Seattle Times, April 22, 1947.

On this date in 1947, U.S. Army Private Garlon Mickles was hanged at a place called “execution gulch” in Honolulu’s Schofield Barracks.

Mickles had enlisted three years before, the 16-year-old son of a St. Louis laundress. (“Tell my mother I died like a man,” were his reported words to the chaplain.)

According to Associated Press reports, army engineers frustrated peeping eyes by “put[ting] up a smoke screen to shield the gallows from the view of the curious.”

He was convicted of raping and robbing a female War Department employee on Guam, where he was stationed with the Twentieth Air Force — from which staging-point the unit conducted bombing raids on mainland Japan. (The Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was part of the 20th.)

Mickles appears to be the last person ever executed on the Hawaiian islands, and also an unusual overlook by the Espy File of U.S. executions, from which he’s totally absent.

On this day..

• 1986: David Funchess, Vietnam War veteran
• 1939: Jose Aranguren, Civil Guard general
• Feast Day of Saint Leonides of Alexandria
• 1803: Cato, slave of Elijah Mount
• 1815: George Lyon, career thief and possible poltergeist
• 1831: Charles Gibbs, the pirate
• MMI: Two thousand and one days, a dystopia
• 1705: The Camisards Catinat and Ravanel
• 1945: Wilhelm Cauer, but not Helmuth Weidling
• 1930: William Henry Podmore, inculpated
• 1846: The last civil executions in Portugal
• 1997: Hostage-takers in Lima
• 1980: Thirteen deposed Americo-Liberian officials