Harbour

Whitewash on Pearl Harbour The Peril of Three Years Ago

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Dec. 7.

WELL, the whitewash has been applied as I predicted.

There are rumblings, however, in the Congress at Washington, and that com posite Pompeii-Hollywoodesque honky tonk, which is Honolulu, may yet get its just dues as the true cause of the Pearl Harbour Disaster.

Everyone in the Pacific knows that the customary Saturday night “binge,” and the Sunday “morning after” (well re ported by the Japanese spy system at Hawaii)- left Pearl Harbour wide open.

All the commissions, inquisitions, investi gations and hush-hush are pure eye wash.

We are indebted to the Honolulu Cham ber of Commerce, the Booster Club, and the Tourist Bureau, for three years of blood, sweat and tears, to attain a posi tion in the Pacific which should have been ours early in 1942. These high priests of Mammon, on, December 7, 1941, laid several thousand of our best soldiers and sailors in their charnel house, beside the bones of the disinherited Polynesians.

That we of the United States are not, to-day, fighting with our backs to the Rocky Mountains in the west, and to the line of the Mississippi River, in the east, is due to the valor of bur British breth ren, during that dark period after Pearl Harbour. Our people should never for get that immeasureable debt.

Our United States achieved a miracle of recovery, and our forces now are doing magnificently; but on the day we remem ber Pearl Harobur we should pay eternal tribute to those valiant knights of Saint George who saved us from disaster dur ing our time of peril.