The Coast Guard’s Pacific Colonizers

In January 1942, military authorities at Pearl Harbor realized that 12 young Hawaiian men had been left on several lonely Pacific atolls, islands that were in danger of being overrun by the Japanese. As a part of a colonizing effort by the U.S. government, four of these men had been placed on each of three islands near the equator, where they remained, alone and without any defense, after the start of the war. A rescue effort was organized hastily, but it proved to be too late for two of the men.

The story began several years before. In spring 1935, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter set out from Honolulu on the first of two dozen expeditions that were to be made over the next seven years to a cluster of desert islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean. These little-known expeditions took colonists to the islands to establish U.S. claims in the expectation that these territories might be useful in furthering commercial and military interests in the area.

The ultimate outcome of these expeditions was the addition of island territory to the United States, the construction of the airfield that became the destination of Amelia Earhart before she disappeared in 1937, the establishment of Pan American Airways’ route to the South Seas, and the construction of several air bases that were used during World War 11.

The islands that were the original goal of the expeditions were Baker and Howland, near the point where the International Date Line bisects the equator, and Jarvis, 1,000 miles to the east. It remains unclear who first conceived the idea of settling and acquiring these islands, but at least two lines of thought formed the genesis of the concept.

The first evolved from the commercial aviation establishment. In 1935, Pan American Airways was developing island bases at Midway Atoll and Wake Island for its transpacific service. The year before, the company had sought and obtained from President Franklin D. Roosevelt the annexation of the latter island as U.S. territory.¹ Pan Am also wanted to acquire a base among the disputed islands south of Hawaii in the same general area in which the Coast Guard expeditions were to operate.²

The second rationale for colonizing the islands came from the federal government’s concerns for national security. To the west of Baker and Howland Islands were the Marshall Islands, placed under Japanese mandate by the League of Nations after World War I. Although treaty considerations prevented the United States from militarizing islands in the Pacific (restrictions that Japan had few qualms about violating), it appeared wise to have a U.S. presence near the Japanese territory, particularly if it could be achieved in a nonmilitary way.

Historians have concluded that President Roosevelt backed both the colonization program and the airline expansion as valuable covert operations. Correspondence between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the President, however, suggests that the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy first raised the question of acquiring Baker, Howland, and Jarvis to serve as U.S. outposts along this mid-ocean frontier.³

Although U.S. merchant and naval ships had made the initial discovery of these islands in the 19th century, the British had established claims to them as well, leaving the status of the islands in doubt. Because the islands still were uninhabited by the 1930s, and Congress had provided in the Guano Act of 1856 that Americans could lay claim to uninhabited islands that contained guano (then a popular fertilizer), it made good sense to start the process of claiming the islands by colonizing them. Pan Am even formed a guano mining subsidiary to justify exploration.

Into this territorial vacuum stepped the federal government. During a two-week period in Honolulu in March 1935, the first of the colonization expeditions was organized hastily. Initially there were four major players. First was the Coast Guard, which furnished the cutter Itasca as the expedition ship. The Coast Guard was chosen over the Navy apparently to keep the expedition from acquiring a military look that might catch the eye of the Japanese. The second participating agency was the Bureau of Air Commerce of the Department of Commerce, which supplied the leader of the project, William T. Miller, the bureau’s superintendent of airways. The third entity was the U.S. Army at Schofield Barracks, which provided a cadre of enlisted men to accompany the first group of colonists, as well as construction equipment when it was needed on later voyages. The final participant was the Kamehameha School, a vocational school for young Hawaiian men, which provided a group of recent graduates to serve as the colonists.

Four colonists were taken to each island, along with two furloughed Army enlisted men who assisted during the first of the three-month rotations. After that, the Hawaiians functioned by themselves without supervision or assistance. Their daily routine involved weather observations, planting and cultivation of gardens, and general surveys on the suitability of the islands for future use.⁴

From the beginning the federal government was less than forthright in explaining to the public what was happening. The Department of Commerce devised an elaborate scheme to counter questions from newsmen who might ask why the colonization was taking place. Under this plan, the Postal Service provided a cover story of a projected airmail service by land-based planes to the South Pacific, even though no such activity was anticipated.⁵

The Itasca carried out the original colonization expedition and three additional replenishment rotations from March 1935 through March 1936 under the direction of Miller. A lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, Miller was rumored to be in naval intelligence. He was well connected in governmental circles, and reported personally to President Roosevelt after the second of the colonizing expeditions.⁶

In May 1936, the President ordered that Jarvis, Baker, and Howland be placed under the control of the Secretary of the Interior.⁷ Initially, this new status resulted in the withdrawal of the colonists from the islands as the Department of Commerce concluded that its work was done, but the Department of the Interior quickly dispatched a resettlement expedition on board the Itasca and the patrol boat Tiger (WSC-152).

In all, the Coast Guard made two dozen voyages to the islands between 1935 and 1942. A valuable summary of their destinations and their personnel was compiled by E. H. Bryan Jr. of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, who participated in a number of the voyages.⁸ The Itasca made eight round trips, the Tiger one, the William J. Duane (WPG-33) one, the Shoshone one, and the Roger B. Taney (WPG-37) a dozen. The first four expeditions were under the direction of the mysterious William Miller. An Army officer, Harold A. Meyer, who had been a part of the team at Schofield Barracks that had organized the original expedition, directed voyage number five.⁹ Voyage number six, symbolic of the transfer of authority for the islands, was directed jointly by Miller and Richard R. Black of the Department of the Interior. Black went on to supervise the following eight voyages and emerged as one of the most powerful figures in the colonization project. A onetime Army reserve officer, he had served in the 1933-35 Byrd Antarctic expedition, and soon after joining the Interior Department became a Naval Reserve intelligence officer.¹⁰

Several events in 1937 influenced the colonization effort. Perhaps the most interesting expedition was number eight, which constructed the airfield on Howland solely for the use of Amelia Earhart. This project had been planned for several months during the winter of 1936-37, but funding from Washington had been slow in arriving. Finally, the Army provided a group of enlisted men, and the Works Progress Administration furnished a small group of workers along with modest financial support. Heavy construction equipment, including several tractors and graders, was loaded on board the William K. Duane, and on 13 January 1937 she departed Honolulu with her decks crammed with the makings of an airfield.

According to Meyer, who was second in command of the voyage, the original destination for the construction materials was Jarvis Island. Two days into the voyage the expedition leader, Black, received word to divert to Howland instead and to build the airstrip there.¹¹ Meyer’s assertion, generally unconfirmed in accounts of the planning for the Earhart flight, seems illogical, because using Jarvis would have added 1,000 miles to the long hop between New Guinea and the Pacific islands.¹² Landing the equipment through the surf was a challenging assignment for the Coast Guardsmen. By disassembling equipment and floating it on pontoons, the ship’s crew and the colonists soon were able to get everything ashore. Eventually, when all the needed equipment had been landed, work began on the unsurfaced runway.¹¹

The routine of the replenishment expeditions continued in late spring 1937 even though a new event was focusing world attention on the equatorial islands. U.S. and British scientists gathered at Canton and Enderbury Islands, southeast of Howland, to observe a total eclipse of the sun. A gentlemanly disagreement between the two nations arose over the sovereignty of the islands, but in time, after each had reaffirmed its jurisdiction over the atolls, a joint- powers agreement was worked out to cover the administration of the territory.¹⁴ Early in 1938, colonists were placed on these two islands for the first time by the Department of the Interior.

In the meantime, the Amelia Earhart flight had ended in disaster. Expedition voyage ten had been tasked with accommodating the needs of this flight. Consequently, the Itasca had taken up her station at Howland as the ship from which Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were to receive homing bearings. It is curious that this older cutter was assigned to such a key role in the Earhart flight, when the newer Taney and Duane were available, and that she would carry out her station-ship duties in the middle of a regular replenishment and rotation voyage. Although the communication problems of the flight were attributable largely to Earhart’s lack of skill in basic radio procedures, the Itasca and her crusty skipper, Commander Warner K. Thompson, never were quite on top of the situation at their end.¹⁵

Black was on board the cutter at this time as the expedition leader. Some historians, however, have identified his primary responsibility as belonging to the Earhart flight, a privately funded venture, rather than to the ship.¹⁶ Likewise, his predecessor, Miller, also was involved heavily in the planning and execution of the Earhart flight, and had gone to Darwin, Australia, to coordinate the homeward flight from there.¹⁷ Thus, the covert purposes of the federal government in sending the colonizing expeditions to the equatorial islands and in encouraging the Earhart flight were merging into a recognizable pattern.

The joint U.S.-British operation on Canton proved to be a fortuitous event; the resolution of national differences there served as a catalyst for the development of both the equatorial islands and of Pan Am’s projected route to the south. Initially, Pan Am had wanted to fly a route to Australia by way of Canton and Fiji, but the British had withheld landing rights at those islands because U.S. officials had continued to deny British landing rights in Hawaii. Thus, only after the joint eclipse activities at Canton had mitigated the mutual distrust between the two nations did a more cooperative climate emerge. The threat of war in the Pacific also brought the two nations closer together.

That improved political climate at Canton manifested itself in additional aviation activities in the islands. For several years Pan Am had been pursuing another projected route from Hawaii to New Zealand. In the beginning, the airline had sponsored an exploratory expedition in 1935 with the schooner Kinkajou. Although this vessel had touched several times at Baker, Howland, and Jarvis, her search had focused on the Line Islands farther to the east, including Kingman Reef, Palmyra Island, and Christmas Island. British islands to the west were ignored at that time because the airline was looking for an all-U.S. route.

By the end of 1937 Pan Am had completed two test flights on the aerial pathway it had selected to New Zealand via Kingman Reef and Samoa. A third flight ended in disaster early in 1938, when a Sikorsky S42B aircraft, Samoan Clipper, crashed off Pago Pago. The airline immediately cancelled further development of that route and began to look for an alternative farther west.

Until that time federal officials had avoided working too closely with airline personnel, a situation that soon changed. In May 1938, the USS Ontario (AT-13), a fleet tug that served as the Navy’s station ship at Samoa, brought several Pan Am officials to Canton to conduct a preliminary survey of that location as a possible base for a new air route to New Zealand.¹⁸ This was the first indication of a permanent U.S. government role in the joint development of the island. It also apparently was the first use of a U.S. Navy ship in support of either the Pan Am or colonizing expeditions, although the fleet oiler Ramapo (AO-12) had provided fuel to Pan Am at Wake and Midway in 1936. Thus, with the Navy’s participation the convergence of national policies regarding commercial aviation and defense in the area was becoming even more apparent.

Canton became the focus of considerable construction activity. Cruise 16 of the Taney brought a number of Pan Am officials to the island in May 1939. At the same time the airline brought in the North Haven, the freighter that had been used at Wake and Midway in the summer of 1935 to supply the construction of air bases on those islands.

That ship remained at Canton under charter to Pan Am during the summer of 1939. Furthermore, during this same period the venerable submarine tender Bushnell (AS-2) conducted hydrographic surveys of the area. In August 1939, Pan Am’s first survey flights were made through Canton using the Boeing B-314, which had just gone into service. After several preview flights, Pan Am made the first passenger flights through Canton to New Zealand in late summer 1940, inaugurating the service that would last only until December 1941, when war in the Pacific brought it to an end.

In February 1942, all remaining colonists were removed from the islands. Left behind were the bodies of two of the colonists who had been killed in the Japanese attack on Howland in December, an attack that demonstrated the proximity of Japanese forces to the island and the distrust they felt toward U.S. activities there.

Official Navy ship histories indicate that the destroyer Helm (DD-388) was sent to Howland and Baker to evacuate the colonists. On 31 January, while leaving the area, a Japanese patrol plane bombed the ship, but the destroyer’s guns drove off the intruder before any damage could be done. The same sources indicate that the Taney went to Canton and Enderbury with the small merchant ship Barbara Olson at about the same time to evacuate the colonists and other Americans. After this the cutter made a similar trip to Jarvis, shelling and burning the facilities there and at Enderbury as she departed.¹⁹

Defense preparations already had begun on the islands before the start of the war. In the Line Islands a Marine Corps defense battalion arrived on Palmyra in April 1941 to protect the naval air base that was being constructed there with a 5,400-foot landing strip and a seaplane base in the lagoon. Later that year the Army Corps of Engineers began building an air base on Christmas Island.

Base construction moved somewhat slower in the equatorial islands, even though that area was the closest to the Japanese-held Marshalls. When the war began, 78 Army engineers were engaged in building a 5,000-foot landing strip on Canton, but no defensive capability existed. Perhaps because it was too short, nothing was done to improve the Amelia Earhart landing strip at Howland, and that primitive airfield passed into history without ever being used. Baker Island, however, eventually was turned into an Army Air Forces base in 1943.²⁰

Today the islands still are sparsely settled. Baker, Howland, and Jarvis remain U.S. territory, serving largely as bird refuges. After being used by Britain and the United States for nuclear testing and missile tracking in the 1960s and 1970s, Canton and Enderbury now are part of Kiribati, a new nation set up to administer a number of scattered Pacific islands.

Little mention has been made of these bases in the various histories of the war in the Pacific, primarily because they were in the eastern Pacific and thus far away from the areas of combat. Collectively, however, they played an important role in protecting the vital sea and air routes south from Hawaii to Australia and New Zealand, as well as serving as a deterrent to any eastward movement by the Japanese. They also served as stepping-stone landing fields for the bombers that were being flown to the southwest Pacific theater of operations. These uses alone justified the long and sometimes unclear venture that the colonization project had represented.