A new look at the Ni‘ihau Incident of 1941

Keith Robinson has compiled new information about the aftermath of the crash landing of a Japanese Zero fighter plane on Ni‘ihau following the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event known to military historians as the Ni‘ihau Incident.

Hours after the attack at Pearl Harbor on O‘ahu on Dec. 7, 1941, a Japanese Zero fighter plane crash-landed on Ni‘ihau.

Benjamin Kanahele, a Hawaiian who lived on Ni‘ihau, was shot three times before he and his wife killed the pilot, and he was later awarded the Purple Heart and the Presidential Medal of Merit for his heroism.

Was the landing of the Japanese fighter plane on Ni‘ihau accidental?

No, contends Keith Robinson, co-owner of the island with his brother, Bruce.

Japanese military officials who had mapped out the attack of Pearl Harbor had designated Ni‘ihau as an alternate recovery site for Japanese aviators who were unable to return to offshore aircraft carriers after the raid, Robinson said.

Japanese submarines were assigned to Hawaiian waters to pick up downed aviators after the Dec. 7 attack.

An incident that occurred in the Lehua Channel on Dec. 16, 1941 further corroborates the theory Ni‘ihau was used as a recovery point for Japanese aviators, Robinson said.

On that day, the Rev. Paul Larimore Denise and Alymer Robinson, Keith’s uncle, sailed to Ni‘ihau in an unarmed fishing boat to obtain technological secrets of the downed Japanese Zero, Japan’s most vaunted fighter plane during World War II. As part of the work, Denise took 500 photographs of the wreckage.

The strategic importence of examining the fighter plane was critical to the U.S. war effort, and allied military officials wouldn’t get another chance until July 1942.

Denise said also he saw an amphibious patrol bomber (PBY), which escorted the boats across the channel between Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, attack a patrolling Japanese submarine and crashed in waters west of Ni‘ihau.

The information on the submarine attack and the fact-gathering trip to Ni‘ihau was recently sent to the Kaua‘i Museum and Koke‘e Museum archives to be kept for posterity, Robinson said.

The information, which was gathered by Robinson, also appears in an article in the December 2002 edition of The American Legion magazine.

The information will provide historians and researchers a better understanding of the Pearl Harbor attack that plunged America into World War II, Robinson believes.

The information surfaced in letters exchanged between Robinson and Craig L. Barnum, the grandson of Denise, who recently passed away in Westfield, New York.

“It (the information) shows that Japan had a comprehensive plan for the recovery of their airmen,” Robinson said in an interview with The Garden Island.

The thinking of the planners of the Dec. 7 attack was that: “If you (pilots) were left behind, you weren’t just going to fall in the water and be forgotten,” Robinson said.

That is what the Japanese pilot must have been thinking when he flew over Ni‘ihau hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and crash-landed, and was subsequently killed, Robinson surmised.

The recovery plan for the Japanese pilots with the use of submarines was only one aspect of the Dec. 7 attack, but it showed to him thoroughness of the planners of that raid, Robinson believes.

Robinson said U. S. military officials on O‘ahu desperately wanted to salvage what they could from the Japanese plane wreck on Ni‘ihau.

But the priority was to repair the damage at military bases on O‘ahu following the Dec. 7 attack, and to prepare for a possible invasion by Japanese military forces, Robinson said.

Few U.S. military personnel could be spared to fly or sail to Ni‘ihau to examine the downed fighter plane, Robinson said.

So an “hastily-assembled scratch team” consisting of the Rev. Denise, Alymer Robinson, one or two officers and a few men was thrown together, Robinson wrote.

The group sailed in two commandeered sampans that were escorted by the PBY aircraft, which circled overhead as the boats made their way from Kaua‘i to Ni‘ihau.

Contrary to what critics may say, the group didn’t make the trip for recreational purposes, Robinson wrote.

He said his uncle had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, and that “he would never have been stupid enough to take any causal guests along on a high-risk, intelligence-gathering mission to secretly study Japan’s most advanced war plane.”

The trip was being made under the assumption that the channel waters between Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau were patrolled by Japanese warships days following the Dec. 7, attack, Robinson wrote.

The fishing boats had cleared Lehua Channel and were starting to go down the west coast of Ni‘ihau when the escort plane may have been spotted, Robinson said.

He said his mother, Helen Robinson, rarely spoke of that expedition, but recalled that someone had reported that a small plane attached to the submarine hovered above the PBY plane.

The PBY plane, which reportedly had eight men aboard, may have attacked a Japanese submarine and then crashed, Robinson said.

As the plane descended, the pilot of the PBY plane also may have jettisoned depth bombs to try to lighten the plane and regain control, and avoid crashing, Robinson wrote.

The release of the bombs could have been misinterpreted as an attempt by the plane to bomb the submarine, Robinson said.

Six of the eight people aboard survived the crash, and the official line from military officials at the time was that the aircraft went down because of air turbulence or wind shear, Robinson said in his letter.

Robinson said he was at odds with the official military report on the incident, because the Ni‘ihau residents probably saw the attack, because Denise was aboard the boat and had a “grandstand seat” of the attack, and because Denise believed submarines lurked in waters around Ni‘ihau at the time.

The concluding section of this update on the Ni‘ihau Incident appears in Monday’s issue of The Garden Island.