Artifact Found in Move: 'Dude, You Know What You Have Here?'

Lost historic log book from Pearl Harbor is back with National Archives after pair finds it while unpacking
Posted Aug 18, 2025 1:26 PM CDT
Recent Pearl Harbor Discovery 'a Very Big Deal'
Sailors aboard the USS Carl M. Levin are seen passing the USS Arizona Memorial during a Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day ceremony on Dec. 7 in Honolulu.   (AP Photo/Mengshin Lin)

A long-missing log book from the erstwhile Navy Yard Pearl Harbor that covered 16 months before and after the December 1941 attack by Japan in World War II is back with the National Archives, after a California couple found it among other books during a move. "Dude—you know what you have here?" Tracylyn Sharrit tells the Washington Post she said to fiance Michael William Bonds when she discovered the stained registry with "Government Registry" and "US Navy Yard and Naval Stations" on its spine while unpacking boxes last year. "It's a very big deal," the National Archives' David Stupar says of the log, said to include minutiae on the weather and tides around Pearl Harbor in 1941 and 1942, as well as when ships came and went.

  • A few hundred pages in, entries appear for Dec. 6 and 7, 1941, the hours surrounding the Pearl Harbor ambush by the Japanese, which left upward of 2,400 US troops and civilians dead. A notation under those dates reads: "0755 Japanese aircraft and submarines attacked Pearl Harbor and other military and naval objectives."

  • The Post notes that the entries for those dates are marred by brown stains, suggesting someone may have dribbled coffee or another liquid. "We like to think that maybe ... somebody was so agitated at what went on that he spilled his thermos," says investigative archivist Mitchell Yockelson.
  • So how did Bonds come to have the log in his possession? The 65-year-old says his late mom, Oretta Kanady, used to work at the now-shuttered Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino as a civilian staffer and saw the book in the garbage one day. Kanady asked if she could take it home and ended up giving it to Bonds, then 15, though he says he's barely looked at it since. No one seems to know, though, how the book got from Pearl Harbor to the military base, or how it ended up trashed.
  • Bonds had hoped the book would be worth something and contacted a rare-books expert, who in turn reached out to the National Archives, which subsequently claimed the book as a piece of history. Bonds isn't thrilled about the outcome, as he says the book would've been gone forever without his mom's intervention. "All I got was a T-shirt," he laments.
  • Flip through a digitized version here.

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