Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!
With the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II approaching Sept. 2, I’m writing several columns about it. This second one is about what is probably the least-known Oahu target of the Japanese Imperial Navy on Dec. 7, 1941: the Marine Corps Air Station Ewa.
MCAS Ewa was created in January 1941 on 3,500 acres purchased from the Campbell Estate 20 years earlier for a dirigible mooring site. It was just east of the future Barbers Point NAS location. At its peak, more than 2,000 Marines and civilian employees worked there.
Japanese pilots saw the Ewa plain as the main approach (and exit) to Pearl Harbor, and it had to be attacked on the way in. They destroyed 24 planes at MCAS Ewa, killed four Marines and wounded 13 others.
A local bus driver happened to be at the base gate when the shooting started. He abandoned his bus and made himself useful loading ammunition for the hard-pressed machine gunners. Later, he said he had dreamed of being a Marine but was rejected due to flat feet.
A base fireman ran to provide ammunition to an officer with a submachine gun. Later, the officer commended him, but he brushed it off. “Hell, lieutenant, I saw a fire, and I’m supposed to put them out.”
A pharmacist hopped into an ambulance that rushed to the fighting. The driver and he hid underneath it when enemy planes fired at it. Later, they counted more than 50 bullet holes in the ambulance. The driver and pharmacist had only minor injuries.
Lt. Yoshio Shiga, commander of nine Zero fighters, after the war recalled one Ewa Leatherneck who bravely stood his ground, emptying his sidearm at Shiga’s Zero as it roared past, oblivious to the machine gun fire striking the ground around him.
Shiga described that lone, defiant and nameless Marine as the bravest American he had ever known. Marines shot down several Japanese planes, and pilots George Welch and Kenneth Taylor managed to take off from the Haleiwa airfield in P-40s. They shot down two Japanese dive bombers over Ewa, earning them the first Distinguished Service Crosses of the war.
My friend Goro Arakawa told me he saw the Zeroes flying so low over Waipahu, he could see the faces of the pilots.
“Oral histories describe the Ewa side of Pearl Harbor as like being in a shooting gallery and a metal hail storm,” historian John Bond wrote. The Ewa area is littered with bullets to this day.
“Metal and spent shells rained down on Ewa Plantation tin roofs and residents remember the thuds and rattle sounds as like someone was throwing rocks and gravel on their homes. Residents hid in corners, and under beds as bullets zipped through the thin wood buildings, shattering windows.”
Ewa Marines went on to play key roles in the Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal and Coral Sea.
The Marine Fighter Squadron 214, later known as “The Black Sheep,” was commissioned at Ewa.
President Franklin D. Roo-sevelt, Gen. Douglas Mac- Arthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz toured the base late in the war, in July 1944, in the back seat of a convertible.
Barbers Point Naval Air Station, which had been commissioned in 1942, assumed ownership of the adjacent MCAS Ewa in 1952.
Barbers Point NAS closed in 1999. Today those airfields and the 1941 attack are largely forgotten. Bond, the historian, has fought as single-handedly as that Ewa Leatherneck to preserve what’s left of the Ewa base from development. He’s working on a book about it now.
Honouliuli Ranch
I wondered what was at the MCAS Ewa site before 1941. Ninety years earlier it was founded as the Honouliuli Ranch.
James Campbell bought the 41,000-acre ranch in 1877. Two years later he brought James Ashley from California to Hawaii in 1879 to see whether water could be found beneath his dry land.
After nearly two weeks of hand-drilling, they reached a depth of 240 feet, and a stream burst forth, flooding the ground.
It was the sinking of this artesian well that inspired Ewa Plantation, which developed on 7,800 acres of Campbell’s land in 1890.
Artesian water allowed sugar growers to control the ripening of cane so that fields could be harvested in a predetermined rotation. Their ability to turn off the water concentrated sugar in the cane, increasing yield.
Ewa Plantation employed nearly 4,000 people. Its president, Edward D. Tenney, said that it “has made more men rich and fewer men poor than any other 14 square miles of cultivated soil on the face of the globe.”
Discovery of artesian water had an impact beyond agriculture. Before 1880 most Honolulu residents depended on stream water. By 1900 over 300 wells supplied the population.
Ewa Mooring Mast Field
In 1925 some of Ewa Plantation’s land was designated as a berthing site for the U.S. Navy’s Dirigible Program and called Ewa Mooring Mast Field.
Private companies were interested in dirigibles, too. The Goodyear Zeppelin Corp. wanted to use airships to bring mail and passengers from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Goodyear President Jerome Hunsaker asked the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce for its support.
The proposed airships were 100 to 150 feet in diameter and 800 feet long, nearly three times the size of a Boeing 747. It could stretch from one end of the Iolani Palace grounds to the other.
It held 6.5 million cubic feet of helium. Flying time from California would have been about 45 hours, much faster than ocean liners.
It could bring 75 passengers per trip, or 2,400 a year, to Hawaii. This was six years before Pan Am began flying to the islands.
John Rodgers Airport (at Lagoon Drive) was too small for a substantial dirigible field. Pearl Harbor, Kaneohe and Schofield Barracks were also considered.
An Ewa site would be far less expensive, and Oahu Railway could add a spur line to it.
A mast could be erected along with an airship terminal building. Two to three hundred men were needed to land the older Graf Zeppelin, but the newer airships could make do with fewer.
Hunsaker believed airships were particularly suitable for long voyages, while the airplane was more suited for short trips where speed was desired.
A 160-foot steel mast was erected in Ewa by the Navy in 1925. Winches for steadying an airship and hauling it in were built, and the ability to furnish electricity, fuel, water and helium were in place.
The mast was a major landmark for early aviators and Pan Am Clippers coming to Hawaii, Bond believes, and was a reference point for Japanese bombers in 1941.
Normally, a small team could land the dirigibles, but the entire Naval Air Station crew could turn out in case of adverse weather conditions.
In 1931 the Empire State Building was erected with a dirigible mast at the top, expecting passenger airships.
Hawaii planned for the arrival of naval airships Shenandoah, Macon or Akron, but all were destroyed in mainland accidents.
The German dirigibles were successful for a while, until the Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937. The public then lost confidence in this form of travel, and its “golden age” came to an end.
For more information about the End of WWII 75th Anniversary Celebration, see 808ne.ws/3fDkJ7Q.
The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s now twice-weekly free email newsletter that gives readers behind-the-scenes background, stories that wouldn’t fit in the column, and lots of interesting details. Join and be an Insider at RearviewMirrorInsider.com. Mahalo!
79
