On December 8, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, a front-page editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle called for unity of purpose, and an end to the ongoing debate over isolationism, noting that “by the act of Japan, America is at war. The time for debate has passed and the time for action has come. This action must be united and unanimous. ‘Politics is adjourned.’ From now on America is an army with every man, woman and child in it, all joined by the one end of victory.”
Each of the three Pacific Coast governors issued statements calling for calm, and preparing their citizens for the unknowns that were sure to flow from the confused circumstances of the war in which they now found themselves.
“The State of Washington is on the frontier of a great war,” said Governor Arthur Langlie. “We do not know what the future holds in store for us. We do not know what trials we must go through or what sacrifices we will be called upon to make. We do know what is at stake. We know that our country, our liberties and our very homes are threatened. We are individually and as a nation being called upon to make good our pledge of allegiance to flag and country.”
Oregon governor Charles Sprague, who was also the editor and publisher of Salem’s Oregon Statesman, as well as the director of the State Council of Defense for Oregon, used a front page editorial published in an “Extra” edition of his own newspaper on Sunday. “We are at war,” Sprague wrote. “Well, we have been at war before and have acquitted ourselves honorably. We will do so again. We are all Americans in this war of defense.”
Sprague sent a telegram to President Roosevelt promising the “full support of the human and material resources of the State of Oregon.” He also proclaimed an “unlimited emergency.”
In Sacramento, though, Governor Culbert Olson downplayed the immediate threat. He postulated in his official statement that “I do not believe that even with the sudden and almost unbelievable attack on Hawaii that we may anticipate any immediate and similar attack on our coast. I feel that the unexpected move should be regarded as requiring the perfection and completion of all civilian protection plans which have been proposed for just such a situation.”
“You know the seriousness of the situation,” San Francisco’s mayor, Angelo Rossi, told a packed meeting at City Hall, taking on a more urgent tone. “This is a real emergency. . .We won’t fail. We are doing all in our power to protect lives and property and ultimately to win any conflict we are forced into.” In his official declaration, he appealed “to all citizens of San Francisco to remain calm and resolute in this emergency.”
Fear of enemy bombers striking at night gripped the states of the Pacific Coast. Blackouts were imposed almost immediately—and while haphazard at first—soon became an obsession of many people.
As the skies darkened on December 8th, Brigadier General William Ord Ryan of the IV Interceptor Command in San Francisco ordered the city to be blacked out. The erratic blackout extended seventy-five miles inland to the USAAF supply depot at McClellan Field near Sacramento, and from Santa Rosa in the north to San Jose in the south. In Southern California, the order called for blackouts as far inland as Las Vegas and Boulder Dam.
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Carlyle Wash of the II Interceptor Command ordered a blackout from the Canadian border to Roseburg, Oregon. In Portland, Mayor Earl Riley reported receiving orders directly from DeWitt himself not to allow any nighttime lights to be “left burning which cannot be turned out in 60 seconds.” It was the same story from British Columbia, where the coast was ordered to be blacked out.
In Seattle, where John Carroll’s Home Defense Committee was supposed to have engineered a plan for seamless city-wide blackouts, things turned rough. On the night of December 8, many downtown stores left their lights on, just as they had on December 7. A short time after 11:00 p.m., when the blackout was supposed to begin, nineteen-year-old Ethel Chelsvig paused outside the Foreman & Clark clothing store on Pike Street near Fourth Avenue, where the lights were still blazing.
“Are you going to stand by while these lights threaten the very life of our city?” She shouted to passers-by. Gradually a crowd formed as she explained that her husband, Raymond Chelsvig, was a sailor aboard the destroyer USS Kane, and he was fighting the Japanese while the store owners ignored the blackout. Soon, she began shouting to the crowd, “Break them! Turn them out!”
It took just one to start things moving. One man broke out the neon lights in the Weisfield & Goldberg Jewelers clock, and soon windows and neon were being smashed all around. The lighted letters in the Foreman & Clark sign were being broken one by one when an employee arrived to turn off the rest. As reported in both the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the window smashing continued, with a crowd of more than one thousand spreading toward Fifth Avenue in one direction, and Third in the other. The police soon arrived, but when they formed lines in front of stores, rocks and other objects were thrown over their heads, and they had to call for backup. Eventually, the police were joined by the fire department and 150 civilian air raid wardens.
Before they were finally dispersed by police, the rioters paused briefly to sing “God Bless America.” There were six arrests, including a defiant Mrs. Chelsvig. According to the Seattle Times, she told police “This is war. . . . One light in the city might betray us.” She was charged with disorderly conduct and later paid a fine of twenty-five dollars.
After the “Blackout Riot,” the Seattle City Council passed a blizzard of ordinances to prevent future disturbances. They banned congregations of five or more on sidewalks or streets and the sale of alcohol during blackouts. Given that cars were required to drive without lights, speed limits were reduced to 15 mph during blackouts. Nevertheless, as was the case in other cities down the coast, crashes and fender-benders increased dramatically. One motorist drove his car into the Duwamish River during a blackout.
In Southern California, where a strict blackout was declared by the 11th Naval District within a fifteen-mile radius of San Pedro, including the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the darkness turned deadly on the night of December 8. Benito Montez of Wilmington, just north of San Pedro, was struck and killed by a car driven by Harry Davis, becoming the first fatality of World War II on the Pacific Coast.
In San Francisco, the first victim of the confusion wrought by the blackout was twenty-seven-year-old Marie Sayre. On that same evening of December 8, she and her husband were driving to Oakland. As their car passed onto the First Street approach to the Bay Bridge, Home Guardsman Albert Rownd called for the vehicle to stop. He had been ordered to stop any car with its lights on and instruct the driver to turn them off. The guardsman shouted, but Donald Sayre did not hear him. Rownd opened fire and a bullet struck Mrs. Sayre in the back, lodging near her spine. Amazingly, she survived and lived until 1968.
Even as Marie Sayre was being wheeled into surgery, and as downtown Seattle was rumbling and rioting, the Pacific Coast experienced the first intrusion into its air space by enemy aircraft—or so everyone was led to believe.
At 1:45 a.m. on December 9, General Ryan, downing coffee at his IV Interceptor Command headquarters, was handed a bulletin. As he later explained, “the controller at the board of command detected planes about which we knew nothing. . . . We are sounding warnings when the detection signals on our board call for them.” Ryan notified General DeWitt, who phoned Mayor Rossi personally. Reports were circulated that “army authorities” had “authenticated” the report. Estimates of the number of aircraft ranged between thirty-five and fifty, but in the confusion, the sources of the estimates were unclear.
Radio station KFRC reported at 1:51 that it had been ordered off the air, and other stations were shut down at the same time. Traffic on both the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge was halted and the bridges were blacked out, but the huge neon signs along San Francisco’s Market Street and the streets to the south remained illuminated. At the Port of Oakland, a glitch in the system would not allow the lights to be shut off, so Home Guard troops shot them out with their rifles. It would not have mattered. It was a clear night and the Bay Area lay beneath a bright moon.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that “Confusion prevailed . . . Fire sirens screamed, and police cars raced through the streets warning residents to turn out their lights.”
After the sun rose on Tuesday, December 9, and the “all-clear” siren had sounded, Ryan spoke to the media in time to be quoted in the morning papers. “There was an actual attack,” he confirmed. “A strong squadron was detected approaching the Golden Gate. It was not an air raid test. It was the real thing. The planes came from the sea and turned back. . . . Some of the planes got into the Golden Gate then turned and headed southwest [over San Francisco]. . . . I don’t think there’s any doubt they came from a carrier, but the carrier would have moved after they were launched and they would rendezvous at another spot.”
When someone asked whether his interceptors had gone up to meet the intruders, Ryan replied, “You don’t send planes up unless you know what the enemy is doing and where they are going. And you don’t send planes up in the dark unless you know what you are doing.”
Ryan’s admission that the IV Interceptor Command knew neither what the enemy was doing—aside from flying over the West’s second largest city—nor what the command itself was doing, did little to allay concerns.
Later in the day, the top brass, the military leaders upon whom the defense of the Pacific Coast rested, met reporters at a meeting of the Civil Defense Council at San Francisco’s City Hall. General DeWitt was there, looking lean and almost brittle next to the round-faced Vice Admiral John Wills Greenslade, the newly appointed commandant of the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco.
“By the grace of God, we were saved from a terrible catastrophe,” Greenslade said nervously. “If bombs had fallen, damage would have been worse than anything I can imagine. When the time comes, be ready.”
But all eyes were on DeWitt.
No one comprehended the extent of the shock of Pearl Harbor upon the man with the three stars on each shoulder. He knew that the extent of the damage done was far greater than had been revealed to the news media and general public. He was desperately afraid of suffering the same level of ruin within his area of responsibility, the same humiliating defeat. It came as no surprise to DeWitt when both Lieutenant General Walter Short, whose job in Hawaii was analogous to DeWitt’s on the West Coast, and Pacific Fleet commander Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel were relieved of duty on December 17 for having their forces in Hawaii “not on the alert.” It was clear that Short’s career was now unsalvageable, and DeWitt did not want that to happen to him.
As the highest ranking American military officer on the Pacific Coast, DeWitt was the man of the hour at the December 9 City Hall conference. He was the man to whom many would look in this time of crisis for leadership, inspiration, reassurance, and confidence. With the right words and the right attitude, he could have calmed innumerable fears, quashed countless rumors, and established a mood of calm across the entire West Coast. He had many examples from which could have drawn: Winston Churchill’s unshakable resolve, Franklin Roosevelt’s buoyant confidence, George Marshall’s rock-solid steadiness, and even Douglas MacArthur’s overly eloquent optimism.
DeWitt instead took a tone that was strident and hectoring. He warned that “death and destruction are likely to come” if the people of the Pacific Coast did not heed his warnings, and take his orders seriously. His voice rose and quavered, as he scolded his audience, telling them that they were “damned fools” for not sharing his concerns.
Instead of speaking of shared goals and common purpose, he accused those to whom he spoke of “criminal apathy.” It was as though he believed himself to be the only one who truly understood the gravity of the situation.
“The people of San Francisco do not seem to appreciate that we are at war in every sense,” he exhorted. “I have come here because we want action and we want action now. Unless definite and stern action is taken to correct last night’s deficiencies, a great deal of destruction will come. Those planes were over our community. They were over our community for a definite period. They were enemy planes. I mean Japanese planes.”
He said, “if I can’t knock these facts into your heads with words, I will have to turn you over to the police and let them knock them into you with clubs.”
DeWitt seemed flustered when someone asked why the Japanese aircraft had not dropped bombs and why there had been no attempt to shoot them down.
“I say it’s none of [your] business.” He continued, “San Francisco woke up this morning without a single death from bombs,” he continued. “Isn’t that good enough?”
That was good, but was it really enough—especially after DeWitt had warned them that “death and destruction” were likely at any moment, especially after DeWitt had accused the civilians of neglecting their duties?
In that morning-after meeting, DeWitt had been handed an opportunity to set the tone for the public reaction to the enemy threat against the Pacific Coast and he had done so, but in so doing he had inspired an atmosphere of apprehension rather than of assurance. His fearfulness was palpable, and it was contagious. DeWitt had been handed an opportunity for greatness and he had let it slip from his grasp. His three stars may have given him authority, but did not instill confidence.