"Dude,” Sharrit said she told her fiancé, Michael William Bonds. “You know what you have here?”
It was the log book from Navy Yard Pearl Harbor, covering the 16 months before and after the attack that pushed the United States into World War II. On Wednesday, the National Archives announced that it had recovered the book from the couple earlier this year.
“It’s a very big deal,” said David Stupar, the Archives special agent who retrieved the book from Sharrit and Bonds, of Hemet, California, Its whereabouts can be traced back to the moment it was plucked from a trash bin in the 1970s at the old Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, by Oretta Kanady, The Washington Post first reported.
In an interview with the Post, Kanady’s son, Michael William Bonds, said she found it in the bin while working as a civilian employee and thought it looked interesting. She asked if she could have it, and it remained in her possession until her death in 2000. Bonds then inherited it.
“In the last few years, I’ve moved here, moved there, it’s just been in a box,” Bond’s told The Post. “I hadn’t really looked at it.”
The book is in good condition, and while it may not alter the basic understanding of the events of Pearl Harbor, where more than 2,400 sailors, Marines, soldiers and civilians were killed after Japanese war planes attacked U.S. military installations near Honolulu, it helps to verify the story of the day that lives in infamy.“We have nothing, nor does the nation have anything similar to this,” Mitchell Yockelson, an investigative archivist at the National Archives, stated as the book was unveiled at the Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. The Dec. 8, 1941 entry for the "Log Book U.S. Navy Yard Pearl Harbor." (National Archives)
Logbooks, used by the Navy, were brief daily records of events and observations. In the case of “Log Book, U.S. Navy Yard Pearl Harbor,” it documented several of the ships that were at Navy installation the day of the Dec. 7 attack. Dec. 5, 1941, records the arrival of the battleships Arizona and Oklahoma. Both were famously sunk just two days later.
The Pearl Harbor Historic log book was nearly thrown away before being saved by a curious civilian employee at the old Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California
