Pearl attack’s 75th anniversary planned

The Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor is preparing for a 75th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that could draw the president, members of Congress, an aircraft carrier and World War II survivors for one last, big hurrah.

“The 75th commemoration will attract nationwide, indeed worldwide, attention,” said museum board President Clint Churchill.

Gov. David Ige signed a proclamation Nov. 23 recognizing the “75th Commemoration of Pearl Harbor Committee” composed of officials from government, the military, the business community and Pearl Harbor historic sites who will be involved in planning for the December event, with retired Adm. Tom Fargo as chairman.

“It will be quite a week,” Churchill said recently at a Rotary Club of Honolulu meeting. “We expect the president to come, a lot of members of Congress, heads of state from foreign countries.”

As part of the big push, the aviation museum introduced General Motors retired Vice Chairman Bob Lutz as head of a national leadership committee tasked with raising lots of money to expand the Ford Island museum.

The museum has a $47 million fundraising goal, but the hope for this calendar year is about $10 million, with the desire to finish renovation of the control tower complex — including getting the small elevator running to the top for public tours — fixing the roof on Hangar 79 and opening an educational pavilion, officials said.

Lutz, an 84-year-old former Marine Corps attack jet pilot, spoke at the Rotary meeting and said he was “very pleased and honored” to be asked to lead the national fundraising effort. Lutz still flies a Czech Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros jet.

The 75th anniversary “deserves to be a national event of great significance,” the Michigan resident said, adding that it should not be forgotten “that the 75th reunion on Dec. 7 will probably be the last time that we can get a meaningful number of World War II veterans together — let alone veterans from Pearl Harbor.”

As an aviator, Lutz said, the Ford Island airfield is distressing because you “no longer know it’s an airport.” The past 15 years have brought neglect to the point “you now have this meadow, gigantic meadow, where a 4,000-foot runway used to be.”

“You see a control tower, and you see several hangars, one of which is renovated, the second one is semirenovated, the third one is a project for the future,” Lutz said of the Navy land. “So if you look at that part, it looks like an airport, a military base. But you look where the runways and taxiways are supposed to be, it looks like farmer’s field, and that is just plain wrong.”

The Navy in the past tried to replace the airfield with a grassy park and more recently planned to blanket it with flat photovoltaic panels that would have been mocked up to sort-of resemble a runway.

Both plans were shot down by historic preservationists.

While some have advocated putting the historic airfield to practical use, Lutz counters that “if we’re preserving an airfield and World War II or Pearl Harbor artifacts, the core of an airfield is the runway.”

Although Ford Island remains part of an active Navy base, both the aviation museum and Battleship Missouri Memorial operate there in tandem with one of the the biggest tourist attractions in Hawaii: the USS Arizona Memorial.

Lutz said the aviation museum should dig up the weeds and crumbling airfield and replace them with concrete or asphalt that looks realistic.

Lutz also spoke to the significance of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack and America’s industrial response to the country’s entry into World War II.

The Pearl Harbor attack was almost a crippling defeat, he said.

“I mean, if our (aircraft) carriers had been there that day, it really would have been game over,” he said. The United States couldn’t have fought back in the Battle of the Coral Sea or Battle of Midway.

“We would have had to settle for a negotiated peace — which I think was the endgame for Japan,” Lutz said. “I think the idea was they’d do a negotiated peace and we would cede some territory to them, maybe Alaska and the Aleutians. Hawaii seems logical.”

Lutz said he’s also involved in the Yankee Air Museum at the old Willow Run bomber plant in Michigan. Under the auspices of the Ford Motor Co., production of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber was ramped up to meet war needs: one every 55 minutes.