Posted on 12/07/2011 2:39:20 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - a date that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said "will live in infamy." It would also begin a complete transformation of the Bay Area and the West Coast from a place that seemed isolated and remote from the rest of the country.
The attack crippled the Pacific fleet, killed 2,402 Americans and plunged the United States into World War II. It also created a huge panic on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco, where the Army and Navy were convinced the city was about to be attacked by enemy planes.
The panic soon subsided and the Bay Area settled into becoming a major staging area for the war in the Pacific. When it was over, the San Francisco Bay Area and the West Coast had completely changed.
The population not only boomed, but the demographic makeup of the region changed for good. The Bay Area became an important industrial center, and after the war suburban housing replaced farmland and orchards all around the bay.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I tend to agree with you on that.
It’s also the 70 year 2 month anniversary of the US and the UK cutting off Japan’s oil coming from what was then called the Dutch East Indies (now known as Indonesia) when the war with Japan really started.
I guess you can pick your starting point where you want...
“It sounds like a familiar story: on a bright Sunday in December, nearly 70 years ago, Japanese planes blazed out of the sky to strafe and bomb an American warship while it lay at anchor. The surprise attack caught the crew off-guard, and despite valiant action, the ship was critically damaged, had to be abandoned, and soon sank. If you said December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor, you’d be wrong. The date was December 12, 1937, and the place was the Yangtze River in war-torn China. The vessel? The gunboat USS Panay...”
http://www.usspanay.org/attacked.shtml
What's not mentioned, is that San Francisco had a huge Japanese-American population, centered in the Fillmore District. They were forcibly resettled first to a temporary concentration camp at the Tanforan Racetrack just outside the city (now a shopping mall), and had to give up almost all their homes, shops and properties. These homes were given over to the newly arrived blacks brought in to work in the shipyards. The former Japanese neighborhood became a black ghetto after the war.
Only a small fraction of Japanese-Americans came back to the neighborhood after release from concentration camps after WWII (some of them had managed to have white friends look after their holdings).
On a personal note, my dad, a Philadelphia native, shipped out of SF for the war in the Pacific, and after the war ended decided to settle down in SF, where I grew up.
I remember that! Not exactly, but I remember my parents talking about it in whispered tones, being very careful not to spook me (I was about 4-5 at the time). But I remember my father (4F) coming home from school (he was a teacher) and bringing the news of the day. He would tell my mother and my grandmother the latest information, all the while being very careful to make me believe that it wasn’t really going to affect us in the Central Valley.
I also remember in 1st grade being asked to explain each phrase in the Pledge of Allegience. Nobody in the class knew the meaning of “One nation, indivisible”. I put my hand up and told the teacher and the class that it meant that we were safe because “the Japs can’t see us.” The class bought it, but the teacher didn’t; and she carefully explained it. That is one lesson I never forgot. LOL.
I was the beneficiary of that. There were great shortages after the war.
In 1945, or 1946, my mother ran into a Japanese friend who had just been brought back to Fresno. It was the height of the Christmas season, and my mother mentioned that she could not find a Betsy Wetsy doll anywhere in town for me.
Her japanese friend said, “Come with me”, and she took my mom to her parents’ store where she took down a suitcase containing Betsy Wetsy and all her clothes and sold it to Mom at a good price. The store had been locked with the stock just sitting there since the day the trains evacuated all the Japanese to the camps in Nevada.
My mother was a member of a civilian defense of plane spotters. Someone erected a tower in the little town and the ladies had a schedule to watch for and report any aircraft that appeared. I’ve never tried to research it.
Yes, the war was hard for many. At least I heard that from my parents, as I was born five years later. Hope you managed to keep Betsy Wetsy to this day! My son-in-law's mom still has her childhood doll, and he also has his (a bear) which my daughter laughs about. If not for the war, my dad would not have left Philadelphia, would not have settled in SF, and I wouldn't be here. He had it tough there, barely getting by during the Depression.
Unfortunately, Betsy Wetsy went to live in the garage. The Central Valley is very hot, and the garage is not air conditioned. When my mother resurrected the doll to give to one of my daughters, the rubber body had melted, and I discarded her.
I remember reading about balloons the Japs launched to float to the west coast to start fires. Didn’t think the sub carried plane thing ever worked out.
Had a contact on military exercise in the 60s with a guy that was a China sailor pre WW 2. He had some interesting
info about some day to day living in that time, with several pictures of himself and various locations he showed me on a visit after the exercise.
Pearl Harbor attack shaped future of Napa
On this day 70 years ago, Algeo Malfante became the first Napa Valley victim of World War II while aboard the USS Oklahoma in the port of Pearl Harbor.
Malfante was one of 429 killed on the Oklahoma and one of 2,403 Americans to lose their lives in that day’s unprecedented Japanese attack on a U.S. military base.
That landmark in world history is now, literally, a lifetime ago.
As decades pass, fog grows around the events of that day and around Napa Valley’s role in World War II.
In marking today’s grim anniversary, it is important to educate the next generation of the sacrifices made by their ancestors.
Not all of Napa’s history includes wine glory or the championing of agriculture.
The Napa of the early 1940s was a very different place, in large part because of the influence of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Napa, with its proximity to defense plants — especially Mare Island Naval Shipyard — made it vulnerable, it was thought. Half of Napa (the area west of Jefferson Street and south of Third Street) was designated as “Zone 1-A,” meaning it was a sensitive area to national security.
That, combined with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 1066, forced scores of “enemy aliens” out of Napa at the start of the war. Fifty-four Japanese were forced to leave Napa immediately. In all, well over 300 Italians, Germans and Japanese were forced to leave the county after Roosevelt’s order in February 1942.
There was little protest.
Napa County’s 1940 population of 7,740 people would triple by 1943. Despite the mass deployment of Napans to war efforts around the globe, the local population soared with the influx of ship builders to manufacture and repair warships on Mare Island. By October 1943, Napa was the third-fastest-growing city in the West.
Additional people brought rubber shortages, rationing, blackouts and aircraft observation points throughout the valley.
The Silverado Horse and Fair in Calistoga and the Napa County Fair were canceled in 1942.
Restaurants had to submit their menus and recipes to the Ration Board to prove their dishes stayed within federal limits.
Cork was unavailable to the county’s then 45 wineries.
Napa did not exactly set the standard for civic responsibility. The county’s grand jury uncovered corruption in the Napa County Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff Jack Steckler. County Coroner Theodore Treadway was also later accused of stealing from the public.
A 10 p.m. curfew was established in 1942. On Halloween in 1944, a mob of 500 local youth pelted buildings, police and firemen with rotten eggs and tomatoes.
Despite the surge in population, the county had 1,200 fewer registered voters by 1944 than four years prior, prompting the Napa Journal to opine, “The majority of us do not care what happens to us.”
Local families cared that Napa Valley men died in North Africa, Italy, Holland, France, Germany and the Pacific.
It was a very dark period in Napa — and world — history, but the demographic changes and population growth seen locally created the foundation for the community we know today.
Today’s youth may know Pearl Harbor as easily as the backdrop of a video game or as overstylized and polished Hollywood fare.
With the Greatest Generation’s voice fading, the burden falls on us to keep the attack on Pearl Harbor and World War II in its proper context.
“The West Coast had every reason to be paranoid because the Tanker Emidio was torpedoed off the Humboldt County Coast and there were Submarine shelling of coastal installations plus a incendiary bombs dropped in the forests of Oregon starting in December 1941 by a sub launched sea plane ...”
Besides that attack by a Japanese plane launched from a Japanese Sub, Japan launced fugo fire bombing ballons from Japan to strike the US. One of those ballons wiped out an Oregon mother and 5 of her children:
http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/html/sub/mshwfug2.htm
Japanese Fugo Bombing Balloons
In November, 1944, the Japanese began launching unmanned bomb-carrying balloons, which travelled on prevailing winds across the Pacific Ocean to North America. It was hoped that the balloons would start forest fires and cause general panic among the population.
The balloons measured about 33 feet in diameter and 70 feet from the top of the balloon to the payload at the bottom. They were first made of paraffined paper, and later from latex and fabricated silk, and contained hydrogen gas. The payload consisted of 36 sand-filled paper bags for use as ballast, 4 incendiary bombs and 1 33-pound anti-personnel bomb.
The balloons began their three to five day journey from Japan at an altitude of about 35,000 feet, usually travelling at speeds between 80 and 120 miles per hour. As gas slowly leaked from the balloons, they descended in altitude. When they fell to about 25,000 feet, a barometric pressure switch would cause one of the ballast sandbags to be dropped, and the balloons would rise again to 35,000 feet. This up and down pattern continued as the balloons crossed the Pacific Ocean. When the balloons reached the west coast of North America, they were supposed to have exhausted their supply of ballast sandbags and the bombs would then be used as ballast, with one bomb being dropped with each descent to 25,000 feet as they travelled across land. After the final bomb was dropped, a fuse would be ignited and the balloons would destroy themselves in bright orange fireballs.
It is estimated that about 9,000 of the balloons were launched by Japan between November, 1944 and April, 1945, but it is believed that less than 1,000 of them actually reached North America, with most of the rest self-destructing over, or falling into, the sea. Of those that did reach land, some were seen exploding in the air and others were found on the ground in remote areas, usually with the bomb loads missing but occasionally with some bombs still attached. The balloons reached Alaska, Canada, Mexico and 16 U.S. states, travelling as far east as Michigan and Texas. Most of the balloons were sighted or found in British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon, California, and Montana. Several minor forest fires, in California and Oregon, were possibly caused by the balloons, but this was never completely verified.
The first discovery of a balloon in North America was made by two woodchoppers, who discovered a balloon on the ground near Kalispell, Montana in December, 1944. It was determined that the balloon originated in Japan by analyzing beach sand from one of the balloon’s ballast sandbags. Tight censorship was immediately imposed on further balloon sightings, since it was feared that disclosing when and where balloons were being found would encourage the enemy to launch more balloons and perfect their delivery. It was also thought that the balloons posed little danger to the public at large, so even though some government and military officials and newspapermen knew about the bombing balloons early on, the general public was not told about them until May of 1945, about six months after they were first launched.
The public announcement was finally made due to a tragic event that occurred on May 5, 1945. A woman and five children, on a church picnic, were killed in a remote area near Bly, Oregon, after they discovered a downed balloon with a bomb still attached, and one of them moved the bomb, causing it to explode. These deaths were the only known fatalities on the U.S mainland from enemy attack during World War II. At first it was officially reported that the deaths were due to an explosion of an ‘unknown object’, but after much debate, it was finally decided that the public’s need to be informed about the existence of the bombing balloons outweighed any military advantage that the enemy might gain from the disclosure. It was also feared that, with the end of the school year approaching, there would soon be many children exploring in remote areas where unexploded bombs were most likely to be found. So in late May, the general public was finally informed about the existence of the bombing balloons, although details about individual balloon encounters were still withheld, except for the one fatal incident mentioned above.
The period of censorship appeared to have served its purpose, since it was later learned that the Japanese scaled down and eventually abandoned the balloon launchings, considering them ineffective since they had heard of very few balloons reaching U.S. territory.
Many of the balloons had been made by patriotic Japanese school children as a part of the war effort. In 1987, several tried to atone. They folded 1,000 paper cranes, a Japanese symbol of healing and peace, and sent them to the families of the Oregon picnickers. Here is an excerpt from one of the accompanying letters:
“We participated in the building of weapons used to kill people without understanding much beyond the knowledge that America was our adversary in a war. To think that the weapons we made took your lives as you were out on a picnic! We were overwhelmed with deep sorrow.”
I remember reading about balloons the Japs launched to float to the west coast to start fires. Didn’t think the sub carried plane thing ever worked out.
Apparently it did work out on a small scale:
http://gesswhoto.com/oregon-bombing.html
Jap Incendiary Sets Forest Fire
DeWitt’s Announcement Hints Raider May Have Been Launched
From Submarine Off Coast, Later Attacked by Patrol Planes
San Francisco, Sept. 14. - Evidence that a Japanese seaplane, possibly operating from a submarine, may have attempted to set Southern Oregon forests afire in the first air bombing of continental United States was reported by the Western Defense Command here today.
A communique issued by Lieut. Gen. John L. DeWitt, Western Defense commander, said that:
A small seaplane was observed over the area of Mt. Emily nine miles northeast of Brookings, Or., Sept. 9.
A submarine was later sighted and bombed about 30 miles off the same shore by an Army patrol plane, with unobserved results.
Caption Left:
Fragments of Bomb - Mrs. Marvin Reeder holds fragments believed to have come from an incendiary bomb found in Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon. The Army is investigating the possibility that a Jap plane dropped the bomb.
A forest fire was started near Mt. Emily and that markings on what appeared to be fragments of an incendiary bomb were Japanese.
Forest patrols, which extinguished the blaze, discovered a foot-deep crater, the communique added, and about 40 pounds of metal fragments and small pellets.
The fragments bore Japanese ideographs.
Apparently the Japanese, if they made the attack, selected one of the most heavily wooded sections of the Coast, frequently threatened by forest fires.
A few years ago a fire in the same general area swept out of control and virtually wiped out the Oregon coast town of Bandon.
SEVERAL SEE PLANE
Japanese submarines have twice shelled the Pacific Coast - at Goleta in Southern California Feb. 23 and near Seaside, Or., June 22, but this was the first reported attack from the air.
The Goleta shelling caused slight damage to oil well installations. The Seaside shells buried harmlessly on a beach.
GEN. DE WITT’S COMMUNIQUE READ:
“The Western Defense Command is investigating the circumstances surrounding the discovery on Sept. 9 of fragments of what appears to have been an incendiary bomb. These fragments were found by personnel of the United States Forestry Service near Mt. Emily nine miles northeast of Brookings, Or. Markings of the bomb fragments indicated that the missile was of Japanese origin.
SUBMARINE SIGHTED
“At about 6 a.m., Pacific War Time, Sept. 9, a small unidentified seaplane was observed coming inland from the sea and a half an hour later a plane was heard at the same point headed toward the sea. Due to poor visibility the plane was not seen on its westward trip.”
“At 6:24 a.m. Mr. Howard Gardner, a forestry service observer on Mt. Emily reported seeing an unidentified seaplane come from the west, circle and return toward the sea. He described the plane as a single-motored biplane with a single float and small floats on the wing tips. The plane appeared to be small and of slow speed. It had no lights, no distinct color and no insignia was visible. It is possible that a plane of this type might have been carried on a submarine.”
“About 11 a.m. [P.W.T.,] the same day, a small fire was observed about three miles south of Mt. Emery. Investigation by forestry patrols who extinguished the fire disclosed a small crater about three feet in diameter and slightly more than a foot in depth.
“The earth appeared to be scorched. An examination of a crater and the area in the vicinity revealed about 40 pounds of metal fragments and a number of pellets. The fragments disclosed markings of Japanese ideographs which may have been part of a code indicating the arsenal where the bomb was manufactured. A search of the area has failed to reveal the presence of any other indications of bombs having been dropped.”
OREGONIANS TELL OF ATTACK
Several Eyewitnesses Describe Incendiary
Raid by Strange Plane
Brookings [Or.] Sept. 14. -
Eyewitnesses tonight told of the incendiary attack of an unidentified seaplane, presumably Japanese, that winged in from the sea last Wednesday.
Residents of this town at the mouth of the Chetco River heard the plane circling in the mist at dawn, and a few caught glimpses of the ship.
Mrs. W.C. Crissey, wife of a Brookings real estate man, described it as a small plane without distinguishing marks. She said it circled over the beach at 500 feet, its pontoons clearly discernible. Then it headed inland.
Asa Carpenter, operator of a sawmill several miles up the Winchuk River, said he heard the plane circling around Mt. Emily shortly after 6 a.m.
SEES FIRE BREAK OUT
Harold [Razz] Gardner, Forest Service lookout on Mt. Emily, saw the plane circling and later fire broke out. He brought the flames under control.
He reported to H.R. Dewart, Curry County air raid chairman, that he found bomb fragments and a “sizable” crater. The bomb sheared a six-inch tree and set fire to a stump, he said.
Ed Marshall, Federal forester, dug out of a crater what he said was the nose of an incendiary bomb. Attached was a steel shank bearing Japanese characters.
Near by were approximately 50 square pellets, each with a hole in the center. These were of a spongy substance.
FAMILIAR TO JAPS
Where they fell the earth was fused into slag, Marshall added.
This area is well known to Japanese.
Japanese exported logs extensively from the Chetco River country. Exporters often had their own men buying logs and arranging for rafting them down river. They had plenty of opportunity for mapping the region. The countryside is heavily timbered, mountainous and sparsely settled. No highways extend into the interior and there are few trails.
It took a fire crew four and a half hours to get to the scene of the bombing from a forest lookout station.
Gardner, who knew a short-cut through the dense growth, reached the flames within two hours and had things under control by the time the crew arrived.
CONTINUED INLAND
Tom Page, a Brookings resident, said he heard an aircraft “engine and rushed out to see a small seaplane with a single pontoon break through a heavy fog bank and come in over Brookings very low.”
“The plane continued inland, but it was impossible to follow its course because of clouds banked against the mountains,” Page said.
“From the sound of the engine, it apparently made a circle over the mountains in the area where the bomb fragments were discovered and headed back out to sea.
“The plane came back directly over Brookings, still flying low.”
The same Japanese Pilot and his so called bombadier made another raid 20 days later off the coast near Port Orford, Oregon north of Brookings:
http://www.outwestnewspaper.com/bomboregon.html
One nation invisible to the Japs meaning they cannot hurt us...... lol
It worked for me (age 6) and all my friends. ;*) Ask tubebender. I had only boys for playmates. Of course we played war. And the enemy couldn’t see us. << Grin >>
I wonder why they tried inciendary bombs on Oregon? It’s much too wet there to wreak much fire damage. Now, had they tried that in August in CA, we might have all gone up in flames.
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