The U.S. Army of 1941 was a work in progress—and nowhere more so than in DeWitt’s Western Defense Command and its Ninth Corps Area. It encompassed not only Washington, Oregon, and California, but Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and the Alaska Territory. His first priority was protecting the 1,300 miles of coastline from southern California to northern Washington and the nearly six-thousand-mile coastline of Alaska.
Most of the fixed gun emplacements on the Pacific Coast dated back to around the turn of the century. These thick, concrete gun bunkers and pillboxes built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1895 and 1905 were manned by the Coastal Artillery Corps, which had been separated from the Field Artillery Corps in 1901, and which maintained its own bureaucracy through individual coast artillery districts.
The coastal guns were seen by strategic planners as the U.S. Army protecting U.S. Navy facilities so that the latter could conduct offensive operations at sea. It was never imagined that most of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet could be taken off line in a single attack—especially not by an air attack as was to happen in December 1941. Such a thing was just impossible.
The Ninth Coast Artillery District within the Ninth Corps Area was commanded by Brigadier General Henry Burgin, and included five locations. In California, Fort MacArthur at San Pedro guarded the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor, while Fort Rosecrans protected San Diego Harbor. The 6th Coastal Artillery Regiment at Fort Winfield Scott in the Presidio protected San Francisco Bay. In Oregon, Fort Stevens, near Astoria, covered the mouth of the Columbia River, while Fort Worden, near Port Townsend, guarded Washington’s Puget Sound.
Each location had two or three batteries, including decades-old ten-inch and twelve-inch guns, 1920s vintage sixteen-inch guns, as well as six-inch rifled guns on “disappearing” carriages that could pop up to fire, then retract out of sight for reloading. In 1940, the Army finally started building casements to protect the sixteen-inch guns from air attack.
As formidable as they were, the fixed coastal guns could do nothing beyond defending access to a harbor or a river at a narrow choke point. They would be useless in protecting the remaining coastline against an invader. To do that would have required mobile forces, including infantry and field artillery, supported by air and naval power that were in short supply.
“With but few exceptions our seacoast batteries are outmoded and today are woefully inadequate,” wrote Major General Joseph Green, head of the Coast Artillery Corps in a May 31, 1940, memo to Chief of Staff Marshall. “Nearly every battery is outranged by guns aboard ship that are of the same caliber. More alarming than this is the fact that every battery on the Atlantic Coast, and all but two of the batteries on the Pacific Coast, have no overhead cover so are open to attack from the air.”
The Coast Artillery Corps did have some mobile guns. As of December 1941, however, they were concentrated in just six regiments equipped with 155mm guns, and one regiment equipped with eight-inch railroad guns. But most of these were not on the Pacific Coast.
In 1935, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy had agreed to begin coordinating their efforts toward preparations for coastal defense through a plan published as Joint Action of the Army and the Navy, but very little practical work had been done toward implementation of the plan before Pearl Harbor. For its part, the U.S. Navy would later install harbor nets and booms, and plant contact mines and detection devices in outer harbor approaches, but most of this work occurred after 1941.
Air defense was the U.S. Army’s responsibility, but despite ambitious plans, there had been little improvement since 1937, when the Army had a grand total of 135 three-inch antiaircraft guns, divided between five understrength regiments, to protect the Pacific Coast. In March 1941, the Army told the Coast Artillery Corps that it had no antiaircraft guns (fixed or mobile) for General Green’s harbor defense modernization program.
Within the Western Defense Command, the only dedicated Regular Army antiaircraft regiment was the 78th Coastal Artillery at Fort MacArthur. Antiaircraft troops from the 101st Coastal Artillery Brigade of the Minnesota National Guard, including the 216th Coast Artillery Regiment, were moved to Camp Haan in Southern California in 1941. Less than a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Battery B of the 216th moved to San Francisco. It and the newly formed IV Anti-Aircraft Command took over Aquatic Park on the north waterfront west of Fisherman’s Wharf, and established their headquarters in a former bathing casino, a few hundred feet down the hill from General DeWitt’s residence at Fort Mason.
Along with its antiaircraft batteries, the Army deployed barrage balloons. Anchored to the ground, these large unpowered blimps floated several hundred feet above a potential target. The idea was that the cables would snarl the propellers and damage the wings of low-flying aircraft.
The regular U.S. Army forces within DeWitt’s Fourth Army/Western Defense Command area were divided into sector commands. On the coastline, the Northwest Sector, Washington and Oregon, was commanded by Major General Kenyon Joyce at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington. The Southern Sector, which included California, was under the leadership of Major General Joseph Warren Stilwell, the future commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India Theater, and a man who had served previously as United States military attaché to China during the Japanese invasion in 1937.
Each sector contained a field corps headquarters and a single Regular Army infantry division. The IX Corps headquarters, containing the 3rd Infantry Division, now led by Major General John Porter Lucas, had moved to Fort Lewis from the Presidio of San Francisco in 1940. Major General Walter Wilson led III Corps at the Presidio of Monterey, which contained the 7th Infantry Division, based at Fort Ord, a former artillery training facility just north of Monterey.
Also on the Pacific Coast were two divisions that consisted primarily of National Guard troops and recent draftees. The men of the recently activated 40th Infantry Division at Camp San Luis Obispo, California, were mostly California National Guardsmen with a few from Nevada and Utah. The 41st Infantry Division at Fort Lewis was mainly a Washington National Guard unit, with additional troops from Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. At Camp Murray, adjacent to Fort Lewis, were elements of the 153rd Infantry Regiment and antiaircraft units of the 206th Coastal Artillery Regiment, both from the Arkansas National Guard.
At the end of 1941, both divisions were led by new commanders. Major General Ernest Dawley assumed command of the 40th in September, and Major General Horace Fuller had taken over the 41st after the sudden death of Major General George White at the end of November. The headquarters of the 35th Infantry Division was also at Fort Lewis, but it was without its operational units, who were members of the Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska National Guard.
None of DeWitt’s four divisions were near full strength, even with the draft and the National Guard mobilization. The majority of the troops that were in the service had been on active duty for less than a year, and, because of widespread shortages of munitions and materiel, the levels of training and equipment left much to be desired. Los Angeles Times reporter John Cornell, who visited the 40th Infantry Division at Camp San Luis Obispo in April 1940, reported 9,700 men at the post, including 3,300 from Southern California, and that the division was seriously under strength. Amazingly, in an environment where there was supposed to be some pretense about maintaining military secrecy, he got these numbers through official channels. Discipline also seemed to be lax, and Cornell was able to report this as well. He observed that to some of the servicemen, San Luis Obispo had “the advantage of offering [easy] week-end furlough jaunts” to Los Angeles.
Two months later, when the 7th and 40th Infantry Divisions went on maneuvers at Fort Hunter-Liggett, seventy miles north of San Luis Obispo, Cornell was there to observe the “mock wars.” He noted that the authorities had to “warn children, hikers, and picnickers from wandering” onto the mock battlefield. The mood was still relaxed. The war must have seemed a long way off.
In June 1941, American military leaders assumed that if the United States entered the war, the troops would be deployed to Europe and all of the tactical and logistical planning was geared toward this. Though there was widespread revulsion about the harsh conduct of Japan’s war machine in China, there was little in the way of practical planning for a war against Japan, except in defense of the Philippines. Beyond the hypothetical, there was even less serious thought given to combat on the Pacific Coast. In August, nevertheless, there was a training exercise that war-gamed the possibility of an enemy invasion, starting with an enemy seizure of the Hawaiian Islands before an attack on the West Coast of the continental United States. Even Chief of Staff Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson flew in to observe.
To add realism to the exercise, even DeWitt himself—commanding the “Blue,” or defending, force—was not told where the “Red” invaders would land until April 9, the day before the mock invasion. The target was the Puget Sound area, and DeWitt flew to Fort Lewis to take command.
The exercise went as scripted, with IX Corps holding the invaders at bay until III Corps could arrive from California by road and rail. Despite a surprise Red capture of Blue light tanks, which caused some uneasy moments, the defenders won the nine-day campaign. George Marshall reported that he had seen “tremendous improvement” in the Fourth Army since the “Battle of California” war game in June. DeWitt had praise for his men after both exercises, On August 22 after the Battle of Washington, he told reporters that “definitely and positively, the troops of the Fourth Army, their spirit, willingness to do, determination . . . cannot be excelled by any troops in the world today.”
When the media pointed out how poorly equipped his men were, DeWitt bristled, explaining acerbically that “it is recognized by everyone that the shortage of equipment exists because it has been necessary for the War Department to establish priorities for many items so as to equip quickly certain divisions for very definite and logical reasons. There can be no justification for criticism of that action.”
During the exercises, DeWitt’s airpower had been limited to observation planes, but he did have an air force, however small, and it looked pretty good, at least on paper. Within the geographic boundaries of the Fourth Army and Western Defense Command were parts of two of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF)’s numbered air forces. In Oregon and Washington, within Fourth Army jurisdiction, were parts of the Second Air Force, with headquarters at Fort George Wright, near Spokane, and a bailiwick that extended all the way to Kansas and into the turf of the Second Army. The Fourth Air Force was based at Hamilton Field in California and its responsibilities extended all the way to Texas and Oklahoma.
For those concerned about the possibility of enemy air attacks on the West Coast, these two air forces did not provide much in the way of security. In their book, Guarding the United States and its Outposts, Stetson Conn, Rose Engelman, and Byron Fairchild wrote that even after the war began, the Second and Fourth Air Forces, except for a small number of aircraft assigned to the II and IV Interceptor Commands, “were there primarily for the training of units, and they had only a secondary and very subordinate mission of providing an air defense and an attacking force along the Pacific front.”
For themselves, the two interceptor commands were burdened by abnormally long and convoluted lines of communication. Brigadier General Carlyle Wash’s II Interceptor Command was located at Fort Lawton within the Seattle city limits, 230 air miles from Second Air Force headquarters, while its handful of interceptors were based at Paine Field, twenty miles north of Seattle.
The Fourth Air Force at Hamilton Field was less than an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, although its commander, Major General Jacob Fickel, maintained his own headquarters office at the Presidio near DeWitt’s. Fickel’s IV Interceptor Command component of the Fourth Air Force was not headquartered at Hamilton Field, but 420 air miles to the south, at March Field, near Riverside, in Southern California—although its commander, Brigadier General William Ord Ryan, maintained a command office and an Aircraft Warning Service office at the Presidio.
The latter arrangement might have been fine in facilitating Ryan’s interaction with the two other officers, but the distance to March Field, over which communications was by way of commercial telephone lines, posed obvious problems for command and control in a combat situation.
Nor was there much in the way of actual air assets. At the end of November 1941, between them, the Second and Fourth had only 140 pursuit planes, including P-40s, then the standard USAAF fighter, along with obsolescent P-36s and other older types—and not all of these were based on or near the Pacific Coast. The USAAF believed that bombers would provide an effective defense against an approach enemy fleet—and invasion force—but the two West Coast air forces could muster only about one hundred of the inadequate B-18s, a handful of B-17s, and a few B-25 medium bombers. Meanwhile, the air defense mission had been largely ignored. There had been some air defense exercises during 1937 and 1938, but these tapered off in 1939 because of a shift in policy from air defense to offensive action against the airfields from which the attackers would operate. Neither Germany nor Japan had aircraft with sufficient range to reach the United States from their respective homelands, but because of Germany’s prewar involvement in Latin American commercial aviation, American planners assumed that if air attacks against the United States materialized, they would originate from captured airfields within the Western Hemisphere.
The threat from carrier-borne aircraft was downplayed despite the fact that Japan had six aircraft carriers in 1939 and more on the way. Furthermore, the allocation of interceptor units, like antiaircraft artillery units, was tilted more toward the densely populated Eastern Seaboard between Boston and Norfolk rather than on the Pacific Coast, which was vulnerable to attack by Japanese naval airpower. A report issued by the Army Air Board in June 1939 dictated that air defense strategy was to “provide in the United States (zone of the interior) the necessary close-in air defense of our most vulnerable and important areas, to include, where necessary, reasonable protection against off-shore carrier attacks. These forces are not intended to repel a mass air attack or to afford air protection to our entire coastline, but are designed to limit the effectiveness of air raids upon our exposed vital areas.”
Radar was in its infancy when World War II began, but it had proven its worth during the Battle of Britain. In the United States, the state of the art systems were the mobile Signal Corps Radar Model 270 (SCR-270) and its fixed location counterpart, the SCR-271. They were capable of detecting aircraft at a range of one hundred miles if they were at twenty thousand feet. However, if aircraft came in at one thousand feet, the radar would not detect them until there were within just twenty miles range.
The radar system had been declared operational in the summer of 1941, but relatively few had been deployed, and the procedures for their use were not formalized. The SCR-270s installed in Hawaii, for example, operated only for a few hours each day. On the Pacific Coast, the SCR-270s were at only ten sites and not yet functioning when the war began.
As the Armed Forces did not have the manpower to watch over the coastlines and inland infrastructure, so, beginning in May 1941, the federal government moved to recruit civilians to fill in the gaps. To watch the skies, the Aircraft Warning Service (AWS), was established as an adjunct of the Army’s Ground Observer Corps. The AWS would involve a network of spotters who were trained to observe and to pass visual sightings to a filter center, which processed the data and passed it on to the USAAF. On the Pacific Coast, this information would be routed to controllers at the IV Interceptor Command for action.
Civilians were also organized for a variety of emergency response roles under the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), which was created by presidential decree inside the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), an organization roughly analogous to the present Federal Emergency Management Agency. The OCD depended to a much greater degree on volunteers than OEM. It grew so large that it became independent of OEM in early 1942. Though the federal OCD office was a brainchild of President Roosevelt, and he its champion, Civilian Defense had already been embraced by most of the states, especially on the coasts.
Before the war, the national OCD provided the familiar red, white, and blue triangle Civilian Defense logo—designed by Charles Coiner of the N.W. Ayer Advertising Agency—as well as truckloads of World War I-vintage doughboy helmets painted white, but the organization and recruiting of Civil Defense volunteers were the responsibility of state and local agencies. Their success varied from locality to locality.
In New York, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s support for the idea of organizing for Civilian Defense earned him the job of titular director of Roosevelt’s federal agency, while he remained as mayor. After the war began, however, and as the OCD budget mushroomed, Congress became insistent that a full-time leader was needed. In January 1942, Roosevelt appointed Harvard Law School Dean James Landis as OCD’s executive director and La Guardia’s eventual successor.
In 1940, as mayor of Seattle, Arthur Langlie had created the city’s Home Defense Committee at the urging of City Councilman John Carroll. After attending an American Municipal Association conference where city-wide blackouts were discussed, Carroll had been convinced, and in turn he convinced Langlie.
In Oregon, Governor Charles Sprague moved lethargically, prodded by snippy editorials in Portland’s Oregon Journal, a rival to Sprague’s own Oregon Statesman. Finally, the governor reactivated the State Council of Defense for Oregon, which had existed during World War I. As “coordinator” for the newly reconstituted organization, Sprague picked Jerrold Owen, an Army officer in the First World War who was well-connected within the American Legion. Sprague kept the directorship for himself. In California, Culbert Olson had the same idea, making himself chairman of the State Council of Defense while picking a military man, Brigadier General Joseph Donovan, to run the operation.
Within it, the Office of Civilian Defense formed a Ninth Regional Defense Board with headquarters in San Francisco, numerically designated to correspond to the Army’s Ninth Corps Area on the Pacific Coast. Intended to foster interagency cooperation, it consisted of representatives of local governments of the region, such as those from police and fire departments, and the attorneys general of each western state. For example, California’s attorney general Earl Warren represented the latter at meetings in San Francisco, while Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles represented the region’s mayors on the board.
Meanwhile, other civilians had already been recruited into a service called the State Defense Forces, better known as the State Guards or Home Guards, which were created to replace federalized National Guard units in the home defense role. After the Guard was federalized in September 1940, Congress amended the National Defense Act of 1916 to permit, even encourage, the states to form such units to act as guards for sensitive locations and facilities.
“There can be no argument as to the importance of protecting our plants against sabotage, but I am convinced that the use of soldier guards is an expensive and not particularly efficient expedient,” observed General Marshall in an October 1941 memo. “Soldiers are not trained as watchmen and are generally younger and more impulsive than is desirable for men on such special duty. . . . I am sure that military units should be kept as an emergency reserve under the Corps Area commanders.”
In theory, the State Guards were to have been trained and equipped by the U.S. Army, but just as there was little military manpower available for guard duty, there was even less available for training guards. As for equipment, the federal government loaned some stocks of World War I-surplus Enfield rifles to the State Guards. Another problem was manpower. Recruits had day jobs and were mostly over draft age, and the federal government did not allow its civilian employees to join such units.
The Army would have been incapable of sustaining a comprehensive program of site security. Though the War Department’s ambitious prewar plans called for the creation of fifty-six military police battalions for duty in the continental United States, only three such battalions existed by September 1941. Eventually, to close this gap, the Army developed plans to give military police training to one of the three infantry regiments in each of National Guard divisions. It is difficult to see how this would have done anything but diminish the combat power of these infantry divisions.
The ability of local authorities to defend against sabotage loomed very large in the mind of General DeWitt. A window into this thinking is provided by Victor Hansen, a young officer who had come to the Army seven months earlier by way of the ROTC program at UCLA, and who had joined DeWitt’s staff at the Presidio a month later. He was part of the Fourth Army G-3 (or operations) staff and a member of DeWitt’s War Plans Division. As such, he was involved in the planning for protection of civilian installations and infrastructure.
In a 1976 interview conducted by Amelia Fry of the Bancroft Library regional oral history office, Hansen recalled that DeWitt “was very much concerned with the possibility of sabotage. He was concerned with the effects of sabotage and particularly how civilian agencies would assume their responsibility. . . . However, the planning for . . . civilian protection in the event of enemy attack or . . . sabotage . . . was quite inadequate. The military plans . . . were inadequate unless they were tied into civilian plans”—and coordinated with them, which they were not.
The future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want.” The Army—or, more precisely, the part of it commanded by DeWitt—was small and top-heavy with administrative units at the expense of operational units. Its harbor defense guns were powerful, but outdated, and covered just four locations on a 1,300-mile coastline. Its airpower was badly organized and poorly equipped, and the embryonic Civilian Defense organization was inadequate. On the ground, DeWitt had just four underequipped and undermanned divisions to guard more than three hundred thousand square miles of territory that was separated from the main part of the United States by a thousand miles of narrow roads and vulnerable rail lines. In short, if war came, he would face a daunting defensive challenge.