Honolulu, Hawaii, serves as a Pacific arrival point and a setting for Willie Keith’s early routine at Pearl Harbor. Its significance lies in the contrast it establishes: naval work and wartime controls coexist with parties, outings, and personal correspondence, while the war’s larger operations gather beyond the harbor.

Arrival and Connection to Pearl Harbor

Willie Keith and Tom Keefer reach Honolulu, Hawaii, aboard a taxicab after debarking with two Navy nurses, Lieutenants Jones and Carter. The men load their luggage into the cab and direct the driver to the Navy Base at Pearl Harbor. The scene makes Honolulu the threshold between their voyage west and Keith’s new shore-based naval duties; the passage does not present the city as a destination in itself, but as the point from which the Pearl Harbor station becomes part of his daily life.

Work, Leisure, and Personal Life

At Pearl Harbor, Keith spends eight hours a day on coding work in an underground cement vault. The labor is monotonous, but it eases his conscience: he initially avoids women and liquor, then relapses into his former social habits after getting drunk at an admiral’s party. His routine soon includes picnics with nurses and other leisure. Honolulu is described as a place of easy pleasures, but not as untouched by war: curfew, blackout conditions, and barbed wire along the beaches remain visible constraints even as Keith experiences little day-to-day disruption from the conflict.

The station also becomes the setting for Keith’s continuing relationship with May Wynn. He writes her affectionate letters and abandons his plan to end the relationship. He has not decided whether he will marry her, but regards their connection as too valuable to cut short. Honolulu thus frames a period in which Keith’s private life remains active alongside his naval assignment, rather than being displaced by it.

Place in the Wider Wartime Narrative

The book later widens its scale from Keith’s personal experience to the movement of a vast fleet. In January, ships depart Hawaiian harbors in a large formation bound for Kwajalein. The text does not identify Honolulu as the fleet’s departure port, so its role should be distinguished from that broader movement: the city belongs to Keith’s earlier Pearl Harbor experience, while the fleet passage shows the Pacific operations into which that experience leads.

Historical Qualification

The novel’s prefatory note identifies it as fiction set during World War II and warns that times, places, ship missions, and naval procedures connected to actual operations have been altered. It also states that the people and events aboard the Caine are imaginary and that no ship by that name existed. Honolulu, Hawaii, therefore functions here as a setting within a deliberately fictionalized wartime narrative, not as documentation of a particular historical episode.