Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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Yet the Japanese attack quickly put an end to such visions of pleasant isolation. If the Japanese assault outraged the United States, it was also a reminder that Hawai‘i was not necessarily the pacific refuge that many Americans believed it to be. What had been tourist sanctuaries prior to America’s entry into the war quickly became militarized institutions serving the American war machine. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the shores of Waikiki, for instance, began functioning as “a haven for U.S. Navy submarine personnel between forays on enemy shipping”—it was leased to the navy for five years as a rest and recreation center for the Pacific Fleet—while “entanglements of barbed wire” lined the beach.¹⁴¹ Tourism and war quickly became conjoined—or reconjoined, as the case may be—as the islands served the “war time needs of hundreds of thousands of fighting men seeking relaxation between Pacific battles.”¹⁴² And Hawai‘i was not alone. California, which in the prewar years was a distant surfing outpost, underwent a similar militarization.