The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (5 page)

“San Francisco Is Being Bombed!”

O
NLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
after the Japanese attack, Fiorello La Guardia, the rotund, feisty mayor of New York City, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, boarded a plane outside Washington to fly to the West Coast. La Guardia was
the director of the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), an agency created only the previous spring, and Eleanor was his assistant, whose task it was to mobilize woman power and keep up the physical fitness of those on the home front.

They were a curious duo, many journalists held. La Guardia spoke rapidly with a rash of arm waving. Eleanor was regal, even reserved. They did not always agree on priorities, but they learned to compromise to keep the OCD program rolling.

La Guardia was fearful of perceived danger to New York City and Washington. At a press conference before departing for the West Coast, he told reporters that “we who live on the Atlantic Coast are in as much danger of being bombed as our countrymen who were bombed yesterday in Honolulu.”

Doom and gloom seemed to be hovering over the airplane carrying the two officials. It took off into the blackness and was soon gripped by bad weather. Perhaps halfway on the trip, the pilot came back into the cabin and excitedly told the OCD officials: “I just picked up an Associated Press report on the radio. San Francisco is being bombed!” They told him to continue the flight course as planned. Actually, the nearest Japanese war plane was a few thousand miles away.

Early the next morning, the mayor and the president’s wife met with the California State Council of Defense, and La Guardia gave a fire-eating speech. California Governor Cuthbert Olson interrupted the speaker and said his aide in New York City was on the telephone with word that the Big Apple, as it was called, was under an alert and expecting a bombing attack.

Did La Guardia wish to speak to his aide? No, he replied, just tell him to follow the instructions already given. With that he continued his speech.

The closest German bomber was in France, more than three thousand miles from New York City.

When La Guardia returned to the East Coast, he was proud of the way New Yorkers had handled the air-raid alert. “City Nonchalant as Sirens Wail,” a New York Times headline exclaimed.

There was good reason for the easy going response. Few citizens had even heard the weak-toned and widely scattered sirens.
¹¹

Watching for Enemy Paratroopers

I
N WASHINGTON,
the Office of Civilian Defense tried to bring order out of chaos, but it was fighting an uphill battle. Most communities, large and small, set up their own operations.

In Florida, the North Dade County Volunteers published a booklet called When the Sirens Scream. It was chiefly concerned with an attack by German paratroopers. “If there is any danger of having parachute drops from the skies,

A Covert Raid into Mexico
17

everyone must lock and mobilize his car as he leaves it,” citizens were warned. “We do not wish to provide transportation for the enemy.”

In Wake County, North Carolina, the Defense Council consisted of members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Daughters of the American Colonists, Colonial Dames, and Daughters of the American Revolution. Ages ranged between the late forties and the early nineties. Presumably this group would defend the region against German paratroopers.

Vancouver, Washington, had among its messengers a blind man with a seeing-eye dog. In case of an attack, this man and his canine companion could make their way better than sighted people through blackouts and bomb rubble.

In California, the State Council of Defense accepted deaf people in various localities. It was reasoned that the enormous cacophony of exploding bombs and antiaircraft-gun shells would make normal conversation difficult or impossible. So the deaf member’s ability to read lips would be most helpful.

One dark night the air-raid siren screamed in Smithville, Georgia. The town promptly blacked out, and volunteer firemen rushed to their appointed civil-defense posts. So dedicated were they to this task that a large building burned to the ground when the firefighters refused to leave their assigned posts.

Enemy paratroopers were a deep concern of many California residents. State Attorney General Earl Warren was inundated by letters in which citizens wanted to know if it was legal to shoot the intruders from the sky. Warren’s legal opinion: fire away.

Across the land in these early weeks of America at war there were countless false alerts. One of these, at San Pedro, California, triggered near panic in that city. Just as a flight of U.S. fighter planes winged overhead on a black night, a thunderclap and lightning bolt rocked the region. Hundreds of people rushed for basements and other shelter and braced for an expected rain of bombs.
¹²

A Covert Raid into Mexico

A
T THE HEADQUARTERS
of the Western Defense Command at the Presidio, outside San Francisco, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt was burdened by an awesome task: security for an enormous stretch of real estate that stretched from Alaska southward to the Mexican border.

DeWitt was sixty years of age, and leadership of the Western Defense Command was to be his final assignment before retirement. Mild mannered in appearance, the general was hard-nosed, a no-nonsense, outspoken type. Two days after Pearl Harbor, DeWitt publicly blasted San Francisco civic leaders for “criminal, shameful apathy” for ignoring blackout regulations.

DeWitt ordered a curfew along the West Coast and commended antiaircraft outfits for firing at “unidentified planes.”

On the day after Pearl Harbor air reconnaissance pilots reported to the Presidio that a Japanese fleet of thirty-four ships had been spotted between Los Angeles and San Francisco. (The enemy force turned out to be fifteen fishing boats.) Three days later the phantom enemy fleet was detected again, one hundred and seventy miles west of San Francisco.

No doubt based on the flood of rumors reaching the Presidio, Army officers developed a theory that the Japanese had secretly massed a large force on Baja California, a peninsula in Mexico south of San Diego, to launch a blow against the United States. Baja would be an excellent locale in which to hide an army, having desertlike regions heavy with scrub brush and desolate mountains.

The theory became more pronounced with reports that all of the Mexican fishing boats along Baja had mysteriously vanished. Presumably these vessels had been confiscated by the Japanese force. Then more rumors indicated that the (nonexistent) enemy airplanes that had been flying over San Diego, Los Angeles, San Pedro, and other West Coast cities had been and were using Baja California as a base.

Submarines, it was reported, were bringing in bombs and fuel to the hostile bomber force under cover of darkness. How did bombers get nine thousand miles from Japan to Baja California? They were sneaked in from aircraft carriers.

General DeWitt secretly negotiated with Mexican officials (presumably those in the consulate in San Francisco) and was granted permission to send a scouting party across the border to look for the assembled Japanese army and bomber force. Operating in the utmost secrecy, an Army captain with a platoon of heavily armed soldiers slipped across the border in six jeeps at night and roamed about the Mexican territory. They found no sign of Japanese activity.

At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington apparently had sent one or more disguised agents across the border into Baja California to check the reports. The covert search was fruitless. One rancher of Japanese ancestry was encountered, described in the FBI report as “a toothless old man.”

The rumor about the secret hostile base in Mexico refused to die. A few weeks after the scouting of Baja California, the FBI office in Los Angeles received an unsigned letter in which the writer claimed that a coordinated bombing attack would be launched from the phantom Mexican base against San Francisco, San Pedro, and San Diego, probably on New Year’s Day. The Pearl Harbor bombing had been early on Sunday morning when many members of the U.S. fleet were caught sleeping off hangovers. Now, the letter writer declared, the looming raids would hit on New Year’s Day morning for the same reason.

This anonymous report had a new twist. The assaults on the three U.S. cities would be by German planes that had been in hiding for several weeks

Fear for Roosevelt’s Life
19

awaiting the signal to attack. Beleaguered General DeWitt held another clandestine meeting with Mexican officials and received permission from the U.S. Army Corps to fly a limited number of reconnaissance missions over Baja California to search for the phantom Luftwaffe bomber force.

No matter how preposterous were the alarms and excursions inundating the Presidio, DeWitt had to investigate them. Privately, he told aides: “I don’t intend to be another General Short!”

DeWitt was referring to Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, who had been in command of the Army’s Hawaiian Department when the Japanese struck. A scapegoat for the disaster was needed in Washington, so Short was being measured for horns.

DeWitt had to deal not only with real or perceived hostile threats to the West Coast, but much of his time was spent hassling with state and local officials. He coerced California Governor Cuthbert Olson to close down all houses of prostitution, an act, wags declared, that caused the “ladies” to peddle their wares on street corners. It had not been made clear how whorehouses had been jeopardizing the security against Japanese attacks.
¹³

Fear for Roosevelt’s Life

S
INCE WORD HAD FIRST REACHED
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. about the Japanese treachery, he had been obsessed with President Roosevelt’s security. A component of the Treasury, the Secret Service was directly responsible for protecting the chief executive on an around-the-clock basis.

American intelligence officers told the Secret Service that Abwehr, the German espionage agency, had for years planted agents in and around Washington. They had been instructed, said the report, to lay low, to blend in with their neighborhoods until given a signal from Berlin. Then, it was said, these moles would put on the German uniforms they had brought with them, dig out the weapons they had hidden, and, under cover of night, assault the White House and murder President Roosevelt.

Police in Washington were told to be on the lookout for suspicious characters lurking about in civilian clothes and promptly arrest them with no regard for their legal rights. How one “looks suspicious” was left to the judgment of the policemen.

An armored Packard sedan was acquired for Roosevelt, and Morgenthau established a tight procedure for admission into the White House. No doubt he recalled to his horror and embarrassment the time two teenage boys had slipped into the White House on New Year’s Day 1939 and prowled around the building without being challenged. They had walked in on the president and his wife and asked the astonished couple for autographs.

Fearing a bombing raid, Morgenthau insisted that Roosevelt take shelter in the thick vault of the Treasury Building, which is located near the White House. (A tunnel would soon connect the two structures.) The president quipped that he would take refuge there only if he could play poker with the guards and use Morgenthau’s twenty-dollar gold pieces for chips.

Morgenthau wanted to obtain four tanks from the Army to guard the approaches to the White House. Roosevelt said no. The treasury secretary then planned to bring in a battalion of heavily armed soldiers. Again, Roosevelt rejected the idea, agreeing to have only one soldier posted every one hundred feet along the iron fence that circles the grounds.

Without Roosevelt’s prior approval, Morgenthau arranged to have a company of soldiers manning World War I machine guns deployed around the White House grounds. On the roof of the building were two ancient antiaircraft guns, along with shells that had been in wooden crates for twenty years.

Among the president’s aides there was a heated debate over the subject of blacking out windows in the White House to thwart enemy bombers. The president was opposed to it, but those in favor won out. So like any housewife in Tupelo, Mississippi, or Springfield, Illinois, Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, was dispatched to scour Washington stores for blackout material.

Although she represented the nation’s most powerful figure, Nesbitt was able to pry loose only three bolts of cloth, a fraction of the amount that would be needed. So the problem was solved by using black sateen shades and painting windows black.
¹⁴

FBI Joins in Sinking Submarine

T
WO WEEKS AFTER AMERICA
was bombed into a global conflict, operators at the Radio Corporation of America Communications (RCAC) radio station at Point Reyes, about fifty miles northwest of San Francisco, heard two strange radio outlets exchanging messages. Using directional antenna, they figured that the strong station was probably one in Japan and the weaker station a submarine a short distance off the California coast.