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Illustration by Adriana Heldiz
If it weren’t for an important decision by the President that is now forgotten, we might remember the Japanese attack on San Diego in 1941 instead of this week commemorating the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
This is a story about how a single decision by the man who once said he felt like “the Godfather of San Diego” could have saved us from disaster. And it’s a story of high voltage wars, when anti-aircraft batteries lined up Linda Vista, nightly power outages threatened lives, and a Japanese submarine secretly landed at Point Loma.
All this was basically unimaginable two years earlier in the 43rd largest city in the country.
Some writers describe San Diego as sleepy at the time, although that’s not entirely true: we were a typical marine town, and any port where seafarers live will be full of distractions. The famous poet Maya Angelou, for example, worked here as a brief madame as a young woman in the 1940s.
But we were definitely on the smaller side. San Diego had just over 200,000 residents – much fewer than Chula Vista today – and 42 American cities were larger, including five on the west coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle). There are only 86,000 people in all of the rest of San Diego County, fewer than there are in San Marcos today.
A war in Europe had started in 1939, but it was not yet a fully global conflict. Many Americans, still bitter about being drawn into World War I, hoped to stay out of a “foreign war”.
Across the Pacific, Japan looked like a potential enemy as it threatened to meet its oil needs by capturing Pacific territories owned by distracted European countries.
He may have loved San Diego, but FDR pulled the Navy off
It was then that San Diego, home to much of the Navy’s Pacific fleet, stepped in.
Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to move our ships to Hawaii.
Roosevelt was actually very fond of San Diego. He was mightily proud to urge the city to become a major naval base when he was assistant secretary of the navy in the 1910s. In fact, he told a crowd of 25,000 on the bay in 1938 that “I feel like the Godfather of San Diego in some ways.”
The president’s decision had nothing to do with us and everything to do with Japan.
“The only reason to move was to impress and intimidate. Bringing the fleet closer to Japan – many times over – was a shot across the Japanese bow, “said Steve Twomey, author of” Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack “, in an interview. “You would certainly not be moving to improve the daily life of the fleet. Everything a fleet needed had to be brought from the mainland, especially oil. In addition, the move completely destroyed the lives of thousands of seafarers whose families stayed on the west coast, at least initially. “
The chief of the fleet, Admiral James Richardson, believed that a Pacific fleet stationed in Hawaii would be inadequately prepared and overexposed. A few months later, he asked the President to return the ships to San Diego. He also mentioned that the Navy did not trust the nation’s political leadership.
Oops. That was the end of his military career: The FDR fired him.
Catastrophe in Hawaii and “full-blown stress” here at home
Should the President have kept the Pacific Fleet here? “It’s easy to say that FDR made a terrible decision,” said Twomey. “But the fleet wasn’t paralyzed on December 7th just because it was in Pearl Harbor. It was also crippled because so many, from Washington to Pearl Harbor, made so many bad assumptions about the Japanese and did not take seriously the vast intelligence information that suggested the Japanese were up to something big. With better thinking and better preparation, Americans could have turned December 7th into a day of disaster for Japan. The attackers could have been greeted by a fully armed and operational American Navy – an ambush of the ambushes. “
Instead, the attack on Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,400 Americans, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed or crippled hundreds of aircraft, as well as eight battleships and other naval vessels.
“Within hours, more than any other area in the country, the attack on the west coast created widespread uncertainty, fear and concern,” Twomey said. “The San Diego Marine Community has been stressed over the fate of their husbands and sons in Pearl Harbor. The civilians had very little information about the extent of the attack and no information about the victims. In my book I present the story of the wife of a naval destroyer captain, a famous one. He survived the attack well, but his wife in San Diego only knew that a few days later when his telegram finally reached her. “
Bad news spread quickly in some cases. The December 8 morning issue of the San Diego Union included a photo on the front page of a 37-year-old ex-San Diegan believed to be the first man killed in the attack when Japanese machine guns hit him shot at while attempting to launch a plane. Robert L. Tyce’s parents and brother were still living in Chula Vista, and his father shouted, “My God, I can’t believe it!” When he got the news.
Aerial view of US warships docked at the US Naval Repair Base in San Diego, California (USA) during World War II. / Image via Wikimedia Commons
Fear, panic and Japanese submarines off San Diego
The west coast immediately went on alert. “People were stunned that the Japanese Imperial Navy could reach more than half the Pacific,” said author Bill Yenne, author of “Panic on the Pacific: How America Prepared for the West Coast Invasion,” in an interview. “It was widely believed that if they could, they could get to the west coast, and the assumption was that they would. And if the Japanese had decided to attack, San Diego would have come first. “
Anti-aircraft batteries in Linda Vista were ready to shoot down planes, blackouts kept the skies dark every night, and “barrier balloons” flew overhead to detonate any Japanese warplanes that flew into them. As the LA Times reported in a 1989 article, “Chicken feathers were placed on large chain-link nets at the Convair facility on the Pacific Highway and painted to camouflage the facility from enemies who were supposed to believe they were flying.” over farmland. “
Meanwhile, thousands of soldiers and war workers flocked to the city, and the downtown cafes are open 24 hours a day. “There were constant rumors of Japanese attacks and secret bases in Mexico,” said Yenne.
San Diego had some close calls. Japanese submarines lurked offshore threatening American ships, and one secretly landed at Point Loma in early 1942. The commander checked his position and then left. The Japanese reportedly considered bombarding San Diego and other cities on the west coast on Christmas Eve 1941.
In the late summer of 1942, however, fears of invasion began to subside as the Japanese focused on battles far away in the Pacific, writes Yenne. It was too late for thousands of Japanese locals sent to detention centers.
The war ended three years later, but not before San Diego began to develop from a tourist naval city into a major metropolis. In 1950, the city’s population reached more than 330,000 and has increased by more than half in just 10 years.
What if Pearl Harbor was just the beginning?
Would the Japanese have launched a Pearl Harbor-style air strike against San Diego if the fleet had still been stationed here? “It’s very, very unlikely,” said Twomey. “One of the main reasons is the simple logistics. The trip would have been at least twice as long: about 6,000 miles by sea from Tokyo to San Diego; It’s just under 3,000 miles to Pearl Harbor. That would have required twice as much fuel and twice as many refueling processes, a dangerous exercise on the way. “
He also said, “The Japanese plan was wholly – wholly – based on secrecy. If they lost it, if the Americans saw them coming, they were doomed. “
But San Diego was still vulnerable to another type of attack that Americans took very seriously after December 7th – a land invasion. As author Yenne writes in his book, “practically the entire Pacific coast was unprotected” and the Japanese could have launched a “great air-land-sea campaign” shortly after Pearl Harbor.
Yennes “What If?” The scenario suggests that Japanese land forces likely landed around San Clemente or Oceanside and initially headed south to defeat the less than 15,000 combat-ready Marines at San Diego’s Camp Kearny, now Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. (Camp Pendleton did not yet exist.)
This scenario never occurred because the Japanese likely realized that “it was simply untenable to support such a distant occupation force,” Yenne said. They also worried about the millions of Americans armed with weapons like hunting rifles.
We weren’t finished with being a potential target when World War II ended. The military presence here hit us again when the USSR threatened the US with nuclear weapons during the Cold War and beyond. The Soviets even made a remarkably detailed map of San Diego, apparently as a guide for an invading fleet or occupier, complete with an introduction to where the “most comfortable neighborhoods in San Diego” are – “north of Balboa Park”.
Be quiet, La Jolla! The Russians don’t know about you yet.
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