Preparations for War 1939

PHOTO: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: Workers in the zero temperatures of the cold storage plants of the Naval Supply Depot of the 14th Naval District must wear sheep-lined coats as protection against the cold. Thousands of tons of perishable foods. have been stored. (Hawaii War Records Depository)

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS, 1939

This blog is about stories and daily life, not facts, figures and dates. If it were a book, I could put Chronologies, bibliographies and notes at the end of the book and you could just flip back to check on them, but with a blog, I can't.

I don't want to bore you with facts, but I need to "set a scene" of what life in Hawaii was like before the war. The attack of Pearl Harbor wasn't like the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. New York City wasn't braced for war. The attack was a shock.

In Hawaii, while very few expected the Japanese to attack Oahu, preparations for war were going on. As I said in yesterday's blog, bets were being taken in tea houses and gambling parlors on Oahu and the safest bet was that the Japanese would attack the Philippines on Christmas.

Now, if you're asking yourself where did she get that information, about gambling it's a fair question. I am a librarian by training. I'm also horrid at keeping track of accurate and precise citations. (Really bad)


I read about the betting on the war in two oral histories of U.S. sailors who were stationed at Pearl Harbor, and in an oral history that is part of University of Hawaii's Center for Oral History (which has amassed thousands of pages of text of oral history and no, I can't find the citation.)

I'm going to keep a running bibliography on the blog. But my "Bible" and jumping off point for research was Gwen Allen's HAWAII'S WAR YEARS. It's been reprinted by Pacific Monograms in Kailua, but the original has photographs; it was published by University of Hawaii Press.

OK, so here's a brief chronology of some of the things that were going on two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

April
The U.S. Navy staged the biggest war games to date.

May 18
Honolulu’s first black out lasted 20 minutes.

July 17-23
The 13th annual conference of the New Americans, group of AJAs (Americans of Japanese Ancestry) urges expatriation of AJAs in Hawaii.

August 1
The Honolulu office of the FBI reopened to work with Army and Navy on information concerning possible sabotage. (Remember, one-third of the population of Hawaii were Japanese.)

December
The Home Economics Division of the Department of Public Instruction presented an emergency plan to the army on how to feed the public during an emergency. The use of school cafeterias was suggested. (If shipping lanes were blocked due to war, food supplies would have been cut off.)

So, that's two years before the war. In Europe, the war was already waging.