Sep 29, 2022 - Sale 2615

Sale 2615 - Lot 318

Price Realized: $ 812
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(WORLD WAR TWO.) Florence Hodgson. Vivid first-hand account of the Pearl Harbor attack by a Honolulu resident. 17 manuscript pages, 7 3/4 x 5 inches, stitched and laid down in the rear of a printed book, Blake Clark's "Remember Pearl Harbor!" (Philadelphia, 1942); minimal wear to the manuscript, the book with substantial wear to backstrip but clean internally, two small photographs of Hodgson's terrace laid down, and one of her brother Joseph V. Hodgson (the territory's Attorney General) laid in; inscribed on front free endpaper to Hodgson's sister on 18 April 1943. Honolulu, HI, 15 March 1943
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Florence Lucile Hodgson (1892-1968) attended the University of Michigan, and then in 1929 began teaching Latin at the Punahou Academy, an elite Honolulu preparatory school. She wrote this haunting manuscript memoir of Pearl Harbor, "written this 463rd night of black-out, March 15, 1943." It begins with a description of a routine pleasant Sunday morning disturbed by a distant sound of "almost continuous firing of guns . . . interspersed with very disturbing louder crashes." She assumed it was simply a military exercise, but thought with annoyance "If war ever should come, it would probably sound like this." The radio began making cryptic pronouncements urging residents to stay indoors and avoid the telephone, adding "This is the real McCoy" and eventually "The Islands are being attacked." She climbed a nearby hill where other residents had gathered, and saw smoke screening Pearl Harbor, burning homes scattered through the city, and military convoys moving into her school's campus below: "Little did we think as we watched them that the U.S.E.D was taking possession of our school and seventy-acre campus for the duration of the war."

The small crowd on the hill spotted seven Japanese planes circling the harbor just out of reach of the anti-aircraft guns, and fled rapidly when the planes veered off and headed directly toward the hill: "A few like me just stood, hoping that if they strafed us with machine guns, that it would be over for us quickly." A neighbor carrying a long rifle urged them to disperse, as the crowd was an easy target.

Actual news mixed with wild rumors filtered in through the afternoon ("Jap parachutists are dropping everywhere on St. Louis Heights"). The radio urged civilians to donate blood. The governor declared martial law "in a shaking voice" as "a bomb that morning had fallen in front of his residence." She learned that a friend who had been out for a drive that morning near the base was evacuated by military truck and spent the night sheltered at Diamond Head Crater. The account closes with the author sitting on her terrace that evening in near-total darkness, "firmly convinced that the dastardly sneak attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor . . . had been but a prelude to the landing of Jap troops. . . . I wondered how ready were we to meet the invasion."