The Twenty-cent Prexie
Airmail to and from Hawaii
Airmail between the U.S. mainland and Hawaii cost twenty cents for the first half-ounce between April 21, 1937 until January 15, 1945.
This cover is postmarked Honolulu, December 3, 1941. From information given in The Last Flight Out: Seven Pan Am Clippers on the Eve of Pearl Harbor in the Congress Book 1997, it would appear to have gone out on the China Clipper flight of December 5, the last mail flight to reach the mainland before the bombing on December 7. It also is possible that it was carried on the December 4 flight of the American Clipper, if there indeed was any mail carried on that flight.
A cover sent airmail to the island of Kauai in 1944.
Airmail from APO's to Hawaii cost the same as if they had been mailed from the mainland. It is interesting that the sender of this cover, mailing from an APO in England, specified air from the West Coast when air service should have been provided all the way if possible. There is no receiving mark to indicate transit time.
A letter sent airmail from a Japanese internee at the Lordsburg, New Mexico camp to the town of Haiku on Maui in 1942. Taichiro Hanzawa and his brother, Tetsuji, were kept in internment camps during most of the war solely because they had been born in Japan. Taichiro established a general store in the early part of the century that remained a family-run business until very recently.
Airmail from Alaska to Hawaii cost the same as from the Lower 48 to Hawaii, as did airmail from Hawaii to Alaska.
This cover was sent airmail from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, to Honolulu in 1942.
This cover was mailed from Honolulu on December 17, 1941, ten days after the bombing. From evidence of registered letters sent on the eighteenth and nineteenth of December, it probably did not reach the mainland until January 3, 1942.
A cover mailed from Maunawai, Hawaii, to a resident of a relocation camp in Arkansas in 1944.
