The National Archives has since recovered the book, which contains more than 500 pages of daily logs from the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard between March 1941 and June 1942.
The National Archives recently announced the recovery of a rare Navy logbook detailing the attack on Pearl Harbor as it was happening. After sitting in storage for 50 years, the volume is now available to the American public.
The logbook — covering the period between March 1941 and June 1942 — records daily entries from the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, including vessel movements, ships undergoing repairs, and other operational details. Most notably, though, it also includes meticulous contemporaneous notes of the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, a lesser-known secondary attack on March 4, 1942 (Operation K), and the repair of the USS Yorktown following the Battle of the Coral Sea.
In a press statement, Jim Byron, Senior Advisor to the Acting Archivist, thanked the “historically-conscious California couple” for returning the logbook to the American people. Still, there was a very real possibility that this valuable piece of history may have been lost to time if not for one woman’s decision 50 years ago.
The Pearl Harbor Logbook Was Nearly Trashed Decades Ago
As The Washington Post reported, this book nearly vanished into oblivion. During the 1970s, a woman named Oretta Kanady was working as a civilian employee at the old Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, and noticed the logbook in a trash bin. She happened to think it looked interesting and asked if she could keep it, according to her son, Michael William Bonds…