KAPA‘A — Retired Army Colonel Duke Curran of Kapa‘a joined millions of other World War II veterans in spirit during the dedication of the new monument to that war held Saturday in Washington D.C.
“I think it looks beautiful, the attendence was great,” said Curran, who due to health reasons was unable to travel from his home to the ceremony, but watched it closely on televison.
“It was sad to watch it,” he added, as over three quarters of the American veterans of World War II have now died, and many of the living are now aged and also unable to travel to the event.
Earlier this year Curran passed along to The Garden Island copies of documents sent to him by Bernard Ryan, an Army officer who led a detachment of soldiers to Ni‘ihau in the days before the Battle of Midway.
Ryan was a member of the 165th Infantry during his days stationed on Kaua‘i in 1942, a unit associated with the famed Fighting 69th of New York. He would later go on to gain national notice for his valient stand against the Japanese Army during the Battle of Okinawa, an action well-known as “Ryan’s Ridge.”
Ryan’s papers were once classified as “SECRET,” and ordered him to defend Ni‘ihau against a Japanese Army and Navy invasion, and dated June 2, 1942.
“It seems that everything I have read about Ni‘ihau and everything that has been said by Hawaiian tourist guides never mention or even deny that this event ever occured,” Ryan wrote Curran in January 2003.
Ryan’s orders said his mission was: “To delay enemy landing from air or sea craft; to protect army rad facilities on NIIHAU and to destroy, in the event of a successful hostile landing all water supplies and all machinery and equipment that could be used by the enemy, particularly with respect to repair or construction of landing fields.”
Similar secret orders regarding Kaua‘î were declassified decades after World War II. Those orders called for the destruction of power plants and other facilities on Kaua‘i, and the movement of civilians to Koke‘e and other isolated interior sections of the island in case of a Japanese military invasion.
The Battle of Midway fought June 4-7, 1942 turned the tide of the war for Hawai‘i, and ended the threat of invasion by Japanese forces.
Another document of Ryan’s was a thank you letter sent to Brigadier Gen. Alexander Anderson then stationed in Kalaheo. It was from Aylmer Robinson and said the Army caused “little disturbance…to the Niihau Hawaiian population” during the Army task force’s days on the island.
