Posted on: Sunday, October 10, 2004

Not many in Hawai'i remember the Hizer

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 wasn't the first time the Imperial Japanese navy flexed its muscle in Hawai'i. Waikiki residents got a preview of Japan's ambitions in the Pacific when the battleship Hizer stood offshore in 1914, her cannon loaded and ready for battle.

An Advertiser reporter and two photographers went out to investigate and found themselves looking into the barrel of a gun.

I stumbled onto this little known snippet of history on a tip from reader Alan Lloyd. There, splashed across the front pages, was an example 27 years before Dec. 7, 1941, of Hawai'i at the flash point of international power politics. At least one historian believes that what was happening in the Pacific set the stage for Pearl Harbor.

Newspaper readers in Honolulu at the beginning of World War I probably knew a lot better than citizens on the Mainland about the forces let loose by war in the Pacific. Nearly every day a schooner, a windjammer or steamer arrived from the South Seas with a report that ownership of another remote island had changed hands.

Japan, Britain and France were allied against Germany. America stood firmly neutral. In Our Honolulu, neutrality looked more like aloha.

California's anti-Japanese hysteria hadn't yet infected Hawai'i. During the war between Japan and Russia in 1904, The Advertiser had printed front-page dispatches in kanji to attract readers of Japanese descent. English-language newspapers reported the celebration of the emperor's birthday as a local festival. Editors of Japanese language newspapers complained about censorship in Japan and passed on news about the Japanese fleet to haole editors. The German consul in Hawai'i supplied local editors with news from the Western front.

But ships kept arriving with disturbing reports from other islands and atolls. The barkentine S. N. Castle came from French Tahiti with German war refugees and news that a Japanese cruiser had shelled Papeete. A German battle cruiser smashed the British cable station at Fanning Island. A Japanese fleet occupied Jaluit, the center of German administration in the Marshall Islands, without firing a shot. Japanese warships took Yap in the Carolines, an administrative center of German Micronesia.

Probably nobody else in the United States cared. But to people in Hawai'i, the tiny islands were in their back yard. The stories named German battleships, they described size of the Japanese fleet, its movements and named the ships hauling supplies.

In early October, a small German gunship armed with a 4-inch cannon, the Geier, took refuge in our neutral harbor to make repairs. Citizens of Honolulu didn't know exactly how to behave. The commander of the Geier wanted to salute his empress on her birthday. Would firing the guns as a birthday greeting constitute a breach of neutrality? The harbor commission decided it was OK so long as the guns pointed out to sea.

Then the Japanese battleship loomed off Waikiki. Its skipper, Lt. Cmdr. S. Taduchi, came ashore and demanded that the Geier stop hiding or be dismantled. The German consul in Hawai'i argued that the vessel was undergoing repairs. Until they were completed, she was protected by neutrality. Taduchi told the Star-Bulletin he would wait as long as it took for the Geier to come out. Then he'd blow it to bits.

So Waikiki residents woke up every morning to stare at a Japanese battleship sitting outside the three-mile limit. No U.S. naval vessel at Pearl Harbor was big enough to scare it away. At night, a searchlight on the Hizer probed the shore from Diamond Head to Honolulu Harbor while a searchlight from Fort Ruger played on the battleship. People stood on rooftops to watch the drama.

At dawn on Oct. 24, lookouts on board the Hizer spotted a little German gasoline schooner, Aeolus, up from the Marshall Island after a weary voyage. The Aeolus was coasting in off Diamond Head. The battleship steamed in pursuit and captured the Aeolus as a prize of war. Observers in Waikiki, training their binoculars, said this happened inside the three-mile neutrality limit.

The Advertiser rented a sampan and sent reporter Walter Doyle with photographers Jimmy and Al Williams and an interpreter to get the story. They approached the schooner tied up alongside the giant battleship and asked if they could come aboard. A haole shouted back in impeccable English to come ahead. It turned out he was the German captain.

As they got closer, he dove over the side and swam toward the sampan, apparently trying to escape to a neutral ship. Alarms in the battleship went off. A marine with a rifle ran to the rail.

"Sheer off! Sheer off!" screamed the sampan skipper. The sampan scurried away leaving the German captain in the water. He turned around and swam back to captivity. That night, the Hizer used the Aeolus for target practice, perhaps as an object lesson. The schooner burned in sight of Waikiki and sank.

It must have occurred to local residents by this time that the Japanese battleship could have leveled Honolulu with little resistance. The American navy was in the Atlantic, 4,000 miles and weeks away. The same thought later occupied the meditations of naval strategists in both the United States and Japan. But at the time, the rules were different.

The next day the German schooner Hermes, also up from the Marshalls, limped into port hugging the shore. Hizer steamed in to intercept her. This time the battleship clearly invaded neutral waters. With no fear, the little revenue cutter Thetis, flying the U.S. flag, raced out to confront the enormous warship. Hizer meekly turned around and went back outside the three-mile limit.

After a few days more, the battleship departed perhaps on orders from Tokyo to avoid an international incident.