The Evacuation of military families

The photo to the left is of navy housing. During World War II, a junior officer's family would have been assigned this type of home. It's single wall (the exterior wall is the interior wall of the home). It is about 1000 square feet, and built on stilts. The construction, materials used, size and paint color were typical of the times.

I hope that by now, I've given you a picture of the confusion and turmoil of that Sunday morning. Families (almost all wives and children) were given conflicting advice. The military wanted to keep the families safe, but there were arguments over whether transporting them in the midst of an attack would put them in even more danger than keeping them in their homes.

Here are snippets of oral histories about the evacuations:

Mrs. Potts, wife of Colonel “Empy” Potts, was told by the military police to “stay in quarters and lie on the floor when the planes flew over. An hour later, an officer from her husband’s unit showed up at the house and told her “to leave the base and go to his (the messenger officer's) house about six miles away.”

Nancy Shea, wife of Colonel Augustine Shea, was told to stay in the garage of her quarters. She and her Filipino maid made a “shelter of trunks topped by a mattress.” When a piece of shrapnel carried away part of one of the trunks, the two of them, ran to the house and crawled under it.

Mrs. “Skinny” Hayes was ordered off Schofield Barracks. She loaded her car with canned goods and sped to the home of friends in Haleiwa on the North Shore. When she arrived, a phone call came from her husband saying she would be safer on base, so she drove back. Back at her quarters at Schofield, a soldier knocked on her door and told her, “Get over to the barracks, you’ll be safer there.” So, she said, “In the middle of the war, I kept moving around.”

Women of World War II Hawaii