The Construction of the Original

Haiku Ladder, or Haiku Stairs

From Woodbury, David O. Builders for Battle, E. P. Dutton and Company Inc., 1946, Chapters XXII and XXIII, pages 348-370: A description of the conception and construction of the Naval Radio Station in Haiku Valley, Kaneohe, Hawaii.

CHAPTER XXII

ALL THE STOPS ARE OUT

… Invasion, they all knew, was very near. What they didn't know was that the Navy had other plans.

One more major item was needed to give the Pacific Fleet full striking power: absolutely certain means of radio communication with headquarters at Pearl. The new receiving station at Wahiawa amply met these requirements but the main Navy transmitter at Lualualei was not powerful enough for an all-ocean war. A giant sending station must be built that would reach not only to the waters of Australia and the Indian Ocean but also to every Allied submarine --submerged -- especially if she were on the bottom of Tokyo harbor.

The plan was proposed in the early spring of 1942, under the aegis of Commander Hord, Radio Materials Officer at CINCPAC. BuDocks immediately delegated a group of its civil engineers to the problem, including Lieutenant Commander R. M. Belt and lieutenant Butsine and Thatcher. As in the case of Red Hill, the Navy proposed to obtain the advice of every possible expert for this untried experiment. Engineers of the Radio Corporation of American were therefore engaged and the New York designing firm of Gibbs and Hill retained. When the idea of a superpower radio station with pan-Pacific range was presented to them, the engineers said they thought it might be built –provided that the antenna could be raised high enough above the ground. The greater the power to be radiated by long wave, the higher and larger must be the antenna system and the network of ground wires under it. The Navy wanted to work with hundreds of kilowatts and hundreds of thousands of volts. When the radio engineers understood the full impact of the problem, they began to think it could not be solved. No steel tower that would stand up would be high enough. Those at Lualualei were over six hundred feet – mere flagpoles in this argument., The Eiffel Tower itself would not suffice, even if it were available. The aerials, said the engineers, must be some two thousand feet above the ground.

A young RCA man named McKesson came forward then with a suggestion. The Dutch Government, he said, had a long-range transmitter in Java, using high aerials strung between the tops of two small mountains. Why not do the same thing here? Immediately Navy and PNAB caught the spark of the new idea. Harrie Muchemore, whom everybody regarded as the difficult-situations man of the outfit, eagerly expressed his approval. Washington chimed in; Admiral Moreell held conferences with McMenimen and Wlson. Here was something to delight the heart of any constructor. For the mountains in Oahu were not tame. Jungle-covered, precipitous, drenched in perpetual rain, they would resist the encroachment of man to the last. To find a suitable pair of peaks two thousand feet high, to plant heavy concrete footings on them, then to string long lengths of copper cable between them, and keep them there – this would be the finest achievement of all.

McKesson came to Honolulu as fast as possible, bringing with him a colleague, Freeman Blanding, to do the radio installation work. RCA was to be responsible for electrical design and installation, with PNAB doing the actual construction. Marty Broan, who had distinguished himself as Harry Lutz's assistant at Johnston, was named Contractors' project manager.

Choosing the site was comparatively simple and was done from a coast and Geodetic map. They needed two adjacent mountain walls, facing each other, rising as nearly vertical as possible, with flat land in between. The windward side of the island, the map showed, answered this requirement exactly. Facing Kaneohe Bay was the towering rock wall of the Koolau Range – a series of ancient volcanoes whose northern exposure had eroded into a fluted cliff marching across the land with great hogbacks jutting out toward the sea. Between these hogbacks were a number of extraordinary ampitheatres, almost semicircular in plan, deep, fairly level, and reasonably accessible from the highway. There were six of them strung along in a line reaching from the Pali road northwest for fifteen miles.

Right away it was evident which was the best: haiku Valley, next but one to the Pali, with sides rising dizzily around a perfect horseshoe curve. According to the map, each hogback fell off a little at its outer end. Its lowest point was something like eighteen hundred feet above the valley.

McKesson and the others lost no time in driving up to Haiku on a reconnoitering expedition. What they found was something not shown on the map. A small dirt road went in part way from the Kamehameha Highway. The rest of the way there was only a faint trail through dense, matted jungle, then the valley itself, its floor a tumbled mass of hills and dales buried in moss and decayed vegetation. Huge lava boulders were strewn everywhere; streams rushed down the slopes, turning the ground into a soft, slippery mush. And every inch was laced and interlaced with the twining branches of the hau trees, some of them fifty feet high. The intruders could not move a step without hacking their way with axes.

As if this were not enough, one look at the towering cliffs above them showed the magnitude of the problem there. It was impossible for any human being to climb to the top from any point in the valley.

Muchemore and his companions cut and slashed their way to the base of the south cliff, a towering corrugated wall, black and naked, to which there somehow clung a thick green mat of underbrush clear up to the point where the mountain disappeared into its perpetual blanket of fog.

"Well," said Harry, "it's going to be quite a job."

CHAPTER XXIII

FIGHTING MEN ON A

FLYING TRAPEZE

A legend surrounded Haiku Valley. Into its dripping jungle a century ago, King Kamehameha the First drove his enemies and butchered them every one. Ever since, the valley had been haunted.

This was a complication the Contractors would have liked to avoid. But when they started slashing a road into the amphitheatre, they began to dig up skulls and bones; some of the Hawaiian truck drivers refused to go in at all. Sent over the Pali with machinery and equipment, they would dump it in the village of Kaneohe below and promptly go away. Those natives who did go in were so uneasy that Broan found the only solution was to give every skeleton an official burial as soon as it was unearthed. Fortunately, word of the discoveries did not get around very generally. Haiku was top secret -- so secret that naval subordinates refused to discuss it even with the Operating Committee. Ferris had to raise hell to get the plans.

Superstition controlled and an entrance bulldozed into the floor of the valley, Muchemore and Broan were ready for the initial attempt -- an onslaught upon the mountain crests to find out what was actually on top and how difficult it would be to locate the ten separate cable anchorages, each to hold against a dead-weight pull of twelve and a half tons. This was no job for ordinary construction men; Broan was on the point of sending back to Boise for a gang of Boulder Dam "high scalers" when he found a couple of them on the job at Red Hill. The two -- Bill Adams and Louis Otto -- were aerial artists to make high-wire circus performers look pale. They had dangled fifteen hundred feet down the jagged walls of Black Canyon on little ropes, knocking the loose rock off into the Colorado River below. "If you can give us a foot-hold any way at all," they said, "we can get to the top of Haiku."

To work this problem out, Broan brought in a tough Irish rigger named Ray Cotherman, son of a Pittsburgh steel puddler, who had been in the Islands most of his life. Short, ruddy, unbelievably blasphemous, Ray stuck out his stubbly jaw and boasted: "You just give me enough goddam rope and I'll get those so-and-sos up that blankety-blanking mountain or ride up it myself on a friggin' cloud."

What they gave Ray for his men was a coil of rope apiece, a combination rock pick and sledge hammer, and a few three-foot steel pins. "Now, boys, climb!" And climb they did,

Starting up the south wall, the high scalers scrambled on all fours as high as they could, clinging like cats to the treacherous mud-rock and the slimy bushes of the slope. When they began slipping back faster than they climbed, they hacked out a foot-hold in the mountain side or, if the rock was too sleazy, drove a spike in, and tied a rope to it. They started on again, exploring ahead this way and that for the least precipitous path. After the first few hundred feet, they were faced with a sheer rock wall, and here it was a question of one man driving a spike, standing on it, reaching up to drive another, fastening the rope, then hauling himself up to start over again. After a few such steps, one would drop back and rest while the other went on. When they had used up their spikes, they slid back down the rope and rolled and tumbled to the valley floor.

Foot by foot Bill Adams and Louis Otto cut their way up the volcano wall, leaving the rope in place after each assault. At the end of twenty-one days of steady work they gained the top. Long before this they had disappeared from view into the depths of the clouds.

Clinging to the northernmost spur of the hogback, they looked around. They could not see more than twenty feet in the dripping mist; it was cold and windy up here, and more scary than Boulder had ever been. Sitting exhausted on the wet ground, Bill Adams swung one leg over the further side and straddled the mountain. The fog broke a little.

"God Almighty!" he grunted. "Look, Louis."

The drop on the east side was almost perpendicular, all the way down eighteen hundred feet to the next valley beyond. They were perched on the thin edge of a giant razor.

Then, suddenly, the clouds blew off and the whole enormous panorama of the region lay below them. There to windward was the shallow curve of Kaneohe Bay, pale emerald in the sunlight, with the vague violet of the shoals showing through. A cluster of microscopic white dots huddling around the base of Ulupau Crater represented the huge Naval Air Base. "Pretty, by God!" said Bill fervently.

But Louis was more interested in their insecure foothold. He picked up a handful of the mountain -- little more than mud -- and crushed it in his fingers. Neither man was willing to risk standing up. As they looked up along the ridge, they could see that it rose gradually toward the solid mountain wall of the range. Nowhere, they judged, was it more than a dozen feet wide.

"I think we go down now," Louis remarked. It took all of two hours to make the descent.

Down below, these three weeks had not left the others idle. A huge pile of wooden ladders had been knocked together; now Bill and Louis started up again, taking a ladder between them and lashing it to spikes at the first point where they could not walk, then climbing down and bringing up another. Sometimes three or four ladders had to be roped together to scale a single cliff. Eventually they had a "sissy's climb" to the top. Up this immediately labored Ray Cotherman and a party of explorers. They inched along the ridge and finally gained the very summit, at an elevation of 2850 feet. Below them along the hogback lay the sites for the five anchorages -- if they could be made to hold. It seemed to Ray that twenty-five thousand pounds pull, multiplied by five, would pull the goddam top off the mountain.

Attention now shifted to the north rim. An exploration party, using local maps, had found a trail winding in six and a half miles from Red Hill on the south, giving access to the second ridge without cliff climbing. Everyone was glad of that; much time could be saved. The trail was soon cleared and made reasonably walkable. But even so, it took twenty-three hours to make the trip in and back.

A party of surveyors under a local engineer named Towill went in over this trail, to begin the work of locating the anchor stations, gathering the distance and altitude data needed to design the final radio spans. Their task was not easy. Sometimes they had to remain a week on the fog-drenched hogback before the clouds broke enough to sight a transit into the valley. This severe handicap delayed the survey for so long that the temporary installations had to be made by guesswork. Plenty of trouble ensued.

A party of geologists, hiking the trail, had better luck than Towill. They dug a hole on the ridge and discovered that Cotherman's fears of pulling the mountain apart were unfounded.

"The first eight inches," wrote Captain Thomas in a report on their work, "was black humus; the next three feet was a red crumbly volcanic conglomerate, and the last foot was gray rock and earth, partially decomposed." Then came good solid mountain -- not hard enough to permit the use of expansion bolts for anchorages -- standard practice in granite -- but entirely satisfactory for the heavy concrete footings planned. This ended the phase of pure exploration, after just a month of work.

[Drawing by Lili Réthi of aerial view of Haiku valley with parallel antennae in place]

Cotherman's high scalers had been steadily busy meanwhile improving the approach up the south wall. The ladders had been supplemented by wooden stairs and gangways till the whole trip to the crest and on up to the summit could be made without difficulty. There were nine thousand feet of stairs. But this was only a makeshift, desirable to get the permanent work started and to speed up the erection of the first test aerial. It was out of the question to move concrete and equipment up by manpower; in fact, a man was little good himself after lifting his own weight up that tough climb. It took three and a half hours to go up and forty-five minutes to come down -- empty-handed. Muchemore decided to put in mechanical hoists -- small aerial tramways running on cables stretched from the ridges o the valley below.

Each cable would drop in a long catenary slack enough to prevent excessive tension on the line but not so lose that a car suspended from it would hit he mountain on its way up. Even when supporting a light car with two or three men and a small amount of materials, this standing cable, or "gutline," would have to resist an actual pull of nineteen tons. Including a factor of safety of two and a half, the cable must not snap under a load of fifty tons. Harrie specified for this the highest grade of plow-steel wire rope an inch in diameter., Each side of the mountain would require some thirty-eight hundred feet of it, weighing at least twenty tons. The problem was, how to get it up the ridge.

The only possible way was to begin with a light steel wire loop, long enough to reach from valley to summit and back, reeve it through a pulley on top, then haul up a larger cable and then a still larger one till the final gutline could be hoisted into place.

Engineering had solved many extraordinary problems, but never anything like this. The ten thousand feet of light rope to make the first loop would weigh a couple of tons itself. Raisin it straight up the side of a mountain for two thousand feet was going to be a job that would rob even Ray Cotherman of his ability to swear.

Marty Broan canvassed every trick of the rigger's trade, including the use of a big army bomber to drop the coil of wire on the mountain top. But to land that wire on a hogback twelve feet wide at a hundred and fifty miles an hour in dense fog seemed too difficult, even for the best precision marksman. The only practical scheme, he feared, was to carry the rope up by hand.

The ingenious method Broan hit upon was worthy of the best Alpine experts, and so simple that it restored Cotherman's tongue to its full power. Assaulting the north ridge first, Ray assembled a crew of fifty-two men at the trail entrance at Red Hill. He had brought in a 10,000-foot reel of quarter-inch cable. Coiling up the first hundred feet of it, he lashed its turns securely and tied the coil over the shoulder of one man, then had him walk up the trail for a hundred feet and stop. Then he made up a second coil in the same way and loaded up a second man and sent him into the trail following the first. Repeating the process over and over again, he finally had his men distributed over a mile of trail with the whole length of wire between them. Now began the arduous trek up the south side of the Koolau Range, along the six miles of rough, tortuous trail. Cotherman pushed on ahead, leaving behind him a magnificent stream of profanity that egged the men on through sheer admiration. At the end of the procession came the waterboy, leaping nimbly back an forth along the line to dole out lukewarm drinks to faltering members of the crew. Once started, no single man could stop or vary his pace without tangling up the whole string. The tramp in to the ridge took eleven hours.

"Don't any of you so-and-sos try getting down to the valley the short way," Cotherman roared as they snaked along the last half mile of the hogback," or you'll take the whole bunch along with you!"

After a night's camping on top, morning brought a job for a real artist. The ends of the rope were to be dropped to the valley, two thousand feet beneath. Bill Adams volunteered. Looping both ends of the line securely under his arms, Bill started to "walk" down the cliff, his weight taken by his friends at the top, snubbing the rope around a small tree.

"See you guys in church," he said lightly, stepping off into the bottomless fog, with only two clothesline-sized strands of wire between him and a fearful mauling and death -- perhaps death by starvation, caught on some bush which no one could reach. Soon he was lost to view in the clouds below, and only by the irregular jerks on the wire cold his team mates tell what to do. Whenever Bill's feet landed on a bit of horizontal mountainside, tension on the rope would slacken and the men above would hold fast till a jerk on the lines told them to pay out more. When long delays occurred, they could only guess that he had run afoul of heavy undergrowth and was chopping his weary out with the axe he had taken with him. He was in constant danger that his pull signals would be misunderstood and that too much line would be released, depriving him of the only support he had over the abyss.

All day long he slid, scraped, and sometimes dangled his way down, and at last, as the sun left the valley a well of mud-gray shadows, the men above knew that Bill Adams had arrived safe and sound.

In three days from the start at Red Hill, both ends of the first line had been delivered on the valley floor, with the bight running over a specially made pulley secured to a tree on the north rim.

The south side, in rigger's language, was 'like stealing candy off a kid." Basing himself at the bottom of the cliff, Ray loaded up half his crew with wire enough to reach the top and started them walking up the wooden steps, then followed them to the hogback himself. This was old stuff to him now and he was determined on the utmost in comfort and safety, learned from the first experience. On the ridge, with only one end of the wire to send back down, he fashioned a "Spanish bowline" (or bos'n's chair) from a piece of plank and sat a man in it for the ride.

"Why, that's good enough for that lop-eared bastard, George Ferris," he barked affectionately, as the high scaler dropped out of sight. "How yuh doin', Louis?" he inquired a little later into the mouthpiece of a walkie-talkie set.

"All O.K.," Louis called back through his. "All but these buckin' fushes. Already I got scratches an inch deep all over my --" With a few simple words of Elizabethan English, a rigger can get himself out of anything.

The walkie-talkies were the last word in convenience. They were used everywhere for the rest of the job.

Cable loops in place, it was a simple matter for the Diesel-driven drum hoists on the valley floor to pull in the heavier lines. Before stringing the permanent gutlines, however, Engineer McKesson wanted to set up a test antenna to make sure that Haiku was electrically efficient. So Cotherman and his assistant, Art Delaye, took a reel of five-eighths cable, hauled one end of it up the mountain with lighter line, brought it back to the valley and over the drum of the hoisting engine, making a continuous loop with the cable reel in the middle. Planking the spool over to make a platform, they had their first skip hoist ready for business. With this rude conveyance and a duplicate on the north side, the preliminary cable work was complete. The reel was left in the circuit because they wanted to have the wire intact, in case the Haiku experiment failed.

Broan made a ruling that this first "car" should never carry more than five hundred pounds or three men. But at quitting time on top the men could not wait for rules. Everyone who could possibly hang on anywhere would get aboard and swing out over the chasm, singing and tossing around their rigger's language. The one concession to safety -- and the high scalers were extremely fussy about this -- was the use of a "skookum block" for each headend pulley. This block had a completely enclosed body and graphite-lubricated bearings, which made it impossible for the cable to jam or pull loose.

During the rigging of the skip, Cotherman was "on the high line" most of the time, hanging out over space in a Spanish bowline which he merely tied under the hauling wire with a bit of rope. He would start up into the clouds with an armload of tools and would soon be out of sight of the "bowie engine" operator below, who could only tell in a general way when Ray's little flying board reached the top. In order to prevent himself being "blown through" the upper pulley, he would go up with a knife in his hand, and as his feet touched the terminal platform, he'd reach up and cut his rope off the cable and jump clear.,

Cotherman was forever trying to get his "lop-eared" friend Ferris to make this trip. George would drive in to the valley, all dolled up in his smooth clothes and say, "Ray, how's chances for going up in your chair this morning""

"Chances is fine," Ray would say. "Here's my knife to cut yourself loose with." Then George would look at the sky and say, "No-o, I think it's too cloudy. Can't see anything up there now." He never did go up till they got the "tourist car" rigged long after, complete with seats and heavy wire caging all around it.

Speeded up by mechanical transport, Cotherman's crew quickly set the temporary antenna anchorages on both hogbacks, using deadmen made of two-by-eight timbers buried in the earth on the further sides of the cliffs. The test antenna, a heavy cable itself, was brought up each side, then pulled up till it hung in a long catenary some seventeen hundred feet above the ground at the center. On each mountain it passed over a stout A-frame of timber and down to the deadman behind it.

The hook-up was ready one Saturday in August. McKesson set up a small transmitter on the valley floor connected it to the down-lead, and started it up. Then he went off to Kaneohe with a portable receiver and was not heard from for hours. Everybody waited around uneasily, wondering if all these months of struggle and success would go for nothing. Then finally toward sundown McKesson drover in.

"O.K.," he said, as if he were passing judgment on a ten-cent cigar; "you can go ahead and build your station."

If Haiku had been lagging on account of doubt, it now turned into a beehive of progress. All through the valley terraces were leveled and made ready for the bomb-proof transmitter building, the "helix house," living quarters, barracks, sewage plant, and system of roads. The "keying" or actual message-sending from Haiku was to be done at Wahiawa, seventeen miles away. To make the connection, a cable was run to Kaneohe, and thence around the island by road.

There was also an elaborate "counterpoise" system to be built, transforming the valley floor into a widespread copper grid. Radio transmitters put power into the air not simply through the high aerial, but by rapidly charging and discharging a condenser-like arrangement of antenna and ground. Even when the ground is swampy and a good conductor, radiating capacity is much improved by an artificial ground or counterpoise of copper wire reaching out from the transmitter house on low poles. At Haiku, Broan found the erection of the ground system almost as much of a problem as the high wires themselves. There were a dozen wires to be run, each a quarter of a mile long, with numerous offshoots at different angles and distances. RCA had specified it all very carefully, and quite without reference to the character of the valley "floor."

The Haiku amphitheatre sloped as much as thirty-five degrees -- a very steep hill indeed -- and was completely entangled with the iron-hard branches of the hau trees. First, Broan sent out crews to hack and saw out the many clearings into the bush. Then, steel gutlines were set up along each of the twelve jungle alleys and small cable cars or "Joe McGees" rigged, to haul out the poles and copper wire. The ground was so wet and slippery that no cats or bulldozers could be used. The men had to set the poles by hand, shoveling out the holes for them and piking them up as they stood in rubber boots. The cost of this one small detail of the project was $80,000.

The main drama, however, continued to be played in the clouds. The riggers and high scalers soon had the gutlines in on both sides, with real aerial cars consisting of broad platforms swung to overhead trolleys running along the lines. The trip from floor to crest took only eight minutes each way. At first they were fooled by the north cliff, which had an outcropping of ledge near the top. On the way up the weight of the car sagged the gutline so much that the little vehicle ran aground. Then all hands would have to jump overboard and push themselves clear by foot power, leaping on again in a hurry before their conveyance went off and left them there. Harrie Muchemore tried hacking out a trench to let the car through; it was no good. The rock was too hard and there was no way to blast it. The trouble was not cured till he built a sixty-foot head tower on the summit to raise the gutline clear of the obstruction.

On the south shoulder it was much steeper; consequently the car cleared -- except once, when for some reason the line sagged and grounded the platform and two men, so badly snarling the lines that the hoist man below didn't dare move them up or down. It was near dusk. The walkie-talkie outfit had gone out of whack, so they had brought along a couple of red and white signal flags. But these didn't do much good, as the cast-aways were completely buried in cloud. Knowing he could do nothing, the bowie man just left them there for the night.

It was a genuine Swiss Family Robinson affair. The boys had the remains of their lunches, even a spot of likker aboard, and passed a comfortable night. "We'd of brought some cards along if we'd known," they related afterward. "But they'd've had to be made of rubber. It rained so hard you could of swam."

Next morning Cotherman sent a man down the gutline on a bos'n's chair and untangled the wire -- and the two castaways were hauled up to go back to work.

[Drawing by Lili Réthi of men working on anchorage]

Easy access to the summits gave Broan's engineers a chance to pick out the locations for the five anchor points on each ridge. Joe McGee hoists were then rigged the length of the hogbacks, each consisting of a cable suspended so as to pass above every station, its lower end terminating in the little shack built to house the head gear of the main gutline. A small platform was suspended from a trolley on this secondary cable and was pulled either way along the line by a loop of wire run by a gasoline winch in the shack. The trolley structure was designed so that when the platform arrived over an anchor station, the men on it could pull a locking pin out of the framework, signal the winch man to slack off on the hauling line, and drop straight down to ground level. This serviceable device was what had given the rig its affectionate name. Underrunning the cars on the main line from the valley, the Joe McGees could receive supplies and concrete by direct transfer and thus deliver them at any point on the ridge. There was a path up along the hogback but the men spurned it in favor of the ride on the Joe.

Men were living regularly on the mountain for days at a time, some camping in the shack, others braving the fog outside. Food and drink were sent up in thermos kits from below, but it was never necessary to provide water. A "tarp" spread over the bushes any night would draw thirty gallons of water from the enveloping cloud.

The job now was to erect the main anchor towers. These were lofty A-frames made of eight-inch steel I-beams set down ten feet or more in solid blocks of concrete. They leaned well out over the abyss and carried several massive pulleys. Before they could be set, the gangs had to notch out the crest of the mountain with picks and shovels till solid bedrock was exposed, then blast a well to hold the anchor block. Concrete was mixed dry down at the Kaneohe batching plant and trucked in to the valley floor. Here it was watered and sent aloft in big steel buckets, then transferred to the Joe McGee and poured directly from it through a portable chute. It took only thirty-one minutes from the time the concrete left the valley till it was in place at the top.

The whole operation had to be done by hand, with some slight help from the Joe in handling the I-beams. The men did it all, clinging like birds to the ridgepole of the world. Most of them were high scalers and steel workers for whom this dizzy job was no thrill at all. It was nothing for a man to knock off a moment, let himself down over the edge by one hand to gather in the tempting red thimble berries that grew in profusion just out of reach.

Anchors in, they set to work making "weight boxes" to be suspended over the further side to counterbalance the pull of the antenna lines. These weighted fourteen tons apiece, were carried on cables running from the heads of the A-frames, over wooden "softeners." Getting them in place involved a certain amount of risk. One day a high scaler slipped, went over head first into the chasm behind. His buddies stared down after him, wondering where he would stop rolling.

"God! Look at that bastard go!" said one.

"Bet he makes it in one more jump," observed another.

"No, by Jeez. Look! He's brung up on that shelf! Here, Jack, pass me that hunk of rope."

The man had rolled to a stop some four hundred feet below. Rifts in the clouds gave momentary glimpses of him as he lay. By weighting the rope, they managed to wiggle it down to him without starting an avalanche that would have knocked him loose for a final plunge. When the rope-end arrived, the victim calmly tied it around himself and waited to be hauled up. He was not even hurt. His "tin suit" of heavy duck had absorbed all the blows. He went back to work without a word.

It is accidents like that, and the constant threat of them, that pull the high scalers into a close-knot fraternity with the most picturesque language in the world.

One more topside job they had to do: build a complete bomb-proof blockhouse on the highest pinnacle of the ridge -- at 2850 feet -- to contain the ultra-high-frequency unit which would maintain communication with Kaneohe and Wahiawa if the regular cables failed. The human problems here were the same -- multiplied by the extra altitude and the fact that one cloudburst followed another all day long.

The time came at last for the main aerials to be hauled into place. This was a mighty job, for the copper-clad steel cables, with their strings of insulators and corona shields, could not be hauled up the mountainsides by main force without serious damage. The RCA engineers had contributed a plan, but it was quickly discarded in view of the rugged terrain. Muchemore and Broan figured out a better way, with plenty of practical suggestions from Cotherman and Delaye. Ray himself superintended the job. "That sonofabitch was the worst blankety-blank piece of business I ever did tackle," he said fervently, when it was successfully done. It can be better shown in a diagram than described. It is worth some analysis because of its engineering ingenuity.

The aerials themselves were to be suspended between "pennants" of steel cable running out from the anchorages. At the center point of each aerial the down lead was to be attached, dropping straight into the transmitter building below.

Cotherman laid out one-half of an aerial through a clearing on the valley floor, made up the insulator string, and attached it to a one-inch steel cable that had previously been rove through the anchor tower above., The other end of this cable was swung down to an engine winch nearby. The center end of the aerial was then attached to a wire rope running around a pulley to the drum of a second winch. The pulley was anchored to a massive deadman buried a dozen feet in the valley floor. When everything was ready the two winch men began work simultaneously, one of them hauling in on the long loop of cable going up the mountain, the other holding fast. This gradually raised the outer end of the aerial clear off the ground till it stood at an angle in the air. Winch Number Two then teamed up with the first and the aerial section was "drifted" across the valley, always in the air, till its center end came abreast of the transmitter building. The whole system was then tied off and the process repeated for the other half of the aerial on the other cliff. The two parts thus stood in a big V with their upper ends draped from the two anchorages aloft. Neither had been dragged even a foot along the ground. Now the two ends of the aerials were connected to form the apex of the V, and the downlead wires attached to the joint. The hauling cables were then rove around the drums of the winches and both taken in together, slowly and evenly. As the V rose straight up into the air, separator rings were lashed into place to form the down-lead wires into a circular cage.

It seems simple here in print, but it was far from that at Haiku. Every minute of action had to be accomplished with all members of the crew doing their jobs in perfect unison. During the raising a stress of fifty-five thousand pounds was developed in the cables and antenna -- more than twice the working load. It made a good but nerve-wracking test. And it was nerve-wracking in another way, too. The mere act of raising the aerials into the clouds was expected to produce enough voltage in the downleads to kill a man. Everything had to be kept carefully grounded throughout the operation.

Haiku Radio was commissioned by the Navy in August, 1943, its details still as secret as the Navy could make them. There was no jubilation. Ray Cotherman pulled an American flag to the top of a pole on the transmitter building; Lieutenant Jim Callahan accepted the station from the Contractors and became CO. Ray himself went back over the mountains to join the Byrne Organization and do his high-scaler stuff on the Lualualei water tunnel. Broan was already out on a new island job.

When the giant power of the big Alexanderson radio alternator was poured into the aerials for the first time, the whole valley seemed to become electrified. Ernie Gray had driven over from Honolulu in a station wagon to look the project over. As he returned to his car, a spark jumped out from it that threw him ten feet. At least, Cotherman said it was that far. But the power was not all flung around the valley. RCA test men picked the station up strongly on Long Island, U.S.A., and it was heard clearly in India, sixty-six hundred miles away.

McKesson had predicted that when the station went into operation it would electrify the atmosphere enough to cut down the rainfall. He was quite right. Haiku had not been in service a month when complaints began to come in from the Kaneohe Water District, which obtained its water supply from a dam and pool at the head of the valley. Before PNAB went in there with its high-voltage cable, as many as a hundred and twenty-seven waterfalls could be counted shooting over the cliffs. Now there were almost none. The Contractors were forced to build a series of catch-basins up and down the slopes to keep the whole region from drying up.