Smith’s Union Bar, December 6, 1941

Saturday Evening, December 6, 1941, 9:30 PM, Honolulu: Strolling into Honolulu’s Smith’s Union Bar, just a few miles away from the military docks and ports of Pearl Harbor, one is greeted by a calmer, more open-area bar than the other dark seedy places on the block. Fifteen or twenty sailors are at the bar carrying on in friendly banter.  Others are sitting at tables with girls or girlfriends.  But the attention seems to be on one sailor who is drinking out of a frozen-looking copper mug. The man behind him asks the bartender if he’s run out of glassware or is it a Christmas drink. The bartender explains that it’s a new drink made popular in southern California. It’s made with the Russian liquor–vodka.  Turns out, he explains, a bartender in L.A. had an over-supply of ginger beer in his basement and experimented with the tasteless Russian liquor to give it some taste.  The L.A. creator then added lime juice, put it in frozen copper mugs filled with ice (his girlfriend sold products made from copper) and soon it was being served in bars all over L.A.

The Moscow Mule.  It was the new drink of the year and had made its way over to Hawaii.  Toward the end of 1941, the drink had helped promote vodka in America. Vodka’s distribution had previously centered on Russia and eastern Europe.

Several sailors enjoyed the “Moscow drink” until they tired out and reluctantly left in order to get up early Sunday morning.  Sunday was a workday on the ships at port, including the USS Arizona.  The sailors who left their cold copper mugs at the bar had enjoyed their last moments of normality before the Japanese staged a surprise attack 8:00 AM the next morning.  Everything of course tragically changed that December 7, and the world turned upside down. At least 2,008 of the 2,403 people lost were sailors aboard the various ships that were targeted in the attack. And of the ships that lost its military men, none lost more than the USS Arizona, which quickly sank and ended the lives of 1,117 men on board, while only 335 survived. Statistically speaking, seven of every ten sailors at the bar that evening never entered the doors again.  Smith’s Union Bar had been a safe harbor for young men, mostly from the USS Arizona, who vanished from the earth in the blink of an eye.

Smith’s Union Bar still stands and operates, and is a memorial to the lost spirits of that day. The Moscow Mule may, or may not, have actually been served that specific evening; but the drink also survived 1941 and has become a well-known and popular drink in our own time. Its 1941 introduction helped promote vodka in a country known mostly for its whiskey drinking.

Our glasses and mugs be raised this Memorial Day to the 2,403 people who were lost eighty years ago this December-2021 and its 1,178 survivors who were marked for life.