Army photographer Lee Embree took
this photo of the crash site of Japanese dive bomber on 12/7/1941.
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — A local
historian is convinced he’s located the site where a two-man Japanese
dive-bomber crew crashed on the morning of December 7, 1941, and was buried
nearby: the tony grounds of Hoakalei Country Club Golf Course in Ewa Beach.
“The responsible thing to do is at
least make an attempt to find these guys,” said John Bond, a semi-retired Ewa
resident who has labored for years to bring recognition to the largely
forgotten Marine Corps Air Station Ewa and its role in the 1941 battle. “If
they can’t find them, then put up a marker saying this is a crash site and
remember that so-and-so was killed here. I don’t understand why that would be a
problem.”
But the golf course’s owner, Haseko
Development, has been less than receptive to the idea of an active search for
the grave on the property, which the company announced in October was being
sold to a Japanese firm. Haseko Vice President Sharene Saito Tam said the
company has done all it was required to do in identifying culturally and
archaeologically significant artifacts on the property during development and
has found no evidence of such a grave. Further, she said, Bond does not have
documentation that pinpoints the gravesite’s exact location.
As to placing a marker on the
grounds, she said: “From the company’s point of view, if there was evidence
that showed that to be the case, of course it would be considered, but at this
point there is nothing like that. But to ask any landowner to put a marker that
indicates a grave where you don’t know a grave exists does not seem appropriate
or respectful of the people they are trying to name there.”
Of the roughly 60 Japanese troops
who were killed or lost during the December 7 attack, many were buried in
various cemeteries on Oahu but were repatriated after the war. About 30
Japanese remain missing from that day.
One notable memorial to a Japanese
airman stands in Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. A bronze
plaque marks the spot where Lt. Fusata Iita, commander of the 3rd Aircraft
Group of the Japanese Imperial Navy, crashed his plane on a hillside near
Kansas Tower that morning. Iita’s body was long ago returned to Japan.
The defense attache with the Japan
consulate in Honolulu said the case of the two Ewa airmen is “a difficult
situation” for Japan because the site is private property and the owner says
there’s no evidence to back up Bond’s assertion.
During the past few years, Bond and
a group of historians specializing in the 1941 attack have gathered extensive
documentation and photos about the crash site, which had been lost to time and
land development.
Even Tom Dye, the archaeologist
contracted by Haseko to monitor its land development, admitted that Bond and
his colleagues have “done an incredible amount of work” in tracking down photos
and accounts of the crash.
“They’ve found much more than I
think anybody could have expected about this crash event,” Dye said. “But
there’s just nothing yet that gets us a location that we could narrow things
down and really make a concerted effort to look for a burial.”
Comparing old photographs and
military reports from the time of the attack, Bond said he has calculated the
crash site lies within a 50-yard radius of the golf course’s club house.
A Dec. 9, 1941, report by Capt.
Lester Milz, with the 251st Coastal Artillery, noted that the badly burned
bodies of two Japanese crewmen had been found and his men disposed of the
remains. Two days a later, an Army staff officer visited Milz’s battery and
wrote in his diary that he’d been told the airmen’s bodies had been buried in a
“coral grave.”
“I knew they buried them in a
sinkhole because that’s what we have out here,” Bond said of Ewa Plain, which
is an ancient limestone field. “You don’t dig easily in this ground. It’s like
concrete.”
Bond contends that burying bodies
beside crash sites was common in that era.
“If you had a crash and couldn’t
extract the people out, you just buried them by the plane,” he said.
Dye said that even if the exact
crash site is pinpointed, there’s no direct evidence indicating where the
bodies were buried.
“You really just have to guess at
that point,” Dye said. “Mr. Bond perhaps is comfortable with guessing, but
you’re not supposed to guess. We really don’t have any credible evidence to
lead us to a place where we could productively search for remains of the two
airmen.”
Bond suggested that
ground-penetrating sonar could be used to detect the grave.
“GPR has highly evolved in the last
few years,” he said. “They’ve used it on archaeological sites to find tombs. It
will detect these sinkholes. It’s also used in old cemeteries.”
Dye, however, said that limestone
subsurface is “a nightmare scenario for ground-penetrating sonar.”
“The problem you have with
ground-penetrating radar is there are just a huge number of false positives,”
Dye said. “You’d have to dig every single one of them up to find out what they
were. It’s not specific enough to tell you, oh, that’s bone versus that’s a
rock or that’s a root.”
Bond has written a request to the
Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which is tasked with locating and retrieving
the remains of U.S. service members lost overseas, requesting that it take an
active role in searching for the grave.
“Getting involved in another
nation’s recovery event is not something we’d typically do unless it was in the
course of one of our own investigations,” JPAC spokesman Lee Tucker said. The
agency has in the past provided research assistance to the Japan Ministry of
Health, Labor and Welfare’s Social Welfare and War Victims Bureau, which
oversees such recoveries.
Tucker said the Japanese government
did not require JPAC’s assistance or approval in searching for remains in Hawaii.
But Takeshi Ogino, the defense
attache at the Japan consulate in Honolulu, said Japan did not have a
comparable agency such as JPAC to research and retrieve MIA remains in foreign
countries. He said the consulate had not received an “official request” from
either Bond or the Haseko group in regard to searching for the airmen’s grave
or commemorating the crash site.
Haseko’s Tam said that if Bond
produces “additional information and evidence that we can authenticate,” the
company might consider further search.
But Bond contends that the time to
actively search and recover the remains is now, as the 73rd anniversary of the
attack nears.
“If a decent search was done they
could be found,” he said.
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