PUUWAI, Niihau -- Military presence on Niihau dates back at least to Dec. 7, 1941, when a Japanese Zero bomber made a crash landing not far from here.
The plane, riddled with bullets, had just bombed Pearl Harbor.
The pilot had no choice but to land in a rock-stubbled pasture because the Robinsons had spent eight years plowing 2-feet-deep cross-hatched furrows in the flatlands throughout the island.
Keith Robinson, co-heir of Niihau, says an Army Air Corps major warned the family in 1933 the Japanese might try to seize the island as an advance base for a takeover of the Hawaiian Islands.
Mules pulled the plow for four years until a tractor was purchased. The project was completed the summer of 1941, Robinson says.
The bomber's landing gear was destroyed and Niihauans captured the dazed pilot. He was locked in a storage room until a second-generation Japanese schoolteacher on Niihau set him free and gave him a gun. The pilot terrorized the village for several days until he was killed by a Niihauan.
Most of the plane was quickly confiscated by U.S. forces, but remnants of the wing remain hidden under lantana trees. The cross-hatchings in the land are still easily visible from the air.
Over the years Niihauans have stripped off the plane's aluminum skin and re-fashioned it into eyes for their fishing nets.
Proves??? Hardly. You present a sanitzed story. Read the accounts as they happened in 1941 then tell me how they acted.