Out of the Trash Can, and Into the National Archives: Pearl Harbor Logbook Recovered
Pearl Harbor logbook tossed in the trash resurfaces as a rare, firsthand record of the attack and is now preserved at the National Archives.
In the 1970s, Oreta Kanady, a civilian employee at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, found an old Navy logbook in a trash bin. Thinking it looked interesting, she got permission to keep it. The logbook was from the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor and covered March 1941 to June 1942—meaning it included documentation of the attack on December 7, 1941, as it happened.
In August, the logbook found a new home at the National Archives. Kanady’s son, Michael William Bonds, told the Washington Post that he inherited it when his mother passed away in 2000. He said he had kept it “in a box” and “hadn’t really looked at it.”
According to the Military Times, investigative archivist Mitchell Yockelson said, “We [at the National Archives] have nothing, nor does the nation have anything similar to this.” The book is still in good condition, and the day-to-day activities at the naval yard are recorded in handwritten entries. A digitized version is available for viewing online.
While the book may not provide any new information, its firsthand account of the “date which will live in infamy,” as well as daily life and work at the navy yard in the first years of World War II, makes it a valuable resource and vital piece of American history.
Yockelson also noticed a small but evocative detail that may capture how it felt to live through the devastating attack: a few brown stains on the December 6, 7, and 8 pages. He suspects that ”somebody was so agitated at what went on that he spilled his thermos.”