Abstract
Can archaeology add to the narrative of the Japanese attack on the U. S. Naval and Air installations in Hawaii, 7 December 1941, or is this event too recent and historically well documented to benefit from the tools of archaeology? One answer to this question lies at the bottom of Kaneohe Bay, some 25 mi. (40 km) from the famed U. S. Naval base of Pearl Harbor. In June and July 1994, East Carolina University, the Marine Option Program of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the National Park Service co-sponsored an unusual field school. The project called for a pre-disturbance survey and archaeological documentation of a sunken flying boat recently located by U. S. Marine Corps divers near the Naval Air Station in Kaneohe Bay on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. Our purpose was to document and identify the abandoned craft and ascertain whether it had been destroyed as a result of the Japanese attack on Oahu, 7 December 1941. Yet the project achieved far more than this, revealing for the first time in 53 years what was not seen or heard through the smoke and thunder of that battle; a patrol crew’s gallant effort to save their craft.
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Rodgers, B.A., Coble, W.M. & Van Tilburg, H.K. The lost flying boat of Kaneohe Bay: Archaeology of the first U. S. casualties of Pearl Harbor. Hist Arch 32, 8–18 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374269
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374269