Beginning on November 1, which is the date of my mother’s first letter from her Hawaii trip 84 years ago, I am serializing day by day, the book, Cecilia King’s Extraordinary Senior Trip, which you can obtain from Amazon in either Kindle or paperback.

I hope you enjoy the upcoming nine-months in Hawaii 1940-41.

Preface

This Project

I found this project compelling and spent several months organizing and compiling it for several reasons. First is personal – this is about my mother before she was my mother. She was thousands of miles away, both literally and figuratively, from the mother I eventually knew. Second, it describes one of the most pivotal times in American history, when the United States emerged from the debilitating Great Depression politically isolationist but began the rapid transition from an almost insignificant military power to become in a short five years the undisputed world military and economic leader. The attack on Pearl Harbor, which catapulted the United States into WWII, happened only a little over five months after Cecilia left Honolulu and the social milieu of military families that would be most affected. Third, Cecilia’s documentation of immediately-pre-WWII life in Hawaii is extraordinarily detailed and colorful and describes many places that I have had an opportunity to visit over the years. I spent the summer of 1966, twenty years after she was there, in Honolulu in a summer job with the National Park Service Historical American Buildings Survey (HABS).[1] In subsequent years, I have visited four Hawaiian Islands, some several times and visited most of the places described in my mother’s letters.

World War II Context

The isolationist mindset and lack of engagement of Americans with World War II already raging in Asia and Europe is, in retrospect, hard to fathom. Even in the growing 1940-41 military community of Hawaii, which would soon become ground zero for America’s entry into the war, it was business (or pleasure) as usual. This puzzling contradiction led me to read several books and cruise the Internet looking for answers.
One book was Herman Wouk’s fictional “Winds of War,” that followed the lives of several individuals in America’s pre-Peal Harbor ramp up to WW II. Another was Paul Dickson’s “The Rise of the G.I Army -1940-1941,” The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor.

While young Army and Navy officers were dining and dancing the nights away in Honolulu in 1940-1941, the events leading to WWII had been underway for nearly a decade:

• 1931: Japan invades and occupies Manchuria
• 1937: Japan invades and occupies mainland China, the rape of Nanjing
• September 1, 1939: World War II begins with Germany invading Poland, inciting Poland’s allies, Britain and France to declare war on Germany.
• September 17, 1939, working in concert with Hitler, Stalin ordered the invasion of Poland, securing a share of Polish territory.
• September 27, 1939: Warsaw surrenders to German troops.
• April 8, 1940: Germany invades Norway, ending 6-month period of operations called the “Phony War.”
• May 10, 1940: Germany invades France
• May 26 – June 4, 1940: The trapped British army evacuates to England from Dunkirk, France
• June 14, 1940: Paris falls to German forces; France capitulates 11 days later.
• June 22, 1941 – Germany Invades the Soviet Union

Dickson writes:
The United States of America had let down its defenses. In contrast to the four million Americans armed by the end of World War I, by 1935 the United States Regular Army had declined to 118,750 men, which, as Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur noted, “could be crowded into Yankee Stadium” and he added that it would be “relatively helpless” in the event of a foreign invasion. The situation was little improved on September 1, 1939, the day on which Germany invaded Poland and a day when the United States Army was smaller than that of Portugal, with fewer than 200,000 men. American troops were still learning obsolete skills and preparing for defensive warfare on a small scale rather than for a two-ocean war overseas. Most of the Army’s divisions were staffed at half-strength and scattered across numerous posts. Their equipment was also obsolete, and their reliance on horses and mules was anachronistic. The Army officer corps harbored many not suited to lead troops into combat.[2]

Although clearly caught tragically unprepared for the attack on Pear Harbor, the United States military and political leadership had almost surreptitiously been changing dramatically, instituting programs and policies that enabled a surprisingly rapid recovery from Pear Harbor and ultimately successful engagement in World War II.

In the latter part of the 20th century, many Americans either never knew or forgot that a vast American citizen army had been created prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also largely forgotten was that during those 828 days between the beginning of the war in 1939 and the “day of infamy,” December 7, 1941, a fully functioning peacetime military draft system had been put in place and that after a purge of senior officers, a new cohort of senior officers was rising through the ranks, which would eventually lead the nation and its allies to victory. What is more, this new peacetime army was given a dress rehearsal for the war ahead in the form of three massive military maneuvers in the spring, summer, and fall of 1941, which ended just a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Heading into the third decade of the 21st century, this element in the narrative of the Second World War has moved farther in the margins of history. I base the assertion that all this has been lost or forgotten in recalling the World War II narrative on personal experience. Here is but one example: when first I began researching the extraordinary but largely untold story of the 1940 military draft and the 1941 maneuvers, I mentioned the prewar draft to several people at a Fourth of July party and was corrected by a well-read man who had served in the U.S. Air Force and fancied himself a student of American military history. He was convinced I was wrong and insisted that the nation in 1940 was still mired in a deep period of isolation and could not possibly have mobilized before the war. He advised me to check my facts.

The primary question I wanted to research was how the United States had been able to create a well-led, mobile army that was in place by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Beyond that, I wondered how the U.S. Army could have been ready to field infantry and armored divisions, made up in large part with draftees and volunteers, to stand up to Adolf Hitler’s Storm Troopers and Panzer divisions on the ground, first in North Africa and then Europe.

The roots of the answers could be traced to events a decade before Pearl Harbor. Henry L. Stimson was a leading member of what was once referred to as the Establishment. Born into a wealthy New York family in 1867, he graduated from Yale and then Harvard Law School. A Republican, Stimson’s career in public service began in 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he became known for his vigorous prosecution of antitrust cases. Stimson served as secretary of war for President William Howard Taft in 1911, served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army during the First World War, and in 1929, President Herbert Hoover made him his secretary of state.

In May 1931, Secretary Stimson, now 64, met with his old friend and fellow New York attorney Grenville Clark, 49. The two men had worked together in the period before the First World War. In 1915, Stimson had assisted Clark in creating the Plattsburg Plan, under which some 16,000 business and other professional men were trained at their own expense to be Army officers at the Plattsburg Barracks in New York State and other locations. Because of the success of the officer training program, which was in full operation well before the United States entered the war, Clark was seen as an apostle of military preparedness and, by extension, universal military service.

During their 1931 meeting, Stimson made a bold prediction: that within ten years, Germany and Japan would join hands in an alliance and ignite a second world war. He thought that this time Germany would run all over France and the rest of Europe, Japan would run over much of China, and then Germany would attack Russia. He foresaw a ten-year war in which the United States would bear the brunt of the fight, unless a coalition of nations—namely Great Britain, Russia, and the United States—could be formed, in which case the war could be ended in five. He then asked Clark if he would undertake a secret mission, monitoring the situation through intelligence-gathering trips overseas, mainly into China and Russia.

Clark turned down the assignment but did not forget Stimson’s prediction. After the Nazi invasion of Norway in April 1940, Clark believed Stimson’s prediction was about to come true and proposed that the United States establish its first-ever peacetime military draft.
After a long battle for approval, a bill was passed and made into law on September 16, 1940, calling for the registration of all American men between the ages of 21 and 34; they would be given a registration number based on a number assigned by their local draft board, where registration cards had been shuffled and numbered sequentially from one to the number of the last man registered by that unit. After the assignment of numbers was over, the numbers were printed on slips of paper, which were put into capsules that were then dumped into a ten-gallon fishbowl, to be drawn one at a time to establish the draft order. On October 29, 1940, Henry Stimson put on a blindfold, reached into the fishbowl, and pulled out the first capsule. Stimson was now President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s new secretary of war, appointed to that position at Clark’s suggestion. President Roosevelt then announced the number that had been drawn: 158. Across the nation, 6,175 young men who had been the 158th man to register at their local draft board held that number; many of them would be in uniform within a matter of weeks.

Many people believe that the United States built an army with volunteers and draftees after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But in fact, it was the controversial peacetime draft before Pearl Harbor that put the nation in a position to fight so quickly and effectively.
Beyond the draft itself, a key element of the transformation was a series of large-scale maneuvers. The most famous were the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1941, which allowed the United States to test itself and learn by the mistakes it made in mock warfare, in which the infantry fired blanks instead of bullets and warplanes dropped flour bags rather than bombs. Not only did the maneuvers train the men in crucial new weapons and methods of warfare, but they also helped create a new and unique “G.I.” culture that was invaluable in boosting morale and bonding men from all backgrounds into a cohesive group before they set off to fight around the world. These boys of the Great Depression brought with them skills and attitudes their fathers and uncles had not had during the First World War. To cite one small but significant example, these youngsters could read maps, having been brought up reading gas station road maps. They also knew engines and having seen their first jeep or Piper Cub light aircraft, within minutes would be under the hood trying to figure out how they could make the engine work better.

But key members of Congress vowed not to extend the original draft legislation, which had called for only one year of active duty. A political battle erupted between those supporting the extension and the continued training of the new army of draftees and those who wanted to bring them home and effectively isolate the United States from global conflict. The battle reached its zenith only weeks before Pearl Harbor, when the House of Representatives came within a single vote of dismantling the draft and sending hundreds of thousands of men home, which would have all but destroyed the United States Army. The isolationists were led by the charismatic, pro-Nazi American hero Charles Lindbergh, who pitted himself against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The two came to despise one another after the Nazi invasion of Poland, when Lindbergh pleaded for the United States to look the other way as Hitler conquered Europe. Besides key members of Congress, other advocates of isolation included automaker Henry Ford, a young Walt Disney, and Teddy Roosevelt Jr., son of the 26th president.

As the political battle raged, the Army’s chief of staff, General George Catlett Marshall, with Franklin Roosevelt’s support and authority, created a new army, purging from it more than a thousand officers he deemed unfit. Men whose names would become famous in the war in Europe would emerge as stars during the training of the draftees in the 1941 maneuvers.

Atop the list was the brilliant but arrogant George S. Patton, a veteran of the First World War, who called the draftees “civilians in khaki pants.” Much has been written about Patton during the two world wars, but little has been written about his role as a prime catalyst in preparing the nation for combat and victory. Patton, born to a wealthy California couple, grew from a colonel stationed at Fort Myer in Virginia, where he was deeply involved in society horse shows, into an audacious and brilliant tank commander. Dwight David Eisenhower would also emerge from these exercises. After the war, Eisenhower credited the war games in Louisiana as the “grand maneuver” that proved of incalculable value in winning the war.

Marshall’s challenges were many. A lot of the draftees were malnourished and otherwise suffering under the difficult circumstances common in the Great Depression. Many were not happy about their new status, especially when posted to remote bases, where they were bored and homesick. Some threatened to desert if the original one-year period of service was extended.

But attitudes changed with the three realistic war games staged in 1941, in which more than 820,000 new soldiers participated. Conducted in Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, the exercises transformed the way Americans would wage war and paved the way for the highly disciplined, fast-moving units, including armored cavalry units led by bold and resourceful officers that led to victory in North Africa and Europe. The maneuvers themselves tell a dramatic story filled with colorful characters and monumental (sometimes comic) missteps, taken as the Army learned by its mistakes. But the maneuvers—largely unchronicled—are also essential to understanding the United States’ involvement in World War II and the ultimate outcome of the war. The Louisiana games, held in the late summer and early fall of 1941, were among the most watched and carefully reported events of 1941—but they were largely forgotten when real war ensued with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States on December 11.

This is the story of how hundreds of thousands of young men were drafted and transformed into an organized, effective fighting force able to invade North Africa ten months after Pearl Harbor, many critical months ahead of the time Hitler’s planners had predicted for a significant American intervention. After heavy losses in North Africa, the U.S. Army learned quickly and ultimately prevailed there, jumped into Sicily, and moved up through Italy into Europe, which eventually led to victory in Europe. The counter-narrative to this book will be the battle fought against the power of Jim Crow and the establishment of racial integration of the Armed Forces. The battle for integration would be fought at the highest level, pitting a reluctant Franklin D. Roosevelt against A. Philip Randolph, who with other civil rights leaders threatened a massive march on Washington.[3]

Following is a tabulation of United States military strength 1941-1942[4]:

The “Pineapple Army:”
Thousands of miles from home, the Hawaiian Division was part of a distinct professional force. According to historian Brian Linn, the interwar Pacific Army had a discrete social milieu with its own customs and dynamics. Part recruit training facility, tourist getaway, and campground, O’ahu provided a unique lifestyle for the “Pineapple Army.” Sparkling beaches and Honolulu nightlife were irresistible pulls for enlisted men taking advantage of short weekend reprieves from a vigorous training schedule. Officers enjoyed a different social life, including unfathomable privileges to the enlisted ranks. For all the hardships, troops found themselves in an exotic tropical paradise, and they took advantage.

There was reason to believe that the bastion would hold defensively against whatever was thrown at it. Focused on the threats against Pearl Harbor, by 1938 the Army spent twice as much as the Navy on military installations to protect the naval base. The Hawaiian Islands garrison was larger than all other US overseas outposts and the strongest base in the Pacific by the mid-1930s. While the interwar average strength remained steady at 15,000 Army personnel, at the end of 1941 the number on O’ahu jumped to around 25,000. 

While the Army’s ground defenses were adequate on the fortified O’ahu, it was unable to keep pace with rapid advancements in carrier-based aircraft capabilities. Leaders recognized that sea-based air attacks against Hawaii would be difficult to defend against, especially due to omnipresent clouds to the north that could screen a surprise attack. Air defenses grew to defend against the aerial threat. The Army also developed two primary air installations in the interwar. Hickam Field, next to Pearl Harbor, acted as a base for US Army Air Force bombers. About 10 miles inland from Pearl Harbor was Wheeler Field. Next to the immaculately manicured lawns of the Army’s main troop base at Schofield Barracks, Wheeler housed the Army Air Forces’ pursuit and observation aircraft. The Army’s efforts, however, were not sufficient. The Hawaiian Air Force, furthermore, was comprised of an obsolete collection of 234 combat aircraft by late 1941. Only half were operational due to their age or chronic lack of spare parts, and many were more useful for training purposes rather than fighting. Their disposition on December 7 further highlighted their shortcomings.

Lieutenant General Walter Short, an officer known for his efficiency and ability to train men, took command of the Army in Hawaii in February 1941. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall informed him that “the fullest protection for the Fleet is the rather than a major consideration” for the Army. Although US forces were preparing for war, much of Short’s attention was focused inwardly rather than beyond the shores. 

Many American commanders, including General Marshall, were convinced a crippling blow would come internally, from sabotage and other subversive activities. Keen not to alarm the civilian population, General Short interpreted late-November War Department messages about the failure of diplomatic talks with Japan as counseling heightened readiness, not a warning of an imminent threat. The defensive posture he chose, therefore, was intended to alert against sabotage and a popular uprising, not an aerial attack. In November, infantry companies from the 24th Infantry Division drew weapons and ammunition and deployed to the beaches to guard against Japanese saboteurs being landed from submarines. By the weekend of December 6, however, the infantry companies turned in their rifles and ammo and returned to their barracks and quarters, the crisis with Japan seemingly averted.

As a result, Army troops were not mentally prepared for the Japanese strikes against their installations on O’ahu on December 7. Beginning at 7:55 a.m., the attackers completely destroyed the Hawaiian Air Depot at Hickam Field, crippling aircraft on the ground and reducing many of the hangars and barracks to ash. Dive bombers hit Wheeler Field minutes later, and nearby Schofield Barracks, a target of opportunity rather than one of primary importance. The outcome was similar. The Hawaiian Air Force was an easy target on the ground, having grouped its aircraft closely for easier security against sabotage. While a small number of Army aircraft managed to get airborne, the Japanese attackers made easy work of most of them. With no time to disperse the aircraft, more than two-thirds of Wheeler’s planes lay destroyed or damaged within a matter of minutes.

The beginning of the attack was a shock for Army personnel who anticipated nothing more than a pleasant Sunday morning. The majority were not expecting to find themselves in a war, and their reactions showed. Robert Kinzler, an Army radio operator in the 25th Infantry Division’s 27th Infantry Regiment, awoke from a late night out to the sound of a tremendous explosion. Running outside his barracks, an unfamiliar-looking airplane came into view just above a nearby building and flashed past. Having had no aircraft identification training, he reasoned it must have been a Navy or Marine plane and continued toward the mess hall for breakfast. Others thought the same, believing that camouflaged Marine planes were staging a mock battle. The sound of bugles made clear, though, that this was more than a training exercise. The soldiers hurriedly assembled at Schofield Barracks and received orders to rush toward their pre-assigned battle stations. [5]

Editor’s Notes
Sources
This story begins and ends in Beebe, Arkansas, (population 1,189 in 1940) and covers 18 months just before and just after the U.S. entered WWII. It is based on 581 pages of handwritten letters, eight months of appointment book entries and numerous newspapers clippings letters, notes, card and other memorabilia.

It started with discovery (or maybe rediscovery) of a trove of letters from Cecilia King to her parents from November 1940 to July of 1941, while she was enroute to or in Hawaii. My brother, Jack Butt, organized them chronologically and had them scanned.
I set out to transcribe them into print and add materials from Cecilia’s scrapbook. For the most part, I transcribed the informal grammar, punctuation and spelling from Cecilia’s letters verbatim, although I did correct the spelling of some Hawaiian places and locations. I added, in chronological order and context, pages from Cecilia’s appointment book and materials from her scrapbook. I also added historical photos of several restaurants, hotels and other venues that I found on the Internet.
Cecilia’s sojourn in Hawaii revolved around a group of young Army and navy officers, their wives and daughters in military families For the ones that occur most frequently, I have added biographical information, when I can find it, the most helpful source being Ancestry.com.