Sons of Hawai'i laid to rest again

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

The young men on Howland Island were supposed to make contact with their military bosses on O'ahu on Dec. 7, 1941, the day before two of the colonists would die, but they weren't getting a response on the shortwave.

Moana Whaley Espinda, left, and Ornetta Keli'ihananui Ka'a'a visit their uncles' new graves at Hawai'i State Veterans Cemetery in Kane'ohe. They requested that their uncles be moved from a Schofield cemetery to Kane'ohe. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

Howland Island colonists, from left, Elvin Mattson, Richard Whaley and Joseph Keli'ihananui. Tom Bederman, not pictured, was the fourth colonist. Elvin Mattson via Bishop Museum

Keli'ihananui and Richard "Dicky" Whaley were two of four colonists sent by the U.S. government to continue America's claim to remote Howland. Colonists, many of whom were recruited from Kamehameha Schools, were also sent to Jarvis Baker, Canton, and Enderbury islands in the colonization project, which began in 1935 and ended in 1942.

Keli'ihananui and Whaley wouldn't have long to worry about the Japanese attack on their homeland. They would see the Rising Sun emblem firsthand on Dec. 8, when the Japanese planes would hit lonely Howland, strafing and bombing the airfield that had been built a few years earlier in fruitless anticipation of the arrival of Amelia Earhart.

Keli'ihananui, 26, and Whaley, 19, died in the attack.

On Monday, 62 years after their deaths, the men will be laid to rest during a 2 p.m. ceremony at Hawai'i State Veterans Cemetery in Kane'ohe, the last of three grave sites their bodies have occupied.

Their first burial was in a bomb crater on Howland, where they remained for 12 years, until the Army brought them back and buried them at Schofield Barracks.

The ceremony at Kane'ohe won't be visited by cannon fire, buglers playing the lonely notes of taps or fighter jets flying in formation: the men were civilians, and military honors are not a part of the plans.

The ceremony will be traditional Hawaiian, and this time, Ka'a'a and Moana Whaley Espinda, their surviving family members, will be in attendance.

The new graves will be high on a hill, next to the flagpole, overlooking the ocean.

Whaley would have liked that ocean view, his niece, Espinda said.

Espinda and Ka'a'a didn't know their young uncles well, and knew little about the expedition. Much of the information they have now came from Elvin Mattson, one of the two colonists who survived the Howland Island attack, and the last still living.

Mattson said yesterday that a long time had passed before he talked to the family members of the deceased, or anyone else, for that matter.

Seven weeks after the attack, he and fellow colonist Tom Bederman were rescued by a military ship and brought back to Pearl Harbor for debriefing, he said. They were told not to discuss the events on Howland Island with anyone.

"Just go on about your lives, they told us," Mattson said. "Don't say anything to anybody."

In May 2002, the Bishop Museum put together a exhibit on the historical colonization project, and Mattson decided the time had come to break his silence.

Espinda and Ka'a'a said they will always be grateful for the times he spent with them, telling the story in as much detail as they and Ka'a'a's grandsons, ages 10 and 7, cared to request.

"And they are very inquisitive boys," Ka'a'a said. "Did they have computers? No."

The men had gone out that December day in 1941 to salt some fish they had caught, Mattson said. The Coast Guard ship that came by to drop off fresh colonists and supplies had provided them with canned goods, bacon and beef, which they kept in a gasoline-power refrigerator, but the fish and sea food helped break the monotony, and the colonists brought dried fish home with them when they finished their rotations.

Whaley, like all the men in Espinda's family from that generation, was a fisherman.

Espinda knew he had found happiness on Howland when Mattson showed her a picture of one of their catches: a fish the size of a small woman. Espinda smiles the smile of a fisherman's daughter as she spreads her arms and extends her fingers.

At about 11 a.m. on Dec. 8, Mattson said, the men were tending to the drying fish when the planes started to come. There were about nine of them, flying in formations of three, he said. The birds that nested on the island flew straight up into the air.

The men took off in twos, Mattson and Bederman, who died in 2000, and Whaley and Keli'ihananui.

They ran away from the scattering of small buildings on the island, thinking the buildings would be the targets, and ducked beneath the shrubs. The Japanese focused most of their attention on the Amelia Earhart flight line, strafing and bombing it and the island's lighthouse.

When the planes passed and Mattson and Bederman went to look for their partners, they found that both had been hit by shrapnel.

Whaley was conscious, Mattson said, and asked to be taken to a nearby high point on the island, so that he could see the ocean. He lived long enough to do that.

Keli'ihananui died before Bederman could get back with a medical kit. Mattson and Bederman wrapped their partners' bodies in canvas and buried them in a 15-foot-deep bomb crater.

For the next seven weeks, the two remaining colonists learned to watch the birds closely: each time a Japanese bomber flew over to observe the island and drop a bomb or two, the birds rising into the air would announce its arrival.

In 1954, the military sent a team to excavate the makeshift graves, and the bodies were moved to a small, neat cemetery on Schofield Barracks, where the Ko'olau rise in the background.

The family was allowed to visit the graves as long as the post wasn't on alert, but after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, visitations became difficult and sometimes impossible.

In January 2003, the nieces asked the government to move the bodies of their uncles to Kane'ohe.

In September, Irwin Cockett Jr., director of veterans services in Hawai'i, notified the family that their request had been granted.

"It is time that the country ... honored the memory and immeasurable loss born by your family," Cockett wrote in a Sept. 9 letter to Espinda.

Reach Karen Blakeman at 535-2430 or kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.