TSUNAMIS By Walter Dudley
J
KeOlaMagazine.com | March - April 2022
ust before 7am on the morning of April 1, 1946, Seaman Perry Minton was in the radio room aboard the USS Thompson headed toward Pearl Harbor when, he recalls, “Almost as soon as I put on the headset, I heard a patrol plane calling its base at Kāne‘ohe to report something on the surface of the sea, perhaps just a line or small wave. When the station at Kāne‘ohe asked the pilot to drop down closer to the surface to see what it was, the pilot said it had outrun his aircraft!” Minton wondered what was going on; however, his friends aboard the Thompson assured
18Men on the Hilo bayfront running away from the third and largest wave of April 1, 1946 tsunami. photo from the Cecilio Licos Collection, courtesy of the Pacific Tsunami Museum
him that it was just an April Fools’ joke—but it was no joke. Herbert Nishimoto, a sophomore at Laupāhoehoe School, had spent the weekend hanging out with some buddies in an empty cottage on the little peninsula when he was awakened by a friend shouting, “Tidal wave!” He watched in awe as the second wave destroyed an old canoe shed and then the third wave came, and Herbert remembered, “It looked terrifyingly huge.” At that point, Herbert was swept off his feet and sucked into the sea. When the wave finally subsided, he found himself floating amongst
