Awaiting the New PBY-5s

"We were an operating squadron again."

During that almost idyllic but rather boring peaceful time, I maintained a desultory correspondence not only occasionally with the family back home, but also with Patty Cross, Elaine, and Shirley Mills.  The latter did not last.  Somehow I was just not much interested and her letters were not the breezy, chatty notes that I got form Elaine and Patty.  Shirley’s letters tended to have a rather possessive flavor to them.  I decided that I could do with less letter writing so, finally, I wrote her that we were not meant for each other—a sort of “Dear Jane” letter.  In return she sent me a new portrait of herself inscribed, “To Conrad, a boy who will always have a spot in my heart”.  I thought that would be that.

I kept up my correspondence off and on with both Elaine and Patty, keeping them up to date and asking about people and things at home.  Elaine was the most faithful to answer.  She wrote as delightfully as she talked, often skipping blithely from subject to subject and always was interesting and entertaining.

Around the first of November (I did not record the exact date in my diary) every one of us were on the ramp the day the new PBY-5s came sweeping around Bird Island and over the bay.  They were a magnificent sight when they made one pass in formation over the base before they peeled off to land.  They were powered by the latest supercharged Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 engines that produced 1,450 horsepower each.  That gave them better takeoff capability, a cruise speed of 110 knots, and improved climb capability.

There were external changes that were obvious.  They flat sliding waist gunners hatches had been replaced by Plexiglas gun “blisters” that also gave good visibility for anti-submarine patrols.  The shaped of the rudder had been changed to a straight trailing edge.  Instead of the silver fuselages and rudders with squadron stripes, the new airplanes were painted a camouflage blue on the topsides and light grey on the bottom in an effort to make the airplanes harder to see by potential enemy either from above or below.  All in all, the PBY-5s had much more businesslike appearance than the old PBY-1s and the deep-throated roar of those big fourteen cylinder radial engines literally sent delighted shivers along my spine.

Our rather sullen non-cooperation with Lt. Delaney, born of boredom and inactivity, was suddenly forgotten.  We enthusiastically reinforced the beach crew with volunteers (me included), splashed the big 600-pound side mounts into the water, and in record time brought those beautiful aircraft ashore.  We were an operating squadron again.

The Fighting Frieze Brothers

During that summer [1941], my opportunistic brother, Dick, teamed up with one of our mechs named Bill Greer.  Greer fancied himself as an Edward G. Robinson type and he did, indeed resemble that actor playing a gangster role.  He was short and stocky, swarthy complexion, black hair, and a thin black mustache.  There was always a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth around which there was an almost perpetual sardonic smile.  He was a much better “card mechanic” than he was an airplane mechanic and brother Dick was an apt pupil.  (It was not long before I would no longer play poker with either of them.)

Actually, both Greer and Dick played it straight in most games with squadron shipmates except for a little practice now and then to keep their fingers supple.  They confined their card sharking to games at Army or Marine bases.  They would go into a game separately and, with one of them on each side of the table and apparently strangers to each other, they would take turns “third basing” for each other and invariably come away with a nice profit—enough that they solved the problem of liberty transportation.  Greer, in gangster tradition, turned up with a big black Cadillac sedan.  Dick went for a flashier “date buggy” and showed up one day with a big baby blue 1937 LaSalle convertible sedan equipped with chrome spotlights, fender mounted spare tires, and a powerful straight-eight that was a real gas guzzler.

Our life at Kaneohe Bay was truly idyllic through the summer of 1941.   We all agreed that it had to be the best duty in the entire Navy.  We spent most of our working hours on the ramp scrubbing and polishing those old airplanes and using liberal quantities of yellow zinc chromate to fight the inevitable salt air corrosion on the aluminum structure.  Every three or four days we would go on a three or four-hour training flight—the pilots practicing navigation and giving us strafing and bombing practice.

The PBY had no internal bomb bays.  Our armament of bombs, depth charges, or torpedoes were carried on external racks up under the broad wings.  We could carry either twelve one hundred pound bombs, four five hundred pound bombs or depth charges, or two 21-inch torpedoes.  We were provided little lead practice bombs to drop wither on smoke markers or on target sleds towed by ships.  Infrequently, we went on high altitude bombing practice over the bombing range on the island of Kahoolawe off the west side of Maui.  Those were long flights because, at the PBY-1 cruising speed of 100 knots and a climb speed of ninety coupled with a laboring rate of climb, it took a while to get to our maximum altitude of 12,000 feet.

In September, we got some welcome news.  We were to fly the creaking old PBY-1s stateside and pick up thirteen brand new improved model PBY-5s at the factory in San Diego.  We were ecstatic—a trans-Pacific mass flight and we would get brand new airplanes!  Many of us on assigned flight crews did not get to make the flights, however.  Leading Chief Duke Byron re-shuffled flight crew assignments so that the ferry crews were made up of the older men who had been in the islands long enough to qualify for annual leave.  Dick, Greer, Glover, Joe Brooks, and I would be among those left behind to more or less twiddle our thumbs until the ferry crews got back with the new planes in early November.

When the airplanes had departed on their stateside flight and we had received word that all planes made it without incident, we settled into an even more leisurely routine at Kaneohe.  Duty sections were small and liberty very plentiful.  Our VP-11 acting commanding officer, Lt. Delaney, was soon faced with a problem—how to keep the 150-odd men without airplanes busy.  He tired several special activities such as a boxing tournament that went over like a lead balloon.  When he tried organizing softball teams he struck out entirely.  Most of us did not particularly like Delaney and simply would not play ball for him.  He finally gave up and simply gave all the special liberty that was requested.

I did stumble onto one special activity in which I offered to participate.  The wife of our executive officer decided to form a VP-11 drama group and the play she selected for an opener was “Seven Keys to Baldpate”—the senior class play in which I had the leading role of Magee in 1939.  I could still remember most of the lines without looking at the lay book.  At the tryouts, without reading from the script, I was selected to play Magee once more.  It was not to be, however.  The group was formed shortly before the arrival of our new airplanes and rehearsals were scheduled to begin in earnest the second week of December so the play could be presented in conjunction with the holidays.  The Japanese were to put a stop to that.

During those halcyon days of October and November in 1941, Richard and I had a reputation in the squadron for frequent verbal scrapping as sibling will inevitably do.  We went on liberty together often in the blue LaSalle, usually accompanied by Glover, but we occasionally had a few arguments.  Sometime during that period I forget exactly when, we became “those fighting Frieze brothers” purely by accident.

Since civilian clothes were not allowed on the base, we had each rented lockers at a “locker club” in Honolulu and had purchased some basic civilian clothes to wear on liberty instead of our uniforms.  I had a pair of slacks, some sports shirts, and a lightweight jacket.

On one liberty both Glove and a shipmate Art Grace had gone into town with us.  During the course of the evening Grace managed to get himself thoroughly drunk—and when he was drunk he was mean.  The rest of us had a few drinks as well.  Sometime in the shank of the evening we went back to the locker club to change back into uniform to go back to Kaneohe.

I do not recall what started the argument between Grace and Dick, but Grace got mad and stomped out of the locker club declaring that no way would he ride back to Kaneohe in the blue car.  We just let him go although we knew that the last Windward Transit had left and that he did not have money for a cab.  “Hell,” Glover said, “let the bastard walk or hitch hike—might sober him up a little!”  We went to the Black Cat and had a couple more drinks.

Somewhere up in Nuuanu Valley on our way to the Pali we caught up with Art Grace trudging along the shoulder of the road.  Apparently he had been unable to thumb a ride.  I insisted that, after all, he was a VP-11 shipmate and that we should stop and pick him up.  Dick pulled over.

Grace had not sobered up appreciably.  He proceeded to cuss us out soundly and finally got so mad that he pulled a very small penknife out and opened the blade, declaring as he did that he would uct one of us.  I had enough to drink that I grabbed his arm, got the little knife away from him and threw it off into the brush getting a cut on a finger in the process.  Art was so drunk he really did not offer much resistance at that point. 

Later I recalled only that Glover said, “Shee-it, we ought to Sunday punch the bastard and throw him into the car!”

In my alcohol fog I thought I was just the man to Sunday punch Art and swung a hard right at him.  It was unfortunate that Dick was standing directly behind Grace, half supporting the frunk.  Just as I swung, Art’s head slumped forward (he was apparently passing out) and my fist missed him and caught Dick on the cheekbone.  I was wearing a heavy Navy ring on that hand and it laid open a pretty good gash on his cheek.  We shoved Art into the back seat and went on to Kaneohe.

At muster the next morning Dick showed up with a bandaid on his cheek and a beautiful purple shiner.  Of course the story inevitably got twisted and scuttlebutt was simply that I had done it to him—which was true, but I had not meant to hit him.  It was an accident.  When I would explain that, eyebrows would raise and someone would snort, “Oh sure!”

Art Grace, it turned out, was an ornery s.o.b. and his story was that Dick ahd held him while I tried to clobber him and that he could whip us both only one at a time.  Since he did not have a mark on him, he was ignored and it was assumed merely that Dick and I had a fight and I belted him.  Our reputation as “the fighting Frieze brothers” was really quite undeserved.

Except for the inevitable occasional squabbling of siblings, Richard and I got alone more as good friends than brothers.  He was reluctant to lend me the big blue LaSalle to go off in liberty with others but we used it frequently, often with glover or other friends.

I sometimes double-dated with Dick when he took his little Japanese friend from the saimen stand out for an evening or for a picnic.  She had a friend named Vivian, a beautiful, slim little half Chinese girl who sometimes came along as mu date.  We never developed more than a casual relationship but she liked me well enough that on one occasion she presented me with a good luck charm.  It was a small teak statue of the Laughing Buddha.  Supposedly, rubbing the Buddha’s fat belly would bring good luck.

One of our favorite spots for a night beer party was Haunama Bay which would later become famous for a steamy beach scene in Jack Jones’ “From Here to Eternity”.  It is a developed Hawaii state park now with asphalt paths, lights, and restrooms; however, in those days it was a very isolated cover reached only by a steep, winding path down the cliff from the Kam Highway.  With that car, we could always recruit a few girls.  I never asked Glover where he found some of the dates he would have.  They were usually haole and seemed quite familiar with the South Hotel Street area.

Becoming AMM Third Class

"Since Hawaii was not on war alert, those final peaceful days of 1941 were devoted to getting the squadron fully operational"

Four days after our arrival at Kaneohe Bay, I took the examination for aviation machinist mate third class and scored a 4.0 (one hundred percent).  My petty officer rate would become effective in two months and I could qualify for a flight crew.  In the meantime, I continued as a member of the beach crew, swimming in the clear water of the bay every day.  With my fair complexion, I sunburn very easily; however, with liberal application of cocoa butter (the only thing available in the way of sun bloc) my freckles gradually merged until I was sufficiently brown to stay out in the sun for extended periods during working hours.

During the last week in June, my blithe existence as a seaman on the beach crew came to an end.  I was ordered on temporary duty in the mess hall as a mess cook.  (Other than being assigned “captain of the head” or scraping paint, mess cooking was the bane of every seaman’s life.  Each unilt was obligated to furnish two or three mess attendants to serve food on the steam tables and do the swamping up in the mess hall.  My turn had come.)

I moved into the mess cook’s barracks at the mess hall building (where we could be rousted out at five AM to set up for morning chow) and suffered the indignity through the month of July.  I chafed with impatience the full time to get back to the airplanes.

It was a miserable period in my Navy career.  When I was notified by the squadron yeoman on the first day of August that my rate had come through, I was ecstatic.  My base pay would now be $72 a month and, as soon as I could get on a flight crew and draw flight skins, it would be a total of $108—a small fortune to an old Ozark boy right out of the Depression.  On our next liberty after payday, out two or three of us who had sewed the third class “crow” of an aviation machinist made on our left sleeves, caught the Red Peril over the Pali and had several zombies at Trader Vics—a traditional celebration.  (I served scrambled eggs the next morning with a vicious hangover and none of us could remember getting back to the base!)

The day after that I lurked in the mess hall after morning chow until our leading chief, CPO “Duke” Byron, was having a last cup of coffee before muster.  As I recall, the conversation went something like this:

“Scuse me, chief, they still got me on mess cookin’ here and I just made third class mech.”

“That so?”

“Yessir—and I sure would like to get on a plane crew.  I got a four point oh on my exam and I been studying everything about those PBYs since I came to the squadron.  I’m good on machine guns, too.”

“That right?”

“Sure is chief—figger I can third mech with the best of them!”

He got out his seat.  “Gotta go to muster.  I’ll think about it.  By the way what’s your name, mac?”

“Frieze, Chief.  Dick Frieze is my brother—he’s already third mech.”

CPO turned to walk out with a noncommittal, “I’ll let you know.”  Two days later I was ordered to report back to the squadron.  On the “Watch, Quarter, and Station Bill” I was listed as third mechanic on the crew of PBY 11-P-11.  As far as I was concerned, I was about as close to heaven as I was liabel to get for quite a while.

The structure of a PBY flight crew was a senior pilot who was the PPC (patrol plan commander), a co-pilot, an enlisted pilot, a leading petty officer who was the “plane captain”, a second mech, third mech, a first radioman, and a second radioman.  (After the war started a bombardier who was an enlisted ordnanceman would be added to combat crews.)

I do not remember all the names on our flight crew of 11-P-11.  The PPC was Ens. Charles “Dopey” Clar, the co-pilot was Ens. Charley “Whiskey” Willis, and the plane captain was AMM1/c “Tex” Foret.  The second mech was Dave Davenport.  I do not recall the radiomen or the AP.

Since Hawaii was not on war alert, those final peaceful days of 1941 were devoted to getting the squadron fully operational at Kaneohe, sporadic and relatively short training flight, and maintaining the airplanes.  The PBY-1s of VP-11 were more than five years old.  They had been first thirteen PBYs off the assembly line at Consolidated and were the airplanes that had made the first mass flight from the mainland to Hawaii in 1936.  It was my understanding that our 11-P-16 airplane was the original XPBY-1.

The old airplanes took a lot of maintenance which rapidly improved our skills as mechanics.  Our plane captain, Foret, had been in the Navy for more than twelve years and he taught us well, driving us unmercifully during working hours.

Working hours were still short.  We remained on “tropical working hours”—muster at 0700, an hour for noon chow, and secure at 1400 (2:00 PM).  Except when we had the duty, liberty cards were available evenings and weekends from 1400 on Friday to 0700 Monday.  Only our funds limited the time we could spend “ashore”.

There were always activities going on at the base during off hours—some that were contrary to Naval Regulations.  Regulations forbade gambling and hard liquor on the base but there was the station beer garden and, almost any evening, poker games here and there and crap games either in the barracks head or the hangar washroom.  We quickly became relatively expert at five card stud or draw, blackjack, and side bets in a crap game.

The Country Club of the Pacific

Chapter 24

“The Country Club of the Pacific”

Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station

Summer, 1941

At the time of commissioning on 4 June 1941, the PBY base at Kaneohe Bay was not yet finished.  Contractors were still working on roads.  Only one of the eventual five big hangars had been completed and a second was half built.  Landscaping was not complete and the new black asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks were bordered by a few newly-planted palm trees and raw red island earth on which grass was just beginning to show.

After the crowded conditions of Ford Island, Kaneohe was a welcome relief to us.  The two-story barracks were large and airy.  We had new steel double-deck bunks that had real mattresses instead of the horsehair pads from our hammocks.  Instead of meager half lockers, each man had a six-foot steel locker at the head of his bunk.

Across an asphalt parking area from the Number One barracks where VP-11 was quartered we had a large ships’ service building that held a ship’s store, coffee shop, bowling alley, and a movie theater.  It was built in an L shape and, behind a curving wall, offered a beer garden for use after working hours in lieu of an enlisted men’s or CPOs’ club.  Officers’ quarters and the officers club were across the broad entry road on the slope of Hawaiiloa Hill.  Beyond a grassy quadrangle between the row of barracks and the administration building was a large mess hall and the brig.  The huge seaplane parking ramp, launch ramps, and the big new hangars fronted on the calm blue waters of Kaneohe Bay.

The view from our new home was magnificent.  Kaneohe is on the green windward side of the island.  From the operating ramp we looked westward across the bay past Chris Holmes Island to the village of Kaneohe and, farther south, toward Kailua.  The backdrop was the Pali side of the Koolau Mountains that divide the island.  Their verdant peaks were eternally topped by towering white cumulus clouds formed by the warm trade winds that swept ceaselessly up the mountain slopes and provided us natural air-conditioning.  To the north, just beyond the entrance to the bay from the sea was the green come of Chinaman’s Hat, a tiny islet just off the white line of breakers along the coast.

It was an idyllic setting.  In the months to come, when the base landscaping was completed, NAS Kaneohe would become known to envious personnel from other bases and from the surface fleet as “the country club of the Pacific”.  We complained about the heat and the mosquitoes, but privately, we all felt fortunate to be stationed there.

The one drawback to life at Kaneohe Bay was that we were a bit isolated form our liberty haunts in Honolulu.  Neither Kaneohe nor Kailua offered much other than some small cafes, a tavern called “The Coconut Grove”, and a small movie theater.  Transportation to Honolulu was via a small local bus line, “Windward Transit”.  We called it the “Red Peril” because the line had but two rather rickety small busses that, beneath many dents and layers of red dust, had once been painted red.  Kanaka drivers wheeled the little busses recklessly over the old Pali Road to the bus stop near the YMCA on Peretania Street.

The old Pali road has been closed for years after a tunnel was dug under the Pali for the current four-lane freeway.  It was something that had to be experienced to be appreciated.  The Pali is a sheer cliff at the top of Nuuanu Valley that overlooks Kailua and scene of King Kamehameha’s triumph over the army of Oahu when he consolidated the islands many years ago and became the first monarch of all the islands.  Legend has it that Kamehameha drove the Oahu army up Nuuanu Valley and straight off the cliff, killing them all.  We heard rumors that bones could still be dug up in the talus at the foot of the cliff.

The old Pali road twisted and turned along ledges that were literally chiseled from the face of the cliff with the sheer rock wall on one side and a straight drop to the floor of the valley on the other.  It was a perilous route but the kanaka drivers wheeled down it with great abandon.  It was a white-knuckle drive in a car, too, but we became accustomed to it and it cut the one hour trip around the island via Koki Head and Kaimuki in half.

Temporary Assignment to Midway and a Brush with History

My promotion to seaman first class became effective on May 1^st of 1941 and my pay jumped to the princely sum of $54 per month.  I happily had the third seaman’s stripe added to the cuffs of my dress blues and I got all of my loose white jumpers tailored to fit my lean frame.  I also concentrated on my practical factors studies for the petty officer rate of AMM3c because I would be eligible in just three months.

Beyond third class, promotions could come slowly in the peacetime Navy because quotas in each rate were limited.  I recall one evening that Dick, Glover, and I were sitting in the Ford Island beer garden killing time until the evening movie started.  We were discussing what our future plans might be beyond our current six-year enlistments.  We wound up agreeing that if we should be fortunate enough to make first class petty officer in that six years it would be smart to stay in the Navy for an entire career.

(We had no inkling, of course, of how a war could and would change everything.  If anyone had told us that at the end of six years Dick and Glover would be chief petty officers and that I would be a commissioned officer, we would have all gotten hernias from laughing!)

Preparations were going forward for the move of VP-23 from Ford Island to the new Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay.  The base was to be commissioned on 4 June 1941.  We would be the first squadron in and would become VP-11 of Patrol Wing One.  We would be followed by VP-12 and VP-14 (At our enlisted level we also had no inkling that Patrol Wing Two was permanently assigned to Pearl Harbor and that Patrol Wing One was destined to go to the front lines in the deep South Pacific when the war started.  We never worried about strategic planning.  We simply did the jobs we were trained for and, in our spare time, went ashore to have a little fun.)

It was decided that, during the transition and to make the move to Kaneohe easier, several of our VP-23 airplanes would go to Midway Island for two weeks of advance base operations.  They would then return directly to the new base at Kaneohe.

The Midway operations would require the support of ground crews. Both Glover and I were assigned to the Midway support group and Dick remained behind with the balance of the squadron that would affect the move of all equipment across the island.  On May 10^th the ground crew contingent boarded the aircraft tender USS WRIGHT for the voyage to Midway Island.

USS WRIGHT

The WRIGHT, my second temporary sea duty in the Navy, was not much of an improvement over the old TIPPICANOE.  The WRIGHT had been converted from a WWI barrage balloon ship used in convoys and had similar ungainly lines to those of the old tanker.  She was another rusty old bucket and the original balloon well still existed amidships.  I do not recall who the captain was; hoever, the executive officer was Lt. Commander Dixie Kiefer who would gain some measure of renown in Naval Aviation during WWII.

The voyage to Midway lasted five days.  We were aboard as passengers, not as temporary ship’s company, and therefore had no watch standing duties.  We could lounge about the deck and watch schools of flying fish and pods of grey whales that crossed our course.  After evening chow we would gather on the fantail and marvel at the luminous phosphorescence in the ship’s wake.

NAS Midway being built in 1941

Midway is barely a speck in the vast Pacific Ocean.  It consists of a large lagoon bordered by reefs and two low-lying islands, Midway and Eastern Island.  Eastern Island consisted mostly of a new runway for lane planes.  Midway itself is perhaps a mile long and a quarter mile wide at he widest point.  Installations consisted of one hangar on a seaplane ramp, a large fuel storage tank, a water tower, and a few small buildings housing the other facilities of a very small base.

East of the naval seaplane installation there was a very small transient hotel used by Pan American Airways for the overnight stop of the big Boeing clippers that flew between the West Coast and the Orient.  The clippers were big four-engine flying boats that landed in the lagoon and used the one Midway dock to tie up and refuel.

The center of Midway rises only a few feet above sea level.  The low hill was sparsely covered by scrub brush and small trees.  A hike around the circumference of the little island (which we did every day or so out of boredom) took barely an hour at a leisurely pace.

One outstanding feature of Midway was its population of gooney birds.  A “gooney bird” is an albatross on land.  In its incomparable soaring flight on seven-foot slender tapering wings, sometimes many miles from land, an albatross is a graceful, beautiful bird.  On land, however, it is an awkward, waddling fowl about the size of a big domestic goose.

Gooneys are reputed to have a brain about the size of a pea and their actions would tend to bear that out.  They had no fear of man and could be petted.  That, however, was a mistake.  If you petted a gooney bird, you became his bosom pal and he would follow at hour heels wherever you went like a faithful dog.  The big birds would even attempt to follow sailors up the gangplank of the WRIGHT moored at the dock and were difficult to discourage.

The gooney bird (or albatross) cannot make a takeoff from a standing start.  They are too heavy and must make a running takeoff like an airplane.  They used the beach for a runway and we discovered that it was necessary for them to make their run into the wind just as an airplane would do.  Young ones would occasionally attempt a downwind takeoff and, upon retracting their legs, would tumble tail over teakettle until they finally figured out they had to run the other way.

Our advance base operations of the PBYs at Midway was good training for handling the airplanes under field conditions.  We were not yet under alert conditions in the Hawaiian area; therefore, we simply conducted training flights and did routine maintenance checks on the airplanes and engines.

We followed the progress of the war in Europe but it was far away and, on our happy-go-lucky enlisted level, we never gave much thought to relations of the U.S. with the Empire of Japan.  The Japanese were “the bad guys” because of their conquest in China, but otherwise we mostly ignored the “slanteyes” and dismissed them as a real threat.  We preferred spending our of hours playing poker or shooting craps under the guise of playing ace-deucy.

Boeing Clipper

One afternoon I was headed back to the WRIGHT at the dock at the end of working hours (we were living aboard the tender) when one of the Pan American clippers came in and landed in the lagoon.  I lingered at the bead of the dock to watch the big graceful Boeing touch down on the water taxi to the dock.  With its massive boat hull and long tapering wing, I thought it the most beautiful airplane in the world.  Our PBYs truly looked like ugly duckling by comparison.

I was standing at the head of the dock wen the Am flight crew and about a dozen passengers passed on their way to the Pan Am hotel.  I paid little attention except to look at them with envy, but noticed that one passenger was a very short, stocky Japanese in a dark suit totally unsuitable for the climate.  He had a serious expression on his round brown face, but he smiles when our eyes met momentarily and his head bobbed in a half bow in silent greeting.  I waved a hand casually and went on to the WRIGHT for a shower.

Special Envoy Sabruro Kurusu

I gave no more thought to the little Japanese until about eight months later when I saw his photograph in a Life magazine article about the beginning of the war in the Pacific.  The man I saw that sunny afternoon on Midway was Sabruro Kurusu, special envoy to Washington on his way to join the Japanese ambassador, Nomura, for the final negotiations with President Roosevelt.

We launched our VP-23 PBYs for their flight back to Hawaii on the morning of May 31^st.  That afternoon, after waiting to take aboard the body of a Marine private that had just been killed on the island when a construction crane fell over, the USS WRIGHT sailed for Pearl Harbor.

Our arrival at Pearl Harbor on the morning of June 4^th caused a bit of a stir.  The executive officer, CDR Kiefer, had become upset with we airdales for some reason and had ordered the first lieutenant to put us to work as temporary ship’s company.  We scraped and painted the rusty plates of the WRIGHT all the way back.

When we arrived off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, the captain found that there was a problem with the tug that operated the anti-submarine net and we had to lay to for three or four hours before entering the harbor.  It was a windless, flat calm day so the first lieutenant decided that two of the paint party should go over the side in bosons’ chairs to finish some painting of rust streaks on the stern of the ship.  They worked just below the black lettering that read USS WRIGHT.

We steamed into the harbor in the early afternoon and up the channel past the Pacific Fleet flagship, the USS PENNSYLVANIA.  Just after we passed the big battleship, the TBS (Talk Between Ships) radio came to life.  It was the Pacific Fleet commanding admiral addressing the captain of the WRIGHT.  His soft, but firm voice said, “Captain, there are two names on the stern of your ship.  I want one of them removed immediately—and I do not care which one!”

As soon as the gangplank hit the dock, the captain of the WRIGHT and Commander Kiefer scrambled down from the bridge and went to inspect the stern.  There, in big letters painted with red-lead, immediately beneath the name of the ship was “USS MADHOUSE”.  Someone in the paint party ahd gotten even for the extra duty we had put in.

Fortunately, all we airdales had our gear on deck and there was a truck waiting on the dock to take us to our new base at Kaneohe Bay.  We quickly loaded aboard and were on our way while the CPO that had been in charge of the paint party was still trying to remember who he had put over the side with the red-lead.  (The chief’s memory was not all that bad.  We all chipped in on the fifth of good scotch that found its way to that chief.)

Prewar Honolulu part II

There was total discrimination against blacks in the Navy in those days.  The few of them in the Navy were limited to being cooks and mess attendants and they were trained in separate boot camps.  On ships or shore bases, blacks had separate living quarters.  They were seldom seen on liberty and quietly disappeared into native or Filipino sections of town.

The most rigid discrimination in Honolulu involved the many prostitutes that manned the several cat houses of the tenderloin.  They were governed by the iron fist of “Pistol” Adkins (I may have his last name wrong , but his nickname was “Pistol”), the head of the Honolulu vice squad.  I do not recall all of the thirteen laws that governed the Honolulu whores, but some of them were: Never go near Waikiki.  Never use public transportation except taxis.  Never go to a public beach except at Kailua across the island on the windward side.  Never be seen afoot on the streets of Honolulu.  Do not try to buy property.  Violations brought swift retribution from Adkins in the way of fines, jail time, and deportation stateside or to some other part of the South Pacific.

Controlled prostitution was condoned by the civil and military authorities for the reasons that it had always existed in Hawaii and, with the massive influx of military personnel in those years, local females would be at peril if there were not “camp followers” to satisfy male appetites for a fair price.  (In 1941 the going price was two dollars—excluding high priced call girls who serviced the officers.  Thus, a two-dollar bill was commonly known as a “whore house dollar”.)  The cat houses operated openly with neon signs such as “Nuuanu Room” and pimps stood on street corners handing out books of matches advertising various houses.

On our limited budgets, we did not spend a lot of liberty time in the environs of Waikiki, but we knew how to have a good liberty on a small amount of cash.  Bar drinks were relatively cheap as were movies.  Instead of patronizing a restaurant when we were having supper ashore, we patronized little saimen stands that long preceded fast food joints.

There was on saimen stand that we frequented two or three blocks down Beretania toward Nuuanu anal.  It was simply a canvas enclosure set up on the corner of a vacant lot.  It had two or three bare wood tables and in a corner there was a cooking pot and a charcoal brazier.  For thirty-five cents we could get a bowl of noodles (the saimen) and a couple of strips of nikoo (thin slices of beef strung on a stick and roasted on the brazier).  Dick always insisted the Glover and I go there for evening chow when we went ashore together because he had taken a shine to the chubby, friendly little Japanese waitress.  I do not know if he ever made any real headway with her or not since it was a family operation and Mama-san and Papa-san kept a pretty close eye on her form the cooking corner.

Hawaii was, indeed, a “melting pot” of nationalities, particularly in the lower classes.  Pure Hawaiians were disappearing as the natives intermarried with Japanese, Filipinos. Chinese, and Caucasians.  A person of partly white blood was known as a “hap-haole”.  More and more the typical Hawaiian was of mixed blood, usually Asiatic and Hawaiian.

More than on American sailor happily married a slender and beautiful Hawaiian girl.  An AMM!c, Carpenter, in VP-23 was an example.  His Hawaiian wife, Ludi, became one of my favorite people.  She and “Carp” lived in a small house in Kaneohe with their five kids.  It was sort of a second home for many of us and she was kind of a surrogate mother.  She was typically gracious and happy.  I never saw Ludi upset except after the war began and Carpenter wanted to send she and the children to family stateside.  She refused to leave the islands.

Honolulu 1941

Chapter 23

Honolulu 1941

Royal Hawaiian 1940

Pre-war Hawaii was, to me, a pure delight.  Honolulu was much smaller than San Diego and could be covered on foot except that Waikiki was a twenty-minute bus ride.  The Navy busses from Pearl Harbor dropped us off on Peretania Street near the YMCA.  From there the Honolulu “tenderloin” of bars, saimen stands, tattoo parlors, souvenir shops, and openly-run “houses of ill repute” stretched down South Hotel Street to Nuuanu Canal beyond which was the Filipino section of town.  In the other direction was downtown Honolulu covering the five or six blocks to the Aloha Tower on the waterfront where the steamships of the Matson Lines docked to bring in a relatively small number of moneyed tourists.

In 1941, tourism was not a major source of income for the territory of Hawaii.  Island income was from sugar cane, pineapples, and the military—not necessarily in that order.  There were no resort hotels on Oahu except the Royal Hawaiian (movie stars and rich people), Moana, and the Halekalani also at Waikiki.

The Territory of Hawaii (statehood was more than a decade in the future) was, a strange new land that soon became familiar and, longing for the wide spaces and climate of “stateside”.  No me.  I reveled in the unvarying warm, sunny weather interrupted only occasionally by a warm tropic shower of rain that quickly passed.  I like the waving coconut palms that abounded, the sights and odors of the myriad tropical flowers, and the laid-back air of the local people as they went serenely about their daily business with no one ever in a hurry.

On liberty, I roamed the streets of Honolulu until they became as familiar as Vancouver—which, like the Ozark hills, was receding into the past.  I visited Iolani Palace (not too long in the past the residence of Queen Lilikuolani, the last of the Hawaiian monarch) with the gilt statue of King Kamehameha.

 I learned the legends of the islands and quickly picked up a smattering of the Polynesian language.  All of us added to our vocabularies some basic and commonly used Hawaiian words.  White people were haoles (“howlies”) unless they had been in the islands a long time, then they became “malininis”.  A man is a kane (“connie”) and a woman is a wahine (“wah-he-nee”).  Many of the Hawaiian words had different meanings depending on the use.  For instance, trouble or bad is “pilikia”.  Kau-kau (“cow-cow”) can mean either food or eat.  (There was a nice drive-in hamburger place in Waikiki called the “Kau Kau Korner”.)  A fat stomach is an “opu” and a fat behind is an “okole”.

I did my share of carousing with VP-11 shipmates in the Honolulu tenderloin every other weekend after payday (we were paid on alternate Thursdays); however, Waikiki was my favorite part of Honolulu.  There was relatively little traffic on the broad streets of Waikiki.  Kalakaua street past the Royal Hawaiian and Moana hotels on the beachfront was wide and lined with palm trees.  There was a scattering of better class souvenir shops, a few restaurants (the better known of which was Lau Yee Chai’s on Kapiolani), the first-run Waikiki Theater, and along the sidewalks near the Royal Hawaiian the air was always redolent with the delicious odors of pikake and ginger from the lei stands under the palm trees.  Except on the weekend evenings, there was an air of somnolence about the area—indeed, about the entire city.

We quickly learned that there was a caste system in Hawaii even more rigid than that of the military.  Enlisted personnel were really not made very welcome in Waikiki.  We could use any of the commercial establishments, of course, and the Waikiki Theater, but we were not welcome at either the Royal Hawaiian or Moana hotels.  I can recall walking along the beach-walk outside the wrought iron fence of the Banyan Court at the Moana and looking longingly at the candlelit tables of military officers and their wives or dates in evening gowns and jewels.  The balance were moneyed tourists.

The dining room and ballroom of the Royal Hawaiian were turf of senior officers, movie stars, and moguls.  The Moana Banyan Court, as I mentioned, catered to officers and the mpre affluent tourists.  If an enlisted man tried to make a reservation, he always found that they were “fully booked” even though a peek through that fence showed empty tables.  The Hawaiian natives, known as “kanakas”, were welcome in Waikiki only as servants, hotel maids and porters, or entertainers.

Enlisted men were not totally excluded from Waikiki night life.  We were welcome at the Waikiki Tavern, a good bar just down Kalakaua past the Outrigger Club (which was very verboten to we common swab jockeys), at the Wagon Wheel Café on Kapiolani, at the original Trader Vics, and a coke and dance spot near there called (I believe) simply Jack’s.

Even in the Honolulu tenderloin, discrimination was apparent.  This was the turf of the enlisted men into which officers seldom strayed.  Two of the better cat houses had discreet entrances for commissioned officer that might wish to avail themselves (The Honolulu Rooms and the New Senator on Hotel Street).