Kaiulani
p. 81 · Read in the full issue
The Wartime Story of A Sailing Ship
THE strange story of how an old San Francisco windjammer plugged an awkward hole in the supply lines for the New Guinea campaign was revealed by a San Francisco shipping executive (said a writer in the San Francisco Chronicle in March).
The bark “Kaiulani”—last American square-rigged ship—and the vessel which Mayor Elmer Robinson wants brought home for permanent preservation in an Aquatic Park maritime museum—is the heroine of the story, George Bradford, general manager of Sudden & Christenson, Inc., told how decomposed coral altered the strategy of the Buna (Papuan) Campaign.
Bradford, then a colonel, was serving as water transport officer for the Army Service Forces.
“We had to get supplies to Buna; it wasn’t going too well for our forces there.” he recalled. “What they needed most of all was tanks. But there was no way for ships to reach Buna without detouring up into Jap-held waters near Rabaul. Finally, in desperation we de cided to send a vessel on a short cut through the coral reefs.
WHAT that ship found out altered the whole strategy of MacArthur’s campaign up the New Guinea coast.
Butting her way through, she found out that the reefs that had frightened mariners for 50 years were not the kind that tear the bottom out of a ship, but what they call rotten coral. It was soft.
“With this knowledge we were able to
develop that short cut into a major channel for war material. We took Buna and turned the airstrip there into a major weapon against the Japs. Rabaul was bv-passed. The gasoline for the planes came up that shortcut through the reefs.
“But to deliver that gasoline we had to have ships. This was early in the war, before Henry Kaiser was rolling We scoured Australia, and bought any thing that floated and could move under its own power.
“We had fishing- boats, ferryboats island steamers, auxiliary ketches, and paddle wheelers. Talk about your evacua tion of Dunkerque—we didn’t use our splinter fleet for just a week as they did we had to keep patching it up and operating for better than a year.
“ A MONO those ships was a whole flotilla of coal burning steamers— Dutch and British vessels. So we had to buy a coal hulk with special load ing machinery to fuel them. As luck
would have it this hulk was sunk in Milne Bay. We needed a replacement right away.
“And that is where the Kaiulani the Mayor’s ship enters the picture.
“This beautiful sailing ship had come wandering into the war, and was tied up in the prettv little port of Hobart, Tas mania. But war is wai. and aesthetic con sideration had to go by the board. The Army bought her and stripped her of her spars. I had to give the orders to do the job, and I hated it!
“So we made Kaiulani into a coal hulk, and sent her to New Guinea. She followed the war up the coast, to Finsch haven and Hollandia and she did yeoman service. If any ship ever felt the stirrings of patriotism, it was that old windjammer.
She sacrificed her beauty to get the job done.
“I think the Mayor’s proposal to res cue her from oblivion is excellent and deserves every support. She is the last of the American sailing ships, and that makes her of national importance.”