 here on Think Tech. I'm Jay Fadale. We're going to remember Westlock today. Westlock is a story that very few people in Hawaii know about, but they should. It's the second Pearl Harbor took place on May 21st, 1944. And May 21st is coming soon, a couple days away from us now. And Dolores Gutman, Steve Gutman, a long marriage and dedicated, defined by their activism in the community, but so many organizations. We don't have time in a short show here to describe all the organizations and causes they have been working on together all these years. And I admire and commend them for their activities in that regard. Today, we're talking about Westlock, a very, very important story. And I suggested our viewers take notes on this because they may not know anything about what happened in Westlock. So the first question, Dolores, I put to you, why are you interested in what happened at Westlock? Oh, it was brought to my attention. In 2009, I never heard of Westlock until the Navy called me and said that this is a bit that you need to be be part of your history here in Hawaii. That was my first knowledge of it, and I'm still learning. Quite remarkable. And Steve, I'd like to say to you, you know, when I was in the Coast Guard, I studied casualties, I investigated casualties, a number of them, serious casualties, right on through casualties that were interesting to the presidency and Congress. However, nothing came close to the investigation. Nothing I've ever done came anywhere close to what happened at Westlock and all the investigations that happened. And all the reports were made, including a book called The Second Pearl Harbor. Gene Eric Sallacher wrote a book only a few years ago. And, you know, it was it was like classified information until the 60s or 70s. And for that reason, nobody knew about it. Nobody captured it. The reports were written for the Navy was all internal and classified. And finally, we have this this positive book, which is on Amazon by Sallacher. And I find it very interesting that he does what I would have done in the Coast Guard, he examines every single fact the book is loaded with exactly what happened. So Steve, make yourself a legal investigator now as a lawyer, then tell us in a few words what happened on May 21, May 21, 1944. Well, actually, Dolores does a better job of describing the incident. But I really think we ought to have her go through it. Okay, I take your point. Dolores, you describe the incident. Well, the Second Pearl Harbor really kind of skipped over some factors. He talked about the LS3, the LST vessels in Pearl Harbor, and those things, but they didn't talk about the incident itself in detail. He skipped over the fact that what happened actually there in terms of the explosion on LST 353, which were being unloaded by the 29th decontamination unit from Schoolfield Barracks. And the ship was overloaded and they lost two or three roll-offs on LS353 as it was moving around Maui. And so the ship came back to Pearl Harbor to be reloaded. And as they were reloaded with no training or anything, the exposure occurred in the afternoon. They arrived around 7 o'clock, about over 100 or so men from Schoolfield arrived at Pearl Harbor around 7 o'clock to unload the ship on the 7th. That was the Sunday morning, May 21, 1944. And so that they, the secret part, and the Navy actually preferred not to talk about it because the men were not trained. And in the second day, in the second event happened me on July 17th at Port Chicago. These men were unloading ammunition and gasoline on this LS353 that blew up the explosion. And the bodies were flown all over the place at Pearl Harbor. And many bodies are still, the boat and everything is still down in the Walker Bay. And we have a lot of history and I have names of people that survive. And we will talk about that on Friday, some of them. Well, tell us what's happening on Friday. On Friday, May 20th, which is we're celebrating the 11th anniversary of the West Lock and Turney's life and memory. This began in 2010 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. And there are 39 graves, I know Mark Graves with butterflies in them. They have to be analyzed by the POWMIA, which is the DPAA at Joint Base Pearl Harbor. So the celebration is to memorialize those men that are buried there in unmarked graves, 39 of them. And it began at 2 o'clock on Friday, May 20th. And it's about a 45 minutes to 60 minute services. And it's a military protocol. And it's in collaborative, the Obama-Hawaiian Africana Museum is working in collaboration with Joint Military Forces of Hawaii to celebrate that. Okay. So there's an African-American connection here. And I want to explore that with you. There are 559 people injured or killed, something I recall, 136 were killed. Well, it's something similar to that. They don't know exactly how many people, because we only pick the body parts off the water. And some of them would never recover. I've gone down Joint Base Pearl Harbor with different admirals in general for the last 10 years. And I get more information every time I go with them down to, in the back of the high security area about this incident. And they're still unfolding. Yeah, there were a lot of reports written. And they're inconsistent in many ways. So we don't know the whole story yet. The Board of Inquiry was initiated the very day after this happened. But one thing I'd like to offer you is that there was an inconsistency as to the cause. And there was an inconsistency as to why it was kept classified. Let me say what I mean. There was some talk about a Japanese submarine, a one man submarine out there, and some investigation done on that and the possibility that that caused the explosion. The explosion was huge. It sank six LSDs and those are large ships. And those ships were loaded with tanks and war material and mortar rounds, 3,000 tons of explosives on these six ships. And it really destroyed West Block at the time, including structures on the beach. In any event, I guess the prevailing theory now is that the men were untrained, as you say. There was gasoline, exposed gasoline. And some fellow was smoking a cigarette. And the cigarettes set off the gasoline and the gasoline set off the ammunition. I think there are probably other theories too. And there are multiple theories about why the Navy originally kept it secret. This was part of a special project, delivering this ammunition to the Marianas to clear the Marianas so they could fly a B-29 into over Tokyo. And so they managed to get their act together only a day or two after by bringing other LSDs in to do the same job and they carried out the mission, the convoy, if you will, to the Marianas, pretty much on schedule, which is really a statement. But since this was a highly classified mission, they didn't want to talk about it. Yeah. And now the state of Hawaii was still under martial law. And because there was so much tension because of what was happening in Japan and they're planning to, you know, invade the Marriott Islands and to make a secret kind of impact. But the Japanese ships were out there from California and all around the Pacific and everything. So they had to be very careful. And so what happened is they needed to test some of the ship because they were overloaded. And we lost three roll-off LSDs on those of the roll-off on the LSD, the larger boat. And so that was why the army was, you know, tasked with unloading and reloading the LSD-353 that blew up. And the reason the guys didn't know how to handle it, they were just rolling live ammunition down the chutes where, you know, they just paced live ammunition on things and onto a truck. I have some pictures showing them doing that. And they don't have a clue about the danger and also the gasoline that tanks that are also on board. So it was easy. It was lots of ways that, you know, the explosion began. And it was just, and when the ship blew up, it was it was, the people on it was just mesmerized. Period. What are the pictures show, Maurice? The picture, the picture just shows LSD-353 just into explosion and it's spanned all over Walker Bay and the adjacent ships that were nestled together. That's how the six ships got, you know, the fire on them. And then one guy, which you will be seeing in our program on Friday, his rider was blown over on the west side, on the Warpio side of the day. And they didn't run him to 10 days later. Other barred apart fingers and arms and all kinds of things were just piqued up off the water. And then I talked to another gentleman who worked in the Navy Yard. He had picked up some of the body parts off the water. And then people later on, even the water parts were still laying all over George Bay's Pearl Harbor in 43. I mean 42 when this happened. So again, they were deteriorating in that kind of thing. So in the Navy, and it's okay, it's historical, Portugal and West Hawk incidents were being handled by Black men, which is the dirty work. Yeah, that's so that's one thing I want to explore with you. Of the people that were killed, at least half of them. More than half. More than half. But what are your numbers? What is it, Steve? Well, the numbers they have, they still, although POWM, they sent me a whole list of things and I've gotten a lot of some declassified information. The numbers vary all over the place. So they were... Why were there so many African American men in such a dangerous job? Why was that? Because this is just the tip of the iceberg. This was the two incidents, the one that were Pearl Harbor on May 21st, 44, and in Fort Chicago, July 17th, 1944. Those are the two events. Another event also happened in the Marriott Islands. I'm known in the ships. That one, I'm not talking about at the moment, my researcher did work on that, but we just talk about Pearl Harbor here. And that story is not real. And I'm not sure why do we have all the people that died because they have military numbers. And the list that I have are military numbers and the families never heard from these people. And more recently, I've been contacted. I don't know why I'm always been contacted on this. They did find a couple of people, bodies and names listed in the last couple of years or so. Remember, Jane, this whole time is this is when the service was still segregated. And this was grunt work. And the grunt work was frequently done by the African Americans. Okay, that explains it, you know, at Fort Chicago and in Westlock. And the difference with the Fort Chicago was that could be seen actually in San Francisco. So the Navy couldn't put the secret tabs on it like they did with Westlock. Here with the Marshall ball and everything else, they were able to keep it under wraps. The real question is why did it stay labeled secret into the 60s? I mean, it's understandable why initially they did it, but it really should have been reported. Well, do you think it was intentional with holding of information from the public? It could be just a mistake. Why would they have continued? Because it was segregated military at the time. In WACP was given the military a hard time in terms of positions of blacks serving in World War II, including Tuskegee Airmen and those people. And here in Hawaii, all of the bases, all the rough work with the engineers, I think they're core engineers they call themselves, the white officers, they were sent to prepare the way into bear the hours. And then the blacks would come in into Pearl Harbor to pick up the pieces and to do all the grudge work at Pearl Harbor that needed to be done. And they don't get credit for this. And the second Pearl Harbor doesn't even deal with that part of the story at all. No, as I read up on this, I thought to myself, this is a story that's basically unknown, even here, even here in Hawaii. And it's very good that you are covering it, exposing it. Well, you have to keep in mind that Hawaii was under martial law. And the Asian people in particular, because they didn't know a lot of mainland people could not tell different ethnic groups of Asian ancestry. And they were monitored day and night. And the people, even today, when we also talked about the Surrey, the capital with the Disturre Foundation, Hawaii Foundation, a few years ago, people remember the incident, but they were not allowed to talk about it during World War II. They were not, the newspaper only had about a short five or six lines about it. The incident happened. They didn't even say where it was. Yeah, you can imagine. I have that document. You can imagine how the Navy was affected by this. They were probably astounded that it happened in the first place. It was a major event in so many ways that affected their whole position in the Pacific. They didn't want to talk about it. They gagged, made a gag order for the press here. They wouldn't discuss it. At the same time, they galvanized themselves on two fronts to have a court of inquiry immediately look into it. And I think they were paranoid, too. They thought that it was a Japanese submarine. They couldn't clear that possibility. And at the same time, they were afraid of public opinion about it. Right, exactly. And the narrow report have the court of inquiry. I haven't seen that yet. And they talk about the court of inquiry to people that survive the incident and also more about the Navy. But that's research for future generations, not for me. Steve, what would you add to all of that? Obviously, you're both interested in this. You're both working on it, so to speak, advancing public knowledge about it. What's your point of view? Actually, I would like to talk a little more about the memorial service that's really on Friday and the fact that I think it's really important if people can be present and celebrate the lives of these people. Because, party, there's so many of them that we really don't have names. And it's really sad in terms of what occurred. Yeah, that's one of the points in what you published on the event to give them names because my recollection across the numbers are not settled. But there were 29 body parts found. They couldn't find any bodies because the explosion was so violent. Series of explosions, I should say. I mean, six LSDs blew up with ammunition of 3,000 tons of ammunition, including mortar rounds, artillery, so that there was really nothing left of anyone. And the 29 body parts were buried. But at the time, there was no technology to determine what belonged to who. And you alluded to the possibility that they can now find out using modern technology. Are they putting names on these graves? Is that what's happening? Well, right now, they have to untune the 39 body parts up there. That is one of the things that the POW, the FIA office have to do here for Harvard. They have, we've talked about it, that they need to do that so they can identify those body parts. They could identify some names. Several families have come forth, both black and white, given their names and they were able to track. This is POW, MIA office, was able to track their names down and find them, and they are listed in the National Cemetery. These suggest names don't have anything to do with the body parts. So that's the second thing that has to be done so that the families, this has been 78 years ago, the families have never heard from that family members again. And you notice that I said 39 graves with body parts in them, not bodies, not bodies, because they were blown to the smithering when the LS-354 and the closest to LS-353 also exploded with the same tenacity as the LS-353. So you have a conglomerate here and a lot of people it says your word, his word, and their word. We're still unfolding this story, so the best that we are going to get in this research, we have to look at the Code of Inquiry reports and how they talk about it. I hope you talk about this book, The Second Pearl Harbor by Jean Eric Selector. It's actually on Amazon and you can get it. Yeah, I have a, except for, I talked to the guy after he sent me a song. The only part, as I said, he was not interested in the African American peace of it. He wasn't interested in talking about segregation. And you know, the army was only desegregated in 1948. So you deal with a lot of history. Do you think that what happened at West Lock led to the desegregation in 1948? No, I'm not saying that. No, I'm not saying that. But you have to kind of think about how our country was, you know, segregated in Jim Crow was evident everywhere. And this included the workers in the factories that helped to build the aircraft while the men are at war. And how the migration came to the West to help work in the factories. So there are many pieces of this story that helps to tell their larger narrative. And the best I can talk about Hawaii, because that history is under the radar that people don't talk about what they did here at all. And in Pearl Harbor, Pearl City, Kwansoa 33 was part of Manana barracks. And I don't know, another base that black barracks were outside of Fort Shaffter. This is our Navy historian Jeff Dodge told me about. They just dismantled that one all together like they did the ones in the ever beach, ever side. So a lot of the history is still under radar. They're dealing with Pearl Harbor here in Hawaii. I understand. But this is not just a lesson in history. Although it is a very interesting lesson. I hate to say this, but it could make a very interesting movie, for example, to cover it in detail. I'm not sure there's a lot of information or people that can give the details aside what's written in these reports. But I think there's lessons to be learned beyond the historical rendition and analysis. And I'd like to ask you guys to talk about that. Steve, what can we learn as we learn about what happened here in Westlock? What can we learn for the future for Hawaii, for the military, for, I don't know, race relations? Well, as far as the actual incident itself, just in terms of the importance of training, and the fact that the people were not properly trained, certainly led to the numbers increasing. The mere fact that the explosion occurred would have led to a fair number of deaths. But it got compounded by the fact that people really didn't know what to be doing initially in terms of how to react and address the problem as it was developing. Who are us? Well, I think that what we need to do is continue. I'm working with a historian and he will be at our services on Friday. We're looking at how to mitigate the situation and tell these at this particular part of the story. We're looking at, I think, at George Bates Pearl Harbor. They want to go on the Westlock side. They're looking at this man on a walk over there. But we need to do something to make sure that our young people, our future generation, know about this particular one so that they can also be able to prevent such a things occurring again, incidents, no matter what they are. So in history informs the future. So I think here in Pearl Harbor says the World War II began here. It is very imperative that we tell a larger narrative about all of the people that participated in World War II in the Pacific. The World War II in the Pacific story has not been told adequately at all, which includes the people of Afghanistan, the Japanese, because they did so well in 442 in Europe. They stand out. But the Filipinos and the Chinese and the Hawaiians and African Americans, our story here in the Pacific are not told well. And we need scholars and researchers to unfold that story. And like you said, a documentary will be really well done if they look at the whole story, not piecemeal it. Well, the other thing about this, and it goes especially now in the time of Ukraine and violence in Ukraine is we forget just how war goes. We forget the violence. We forget how dangerous it is to handle ammunition, 3,000 tons of ammunition. You know, it's easy for something like this to happen just as in Port Chicago of San Francisco. Exactly. Only 60 days before. So it's really a lesson in making us understand about war, about the lethal consequences of even relatively innocent acts of loading a barge. And I don't think people understand that. We've been sort of cauterized about the violence. We've heard it all, Pearl Harbor. We've seen the pictures of the ships smoking and sinking and what have you and look at the Arizona Memorial and all this. But the fact is that we don't fully appreciate the violence of what happened and the guests surrounding us and the body. This is a factor which is very prevalent that we can talk about after the COVID and the pandemic. We need to talk about the real story of war, especially looking at Ukraine and what's happening there. And that situation is not any different than happening in World War II here in Hawaii and across the Pacific Islands and also Europe. And again, I think that it requires us to have a dialogue. And I think that would be a nice program to have to actually talk about it, that having from different sectors and people from different sectors to talk about it in terms of how war has impacted our lives. And we need to put, we need to kind of start looking at for the future generation to kind of minimize this and mitigate it in some way. Because war is not, it is not acceptable. And along too many innocent people died, by the way. And can we get along otherwise? And I think we need to be at the table to actually talk about one thing that COVID has done and the pandemic crisis. I think now PearlCon, it can bring us together to have a conversation. Yep. Well, and the great tragedy is in war, in the fog of war, terrible things happen to people, they lose their lives. And that is, that is something every time. And as they say, the history is told by the survivors. But the people who were killed, they don't have a chance to tell them. They don't have a voice. And we are, that's why the 20th, the May 20th at the natural cemetery, we're that voice. And we need to kind of mitigate it in some way to, so it doesn't happen again. So that they do have a voice. And I thank you for inviting us on the show to talk about that. This is beginning of a long, a long narrative that should take place on your show and on our media. Yes, we want it. We want to cover this. We want people to be fully informed and thoughtful about it. So Steve, let me ask you, have we covered the points that you would have liked to see us cover today? Is there anything you want to add in terms of, you know, what we should take from this discussion? No, I think you've covered the primary, primary points. I mean, it's an incident that happened. It easily happened again. And it's something that people need to need to say their proper prayers for. Yeah, sometimes I think Hawaii doesn't think of its history in the comprehensive way that you guys are talking about. And we have to be mindful of history, or we will repeat it. And so I think it's very valuable that you're bringing this to public attention. Well, you know, the other thing though, Ray Emory, who just died last year, he was that voice before he was he it was a one man show and he worked at it ferociously until he died. And he was actually here's my anchor and put the wind wind beneath the wing to get involved in this project. And he would not let me walk away with it. But he gave me all of the support to tell the story. And for him, making sure that the unknown people that died on December the 741 that their lives were meaningful and that we shouldn't forget them. And so the same thing happened. He said he was in court when May 21st 44 days that occurred. So he witnessed it. You know, part of think tech's approach to things is to make people to take people beyond their daily lives, their daily grind, you know, whatever they do on a given day, take them out of their comfort zones, try to give them a world view, not only about the present, but about the past. And I think that if you want to, if you want to understand Hawaii, right down to the core, you have to understand things like this, too. It has to be in our historical lexicon, it has to be things we think about and we build into our world view or at least our Hawaii view. So thank you very much for this discussion. Dolores and Steve, I really appreciate you coming around. Thank you for you. And I wish you a productive event here coming up soon. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jay. Really appreciate it. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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