JAPAN ATTACKS CALIFORNIA COAST DURING WORLD WAR II

On my blog today, Muse shows up as a twenty-two year old American Indian female perched behind the wheel of a 1940s-era Woodie Station Wagon. She is traveling mountain roads along the Pacific coast of the United States. The mind-journey back to this imaginary young woman in late February, 1942 grants me with her unique perspective on a shocking, true event on California’s coast during World War II.

JAPAN ATTACKS CALIFORNIA COAST DURING WORLD WAR II

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

“Have you ever seen California’s coastal mountain ranges—the way they tumble right down to the threshold of the roaring Pacific Ocean and keep it from drowning the continent? I call your attention to the way their folded and faulted contours, mushroomed from volcanoes at the ocean’s bottom age upon age ago, support astonishing diversity in animal- and vegetable-life, as well as richness in mineral deposits and other raw materials. This topography encourages wild, freshwater rivers, lakes, and gentle streams that gather into crystal waterfalls and cascade into cold, blue, swirling pools. If you remember, these mountains were the source of the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, which reinvigorated a stalling U.S. economy. The population surge driven by the gold rush also catapulted California into statehood. These mountains are the home of the giant sequoias and coast redwoods: nature’s skyscrapers. And of course, consensus has it that human settlement in this hemisphere of the planet began in this west coast region. It is an impressive biography, one that never fails to strike in me a sense of awe.

“I have lived in these mountains all of my twenty-two years of life, as has my family. We are descendants of North America’s native Chumash people, and therefore are the natural inheritors of the multitude of blessings of these sacred mountains. Inland from coastal Santa Barbara, my family’s ranch is tucked between sandstone outcroppings of the Goleta Valley foothills, the craggy, scenic Santa Ynez Mountains as its backdrop. Our ranch is an idyllic place whose pastures are spread quietly white with our flocks of sheep, and ringing with the evensong of our shepherd’s guitars. My grandfather three times removed struck a rich vein of gold in one of the mountains north of us, and it is he to whom we owe our lives of freedom beyond the confines of reservation-life that is the plight of so many of our native kin. Twilight is my preferred time of day to roam among my favorite nooks and crannies sculpted along the rough byways of these peaks. They are rollercoaster lanes that dip into gentle basins and rise onto taxing slopes that my muscular Woodie Station Wagon outstrips so well. It is also the last chance each day to ferret out our sheep that have gone astray among the chaparral in earlier hours.

“Ordinarily my twin brother, Theo, would be alongside me in our vehicle on these treks, but he enlisted in the U.S. Navy last year. He is stationed at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii. Great Spirit favored us by allowing my twin to escape unscathed from Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the action that plunged the United States into World War II. It is hard to believe the attack took place only about twelve weeks ago, because it seems an eternity. I had considered taking training as an Army nurse, but my father’s weakening health keeps me stateside and overseeing the day-to-day operations of our ranch. It is difficult going on my own at times, but my job is child’s play compared to my brother’s.

“Theo is a little over three minutes my junior. Mother delights in explaining our birth order as my being the pushy one between the two of us. Theo corrects her and says that he held back from the birth canal because with him ‘ladies always go first’. Mother complains about my hotheadedness and the fact that I fail to think about the consequences of my actions before I jump into situations. On the other hand, my brother is laid back and contemplative. As you can imagine, I am often in trouble, while my brother is perfect! With much affection I call him, ‘Mr. Goody Two-Shoes’.

“My brother foresaw that the U.S. would be propelled into the war eventually and felt honor-bound to join the military and prepare to fight our enemies. My awareness of his sacrifice keeps me stoking the home-fires for him. He told anybody who would listen that it was starkly apparent that America underestimated Japan’s fighting might. He understood that at its core was an array of racist stereotyping by U.S. military chiefs and government heads, prejudices that held fast to a belief in Japan’s people as inferior, both as a species and as a combatant. We American Indians are adept at recognizing blind and foolish prejudice, being the brunt of so much of it ourselves. Theo says that such biases on the part of U.S. leaders gave rise in a dismissal of Japan’s ability to reach, and much less to attack, Hawaii by air, and manifested in the disastrous decision to transfer the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor in the first place. The rationale behind the policy of amassing the fleet on Hawaii’s waterfront was that it was an effective deterrent to Japan’s steady expansion in the Pacific. Japan had been menacing China for a number of years, as well as some of its other neighboring territories, which included oil reserves in British and American holdings in the area.  

“Following the disaster of Pearl Harbor, it is no mystery that North America’s Pacific coast is also in Japan’s crosshairs. It has been reported that by the end of December alone, Japanese submarines had sunk two U.S. merchant ships and damaged six more along our shoreline. Consequently, we jittery Pacific coasters are ordered to observe the mandatory blackout. For this reason I have been careful to switch on only the parking lights of my vehicle during my evening drives on the mountain roads, a routine that got me into big-time trouble about two weeks ago.    

“It was coming onto 7:00 PM that Monday of February 23^rd of 1942, the day of my trouble. I was of two minds that evening. On the one hand I wanted to hurry back to the ranch to listen to President Roosevelt’s fireside chat on the radio. He had asked citizens to have a map of the world on hand, which would enable us to follow along with him as he gave us details of the progress of the war. He had chosen that particular date because it was the 210^th anniversary of the birthday of President George Washington. Needless to say, my family and I are not particularly enamored with the country’s first president, but we have enormous stakes in the war, right alongside of all other Americans. But rather than turning back toward the ranch after having coming up empty in my search for a lost lamb, I did as I had done nearly every evening since my early teen years. I pulled my Woodie onto a flat space of a pinnacle, a highpoint along my route that affords the best view of the ocean. I allowed myself a few minutes to sit spellbound by its immensity, and to send my thoughts out to my brother. From that height, you can see up and down the coast for what seems like all the way to China. The setting sun filled the area with a flood of last light—it sparkled on the wet sand of the beach below like a field of diamonds, and it flashed electric in hypnotic frequency on the whitecaps of the ocean’s restless waves.

“The languid sun splashed across the metal roof of a small structure located in the Goleta Oil Field stretched along the channel below. The site was dense with lemon groves during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Buried beneath the agricultural fields were rich oil and natural gas reserves, land that was developed in the 1920s to an oil refinery. While profuse with storage tanks, piers, and pump houses, the harbor below was quiet on that evening of February 23, 1942. At that late hour, the oil field’s workmen had gone home. I surmised that only a skeleton crew was still in attendance.

“It is not unusual at this time of year for giant blue whales to appear out to sea, but close enough to be within sight from my vantage point. For a few minutes, I was convinced that the dark object in the water was a whale, the largest one I had ever seen. It didn’t occur to me how unusual it was that it sat motionless on the water rather than diving to the depths as whales are habituated to do, its tail flared and flapping like the wings of a prehistoric bird. All of a sudden, the dark object glinted as if the sun was captured in one of its rapidly blinking eyes, and then a series of booms shattered the night. I was slow to come to the awareness that it was not a giant blue whale at all, but was a submarine, a surfaced, long-range, Japanese submarine, and it was bombarding the oil field. My heart in my mouth, I hunkered down behind the steering wheel of my Woodie and watched unbelieving as a derrick and pump house exploded and portions of the catwalk were splintered by cannon-fire. The fireworks continued for a good fifteen minutes, maybe longer. I searched the sky for defending warplanes, but none appeared. Abruptly, the dark hulk in the water fell silent and turned west toward Japan.

“While I had been safely beyond the shelling, for the first time I had an inkling of what my brother and his comrades had suffered at Pearl Harbor. I understood that this attack would cause panic among the citizens of America’s Pacific Coast far greater than already existed, panic based on a fear of an impending, full-scale assault. I worried that it would set off a stampede to inland areas. My frail parents at the top of my mind, I gunned the engine of my Woodie and dashed back to the ranch.

“My parents were huddled around the radio set in the parlor of our ranch-house. Mother gave me what-for when I admitted that I had stayed and watched the entire strike. Moments later, sharp rapping on the front door announced the arrival of a cadre of uniformed young men, and my parents and I stared down the barrel of a nasty-looking gun. Our arms bound behind our backs, we were hustled into a military vehicle and taken to naval intelligence headquarters.

“Included in more than one of the reports to authorities by citizen-observers of the attack were statements of their having seen ‘signal lights’ emitting from the Goleta foothills that were assumed to direct the actions of the submarine. Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ‘Japanese war societies,’ suspected of conducting espionage against the United States, were under surveillance. The so-called ‘signal lights’ were alleged to have emitted from one such cell of Japanese spies. My parents and I were questioned by intelligence officers and after two exhausting hours, they concluded that the source of the ‘signal lights’ was the parking lights of my Woodie, and that we were not spies for Imperial Japan, after all. We were released from custody and taken back to our home. Apparently, as my vehicle had slowly traveled the dips and turns of the mountainside roads, the sporadic nature of the lights was taken as signals.

“The good news was that the damage done by the attack was minimal and produced no human casualties. On the other hand, the regretful part of it for me lay in the fact that I failed to observe the blackout in its entirety and used my Woodie’s parking lights. There is no getting around it that to some degree, my irresponsibility contributed to the administration’s recent decision to isolate over one-hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war in remote internment camps across the United States. The lesson I learned is that even small wrongdoings can have great big consequences. I am mortified by my own behavior and sick to heart over the terrible fate of the Japanese-Americans among us who are innocent and loyal citizens of our country.”©

Note – While the bombardment of the Goleta Oil complex by the Japanese submarine, I-17, did take place on February 23, 1942, the above essay in relation to it is the product of its author’s imagination.



Images – A World War II-era Japanese long-range submarine and a map of California.

Multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s paperbacks and eBooks are available for purchase worldwide through Amazon. An overview of her latest novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON is below:

Amid the seductions of Las Vegas, Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.

Was it chance or destiny’s hand behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure murder?

While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.

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