no more racial segregation on any Army post. This is an Army bus operating on an Army post.”

The man backed down, but at the end of the line, as Robinson and Mrs. Jones waited for a second bus, he returned with his dispatcher and two other drivers. Robinson refused, and so began a series of events that led to his arrest and court-martial and, finally, threatened his entire career.

Later, all charges stemming from the actual incident on the bus and Robinson’s argument with the civilian secretary were dropped. He had still to face a court-martial, but on the two lesser charges of insubordination arising from his confrontation in the guardhouse.

The court-martial of 2d Lt. Jackie Robinson took place on August 2, 1944. After testimony, voting by secret written ballot, the nine judges found Robinson “not guilty of all specifications and charges.” (Tygiel) In November 1944, he received an honorable discharge and then started his professional baseball career.

He played for the Kansas City Monarchs as a part of the Negro Leagues until Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey decided he wanted to integrate baseball. (Hall of Fame)

On October 23, 1945, it was announced to the world that Robinson had signed a contract to play baseball for the Montreal Royals of the International League, the top minor-league team in the Dodgers organization.

Robinson had actually signed a few months earlier. In that now-legendary meeting, Rickey extracted a promise that Jackie would hold his sharp tongue and quick fists in exchange for the opportunity to break Organized Baseball’s color barrier. (Swain)

Robinson led the International League with a .349 average and 40 stolen bases. He earned a promotion to the Dodgers. (Hall of Fame)

On April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their opening-day game against the Boston Braves. In so doing, he became the first African-American to play in the major leagues since an abortive attempt at integration in 1884. (Schwarz)

At the end of his first season, Robinson was named the Rookie of the Year. He was named the NL MVP just two years later in 1949, when he led the league in hitting with a .342 average and steals with 37, while also notching a career-high 124 RBI. The Dodgers won six pennants in Robinson’s 10 seasons. (Hall of Fame)

Playing football was not Robinson’s only sports experience in Hawaiʻi; immediately following the 1956 Worlds Series (that the Dodgers lost to the Yankees,) on October 12, 1956, the Dodgers went on a Japan exhibition tour.

Along the way, Robinson and the Dodgers stopped for pre-tour exhibitions in Hawaii with games against the Maui All-Stars, the Hawaiian All-Stars and the Hawaiian champion Red Sox. (Jackie Robinson died on October 24, 1972 at the age of 53.)

February 10, 2026 by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Fueling the Forces

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor all of the Navy’s fuel was stored in unprotected above ground tanks at Pearl Harbor, next to the submarine base.

When RADM Chester Nimitz was Commander of the Bureau of Yards & Docks (in 1940) he wanted the Navy’s 2 ½-year supply of fuel oil protected from aerial attack – existing aboveground unprotected tanks next to the Submarine Base presented a vulnerable enemy target.

In 1942, US victory at the battle of Midway altered the role of Hawaii from a defense position to “a springboard for the Pacific offensive. Troops poured into the islands en route to the western Pacific, and were housed in barracks and makeshift camps throughout the islands.”

“There were 43,000-soldiers on Oʻahu on December 7, 1941, plus a handful on the other islands. In the first six months of the war, the total swelled to 135,000. By June of 1945, when plans were mounting for an offensive against the homeland of Japan, troops on Oʻahu alone numbered 253,000.” (Allen; army-mil)

Jungle training and coordinated Army-Navy amphibious landings were practiced in anticipation of the island-hopping battle strategy of the western Pacific. Areas on Oahu that had been taken over by the military at the onset of war were developed as training areas.

“Hawaiʻi served as an invaluable training ground for the amphibious and jungle warfare which characterized the Pacific fighting. Well removed from the combat zone, yet 2,000 miles nearer the battlefront than the Mainland …”

“… there was sufficient area and enough equipment in the Islands to handle many thousands of troops and to embark them for large-scale operations. More important, some of the varied climates and terrains in Hawaii were like those of the target areas.” (Allen; army-mil)

To fuel the forces, the military had three major fuel storage sites located in the mauka lands of Oʻahu: Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility, Waikakalaua Fuel Storage Annex and Kipapa Gulch Fuel Storage Annex (other storage areas supplemented the effort.)

The Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility was started the day after Christmas 1940 and continued through 1943; 20-underground fuel storage tanks were built more that 100-feet below the surface. The facility was designed as an impenetrable, bombproof reserve of fuel for the military.

Each vertical tank is 100-feet in diameter and 250-feet high, roughly the size of a 20-story building, and lined with quarter-inch steel plates.

Each tank is able to store up to 12.5 million gallons of fuel. it has an overall design capacity of 6-million barrels of fuel oil (9.97-billion gallons.)

Dug from the inside, the storage facility is connected with pipes (32-inch-diameter diesel pipe, and 18- and 16-inch jet fuel pipes) and tunnels down to a Pearl Harbor pumping station, more than two-and-a-half miles away.

The tanks were set up in two parallel rows with two main access tunnels, one above the other, bisecting the rows; smaller tunnels branched from these main axis tunnels to the tank cavities.

Waikakalaua Fuel Storage Annex near Wheeler Army Airfield, one of two Air Force Fuel Storage Annexes, was made up of nine 1.75-million-gallon underground storage tanks.

It borders the Wheeler Army Airfield on the Schofield Plateau; underground fuel storage tanks are reported to have been constructed between 1942 and 1945, and were used to store various fuels since 1943.

The other Air Force fuel storage facility was the Kipapa Gulch Fuel Storage Annex that consisted on four massive underground tanks. Each tank is three times the length of a football field. Each tank could hold 2.4-million-gallons of fuel.

A 20-mile, 10-inch pipeline connected the Waikakalaua Fuel Storage Annex and the Kipapa Gulch Fuel Storage Annex with Hickam Air Force Base. Fuels that were stored in the tanks included aviation and motor gasoline and later, JP-4 and JP-8 jet fuel. (army-mil)

The image shows the aboveground fuel storage tanks at the Submarine Base in Pearl Harbor. (October 13, 1941)

December 7, 2025 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Battery Pennsylvania

On the morning of December 7, 1941, a fleet of Japanese carriers launched an air strike against the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. The attack decimated the ships and personnel of the fleet and thrust the US into WW II.

The USS Arizona (the second of two Pennsylvania-class battleships – built in 1916) was moored on “Battleship Row.” Just before 8 am, the ship’s air raid alarm was sounded and the crew was ordered to general quarters. During the attack the Arizona was struck by as many as eight aerial bombs.

In addition, one 1,700-lb armor-piercing shell penetrated the deck and detonated in the powder magazine, causing a “cataclysmic” explosion “which destroyed the ship forward” and ignited a fire which burned for two days. It is thought that most of the Arizona crewmen who perished in the attack died instantly during the explosion. (DPAA)

After the attack, the Arizona was left resting on the bottom with the deck just awash. (U of Arizona) Within one week of the attack, divers surveyed the submerged portions of the ship to determine which parts could be salvaged. (DPAA)

One of the divers, Lt Col Lawrence M Guyer of the Hawaiian Seacoast Artillery Command (HSCAC), concluded that, from an artillery viewpoint, Arizona’s aft turrets 3 and 4 (with three guns each) were serviceable and capable of being used on land.

Guyer was credited with establishing numerous seacoast gun batteries on O‘ahu, including four batteries, each armed with two twin-gun 8-inch 55-caliber naval mounts removed from the aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga in early 1942.

Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the coastal defenses for the island were considered extremely inadequate. Standard coast artillery then in production would have taken two to three years to procure, and Arizona’s 14-inch guns had much greater hitting power than the 6-inch and 8-inch guns being used on O‘ahu at the time. (John Bennett)

The Navy decided that the Army would receive gun turrets 3 and 4 for use as coastal defense guns. (NPS) In June 1942 the Hawaiian Department Engineer and representatives of the Hawaiian Seacoast Artillery Command examined potential sites on O‘ahu after the War Department gave preliminary endorsement to reusing both 14-inch naval turret batteries.

Two sites were selected: one at Mōkapu (Kāne‘ohe – to cover the eastern portions of O‘ahu) , and the other at Kahe, an area known today as Electric Hill (HEI generating plant) on the western shore of Oahu, up the slopes of the Waianae Mountains – to cover the south and west.

Arizona’s aft guns were removed in May 1942. Because the removal of the turrets began before any consideration was given to their reuse, no consideration was given to their reassembly, and no attempt was made to safeguard the integrity of the turret shells, which had been separated into two major components.

The Navy’s 150-ton heavy-lift floating crane transported Turret 4’s faceplate and slide assembly and the aft catapult to Waipio Point for safekeeping in early March 1942. The smaller turret components were removed from the Arizona, transported to the Pearl City Peninsula, and taken to a nearby yard and warehouse, where they were set aside for the salvage operation in May 1943.

Once ashore the equipment was disassembled completely; then the time-consuming task began – cleaning the small parts of corrosion caused by immersion in seawater for over a year. This included reworking and rewinding electrical motors and completely overhauling the hydraulic systems. (John Bennett)

Batteries Pennsylvania (at Mōkapu) and Arizona (at Kahe) were named on October 21, 1942, by a directive from Brig. Gen. Robert C. Garrett, commanding HSCAC. Garret approved the construction plans for both batteries on May 7, 1943.

The adjutant general of the army gave final approval to both projects on August 13, 1943, based on a Hawaiian Dept. letter of May 11, 1943, ‘Plan for Batteries Arizona and Pennsylvania.’

The most complex project undertaken during World War II at Mōkapu Peninsula was that of the construction of Battery Pennsylvania at Mōkapu Point.

Battery Pennsylvania is a 7-stories deep self-contained unit, gouged out of the side of Ulupa‘u Crater. It contains reinforced concrete rooms for radar, plotting, powder and shell storage and eating and sleeping quarters for approximately 160 troops. The battery was completely air conditioned.

Project engineers had to design a central concrete barbette well that extended 70 feet down in rock. The nucleus of the battery was the barbette (the gun mounting system): 42.5 feet in diameter and 70 feet deep.

To sustain a vertical load of 780 tons and a firing thrust of 2,620 tons, a heavy circular steel foundation ring supported the roller path, with radial webs anchored to the reinforced concrete barbette that ranged from nine to 15 feet thick.

The barbette contained three service levels; the first two levels were accessed from the powder and projectile magazines 70 feet below ground. Ammunition service was by a pair of naval-style shell skips powered by motor-winches that raised the shells from the floor of the magazine to the shell-loading platform in the turret 45 feet above.

The capacity of this room was 105 shells aboard ship; the number was increased to 150 at the batteries. A pair of powder hoists similar to those aboard ship raised the powder bags to the powder handling room, 25 feet above the magazine.

It took nearly four years to build the battery and reassemble the gun. In 1944, Army Ground Forces had scheduled Batteries Arizona and Pennsylvania to be manned by four officers and 157 enlisted men each when completed.

Battery Arizona’s construction was halted on August 1, 1945. Although the turret and guns had been mounted, the battery still lacked some components. It was not probable that it was turned over to the coast artillery and manned. The heavy guns at Battery Arizona were never test fired.

Only Battery Pennsylvania was fully completed; it was completed just before the end of the war in the Pacific. Battery Pennsylvania was test fired on August 10, 1945 (the only firing of its guns). (HABS) Today both sites are abandoned; the guns were removed and cut up for scrap shortly after the war ended. (Lots of information and imagery is from John Bennett.)

October 9, 2025 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Rainbow Plan

The primary war planning agencies of the period 1890-1939 were the war colleges of the US Army and US Navy. The US had a series of military plans in place to deal with an array of potential adversaries.

War plans outlined potential US strategies for a variety of hypothetical war scenarios. They were prepared and referenced by colors, each color corresponding to a specific situation or nation.

For instance, of the initial 12-plans, there was War Plan Black, a plan for war with Germany; War Plan Orange for Japan; and even a War Plan Red for Great Britain (with a sub variant Crimson Plan for Canada.)

After World War I, the Joint Army and Navy Board (the predecessor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) reviewed all the prewar plans to ensure they were consistent with the current state of affairs in the world.

The possibility of war with Japan had led the Army and Navy in 1924 to draft a new joint Orange plan to govern the conduct of such a war.

War Plan Orange made no provision for a landing on the Japanese home islands. Japan was to be defeated by ‘isolation and harassment,’ by the disruption of its vital sea communications, and by ‘offensive sea and air operations against her naval forces and economic life.’

With events starting in 1938, with German and Italian aggression in Europe and simultaneous Japanese expansion in the Far East, US war planners realized that the US faced the possibility of war on multiple fronts against a coalition of enemies.

To that end, the Joint Planning Board developed a new series of war plans, the ‘Rainbow’ plans – the term being a play on the respective ‘color’ plans that had been previously drawn up.

The single most important strategy, made before US entry into World War II, in the context of a world threatened by Axis aggression in Europe and Asia, was that Germany must be defeated first.

“In the years preceding US entry into World War II, the Army’s war planners tasked students at the Army War College to prepare responses to a set of amazingly realistic wartime scenarios.”

“The students’ sound but imaginative solutions not only influenced the armed services’ post-1939 Rainbow plans for war with Germany and Japan, they also anticipated and provided answers to most of the war’s major strategic questions.” (Gole)

Ultimately, planning (and later implementation) resulted in War Plan Rainbow 5 – this plan included Hawaiʻi.

“Rainbow 5 assumed the United States, Great Britain and France to be acting in concert; hemisphere defense was to be assured … with early projection of US forces to the eastern Atlantic, and to either or both the African and European Continents”.

“Offensive operations were to be conducted, in concert with British and allied forces, to effect the defeat of Germany and Italy. A strategic defensive was to be maintained in the Pacific until success against the European Axis Powers permitted transfer of major forces to the Pacific for an offensive against Japan.”

As to Hawaiʻi, War Department message of November 27, 1941 read as follows: “Negotiations have come to a standstill at this time. No diplomatic breaking of relations and we will let them make the first overt act. You will take such precautions as you deem necessary to carry out the Rainbow plan. Do not excite the civilian population.” (Proceedings of Army Pearl Harbor Board)

Oʻahu held a position of the first importance in the military structure of the US before and during WWII. During the prewar years, Oʻahu and the Panama Canal Zone were the two great outposts of continental defense. (army-mil)

A key goal in the Pacific was to hold Oʻahu Island as a main outlying naval base and to protect shipping in the waters around the Hawaiian Islands.

In the year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American strategists developed a strategy that focused on “Germany first.” In the end, that was what occurred with the American war effort.

Rainbow 5 imagined the rapid projection of American forces across the Atlantic to Africa or Europe “in order to effect the decisive defeat of Germany, Italy, or both.”

Clearly implied in this statement was the concept that finally emerged as the basic strategy of World War II: that in a war with the European Axis and Japan, Germany was the major enemy and that the main effort therefore should be made in Europe to secure the decisive defeat of Germany at the earliest possible date.

But for much of 1942 and well into 1943, the US deployed substantially greater forces to the Pacific than to Europe. This was in response both to political pressure from the American people and the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Pacific over the first six months of the war.

On June 6, 1944, more than 160,000-Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline, to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France.

General Dwight D Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.” More than 5,000-ships and 13,000-aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end, the Allies gained a foot-hold in Continental Europe.

The final battles of the European Theater of WWII, as well as the German surrender to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union took place in late-April and early-May 1945.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. On September 2, 1945, the Japanese signed the Instrument of Surrender on the deck of USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. (Lots of information here from army-mil and GlobalSecurity.)

June 4, 2025 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Codebreakers – Secret to Success at Battle of Midway

Around 7:20 Sunday morning, a single-engine Japanese reconnaissance plane entered the cloud-streaked airspace over Pearl Harbor. Launched earlier that morning from the heavy cruiser Chikuma, the plane circled as the pilot studied the ground below.

Having seen all he needed to see, at precisely 7:35 the recon pilot radioed his report to the striking force, which quickly relayed the information to the Japanese planes now approaching Oahu from the north: “Enemy formation at anchor; nine battleships, one heavy cruiser, six light cruisers are in the harbor.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor set in motion a series of battles in the Pacific between the Japanese and the United States.

With the fall of Wake Island to the Japanese in late-December 1941, Midway became the westernmost US outpost in the central Pacific.

Midway occupied an important place in Japanese military planning. According to plans made before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese fleet would attack and occupy Midway and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska as soon as their position in South Asia was stabilized.

Defenses on the atoll were strengthened between December and April. Land-based bombers and fighters were stationed on Eastern Island. US Marines provided defensive artillery and infantry.

Operating from the atoll’s lagoon, seaplanes patrolled toward the Japanese-held Marshall Islands and Wake, checking on enemy activities and guarding against further attacks on Hawaiʻi.

The turning point in the Pacific came in June 1942, when the US surprised and overpowered the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway.

That victory was possible, in large part, because of the work of a little-known naval codebreaker named Joe Rochefort. (Rochefort, responsible for the Pacific Fleet’s radio intelligence unit at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, felt immense guilt at the failure to predict the Pearl Harbor attack.)

The Japanese Combined Fleet depended on a complex system of codes to communicate by radio. The codes were regularly modified to avoid detection, but in the confusion of the rapid Japanese expansion in the South Pacific the change scheduled for early-1942 was delayed.

The course to Midway started not on a map in a top secret chart room with top strategists and tacticians contemplating Japan’s next move, but was set by the deciphering of messages from the Japanese Fleet.

This was done by a handful of US Navy intelligence officers stationed at Pearl Harbor.

In the spring of 1942, it took cryptanalysts in Australia, Washington, DC and Hawai‘i to achieve the breakthrough that made an American victory at Midway possible.

The Japanese naval code, known as JN 25, consisted of approximately 45,000 five-digit numbers, each number representing a word or a phrase.

Breaking this code, which was modified regularly, meant finding the meanings of enough of these numbers that a whole message could be decrypted by extrapolating the missing parts.

According to one of the leading codebreakers involved, it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with most of its pieces always missing.

Leading the codebreaking effort was Station Hypo, the code name for the combat intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor under Commander Joseph Rochefort.

Rochefort included members of the band from the battleship ‘California,’ damaged at Pearl Harbor. He thought their musical skills might make them adept codebreakers in much the same way that Marine bandsmen used to serve as fire control technicians on ship — the ability to quickly read and play music made them excellent mathematical problem solvers.

By May 8, Rochefort knew that a major enemy operation, whose objective was sometimes called AF, was in the offing and that it would take place somewhere in the Central Pacific.

When they checked this against their partially solved map grid, the found that “A” represented on coordinate of Midway’s potion and “F” represented the other.

His superiors in Washington weren’t convinced; they devised a test that would flush out the location of AF.

The radio station on Midway dispatched an uncoded message falsely reporting that the water distillation plant on the island had broken, causing a severe water shortage. Within 48 hours, a decrypted Japanese radio transmission was alerting commanders that AF was short of water.

Several days later, he was sure the target was Midway. As a result, the Americans entered the battle with a very good picture of where, when and in what strength the Japanese would appear.

On June 4, 1942, armed with information from Rochefort and his team, American planes caught the Japanese by surprise and won the decisive battle – it marked the turning point in the war in the Pacific.

In the four-day sea and air battle, 292 aircraft, four Japanese aircraft carriers – Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu, all part of the six carrier force in the attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier – and a heavy cruiser were sunk. There were 2,500 Japanese casualties.

The US lost the carrier Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammann, 145 aircraft and suffered 307 casualties. (The inspiration and information in this summary comes from NPS, NPR and Naval History)