Countdown to Pearl Harbor by Steve Twomey

Author:Steve Twomey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Under partly sunny skies and with temperatures in the seventies, as they mostly were at that time of year, a great ship did indeed come around Diamond Head on Wednesday. It was the Lurline out of Los Angeles, as impressive as always, a Matson Line M on each of her twin funnels, bringing tourists to vacations and residents back to their homes on what would turn out to be her last carefree port call for many a month. While Kimmel’s niece may have feared Japanese torpedoes when she and her children made the crossing in November, the islands remained as popular with mainlanders as ever, perhaps more so now that London lived under Nazi bombs and Paris, Amsterdam, and so many other European destinations lived under Nazi rule.

No doubt to the traditional welcome of band music and draped leis, the Lurline surrendered 793 passengers to the Honolulu pier on Wednesday morning: 741 who had not come to play football, 52 who had. The teams from San Jose State College in California and Willamette University in Oregon would each play the University of Hawaii, as well as each other, in a round-robin in paradise. The first game, between Willamette and Hawaii, was set for Saturday at Honolulu Stadium in verdant Manoa Valley, where mists sometimes floated down from the mountains “like great white parachutes.” Most of the players would serve their country in the next four years. San Jose State’s Kenneth C. Bailey would be killed in action; Willamette’s Ted Ogdahl would be nearly bayoneted to death on a beach at Okinawa in 1945.

On their way to the Moana Hotel in Waikiki Beach, the teams traveled through a Honolulu in which General Walter Short’s troops still stood their antisaboteur posts, but also a Honolulu that was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, or as much like it as a town that never knew snow could look. Four thousand lights illuminated the evenings along Fort Street downtown. Gift ideas crammed both newspapers. “Christmas has a year round meaning when you give electrical gifts,” the advertisement of the Hawaiian Electric Company said. Sears suggested a Hawaiian-made “lounge coat” for $4.98, or a “slack suit” for $3.98. One essential component of the season was being imported, of necessity. “Here’s the Good News, Folks,” a Star-Bulletin headline proclaimed. “Yule Trees Are Coming.” Precisely 12,995 bales from the Pacific Northwest—about 78,000 trees—were due in port on December 14. When not shopping, residents could sample the films playing at local houses, perhaps A Slight Case of Murder starring Edward G. Robinson, described as a “hilarious comedy-drama,” or Road to Zanzibar with Bing Crosby, also described as a “hilarious comedy-drama.”

Sometime on Wednesday, a Pan Am Clipper from San Francisco skidded onto the waters of Pearl Harbor, mail in its belly, one of the missives earmarked for Husband Kimmel. “Dear Mustapha,” Betty Stark began, his preferred greeting in personal letters to the fleet commander. This one was dated eight days earlier, before the war warning, before the dispatches about Japanese code destruction.

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