The Lunalilo School Fire

While the firefighters were at Hauoli and Algaroba Streets, a block from King and McCully, people raced up to them shouting that Lunalilo School on Pumehana Street, three blocks away had been "bombed." The school was designated as a First Aide station and was was filled with civilian evacuees fleeing their burning homes and with Emergency Service Corps volunteers.

Since the firefighters had the Hauoli Street fire just about out, they moved to the school. Among the Emergency Service Corps volunteers at the school was a contingent of older Boy Scouts who had been trained for rescue work.

Part of the lore of Hawaii includes a story about a young Boy Scout, the future Senator Daniel Inouye, who was was at the school. At the time, Daniel Inouye was a seventeen-year old senior at McKinley High School and an instructor for the Red Cross station posted at Lunalilo. The story goes that Inouye worked 24 hours straight. Exhausted and filled with rage, he yelled out toward the vanishing planes, "You dirty Japs."

(The only written account of this story I could find was in Theon Wright's The Disenchanted Islands: The Story of the Second Revolution in Hawaii , 1972. However, if it's true or not, it focuses on the fact that there was a distinction between "Japs" who were the Japanese enemy and "local Japanese" even by those of Japanese ancestry. It was a strange double-edged sword.)

PHOTO: Firefighters and volunteers fighting the fire at Lunalilo School. Lunalilo School was a large two-story wood frame building built in a U-shape. The flames from the school jumped to the next building, then to homes that burned down. Three residents trapped in the houses died.