Katherine Ah Lan Lowe and the Pearl Harbor Fire-Hose Photograph

Katherine Lowe and other women training with a fire hose at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, 1940s. Named in the caption, left to right: Elizabeth Moku, Alice Cho, Katherine Lowe and Hilda Van Gieson. U.S. Navy.

The photograph

The picture of Katherine Ah Lan Lowe and four other women, grim-faced, holding a fire hose steady at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard became an emblem of women's heroism in World War II. For decades it appeared in newspapers, magazines and books — among them Fit to Fight: Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard (1908–2008) — often described as showing the attack.

Lowe saw it for the first time on the sixtieth anniversary of the attack, and corrected the record. The women had supported the war effort by moving from factory work to the shipyard, like many civilian women taking jobs once held by men — but after the attack, not during it.

Early life

• Born Katherine Ah Lan in Iwilei, Hawai‘i, in 1915, to Mary Kailipala Chong and Ching Tong Chong, and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• In 1931 she married David Kamakaikolia Kauhi; they had two sons, David and Joseph. By 1939 they had separated, and she married George Kaina Lowe.
• In 1941, while she worked as a trimmer at the Dole Pineapple Cannery, her son Joseph died in an accident at his babysitter's home. Dole, founded by a descendant of Anglo Christian missionaries, was one of the powerful U.S. companies whose commercial and political interests dominated the islands.

December 7, 1941

The family was dressing for church when six-year-old David told her, "We're at war." Already dressed, they went to church anyway: "We didn't know it was an attack," she recalled. That night she covered the windows so Japanese bombers would not see the lights.

At the shipyard

After the attack, Lowe, her best friend Elizabeth Moku and several other Dole workers applied for civilian jobs at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard — the very place that had been bombed.

• They worked in the storage area, moving materials.
• Because the area could easily catch fire, they learned to handle fire hoses — the moment the famous photograph caught.
• They carried oil drums and heavy equipment. "We were rugged," she said.

A long life

• In 1944 she and George moved to Okinawa, where he was a marine superintendent for twenty-two years; they returned to Honolulu in 1968 when he retired.
• She had 8 children, and lived to see 52 grandchildren, 137 great-grandchildren, 115 great-great-grandchildren and 20 great-great-great-grandchildren.
• She bowled and danced hula into her nineties. At ninety-six she told NBC reporters she still bowled a 145 average, and offered to dance for them.
• In August 2015 she celebrated her hundredth birthday at a big party, where she joined in the hula performed in her honor — an "Aloha moment," as a friend put it. She died that November.

Further reading

• "The Hawai‘i Chinese," special issue of Chinese America: History & Perspectives, Chinese Historical Society of America (2010).
• Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Twayne, 1982).
• The story of the photo's correction was reported by NBC News, Hawaii News Now and The Mary Sue in 2011; NAVSEA's "A Legacy of Excellence" (2019) tells more of her life.

Sources

Based on Faith Bennett, "Katherine Ah Lan Lowe," Women's History in the Pacific West — Pacific Islands Collection, Pearl Harbor National Memorial, National Park Service, written with the University of California, Davis, History Department and supported by a National Park Foundation grant; published by the National Park Service. Records give her father's name in several spellings; Ching Chong is the most common. The photograph is from U.S. Navy public affairs (NAVSEA); its caption names four of the five women shown.