Fresh off an exciting 20-6 victory over Willamette, Hawaii didn’t have much time to celebrate as early the next morning Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
From the coach on down, the University of Hawaii football team responded to the call after the attack, immediately trading leather football helmets for shiny “tin” police headgear.
Hawaii football coach Eugene Gill, a veteran of World War I, during which he served in France, was among the first to respond for guard duty, and his players followed. Melvin Abreu, Chin Do Kim, Harold Kometani and Bob Henderson were assigned special police work. While their teammates were patrolling the streets, Axel Silen and Lloyd Conkling enlisted in the Navy. Hawaii Hall of Fame halfback Nolle Smith went from serving in the ROTC to being promoted to second lieutenant in the territorial guard just 23 days after shots were fired. Silen was in the doctor’s office being treated for a leg injury suffered in the previous day’s win. Within two years, he commanded patrol boats in the Pacific.
The Rainbows weren’t the only ones to get busy, as players from visiting Willamette and San Jose State immediately volunteered for police duties while hoping to play a football game that never came. The Spartans were slated to play Hawaii in the Police Benefit Game on Dec. 14 before it was canceled by the hostilities.
SJSU inspired idea
San Jose State coach Ben Winkleman got the idea to volunteer when one of his players, 21-year-old Chet Carson, spoke up and said, “Gee, if only I had a gun in my hands I would feel better.”
Willamette coach Roy Keene, who served with Gill in France, said his only hope for his team during volunteer police duty is that “they will shoot straighter than we did with our passes against Hawaii on Saturday.”
All told, the Honolulu Police Department enjoyed 50 new volunteers and put them to work as early as Saturday afternoon while Japanese planes were still in the air.
“A great many of them had never fired a 30-caliber rifle,” Hawaii Territorial Guard Executive Officer H.J. Keeley said. “Many didn’t know how to load one. … Under the most trying conditions they stuck on guard duty at public installations.” Chaplain Father Kenneth Bray added that “their attitude compares most favorably with that of the regulars. Army officers are amazed at the way they take whatever comes without a growl.”
San Jose State and Willamette didn’t leave the islands until Dec. 19, arriving in San Francisco on Christmas Day. The Bearcats paid for their living expenses during their time on Oahu with their defense work, allowing UH athletic director Pump Searle to donate an additional $1,500 to the Shrine Hospital for Crippled Children.
College football players weren’t the only ones who responded to the call. Hawaii’s prep football teams got down and dirty as well.
Saint Louis beat the Kauai Army team 39-0 in Lihue behind Herman Wedemeyer the day before the attack and was primed to take on a combined Kekaha and Waimea team on Sunday. Punahou was on Maui preparing to play Baldwin when word of the attack caused the game to be canceled.
Saint Louis won the ILH before the trips, with its lone loss coming to Punahou.
Prep teams stranded
With travel restricted, the programs had no way of knowing when they would be able to return to their battered home island. It took nearly 10 days for the first Buffanblu party to escape Maui, with assistant coach Harold Yap leading Johnny Ruiz, Forrest Dunham, Jack Ackerman, John Watkins and Gordon Tilly home.
Coach Harry Field stayed behind with the rest of the players. Twenty-nine of the 42 members of the traveling party landed on Oahu the next day, leaving 13 people still waiting for transportation.
Saint Louis had a harder time securing flights from Kauai, with 11 of the party returning on Dec. 15 and 35 Crusaders waiting for a ride.
By Dec. 19 both teams had returned their full contingents to Oahu.
During their 12 days away from home, they stayed busy with police duty, standing guard and digging trenches. The trip was especially harrowing for Saint Louis athletic director and assistant coach Stephen McCabe, whose brother Joseph was killed when an anti-aircraft shell dropped on the Packard sedan he was in near 802 Judd Street on his way to Pearl Harbor three hours into the attack. Joseph McCabe was 43 years old and left behind a widow and six children.
Stephen McCabe relinquished his post as the school’s athletic director in 1942 when the school became an army hospital and intended on resuming duties but died of a heart attack in the school’s reading room in 1951.
Two thousand people showed up when the school’s gymnasium was dedicated McCabe Gym in 1957.
