Kahoʻolawe: The Hawaiian Island the Navy Bombed for 49 Years, and the Nine Who Took It Back

On February 6, 1965, a dome of 500 tons of TNT went off on the shore of a small, dry Hawaiian island. The blast threw a white condensation cloud over the sea, sent a shock wave racing across the water, and slammed into a converted cruiser moored offshore, the USS Atlanta, which had been fitted out to see what a nuclear-sized blast would do to a modern warship. It was the first of three such shots that year. The island was Kahoʻolawe, and by then the US Navy had been bombing it for more than two decades.

Kahoʻolawe sits about seven miles off the southwest coast of Maui, close enough that visitors on Maui’s southwest coast see it on the horizon every evening. From 1941 to 1990 it was a live-fire target for ships, planes and artillery. Today it is a reserve held in trust for a future Native Hawaiian sovereign entity, and no one can land on it without permission. How it got from one to the other is one of the most remarkable stories in modern Hawaiian history: a protest that began with nine people jumping off a boat onto a beach, cost two men their lives, and ended with the United States military handing an island back.

In our tour of the Forbidden Pacific, Kahoʻolawe got a few paragraphs. It deserves a full telling.

The smallest of the eight

Kahoʻolawe is the smallest of the eight main Hawaiian islands, about 11 miles long and 6 miles wide, roughly 45 square miles in all. Its highest point is the crater of Luamakika on Puʻu Moaʻulanui, around 1,477 feet above the sea. That is not high enough to wring rain out of the trade winds, and the island sits in the rain shadow of Maui’s 10,023-foot Haleakalā, so it gets less than 26 inches of rain a year. Seen from Maui it looks low, brown and empty, a long dark shape on the horizon.

It was not always empty. The Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC), the state agency that now manages it, says archaeological evidence points to Hawaiians coming to the island as early as 400 AD; other estimates put permanent settlement closer to 1000. Small fishing villages lined the coast. The largest settlement, Hakioawa, on the northeastern end facing Maui, may have held as many as 120 people. The cinder cone of Puʻu Moiwi was the second-largest basalt quarry in the islands, where stone was worked into koʻi, or adzes. The lack of fresh water probably kept the total population to a few hundred at most.

Kanaloa’s island and the road to Tahiti

To Native Hawaiians, Kahoʻolawe is more than a dry rock. The island is venerated as a kinolau, a body form, of Kanaloa, the god of the ocean, and one of its old names is Kohemālamalama o Kanaloa. It was also a place of navigators. The western point of the island is Lae o Kealaikahiki, "the point of the path to Tahiti," and the channel beside it carries the same name. Tradition holds that voyaging canoes set out from here for the South Pacific, and above the high-water mark four large boulders form a traditional compass site that marks north, south, east and west.

A study of the island’s ocean traditions notes that crew members of the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, which sailed to Tahiti in 1976, estimated they could have saved five days if they had departed from Kealaikahiki rather than from Hawaiʻi Island. Activist Emmett Aluli, recalling the view from Moaʻulaiki, one of the island’s two highest points, told the Honolulu Advertiser that from there he could see Haleakalā, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa and the ridges of Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi: "That’s why it’s referred to as the piko (navel)."

Goats, convicts and cattle

The island’s ruin began long before the bombs. In 1793 the British captain George Vancouver gave goats to Kahekili, the ruling chief of Maui, and the goats ended up on Kahoʻolawe. Around 1830, after missionaries persuaded the kingdom to replace the death penalty with exile, Kahoʻolawe became a penal colony for men. The law was repealed in 1853.

From 1858 the Hawaiian government leased the island to ranchers. KIRC records that by the late 1890s there were 900 cattle and 15,000 sheep on it, and the goats were never brought under control. The animals stripped the dry forest and grassland, and the trade winds did the rest, carrying the red topsoil away in dust clouds that blew toward Maui. The territory declared Kahoʻolawe a forest reserve from 1910 to 1918 to try to save it, but the attempt failed. In 1918 a Wyoming rancher named Angus MacPhee took a 21-year lease and began a cattle operation that was showing modest success by the 1930s.

More than a quarter of the island has since been worn down to bare, saprolitic hardpan, a dense red crust where little will grow. That damage, from animals and wind, was the island the military inherited.

Target Island

In May 1941 MacPhee’s ranch sublet part of the island to the Navy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, martial law was declared across Hawaii and the military took the whole island. Kahoʻolawe became a training ground for the war in the Pacific: thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen practiced here the naval gunfire support and air strikes they would use against the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas and Peleliu.

The bombing did not stop with the war. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that formally handed the island to the Navy, with a condition that would matter later: when the military no longer needed it, the island was to be returned in "reasonably safe" condition, as the Los Angeles Times later summarized it. During the Korean War, and then through the Cold War and Vietnam, crews built mock-ups of airfields, vehicles, radar sites, gun mounts and surface-to-air missile sites across the island for pilots and bombardiers to aim at. Meanwhile the goats thrived. KIRC estimates their population reached about 50,000 at some point between 1941 and 1988.

500 tons on the shore

The strangest chapter of the bombing years was Operation Sailor Hat. When the Limited Test Ban Treaty took effect in 1963, the United States could no longer explode nuclear weapons in the air or under water, so the Defense Atomic Support Agency looked for another way to learn how ships would stand up to a nuclear blast. Its answer was to stack an enormous amount of conventional explosive and set it off close to a test ship.

The Navy’s Bureau of Ships ran two underwater shots off San Clemente Island in California in 1964, then moved to Kahoʻolawe. For each of the three shots there, Seabees stacked 500 short tons of cast TNT blocks into a hemisphere on the shore. Because TNT releases its energy more slowly than a nuclear weapon, the setup was designed so the blast at the ship would match a one-kiloton nuclear explosion at a greater distance. The target was the USS Atlanta, a World War II light cruiser that had been stripped and rebuilt with test superstructures. More than 500 high-speed cameras recorded each shot, while a navy crew of 169 and 60 scientists rode it out below deck. The Atlanta was damaged but not sunk.

The tests answered questions the Navy had been asking since Operation Crossroads at Bikini in 1946, without the fallout. But they left a mark on Kahoʻolawe. One shot blasted a crater into the shoreline that is still known as Sailor’s Hat. Sea water now seeps into it, forming an anchialine pool where tiny red Halocaridina rubra shrimp live. It has also been suggested that the blasts have cracked the island’s caprock, letting some of its scarce groundwater drain into the ocean.

Hawaii had already watched the night sky glow in 1962, when an H-bomb exploded high above Johnston Island during Starfish Prime. Sailor Hat brought the nuclear age’s test program right to the edge of the main islands.

Nine people on a beach

By the 1970s a new generation of Native Hawaiians was rediscovering its language, music and voyaging traditions, a revival later called the Hawaiian Renaissance. Kahoʻolawe, a sacred island being shelled as target practice, became the issue that pulled that energy together.

Maui activist Charles Maxwell and others had spent 1975 quietly planning a landing, with fishermen making secret trips to hide food and water in caves. The group picked the bicentennial year of the United States for the protest. Shortly after daybreak on January 4, 1976, between 50 and 60 people set out from Māʻalaea Harbor in about ten boats. As the flotilla crossed the ʻAlalākeiki Channel, a Coast Guard helicopter warned that going further could mean arrests and seized boats. Most of the fishermen turned back to protect their vessels.

A Maui charter captain and a reporter who had hired him offered their faster boat instead, and nine people climbed in: Emmett Aluli, Kimo Aluli, George Helm, Ian Lind, Ellen Miles, Stephen Morse, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean, Walter Ritte and Karla Villalba. They came ashore at Kūheʻeia. Seven were soon picked up by the Coast Guard. Emmett Aluli and Ritte walked inland, watched from high ground as the others were taken away, and stayed two more days before giving themselves up.

Several of the nine later described being stunned by how big the island was, how much red runoff stained the water, and how quiet it was. "It wasn’t a tiny negligible piece of land," Lind told the Honolulu Advertiser on the thirtieth anniversary. Ritte said the island changed his life: "It was the island that told me, ‘Hey, I’m dying.’"

Aloha ʻāina

Within the year the group had formed the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (PKO) and filed suit in federal court to stop the bombing. In 1977 the court allowed the Navy to keep training but ordered it to prepare an environmental impact statement and inventory the island’s historic sites. The landings kept coming. Ritte and others were arrested repeatedly; at one point, he told Hawaiʻi Public Radio in 2026, they occupied the island for 35 days. Asked how they survived on ground littered with unexploded bombs, he said they stuck to goat trails: "If the goats didn’t get blown up, then you’re not going to get blown up."

George Helm, a gifted falsetto singer and the movement’s most charismatic voice, is most credited with coining its rallying cry, aloha ʻāina, love of the land. On March 7, 1977, Helm, Kimo Mitchell and Billy Mitchell tried to paddle surfboards from Kahoʻolawe back to Maui in rough seas after a trip to check on Ritte and fellow activist Richard Sawyer, who were hiding on the island. Billy Mitchell turned back to get help and survived; Helm and Kimo Mitchell were never found. Accounts still differ on exactly where they were last seen.

For nearly half a century, the target was a god’s body.

Their loss hardened the movement rather than ending it. For nearly half a century, the target was a god’s body. Now that idea had martyrs. In 1980 the PKO and the Navy signed a consent decree that let the ʻOhana visit the island ten times a year, limited the shelling, and required the Navy to protect historic sites, replant, and remove the goats. On March 18, 1981, the entire island was added to the National Register of Historic Places, with 544 recorded archaeological and historic sites and more than 2,000 individual features.

The bombing stops

The decisive push came from an unexpected direction. In May 1990, Representative Patricia Saiki, a Republican running for the Senate, raised Kahoʻolawe with President George H. W. Bush, who ordered a National Security Council review. On October 22, 1990, Bush directed the Secretary of the Navy to stop using the island as a weapons range immediately. "We have waited a long time for this day," Governor John Waiheʻe told the Los Angeles Times.

In 1993 Senator Daniel Inouye sponsored Title X of the 1994 defense appropriations act, which ended military use of the island, provided for its return to the State of Hawaiʻi, and authorized $400 million to clear unexploded ordnance. The state created the Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve, covering the island and two miles of surrounding ocean, and the commission to run it. On May 9, 1994, the Navy conveyed the title to the state.

A cleanup that could not finish

Clearing half a century of ordnance from a 45-square-mile island turned out to be harder than anyone hoped. Parsons/UXB, a joint venture hired by the Navy, began work in November 1998. In the initial effort some 400 workers collected more than 10 million pounds of bombs, shells and scrap, and the Navy called it the most expensive cleanup of unexploded ordnance ever undertaken. On November 11, 2003, control of access passed from the Navy to the state in a ceremony at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu.

The money ran out before the island was safe. When the project closed in 2004, according to KIRC, about 75 percent of Kahoʻolawe had been cleared of surface ordnance, and only about 10 percent, 2,647 acres, had been cleared to a depth of four feet. The remaining 25 percent, 6,692 acres, was never cleared. Rusting shells and fragments still lie on the ground in places, and KIRC warns that hazards remain even in cleared areas and in the surrounding waters.

That legacy showed itself in February 2020, when a wildfire broke out at Kealaikahiki on the western end. Because the fire ran through uncleared land, crews could not fight it on the ground or from the air. It burned for six days and consumed about 9,000 acres, nearly a third of the island, before rain finally put it out. It destroyed KIRC’s upland storage base, with vehicles, tools and restoration supplies worth more than $1.3 million.

Healing Kanaloa

The work since the return has been slow and physical. Volunteers and staff bring bales of native grass and seed to the barren summit, lay them across gullies to trap the sliding red soil, and plant native shrubs such as ʻaʻaliʻi in the hardpan. A 500,000-gallon rainwater catchment now irrigates restoration plots on an island with no reliable streams. Access is limited to KIRC volunteer trips and PKO cultural access, and trolling boats may enter only the deeper outer waters on scheduled weekends.

The ʻOhana still holds Makahiki ceremonies for the god Lono on the island, and the University of Hawaiʻi brings Hawaiian-language students across the channel every year. Under state law, Kahoʻolawe will be transferred to a sovereign Native Hawaiian entity once one is recognized by the United States and the State of Hawaiʻi. Until then, it is held in trust.

In January 2026, the fiftieth anniversary of the landing, Ritte looked back on the fight in an interview with Hawaiʻi Public Radio. "Yeah, we defeated the United States of America military with aloha," he said. Half a century after nine people waded ashore at Kūheʻeia, the island that the Navy once called a target is quiet again, except for the wind, the surf and the people slowly planting it back.

Further reading