The Fallen Continent: Hawaii

The State of Hawaii, thirty years after the Great War. The first of fifty states, whose fates will be examined in detail.

Population: 330,000
Largest City: Kahului

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bid'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.

Author’s Note: Most states will be covered on a faction-by-faction basis, with an introductory paragraph concerning the entire state and other important concepts. As Hawaii is one of two states to be entirely controlled by a single faction, the article will not be broken up as such.

---

Republic of Hawaii

Capital: Kahului
Classification: Special Case Faction (Liberalized military government)

The island of Oahu was heavily targeted during the Great War for hosting the state government in Honolulu and the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. The fallout that spread over the island effectively rendered it uninhabitable for several decades, and the entire surviving population was immediately evacuated. Fortunately for the rest of Hawaii, most of the fallout was blown out to sea by the prevailing winds and the rest of the islands remained untouched. The Hawaiian National Guard, working with local city-counties and the few surviving state authorities, organized a new state government in Hilo, on Big Island.

Though the Third World War was chiefly remembered for its two-day nuclear exchange, the war actually lasted for over two years, including the brief conventional warfare period and a twenty-month follow-up period of secondary strikes by nuclear submarines on both sides. Even after the destruction of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii continued to serve as the hub of the United States Pacific Fleet; remnants of the Pacific Fleet returning to port found safe haven in Kahului. Three months after the initial nuclear exchange, Hilo was destroyed in a secondary strike by a Chinese nuclear submarine and the state government was annihilated with it.

The federal government in Twin Falls, Idaho, meanwhile, was destroyed a few days later. The Vice Admiral of the Pacific Fleet, lacking a clear civilian authority to follow and being the highest-ranking surviving officer of the US Navy, established a military administration in Kahului and proclaimed himself the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States of America. Without any suitable alternatives, Acting President Oscar Zinn of the Amarillo Government confirmed his position; the two administrations cooperated with one another until the loss of Amarillo in the September of 2030. The Acting Chairman then recognized Ingersoll’s government until the outbreak of the Dodge City-Midland War. With no clear successor to the Presidency, he argued, the Chairman was now the highest-ranking office in the country until a new President could be elected. As a result, his military administration now claimed dominion over the entire United States of America. It was commonly referred to as the Kahului Government or the Naval Government by outsiders. He achieved substantial recognition from various military factions and even some civilian leaders on the continent, but was never able to materialize this support into a real continental presence.

The Kahului Government persisted for several stagnant decades, until a crisis on the mainland forced them to act. When the Redding-based State of Jefferson pushed south and brought the Kahului-endorsed Provisional Government of California to its knees, the Acting Chairman—now the Acting Commander-in-Chief—assembled an expedition to the mainland in aid of the Acting Governor in Chico. With a miniscule land army and an oversized, top-heavy navy made up of rusting hulks wanting for fuel and ammunition, their chances of success looked slim. To ensure military success, Kahului turned to the last ace up its sleeve: nuclear weapons.

They never intended to actually use any, but the threat was serious enough that Jefferson backed down and signed a ceasefire with Chico. By brandishing the Sword of Damocles, however, the Kahului Government had sealed its own fate. Protests against the Commander-in-Chief’s nuclear warmongering broke out in the streets of Kahului. When the first demonstrations were violently quashed by military police, even more broke out across the entire state. Protestors occupied the Oahu Exclusion Zone and formed their own congress. The Oahu Congress issued demands for nuclear disarmament, free elections, and a withdrawal from continental affairs.

When the government ordered the military to re-capture Oahu, the sailors and marines mutinied. Paralyzed by strikes, protests, and mutinies, the Acting Chairman resigned and held a plebiscite on the future of Hawaii. Faced with the choices of perpetuating the military government, forming a civilian United States government with free elections, or dissolving the US government entirely and re-establishing the Republic of Hawaii, the population chose the last option.

After a ten-week period of political upheaval now known as the Hawaiian Spring, a new constitution was drawn and Kahului seceded from the United States as the Republic of Hawaii. Hawaii held its first elections since before the Great War and shelved all future plans to retake North America. The military still holds significant influence in Hawaiian society, but with a reshaped vision. The Navy has been drastically downsized, with a focus on high-performing modern ships. Most of the fleet was consequently sold to other countries (and private buyers) or broken down for scrap. Contrary to the protestors’ original demands, Hawaii still retains its nuclear arsenal, although a no-first-strikes clause is written into the constitution.

Hawaiian society is quite different from that of other states, even when discounting politics. Due to their southerly latitude and tropical climate, they recovered from the Starving Time far more quickly than other states, as the nuclear winter was never as harsh and agriculture remained practicable throughout. Fishing and international trade further helped Hawaii’s relatively high survival rate. Their central position between North America and Oceania is beneficial for trade. Hawaiian exports consist of coffee, sugar, pineapples, and sandalwood, which they sell in exchange for fuel and manufactured goods. Their chief American trading partners are in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, but they have begun to open up trade with the larger Californian factions like Jefferson and the Provisional Government, much to Oregon’s frustration. Hawaii even has its own currency, the Hawaiian Dollar (or Dala, in the Hawaiian language). It originated as military scrip issued by the US Navy, but is now backed by reserves of New Zealand dollars, Papua New Guinean kina, and Chilean pesos: all common trading currencies found across the Pacific Ocean.

The landscape of Hawaii’s islands has changed significantly since the Great War. Niihau and Lanau, two privately-owned islands with miniscule populations, were confiscated by the Navy and redistributed to displaced farmers and ranchers from Oahu. Other settlers joined the islands’ plantations as part of a Navy-sponsored agricultural program; as a result, these islands have a larger population now than they did before the war. Molokai, an island similar in size to Maui but with a much smaller population, also received a heavy burden of Oahu refugees, shattering its prewar isolationism. Recent reconstruction initiatives by the Hawaiian Navy include cleanup and scavenging expeditions to Hilo and Oahu to prepare the road for recolonization. The more habitable fringes of Oahu remain a favored destination for criminals and outcasts, and most violence in the Hawaiian islands takes place there.

In addition to the refugees from Oahu and Hilo, others poured in from across the West Coast of the United States and even from Australia, New Zealand, and East Asia. The flight of these refugees across the Pacific led to the establishment of what is sometimes called “the Pacific Continent,” a vast chain of islands populated by refugees from across the globe. Although Hawaii had the resources and a large enough resident population to keep their refugees under control, many Pacific islands did not, including some entire countries. The result are vastly shifted demographics throughout Oceania, whose population is now more than 60% descended from Pacific Continent refugees.

Even the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have seen changes over the years. Most visits are for the purposes of poaching, wildlife preservation, cable laying, or ham radio communications, but there have been various attempts at permanent colonization for each of these smaller islands.

The US Navy returned to Midway shortly after the secondary strike on Hilo and reactivated its long-abandoned naval air station. It maintains a permanent military presence on the island, as well as a seasonal civilian population of researchers and wildlife workers. The Pacific Continent refugees found squatting on the old base’s premises were interred and deported to Hawaii Island. Kahului has floated proposals of establishing a permanent civilian settlement on the atoll, but none of these have ever been seriously considered, for environmental and security reasons. Nearby Kure Atoll also has a naval airstrip and observation post. The abandoned island was frantically militarized for fear that the Chinese could use the atoll as a submarine base or as a forward post in preparation for an attack on Hawaii. Here, too, the small camp of Pacific Continent refugees was scattered, and its residents were resettled in Hawaii proper.

The island of Nihoa was once the site of a short-lived settlement for poachers and fishers hoping to avoid government regulations and rationing. Already suffering from water shortages, food shortages, and a lack of all useful materials, they readily surrendered to the US Navy and dismantled their encampment when a frigate from Kahului came to arrest them. Lisianski Island and Tern Island were both briefly colonized by Pacific Continent refugees, but both settlements failed and the survivors relocated to Maui. The Tern settlement, however, was revived by an eccentric Japanese emigre-turned-Hawaiian businessman who transformed it into his own private island, on the condition that he maintain the island’s airstrip for use by the Navy. Possessing the funds to ship in all the materials needed for habitation and upkeep, he has made this miniscule island into the only permanent civilian settlement in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The Republic of Hawaii enjoys strong foreign relations both with mainland American factions and other Pacific island nations. They maintain the old Compact of Free Association with the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau; the Republic of the Marianas Islands has also been added to their number and has very close diplomatic ties with Hawaii as a fellow former US territory. Larger nations who recognize Hawaii include Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Chile, Japan, and the internationally-recognized Australian government in Tasmania.

Their ties with the American mainland are more complex. Hawaii is heavily dependent on trade with the American west coast and has economic and diplomatic ties with many of the factions there. Yet no other factions explicitly acknowledge Hawaiian independence and treat Hawaii as just another American state. Hawaii, in turn, does not recognize any one American government and prefers to leave the American succession question in its tangled status quo.

---

Index

Click here to read the master post of the series, with links at the bottom of the page to all other Fallen Continent entries.

Previous Entry: Introduction
Next Entry: Alaska