REVOLT IN PARADISE
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION
IN HAWAII AFTER PEARL HARBOR
By ALEXANDER MACDONALD
{Submitted to Genealogy Trails by Christine Walters}
ERUPTION ON DECEMBER
"The Governor has called upon me to prevent invasion to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and to place the Territory under martial law. I have this day assumed the position as military gover-nor of Hawaii."
-Lieut. General Walter D. Short, U. S. Army, Dec. , 1941.
Hawaii despite the early labors of fourteen shiploads of missionaries was largely a hard-drinking, non-churchgoing community in 1941 . Sunday morning was a time of leisure best spent abed or, if the flesh were strong, at gardening, on the golf links or at the beach. For most kamaaina, or long-time residents, it was the easiest and most pleasurable time of the week. Army and Navy officers, when they had been in the Islands any time at all, usually agreed wholeheartedly with this kamaaina way of life.
So the Japanese attack at 7:55 A.M. on Sunday, December 7, came at a time when the civilian population, at least, was particularly vulnerable. It was too blue, too placid a morning for such horror. Nor would many Honolu'ans accept first reports of the attack, which in some cases was taking place before their very eyes. Even on a Sunday morning it was no new thing for them to watch waves of bombers flying over the Islands, to see planes realistically dog-fighting, to hear the practice roar of coast defense guns and anti-aircraft batteries. They would need more than one piece of evidence to convince them that the Japs actually had come over.
Radio announcers, who were the first to break the news to the bulk of the population, knew they had to overcome this general spirit of incredulousness. Their warnings would have to be persuasive. So when they broadcast the first an-nouncement, they did not merely report the Islands were being bombed. "Oahu is under attack! This is not a prac-tice! Take cover!". . . "Oahu is under attack! This is the real McCoy! Take cover!". . . They repeated this over and over.
Until they could get further details of the air raid, local stations for some time turned back to their regular programs between the repeated warnings. One station was broad-casting a transcribed Mormon church service from Salt Lake City. Just as the announcer broke in with the first news bulletin on the bombing the minister was saying his concluding words.
". . . and may Peace be with you on this day." The swelling voices of the Tabernacle Choir were closing the service as the announcer cut in with his bulletin. "This station has just been advised that the island of Oahu is under attack. Enemy planes were shot down. The Rising Sun has been sighted on their wing tips."
Even then thousands of unbelievers flooded the police and newspaper switchboards with calls for verification. Most of those calling the police station wanted the operator to assure them that the radio reports were not true. The Chinese-Hawaiian sergeant on the board had a stock, brief answer for all of them.
"The hell it ain't, Brother! Find shelter!"
It was not until the radio announcers began to cite damage, to give the first details of the carnage taking place at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, five miles outside the city, that most Honoluans became convinced. Or until bombs or anti-aircraft shells shattered close by in their own neighborhoods.
In a matter of minutes after the full truth of the event exploded through the community, Honolulu became a city convulsed by great emotion. People who had been in the street ran inside. Those in homes or stores ran out. Fire engines, trucks, ambulances tore screaming through the city. There was no normal motion. Everything seemed to move with the jerky, blurred effect of a long-ago moving picture. The distant action at the navy yard became a dull roar. Underfoot the ground trembled. Planes shot by over-head; but few were aware which were friendly, which enemy.
Bombs and shells fell only sporadically on the city. The first crashed into the yard of Thomas Fujimoto, a Japanese carpenter, but none of his family was hurt. One, probably directed at lolani Palace, the Territory's Capitol, landed by the yard of the governor's residence at Washington Place. The blast killed an old Chinese man standing on the side-walk. Another exploded in the Nisei Club on School Street, headquarters of young Japanese-Americans. Only an aged Japanese woman working in the kitchen was hurt. Four Japanese-American youths, members of a championship club boxing team, were talking on a street corner when a bomb exploded on the drug store behind them. Three of them were killed. Ironically, of the first thirty-six civilians killed by shrapnel and fire, twenty were Japanese.
Also ironically, the only business building struck down-town was the big Lewers & Cooke store, home of the lumber trust. The bomb crashed through the roof, exploded on the third floor. Besides wrecking that part of the building, it smashed the water system, causing a destructive flood throughout the store.
Scores of Honolu'ans hurried to the top of the Punch-bowl, the extinct crater which overlooks the city, for a pan-oramic view of the whole terrifying show. They could see the Japs coming in single lines of dive bombers. The planes flew over to Pearl Harbor where at what seemed a pre-determined spot in the sky, they nosed directly earthward and screamed down to targets below. They kept going down until they disappeared in the smoke that was billowing up from earlier hits. Then there would be a mushroom of flame below and the boom of new explosions. From Hickam Field, just in front of the naval base, a great shaft of fire reached into the sky. Below were the blazing hangars and wrecked barracks.
Occasionally a ship would work itself out of the fury of gunfire and smoke in Pearl Harbor and race out of the channel for the comparative safety of open water. Several slim destroyers could be seen getting through, then deploy-ing to hunt out the enemy.
Overhead the sky was polka-dotted with the black puffs of anti-aircraft fire.
At the emergency hospital in Honolulu, the gory score of bomb hits and shrapnel blasts was being taken. In the morgue several ambulance loads of victims had been laid out on the floor. By the operating room a line of wounded, some in ambulances, some in litters, waited for treatment. Makeshift ambulances arrived with more victims. One was a bakery wagon loaded with men from Hickam Field, some wounded, some dead. A field station had been set up there, for on the foreheads of some was scrawled a letter "T" meaning that they had been given tetanus shots. The clothes had been burned or blasted from most of them. Some bodies had no arms, some no legs.
A private car stopped at the hospital driveway and a frantic Hawaiian man jumped out. He came running up the stairs, carrying a girl eight or ten years old in his arms. He pushed into the group crowded around the hospital entrance.
"Please, somebody. Please help her. My girl . . . she's hurt."
Someone took the child from his arms. It was obvious she was dead. She had been playing jump rope when the bomb fell. The rope itself had been burned away but in her charred hands the wooden handles for the cord were still tightly clenched.
Throughout the day the island community struggled, like a fighter beaten to his knees, to recover from the brutal suddenness of the attack. Wave after wave of raiders having come over, there was no telling when the next bombs would fall. Nor was there any let-up in the noise, the mad traffic, or black rumor.
Coastal defense guns and anti-aircraft weapons con-tinued to blast into the sky. Ambulances and fire engines raced to and from places of disaster. The islanders, groping for news, were easy victims for each fresh rumor.
"Transports have been sighted. They're landing troops on the beaches!"
"All the other islands have been taken!"
"Oahu's surrounded by enemy subs!"
"Jap parachutists have landed up in the hills!"
This last report was even published as news in the first extra of the Honolulu Advertiser.
But descriptions of these events have gone into a hun-dred stories of that December day. The newspaper cor-respondents and radio commentators who were on hand covered in detail all the carnage, the heroics, and the mili-tary meanings of what happened that Sunday on Oahu. Few of them, however, told of what Hawaii itself the willful little sugar kingdom was going through. No one then interpreted the attack as the end of an era in Hawaiian history. The devastation that the Japanese had wrought was too patent at that time for many to note the first crumblings of a structure that had been nearly a century in the building.
To those sensitive to this less obvious effect of the Japa-nese bombing and they would certainly include the hand-ful of men behind the Big Five the first tokens of what was to come became apparent soon after the bombs began to fall. One of these was the voice of the Army coming over island radios. It was easy enough to detect a new note of authority. There was no mistaking it when an officer of G-2, the Army's intelligence section, made the first official announcement of the attack and gave out first instructions.
"Oahu is under a sporadic air raid. Civilians are ordered to stay off the streets."
"Civilians are ordered!" There it was. This was no police order, backed up by locally-made, easily amenable statutes. This was the Army, speaking straight out to Hawaii's civilians for the first time. It was the voice of the new boss of the Islands.
A couple of hours later the official routine effecting the transfer of sovereignty was begun. At 10:55 A.M. Governor Joseph B. Poindexter announced over local radio sta-tions, his voice still shaky, that he had signed the M-Day measure preparatory to placing Hawaii under martial law. This was the bill the regular session of the Legislature had not passed in 1941. Just two months before December 7, a special session had been called for the single purpose of acting on the M-Day bill which the regular spring session had ignored. With an aroused community watching closely and suspiciously, the legislators had hastily voted the meas-ure into law.
Poindexter, a former federal judge from Montana with a consummate talent for cautious statesmanship, had rarely acted with the alacrity he showed in turning Hawaii's cares over to the military. In invoking the M-Day law he pro-claimed a defense period to exist, effective as of 10 A.M. that day.
Early Sunday afternoon Lieut.-General Walter D. Short, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department, U. S. Army, called upon the public for co-operation with the army forces. He stated that martial law would soon be in effect.
At 4:30 P.M. Governor Poindexter issued the formal proclamation of martial law, citing the section of Hawaii's Organic Act which allowed turning of the Islands over to the military in the event of invasion. He announced that he had authorized and requested General Short "to exer-cise all the powers normally exercised by me as the governor."
General Short's formal acceptance seemed to have a certain grim promise in it. In part, he said to the community: "Pursuant to Section 67 of the Organic Law of the Territory of Hawaii, approved April 30, 1900, the Governor has called upon me to prevent invasion, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and to place the Territory under martial law. I have this day assumed the position as military governor of Hawaii."
That made it official. The transfer was consummated. With a stroke of his pen, Poindexter had written off the power of Hawaii's traditional rulers, just as effectively as sugar's Committee of Safety had written off the power of the native monarchy in 1893. For the governor had signed away something more far-reaching than his own, closely circumscribed executive powers. He had turned over, lock, stock and barrel, the whole elaborately interlaced system vof controls that the Big Five exercised over their island realm. On the face of it the transfer was political. Actually, it was a surrender of nearly all the economic and social powers that the Big Five had wielded. The events of the days which followed soon confirmed this.
It was no political transfer, for instance, when the Army at once took over the control of all shipping in and out of the isles. A discreet Castle & Cooke announcement in the paper on December 8 said that all Matson Line bookings were being cancelled indefinitely. What that meant was that henceforth the military was going to decide who and what was going to travel on ships touching Hawaii. The Army Transport Service took charge of the comings and goings of all merchant vessels touching port. The Matson Line as such was out for the duration.
Khaki-clad officers moved into Castle & Cooke's sump-tuous Merchant St. office. The building's new electric-ray doors operated their magic opening and closing now for army privates and sergeants coming to work; they were to replace many of the white collar workers in the august halls of this handsome monument to the enterprise of S. N. Castle and Amos Starr Cooke.
Meantime, over on the West Coast, the Army began making troop ships of the Matson's newest luxury liners, Monterey and Mariposa. Army workmen carried ornate glass chandeliers, rich paintings, and paneled mahogany beds down the gangplanks and went back aboard bearing metal three-decker bunks, gun mountings, and ammunition.
The Lurline, en route to San Francisco on December 7, was likewise seized upon her arrival and put through similar alteration. When the $8,000,000 ships were built several years before, the United States Government had put up $6,000,000 for each one, so that they might be taken over in time of war. But there was more disturbing news to come. In the first week of war the Matson freighter Maliko, bound for the Islands from the Northwest Coast with her holds full of cargo, piled up on the Oregon shore. Then on December 1 1 the Navy announced from Wash-ington that the Matson freighter Lahaina had been sunk, en route from Hawaii to San Francisco, by a Japanese sub-marine. Luckily, all but four of the crew got safely back to the island of Maui. On December 17 another Matson freighter, the Manini, was sunk.
The Inter-Island Navigation Company's prosperous trade was similarly upset. On December 8 the company's presi-dent announced that all schedules had been cancelled; the Army was taking over. When inter-island traffic was re-sumed later, it was almost exclusively by air. Six weeks after Pearl Harbor, the wisdom of this step was shown; for on January 29 the inter-island army transport, the Royal T. Frank, was sunk by a Japanese submarine. She was on her way to Honolulu from the island of Hawaii, crowded with newly-inducted U. S. soldiers from the city of Hilo. All aboard were lost.
Loss of their shipping had an immediate effect upon the Big Five's sugar and pineapple trade. Sometimes, under Army Transport Service command, arrangements could not be made for picking up shiploads and pineapples. Ships were traveling from Hawaii to the West Coast under con-voy, so there was often not time to send freighters around to the small island ports to pick up plantation produce. Raw sugar shipments sometimes piled up. A few months after Pearl Harbor the Hawaiian Pineapple Company had thou-sands upon thousands of cases of canned fruit waiting to be shipped. The Islands' basic economy was greatly upset.
When Big Five executives ventured down to their offices on Monday morning, December 8, they saw at once with what thoroughness the military had assumed control of the Territory. It was not a pleasant revelation, after the hor-rors of the night before. Hawaii's first night of blackout had been an unqualified nightmare for more than the shaken military commanders of the isles. All during the dark hours guns had continued to blast. Planes, which might have been the enemy searching for bombing objectives, droned through the black sky. Bands of armed civilians and soldiers noisily patrolled the streets. Lights inadvertently left on, particularly store lights with automatic time switches, were broken or shot out. Several night walkers out on defense assignments were killed or wounded by jittery sentries. Up in Nuuanu Valley three wardens beat to death a fellow warden they encountered in the night because they mistook him for an enemy parachute trooper.
The Monday morning scene was only slightly reassuring. Businessmen found armed guards standing watch in front of their buildings. On street corners machine gun nests had been hastily erected; they were pill boxes made of bags filled with sand. Big Five executives who looked closely saw that they were bags marked in large block letters with the word "Sugar."
Outside the Hawaiian Electric Power plant, the Mutual Telephone Company, and the Honolulu Gas plant were barbed-wire barricades. No one, not even the utility exec-utives, were admitted without passing inspection. Out-side the buildings soldiers on guard stopped them.
"Let me see your pass!"
The passes had to be signed by army authorities. Later, identification badges with the picture of the identified were required.
Down in Aloha Tower, overlooking Honolulu harbor, naval officers were setting up offices, to take over control of ship movements in the port.
The U. S. Engineers' Department jumped to the task of taking over a thousand and one semi-military projects which the war set into motion. With the startled trustees of Punahou School, the preparatory school which the Rev. Hiram Bingham founded on land given him by the Hawai-ians, the department signed terms for a lease giving it use of the buildings and campus for the duration. At once the quiet palm-shaded campus was transformed into a bustling headquarters for the many jobs of war construction. It was perhaps inevitable that the transformation and the overnight recruitment of a huge army of USED workers be accompanied by tales of waste and ineptitude. Punahou trustees were horrified, for instance, to hear that brusque
USED foremen, clearing out one of the study halls for office space ordered the arms on a statue of "The Discus Thrower" broken off so that it could be taken through a narrow doorway. Another of the many USED classics was the story of a department plumber trying to rig up water pipelines for new drinking fountains. The plumb-ers, unfamiliar either with the campus' pipe system or with plumbing blueprints, ran a line to the new foun-tains straight from Punahou school's famed lily pond. For generations the muddy little pool had been used for tra-ditional "dunking" of the losers in interclass contests. This was the first attempt a short-lived one to use it for drink-ing purposes.
Down at the Honolulu police station Military Police and Shore Patrol officers moved into larger quarters, sat down with the civilian chief to decide how the Islands would henceforth be policed.
From General Short's headquarters came word that civil court functions had ceased, that the military governor had assumed all court powers. The writ of habeas corpus was suspended. There was little doubt that this vital American privilege was no longer on the Territory's books. All the day before, through the night and for days to come, the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence men and civilian police were busily rounding up alien and citizen suspects, hurrying them out to a new detention camp set up at Sand Island, in Honolulu harbor. There was not time then for hearings, for trials. When Governor Poindexter called President Roosevelt on the radio telephone Sunday noon to make his report on the raid, a naval censor was listening in.
On other calls the censor cut in: "Your call must be restricted to purely non-military matters."
He then described a long list of topics which would be interpreted as military. No one could use the transpacific telephone until he had thoroughly identified himself, the person he was calling and outlined what he planned to talk about.
Similarly a force of army reserves had moved into the Honolulu post office, to begin the censoring of every bit of mail leaving the Islands.
After setting up an office at lolani Palace, where kings, queens, a president and eight territorial governors had preceded him, Hawaii's new military governor began to show how the Army intended to govern the domain over which sugar had been king for nearly a century.
The first military order out of General Short's offices appointed an advisory committee of civilians. The members were Governor Poindexter; Charles M. Hite, and Ernest K. Kai, Secretary and acting Attorney-General of the Ter-ritory; Major Lester Petrie of Honolulu; Frank H. Locey, director of civilian defense; and Charles R. Hemenway, president of the Hawaiian Trust Co. The latter was the only one of the group who could be said to represent the Big Five.
The second order closed all saloons and liquor establish-ments in the Islands. On the heels of that came the military's substitute for Hawaii's civil courts. A board of seven men-three civilians and four army officers was named as a military commission with authority to pass sentence of death. The same order set up provost courts, whose judges sat with power to imprison up to five years and to fine up to $5,000.
In quick succession other orders, all hinging upon military security, were issued. Restrictions were imposed on aliens. All schools were told to remain closed until further notice. Gasoline distribution was placed in the hands of the Office of Civilian Defense. Censorship regulations were an-nounced for press and radio; several newspapers were shut down. Rent, wage and food control was set up. All men, and later all women, were ordered to appear for finger-printing and registration. A program of compulsory small-pox and typhoid vaccination was ordered for all.
But these were merely restrictions upon the individual's life. How completely the military was taking over was not really revealed until January when the military governor an-nounced the manner in which the economy of the Islands was henceforth to be governed. At that time he explained how the government of the Territory of Hawaii was going to operate under martial law.
In the meantime, a new personality had stepped in as Hawaii's military-civil ruler. On December 17 the Army and Navy Departments in Washington announced their shakeup of island commands. General Short and Rear-Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, had been ordered to return to Washington, charged with dereliction of duty. To succeed General Short as commanding officer of the Hawaiian Department, U. S. Army, and, as such, military governor of the Territory, Lieut. General Delos C. Emmons, U. S. Air Corps, was appointed. Admiral Kimmel was succeeded by Rear-Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who subsequently was made a full admiral and chief of the unified command of the Pacific Ocean area. This meant he outranked the Army's Hawaiian 'commander.
Within a month General Emmons had decided the makeup of his Hawaiian government. The core of the or-ganization was an executive section of army officers headed by Lieut-Col. Thomas H. Green. (The Lieutenant-Colonel flourished so notably at this pioneer effort in applied martial law that within six months he had rocketed to the rank of Brigadier-General.) The executive section actually carried out the policies and operation of martial law, leaving Gen-eral Emmons free to work on the weightier problems of military defense.
Under the executive session came six control bodies whose influence reached out into every sector of Hawaii's industrial and commercial life.
Through these boards for the final decisions of the gov-erning army officers was channeled all the tributaries making up the life stream of island commerce.
Perhaps most important, economically, was the Office of the Director of Material and Supplies Control. This section had charge of the importation, exportation and distribution of building supplies, fuels, chemicals, electrical and radio supplies, cloth, and medical supplies. Importa-tion and exportation that was the lush trade upon which the Matson Line had thrived. Now it was Army-con-trolled on Army-operated ships. Distribution that would be the stranglehold the Big Five held on the building trades. This spelled the end of their lumber trust. Here, in this section, was lost a huge slice of the profits made from the Territory's incoming $137,000,000 commerce.
A second major bureau was the Office of the Director of Food Control. This section saw to the feeding of the civilian community. It took over control of all food im-ports and the production of foods on the Islands. Foods could not be brought into or taken out of the Islands except through this office. Of the Big Five, that hit American Factors the hardest. Control of food distribution had been its almost exclusive province.
Another governing section was the Office of the Direc-tor of Labor Control. Its function was to see to the procurement and distribution of labor, to act in labor disputes and to decide upon questions of wages and hours. Policies were to be established by an advisory board upon which sat a representative of the Army, the Navy, the federal gov-ernment, the territorial labor board, the CIO, the AFL and the sugar and pineapple trades. Here was a new deal for island labor. Here, for the first time, they were given some voice in a plan of control which looked as though it really had teeth in it. Under such a setup unionism, no longer over-awed by two-fisted paternalism, could become articulate, and did. It was a rich opportunity and with dis-may the Big Five interests watched labor make the most of it in the months that followed. Labor began to flourish under army rule.
Another office was that of the Director of Cargo and Passenger Control, in charge of waterfront problems, inter-island cargo and passenger traffic. The Director of Land Transportation was in charge of gasoline and tire rationing, motor vehicles and transport systems. The last officer in the military governor's "cabinet" was the Director of Civilian Defense who, with a federal appropriation of $15,000,000 got under way a program of bomb shelter construction, air raid defense, evacuation, emergency medi-cal aid, civilian registration and other defense projects.
Within the governor's executive section were retained special controls, incuding disposition of internment cases, liquor distribution and the custody of alien property. The Internment Hearing Board was made up of civilians and military officers whose function was to decide upon the detention and internment of subversive suspects picked up by investigatory agencies.
Many islanders who looked over the new military system of government were moved to comment half admiringly on its all-inclusiveness. "The army didn't leave any leftover authority lying around loose that's a cinch! "
Executives of the Big Five were not inclined to be so liberal in their criticism. "They've taken over everything including the kitchen sink," one Castle & Cooke man was quoted as saying.
Added gall for Big Five individualists was the blossom-ing of a new bureaucracy under Army sponsorship. Perhaps by virtue of its distance from the national capital, Hawaii had been singularly free of many of the myriad federal agencies which had for years been taking root in other U. S. communities. The Territory's most intimate as-sociation with federal bureaucracy had been with the agricultural agencies, particularly the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which had given the sugar planters nearly as much trouble as did the cane borer. Island industrialists shuddered each time a visitor arrived from Washington to survey their federal needs.
But now there came a host of agency men from Washing-ton. Most distasteful was a representative of the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation who came blessed with a $ 1 0,000,000 appropriation for Hawaii's food needs, signed the week before by President Roosevelt. This gentleman fitted neatly into the military governor's cabinet as a right hand man for his Director of Good Control.
The action was looked upon as an ominous one by island businessmen. "This thing's beginning to look a bit too permanent," they told themselves.
They saw almost immediately what good reason they had for misgivings, for in January General Emmons announced that the FSCC man would be the sole procurer for Hawaii's basic foods. No one else, not even the food control director, could order such staples as rice, flour, potatoes, canned milk, certain canned meats, vegetables, fruits and cattle feed.
On the heels of the FSCC came the man from the Office of Price Administration. The military governor set up a new price control section and a general order went out that the Army was ready to crack down hard on any violation of the new maximum price schedules. For the nation, price control might have been an attempt to control in-flation; but for Hawaii it looked like liberation of the ulti-mate consumer. No more would lumber prices rocket from $15 to $78 a thousand board feet.
A bureau of the War Manpower Commission was set up in the Islands and incorporated into the military governor's plan to control labor. This, too, had something of the ring of permanency.
By the time the military governor had completed his plan of organization, there was no doubt that new hands were in control of all the resources which had given the real sovereignty of the Islands to the Big Five. The traditional interests had been stripped of their control of ship-ping, of consumer goods, of labor, of property and supplies, of politics, of individual lives. The Army and federal bureaus had now succeeded to most of the seats of authority that the Big Five's interlocking directorates had so long held down.
This transfer of sovereignty had immediate effects upon the complexion of island life and upon the nature of island economy. The first two years of army rule considerably altered the native forces that were gearing themselves for the struggle for control of post-war Hawaii. This can be seen best by looking at the war's effect on each of the various elements separately. More obviously than upon anything else, were these effects shown upon the check-ered political life of the Territory of Hawaii.
"Someone has adroitly outlined the situation here to give the impression that Hawaii has risen en masse against the military. Any belief that there has been a popular mandate for repeal (of martial law) is untrue and is putting Hawaii in a false light before the nation" Editorial, Honolulu Advertiser, Dec. 30, 1942.
A few hours after the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, Hawaii's civil government with all the haste possible in fact, almost as soon as signatures could be put to the documents making it legal had handed over island sovereignty to the U. S. Army. While the bombs were still falling, no one in the Territory was ready to ques-tion Governor Poindexter's action. The protecting arms of the military were more than welcome so long as there was the threat of a Japanese invasion fleet hovering near the Islands.
However, in the weeks and months that followed Pearl Harbor, and particularly after the victory at Midway the following June, some few voices in the community began to question the need for continuance of martial law. In the relative peace which came after the December 7 attack, some even found themselves free enough of the distractions of war to write critical, documentary pieces on the uncon-stitutionality of government by martial law.
The army stuck to its guns. It was by no means ready to begin making concessions.
"There's going to be martial law," said General Emmons, "until Japan's fleet lies at the bottom of the Pacific."
Other army spokesmen explained why it wasn't a matter of Hawaii's sovereignty. They said it was a matter of national security. Hawaii was no longer an independent island community. Its principal role now was that of a forward bastion in the defense of the United States; and, besides that, it was the heart and core of U. S. offensives in the Pacific. The archipelago must consider itself a huge arsenal, the supply base and staging area for America's military operations against Japan.
Abolishment of martial law would be gambling dangerously with the security of this role. Without martial law the military would lose control of such specific items as: blackout and curfew; restricted areas, communications; 35,000 enemy aliens and their prohibited possessions such as firearms, cameras and short wave sets; internment of persons suspected of subversive activities, and labor neces-sary to the upkeep and strengthening of this Pacific for-tress.
Hawaii might chafe under the continued blackout and 10 P.M. curfew, but both were highly essential to security, the Army pointed out. If there were no blackout the Islands would be constantly vulnerable to attack by Japanese submarine and planes.
A half dozen such sporadic raids after Pearl Harbor-night shellings of the island ports by submarines, one as late as October, 1943 illustrated this menace, they said. Without the curfew, 159,000 Japanese, including 35,000 aliens, could be at large all night.
Military control of shipping and communications was just as vital, the army explained, not only to keep these lines open for strategic military purposes but as a check on the movements and operations of possible enemies of the nation. Only under martial law would they have been able to intern the 1,479 people of Hawaii, who had been picked up on suspicion of subversive activity. Control of labor was administered purely as a matter of security and had evoked a few complaints from labor itself, the Army claimed. Strikes on war projects were not per-mitted and men in such work were frozen to their jobs. This control allowed for identification and investigation of all war workers and for the pooling of the labor supply so that the vast job of construction and maintenance in this vital area could be done with maximum efficiency.
"This is a military situation and it's going to be run according to military rules."
That was the way army officers summed it up.
Hawaii accepted these arguments almost without ques-tion. A good deal of the little grumbling that did occur could be traced pretty directly to the community's legal fraternity.
Island attorneys found themselves bereft of a place to practice their profession. Martial law had closed the civil and criminal courts of Hawaii and, except for their re-taining fees and the limited practice later allowed in court, lawyers generally were finding life under army rule highly unprofitable. It was not surprising then, that the first articulate challenge to martial law should come from an attorney.
In the California Law Review of May, 1942, a lengthy article by J. Garner Anthony, onetime president of the
Bar Association of Hawaii, questioned the constitutionality of martial law in the Territory. Specifically, the young attorney claimed that the complete delegation by Governor Poindexter of his gubernatorial powers and authority to an army general was illegal.
In the next month's issue of the Harvard Law Review, an army spokesman entered a rebuttal to Anthony's argu-ment. Written by Major Charles Fairman of the Army's judge advocate division, the article specified the unprec-edented conditions which made martial law not only legal but necessary in Hawaii.
A slight political shade came into this question of martial law later in 1942 as the central committee of Island Demo-crats began to draw up its platform for the fall elections. It is worth noting that, once Hawaii party platforms were written, they were largely ignored by all candidates in the catch-as-catch-can turmoil of the island political campaigns. But the memory of one plank was conspicuously absent from the subsequent speeches of Democratic candidates. It said, "We deplore a system of government whereby citizens of the Territory of Hawaii can be arrested and held without bail for offenses that have nothing to do with operations of the military establishments."
The Republican party discreetly overlooked the whole question of martial law in its 1942 platform.
But, constitutional or not, the new deal in crack-down justice meted out by the Army's provost courts was almost unanimously acclaimed by the average man in the Islands. With these streamlined tribunals there was none of the myriad circumventions which a well-paid attorney could contrive before Hawaii's own courts. Here in the provost courts the Castles and the Cookes got the same medicine as the Kanakanuis and the Crowleys. Big Five names were not at all sacred to army judges.
Many a Honolu'an was reminded by their brusque jus-tice of the attempt an island grand jury had made in 1939 to dig into the matter of county government purchases. The presiding judge had quickly squelched their investiga-tory ardor.
"I will not tolerate any action by the jury which would take issue with the court as to whether it was right or wrong," the judge said. "It will be a very rare case indeed which will require your own initiative."
When a juror asked if grand jury procedures of New York or other states would not be applicable in Hawaii, the judge replied, "Actions of Mainland grand juries are not applicable in Hawaii because of different conditions here." Few had any doubt as to what the "different con-ditions" might be.
There were no bypasses in the provost courts. A glimpse into one of the court's typical daily sessions was enough to convince any Honolu'an of this.
The busiest court was in the Honolulu Police Station. The judge, an army major, sat on the bench in coatless uniform. There were no legal trimmings as the defendant was brought before him. Another officer, a lieutenant, read the charge, sometimes merely reading the facts of the case from the arrest sheet. The army judge might ask the defendant a few questions.
One such defendant was a liquor dealer, charged with illegal sale.
"You knew the military orders froze all liquor?" ques-tioned the judge.
"Yes, sir."
"You read of this in public announcements and you received notice of the stoppage of sales?"
"Yes, sir."
"This court finds you guilty. You will pay a fine of $1,000. You will serve four years in prison, at hard labor."
There was no appeal. The court's finding was final. The wholesaler who supplied the dealer from stocks which had been hidden and not registered, as required by military order, was fined $5,000 and sent to prison for five years.
A merchant seaman was brought in after a scrape with Honolulu police.
"Witnesses report that you publicly described the military government in the Territory as a little dictatorship. Is that true?" the provost judge queried.
The defendant admitted it was.
"One hundred dollars fine, three months in jail."
Another defendant, charged with fighting a policeman while drunk, was sentenced to three years in prison at hard labor.
At one provost court session the defendant was Judge Francis M. Brooks of Hawaii's circuit court. He had been arrested after a brush with a military traffic policeman. Driving on the wrong side of the street, he was told by the motorcycle officer to pull over. He refused. The policeman, an army private, threatened to shoot his tires if he didn't stop.
According to court testimony, the judge then invited the policeman to drop into his home, near by. "Come and have a cigar. I don't mean it as a bribe," he is alleged to have said.
Instead, the policeman took down the judge's name and license number.
Submitted by Christine Walters
