By John Gilman
Five years ago, on the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor I told the story in WestView News of my fathers’ experiences as the first newspaper man at the scene of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had received a call from a reporter at the Honolulu Advertiser where he was the City Editor shortly after 8 AM, the two men meeting in downtown Honolulu and driving the nine miles around the Pearl Harbor lagoon to the naval base on Ford Island. What they saw on the way to Pearl that Sunday morning, now 80 years ago, was published in a front page article in the December 8 issue of the Advertiser, the same day that President Roosevelt declared war on Japan. ‘The story of the century’ which the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor has been called, was not fully told in their article because military censorship policy prevented the details of the carnage behind the gates of the base to be published. The last sentence in the last paragraph of their story which described their trip has them entering the base, and then departing and driving back to town. In the intervening years, of course, the attack has been described in complete detail, most recently minute by minute, in a large format photo magazine History—Pearl Harbor—Minute by Minute—80 Years Later published by Meredith Corporation, 2021, which is on the stands now. The statistics have not changed: almost 3,000 military personnel and civilians were killed, l,l50 wounded, over 30 ships were damaged, destroyed or sunk, 159 aircraft damaged and 169 destroyed,
‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the American rallying cry until it was supplanted by Remember 9/11 in 2001 which coincidentally was also a surprise early morning air attack, this time by two hijacked passenger jets which deliberately crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, causing them to collapse and remarkably killing almost the same number of victims. In the 20 years since 9/11 which plunged America into a war in the Middle East, now just ended, and the 80 years since the attack in Hawaii which was the beginning of World War II —only ending five years later with the drop of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—there have swirled conspiracy theories about many of the basic details leading to these two catastrophes, none of them proven or conclusive, and it is definitely not my purpose in this article to dwell on the causes of America’s 20th or 2lst century’s (so far) top stories. After all, I was not an actual witness to either event, having been vacationing in Ocean Grove, just south of Asbury Park at the Jersey shore on 9/11/01, and two months old in my bassinette on the Lanai at home at 1631 Kalakaua Avenue in Honolulu on December 7, 1941.
It was just another day for me, the infant. My brother Peter was almost two, and apparently much more concerned to find his idyllic life in paradise interrupted so abruptly. Trips to the beach at Waikiki, just a few blocks away, became less frequent and more difficult in the first few weeks after Marshall Law was declared and the imposition of strict blackout rules were instituted. My father LaSelle, a seasoned journalist and ‘old China hand,’ switched from writing his column, Down the Gangplank, where he interviewed celebrity visitors to Hawaii to that of War Correspondent, and was away with the military for long stretches of time. When he was in town he often brought people home to meet my mother and us little boys. My mother, Helene, has told me that I sat on the lap of the singer Frances Langford who declared me the ‘Pearl Harbor Baby’, and that I laughed hysterically at Bob Hope’s and Jerry Colona’s antics but became strangely silent and in great awe of the majestic Madame Chiang Kai Shek, the wife of the leader of China’s nationalist party. Extreme shortages of practically everything started before the official imposition of rationing; to entertain, the parents learned how to make liquor from fermented pineapples; and Pete’s and my diet became mostly poi and coconut milk. As the accompanying snapshot shows, we resumed beach visits and, indeed, my childhood on Kuhio Beach at Kalakaua and Kapahulu Avenues and visits to the lagoons in Kapiolani Park continued undisturbed, except for having to crawl beneath the barbed wire surrounding the camouflaged machine-gun nests seen on the right. On the left of the photo, in the background, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel can be seen. It had been converted to a military rest and relaxation destination for the duration.
With his extensive knowledge of China and the South China Seas as well as the troop movements of the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists, Gil (as he was called) was often transported by submarine to far-off ports and island-hopping campaigns with the Pacific Fleet and Army units for NBC and Reuters Agency. Among others his byline appeared in Paradise of the Pacific Magazine—one of these articles complained that the light from his auto cigarette lighter was enough to get him arrested in Honolulu’s total blackout vigilance. And the rigors of those war years caused a rift in my parents’ marriage. They divorced, strangely remarried, and divorced again. The family departure from Hawaii had to wait until civilian travel was approved and after the war was over we sailed to San Francisco where we moved into an apartment on Telegraph Hill. The ship we sailed on carried Japanese prisoners on deck, cordoned off with barbed wire. Once on the voyage my brother Pete got too close and a Jap—as my mother angrily called him—tried to poke his eye out. Her anger was understandable; the reason we were all in Hawaii was because the Japanese, ignoring international agreements, had bombed the neutral territory of Shanghai and now they had seemingly followed us across the Pacific.
LaSelle and Helene met in the mid 1930s at a notorious café in San Francisco’s North Beach called The Black Cat and after a whirlwind courtship (in what my stepmother Veda later told me) were married in an alcoholic haze. Gil, who graduated from a prestigious journalism school at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, had an assignment-of-a-lifetime from his news agency INS, the International News Service, called by many of its members—‘I’m Never Sober’ or ‘I Never Sleep’—to be their Far East correspondent and he had also been appointed news editor of the Shanghai Evening News and the Peiping—later Beijing—Daily News, both English language papers. The couple’s first stop, by train, was Portland, Oregon, to meet my mother’s parents. After that they hurried to Seattle to catch a ‘slow boat to China’—which is actually the title of a popular song of the time. In Shanghai they lived in Art Deco splendor in the International Settlement and hobnobbed with China’s elite, including those living in the different Settlement quadrants which included English, French, American, and Japanese. In his spare time my father wrote the first of his seven novels, all set in China, entitled Shanghai Deadline. Other titles included The Red Gate, The Dragon’s Mouth and The Golden Horde. He also began his career of short story writing for The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Argosy and other popular American magazines. One day in Shanghai, at a party at the French legation, a Japanese bomb came through the stained glass ceiling and Gil decided that the time had come to leave. They engaged seats on the China Clipper for Honolulu and departed just in time to escape the hordes of Chinese refugees escaping what was later called ‘the rape of Nanking.’ Shanghai fell and the violent and tragic story is told in Steven Spielberg’s award winning movie Empire of the Sun, which I watched recently on television. With the proceeds from the sale of Shanghai Deadline to the movies—it was ultimately called International Settlement—which starred one of the most beautiful women in the world, Dolores Del Rio opposite George Sanders and Charlie Chan’s (the Honolulu detective) number one son Key Luke—they bought their house on Kalakaua Avenue, later torn down and replaced with a warehouse type building called The Fabric Mart which sells Hawaiian print fabrics including bark cloth, cotton and upholstery. In the years gone by, I have collected quite a number of terrific Hawaiian shirts, one vintage label having the name of Duke Kahanomoku, and am now wondering if the cloths used in the manufacture of some of them might actually have come from my old digs on Kalakaua Avenue.
John Gilman’s book, co-authored by Robert Heide, Home Front America—Popular Culture of the World War II Era—was published in 1995 by Chronicle Books on the 50th anniversary of the end of the War, August 6, 1945, which of course, was the dawning of the Atomic Age. For stateside homefront World War II reminiscence, read Robert Heide’s “Little Bobby” in this (December 2021) edition of WestView News.
