The Footfalls of History In 1919 when countries were picking up the pieces of the Great War, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and others were concerned about communication between countries. Up until that time British owned Marconi of America ruled the airwaves. They moved to make sure wireless radio communication in America was American owned. When the Great War broke out the US government took temporary control of Marconi’s America division. The gove

If you don't already know, I wrote a book and self published it through Amazon. It's about a German who spied for the Japanese before the Pearl Harbor attack. His story was too long for my blog. I'd stumbled across Kuehn's story because he used RCA to transmit some of his messages. One in particular, the signals message, was mentioned in the Congressional record as well as by other authors. His story fasinated me from the start. Why would a German family man spy for the Japa

The Footfalls of History It was 1942, and the fleet was in. In Honolulu prostitution was legal, and it was [1]welcomed. A white river of uniforms, peppered with the occasional brown uniform of an officer lined Hotel, River, Mauunake and Pauahi streets in front of the boogie houses. Only about two hundred girls worked in Oahu’s houses. One carrier had two thousand or more men.[i] The girls charged $3.00 for sailors, $2.00 for locals, a day’s wage. The Madam got a dollar. Girls

The Footfalls of History It was a typical 1939 Honolulu day, sunny at Waikiki and sultry in the highlands when Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Shivers stepped off the sidewalk in front of 735 Bishop Street. Elaborately carved urns lined the edge of a second story balcony above a stone arch of a frieze of a sailing ship, a sea captain and a steam schooner that reflected the history of The Dillingham Transportation Building’s occupants. Now it held the FBI. It was within walki

The Rest of the Story- Takeo Yoshikawa; from playboy spy to poverty Takeo Yoshikawa, code-named Tadashi Morimura, wove his way into the Money Eater; Bernard Otto Kuehn and Pearl Harbor’s Final Warning because he used RCA to transmit his coded radiograms to Tokyo in 1941. He also activated sleeper agent Bernard Kuehn whose story will soon be available on Amazon. I wrote Kuehn's story while we wait to hear back from the Navy Institute about the publication of Pearl Harbor's Fin

The Footfalls of History; Tidbits of history that we found during our research. 7 December 1941~ 1:00 pm – Niihau Island, Territory of Hawaii Japanese Pilot First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi opened his canopy, lowered his landing gear, braced himself, and crashed landed on the small island of Niihau 17.5 miles southwest of Kauai across the Kaulakahi Channel. He had attempted a dead stick landing near Nonopapa, a cluster of farms on a dry shallow swamp bed. In just 70 feet, he

Writing about Pearl Harbor has been a wonderful learning experience. And one of the best has been uncovering the stories about ordinary civilians and their reactions to the life changing event they lived through on the day of the attack. Many of those people have been added to my list of personal heroes. Cornelia Fort is one of them. She was a civilian flight instructor flying with a student the morning of the attack. A recent article in Sport Aviation prompted the mem

My local paper, the Bend Bulletin, published a thought provoking editorial by Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist at the Hoover Institution, Sanford University on September 25, 2106. Educated in such hallowed halls, I took note of his opinions. And they scared me. In his column he shows how war often takes people by surprise like the calm before the storm-- in spite of long- simmering disputes. Hanson points out that the Great War was sparked by an assassination.