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.
