GRIDLEY, CA (MPG) – In 1983 Lance Corporal James Thomas was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay, originally Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay on the windward side of Oahu. The Marine spent two years on the island, but during the year of ‘84 he stumbled upon something that he would treasure for a lifetime.

“I was on guard one night, and I was guarding a bunker on the flight tower. And right in the middle of the base on Kaneohe there’s this field… The bunker kind of goes into the side of the mountain so it’s kinda a little flat area and then a slope. So, I was going up the slope, you know, checking all around and coming down the slope – it was just sticking in the dirt about this much (he holds his fingers about an inch apart), just enough where I could trip over it. And that’s how I found it…” He shares how he trudged back up the hill annoyed at whatever had made him trip and tumble down the hill. He dug the bullet shell out of the earth, thinking that it was a flare casing due to its large size. “Well that’s kinda neat,” Thomas thought. He took it to his supervisors for inspection and they agreed that it was an old sea-plane flare. For some reason they allowed him to keep it instead of recycling it like they would have typically done.

Years later, he realized that something was off with the shell he had found on the island and began to research it. With the help of an armor specialist who served in Vietnam and currently specializes in ammunition at RCBS in Oroville and the help of the internet, Thomas finally got his answer.

He discovered the shell was a Swiss developed and later German-adapted bullet casing for a type 99-1 cannon gun used by the Japanese in WWII. The guns were used in various air forces after WW1, but became famous under the designation 20mm Type 99-1, which equipped the initial Japanese Navy air force Mitsubishi AM “Zero” fighter planes. The huge bullets were almost 6 inches in length, the casing around 3. “It’s got Americanized numbers on the bottom and that’s what we couldn’t figure out... Normally a real Japanese bullet has the little imperial mark on it,” Thomas said. “That was the little puzzle that kept hounding everybody,” he explained, “so, when you buy the gun, you get the ammo too.”  Tracing how the bullet made it from Germany to the Japanese “Zero” fighter planes.

What Thomas possessed was actually a piece of history – an actual shell casing from the bombing on Pearl Harbor, December 7^th, 1941.

According to Thomas, the Japanese attack flight pattern took them over the windward side of the island of Oahu first, breaking out over the mountains to surprise Pearl Harbor waiting on the other side. “The Japanese planes scraped the military base on the eastern side on their way through” he says. Thomas shares how even during his tour, bullet holes remained at the Marine base from the attack over 40 years earlier– kept in memorial of the brutal attack. “It had that patina when I found it. I knew it was old!” he said, never thinking that it could have been from the attack on Pearl.

Thomas has compiled information about the shell casing and plans to put it and the shell on display at the Gridley Veterans Memorial Hall, as a tribute to those lost in 1941.