Lanikai Pillbox Trail

This guide to the Lanikai Pillbox Trail in Honolulu opens with a name that turns out to be wrong: the concrete structures hikers call pillboxes never held a single weapon. Built in 1943 as Station Podmore, they housed soldiers scanning the horizon with telescopes for Japanese ships in the tense months after Pearl Harbor, radioing coordinates down to real gun batteries elsewhere on Oahu. The Army named the outpost after a private survey operation that once worked this same ridge.