On December 11, the day the Third Reich declared war on the United States, and the United States responded in kind, General DeWitt became a theater commander in a world war.
As Stetson Conn and his colleagues wrote in Guarding the United States and its Outposts, “The most vital installations along this coast were military aircraft factories that had sprung up during the prewar years at Los Angeles and San Diego in the south and at Seattle in the north. In December 1941 nearly half of the American military aircraft production (and almost all of the heavy bomber output) was coming from eight plants in the Los Angeles area. The naval yards and ship terminals in the Puget Sound, Portland, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego areas, and the California oil industry were of only slightly less importance than the aircraft plants to the future conduct of the war. In the first two weeks of war it seemed more than conceivable that the Japanese could invade the coast in strength . . . there appeared to be a really serious threat of attack by a Japanese carrier striking force. . . . This was the outlook that persuaded the War Department to establish the Western Defense Command as a theater of operations.”
Conn and his fellow authors pointed out that it was an operational theater in name only, where antiaircraft artillery regiments “lacked two-thirds of their equipment. . .The Second and Fourth Air Forces had only a fraction of their assigned strength in planes, and they were critically short of bombs and ammunition.”
General Stilwell wrote bluntly on December 11 in the wake of the great Los Angeles invasion scare, “had the Japs only known, they could have landed anywhere on the coast, and after our handful of ammunition was gone, they could have shot us like pigs in a pen.”
Back on November 27, the War Department had warned DeWitt, along with commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines, that the Japanese probably were preparing for war. Though the specifics of the impending Pearl Harbor strike were not known, intercepted intelligence from “Magic,” the top secret project that had broken Japan’s diplomatic codes, made it clear that something was afoot. The next day, DeWitt had promised the War Department that he was ready for war, ready, that is, “except for a woeful shortage of ammunition and pursuit and bombardment planes.”
One can imagine DeWitt and his air commanders watching with some jealousy as a squadron of B-17 bombardment planes passed through Hamilton Field near San Francisco, on December 6, heading toward Hawaii, where, on December 7, Oahu, low on fuel, they were forced to land amid the Japanese attack.
Overseas on December 11, the Japanese armed forces were on the offensive. Bangkok had fallen, and Thailand had officially joined the Axis. The Japanese 25th Army was in Malaya and driving south toward Singapore. Both Guam and Wake Island were under attack, and both Hong Kong and the Philippines had been invaded. The two largest British warships in the Far East, the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, had been sunk by Japanese airpower on December 10—just as Japanese air-power had put the battleships at Pearl Harbor out of commission.
John DeWitt had two Regular U.S. Army divisions, bivouacked 900 miles apart, and two National Guard divisions, also bivouacked 900 miles apart, to guard a 1,300-mile coastline. There was no immediate effort to rush reinforcements to the Coast. Nearly half of the ground troops in the Western Defense Command were occupied with guard duty, harbor defense, or patrolling the coastline and the “Southern Land Frontier,” the military euphemism for the Mexican border.
DeWitt’s command was not alone in having shortages of men and materiel. Despite a year and a half of rebuilding, the regular Army throughout the continental United States was so short of equipment that it was forced to reclaim the stocks of World War I surplus rifles that it had lent to State Guards.
The Navy was spread as thin, or thinner, on the Pacific Coast as the Army. The backbone of the Pacific Fleet had been at Pearl Harbor—although, luckily, the fleet’s three aircraft carriers had not been. The USS Enterprise and USS Lexington were at sea, and the USS Saratoga was in San Diego, having just arrived from Bremerton, Washington, after a major refit. The only battleship on the Pacific Coast was the USS Colorado, which was being overhauled at Bremerton. The only cruiser on the West Coast was the USS Concord, then being overhauled in San Diego. The Pacific Fleet’s only active warships in the theater were fourteen destroyers scattered from Bremerton to San Diego, and a half dozen submarines, of which two were being overhauled at Mare Island.
The U.S. Coast Guard was in worse shape than the Navy. On the afternoon of December 7, Fritz Dickie at Stembridge Gun Rentals in Hollywood had received a phone call from the Coast Guard. Founded in 1920 to supply firearms to the motion picture industry, Stembridge operated what was known in the trade as the “Gun Room” on the Paramount Pictures lot, a facility that was one of the biggest private arsenals anywhere. The Coast Guard needed guns—especially Thompson Submachine Guns—and they knew about the Gun Room.
“We loaded them on trucks and, by night, the guns which had been used mostly in gangster pictures were ready for the feared Japanese invasion,” Dickie recalled after the war. “During the next few days, we also loaned rifles to the Coast Guard stationed at Catalina and machine guns, pistols and shotguns to the California State Guard. It was several months before all of the weapons were returned. Subsequently, we received a letter from the Harbor Defenses command which said, in part: ‘Due to the critical shortage of such weapons on Dec. 7, 1941, those provided from your stock were a most welcome addition to our defenses.’”
While the Army’s leadership was focused on preparing to take on Germany and Japan in a global war, the War Department was being deluged with requests to detach troops to take up guard duties at thousands of locations within the United States. Now that the country was actually at war, even Fiorello La Guardia, President Roosevelt’s own director of Civil Defense, was dubious about entrusting the task to civilians. “No city has enough police for [this] emergency,” he wired nervously to Roosevelt. “States can’t help much. Home Guard not constituted or prepared for such duty day-in and day-out.”
The president forwarded La Guardia’s comments to Stimson under a handwritten memo that read: “Harry Stimson—How about this?”
Stimson and Marshall resisted, knowing that they did not have the trained manpower to both take up the slack for the Home Guard and build an Army to strike back at the Axis overseas. Their protests were to no avail. On December 16, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8972 “authorizing the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to establish and maintain military guards and patrols, and to take other appropriate measures, to protect certain national defense material, premises, and utilities from injury or destruction.” The War Department announced plans to activate fifty-one new military police battalions for service inside the continental United States, but it would be months before they would be ready for service, and their creation would divert valuable manpower from other activities.
In fact, this manpower situation was at its most critical on the Pacific Coast. DeWitt could ill afford to divert his personnel to static guard duty when he and those around him assumed and expected that the Japanese would be bringing the war to their doorstep at any moment. Adding to their concern was the fact that they had no idea where on their 1,300-mile front line this might happen, and which of their thinly spaced units would be first to respond.
Air defenses were thinly spaced along the Pacific Coast. General Ryan’s IV Interceptor Command, and General Wash’s II Interceptor Command did have fighters that could intercept Japanese aircraft, as the USAAF pilots had done over Hawaii on December 7, but they had too few to concentrate effectively, and they lacked adequate training for night missions. Radar-equipped night fighters would not be available for a few years.
Nor would Ryan have wanted to send airplanes up into the darkness when he was so short of them. In The Army Air Forces in World War II, the official USAAF history, Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate note that “with the extremely limited resources available to the Army Air Forces in December 1941, it was impossible to provide even token defenses for all vital targets in the hemisphere.” They add that on the Pacific Coast, USAAF “crews of both fighters and bombers were handicapped by an acute shortage of ammunition.” With few exceptions, therefore, the Pacific Coast was essentially naked to air attack.
Addressing the perceived threats that had resulted in the disastrous Los Angeles blackouts, Craven and Cate delved into the “what if” scenario. They wrote that “to reconstruct the problem as it appeared to air officers at the time, let us assume that the report of the presence of thirty-four Japanese ships off the California coast on December 9, 1941, had proved to be true. With what forces could so threatening a surface fleet have been opposed? There is good evidence on this point, for the Fourth Air Force actually issued an order to ‘attack and destroy’ the enemy task force. By good fortune, fourteen bombers destined for the Southwest Pacific were in the vicinity; but it was found that the machine-gun turrets on the planes would not operate, that there was no adequate supply of oxygen for high-altitude operations, that only a few 300- and 600-lb. bombs were on hand, and that the bombers would have to enter an engagement without fighter support.”
USAAF reinforcements were coming, but they were slow in arriving. The first USAAF unit to be relocated to the Pacific Coast was the 1st Pursuit Group from Selfridge Field, Michigan, but all of its P-38s would not reach Southern California until December 22.
The ideal air defense scenario would have been to replicate that with which the Royal Air Force had during the Battle of Britain. However, compared to the situation with the II and IV Interceptor Commands, the RAF had nearly eight times the number of interceptors to cover a quarter of the distance. Radar and a thoroughly integrated command, control, and communications system were the key to detection of the enemy and deployment of RAF fighters to the right places at the right times. There was nothing like this on the Pacific Coast.
As previously mentioned, there were SCR-270 and SCR-271 radar systems at ten sites, but most had proven unreliable. At least DeWitt could have blamed a failure to detect an enemy air attack on “technical difficulties.”
And it wasn’t just the reliability of the equipment that was hampering the use of radar. “Many of the original [radar] sites having proved unsuitable, extensive resiting work was carried out,” recounted Craven and Cate. “The process was difficult, costly, and time-consuming. Rugged terrain often made the work difficult even for experts—and there were few men of experience available. Good radar sites often were relatively inaccessible, far removed from roads, communications, power, and water; it was frequently necessary to build pioneer trails or roads for considerable distances before preliminary tests of radar equipment could be made, and the effort might be wasted then by the discovery of unpredictable operational difficulties.”
Meanwhile, “when the Western Defense Command desired an expansion of radar coverage to protect California’s southern flank, delicate diplomacy was required to assure Mexico that no infringement of her national sovereignty was contemplated.”
Speaking of Mexico, many people in Southern California, both civilian and military, believed strongly that Japanese air attacks, and perhaps even attacks by Japanese paratroopers, would originate from south of the border.
Latin America had long had a large German presence, and many of the major airlines were operated by German interests. Concern for the threat from Latin America intensified after December 18 when the Associated Press reported on a “startling” Congressional investigation spearheaded by John Conover Nichols of Oklahoma that revealed information about “Axis air bases, arms depots and jungle radio stations” in seven countries from Argentina to Guatemala. The majority were German, but “a Japanese colony, located approximately 30 miles from [Cali, Colombia] has become a veritable storehouse for rifles, ammunition, pistols and hand grenades.”
A few days later, on December 23, a New York Times article datelined Mexico City reported that “the presence of Japanese submarines off the coast of California has led defense experts here to suspect that they may be refueling at small harbors along the remote, almost uninhabited coasts of the Gulf of California or along the Pacific side of the [Baja California] peninsula.” The same article reminded readers about “the Japanese smuggling of some $300,000 worth of mercury out of Manzanillo just before the Pacific war began.”
During the second week of December, General Stilwell stopped in at Muroc Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) about seventy miles from San Bernardino. He found that Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Smith, commander of the 41st Bombardment Group, had B-17 heavy bombers, but he complained that his men were virtually defenseless on the ground, especially if an attack came from Mexico.
“He was sure the Japs could fly in at any moment and shoot his men down,” Stilwell recalled. “The Engineer Battalion was leaving him, and he didn’t see how he could get ditches dug for his men to hide in. The only weapons available were pistols, so he was fearful of a parachute attack that would come in off carriers or from a secret base in [Baja] California, and murder them all.”
The blizzard of rumors about secret Japanese bases in Baja California that were making the rounds in December 1941 had reached the point where there were discussions between Stilwell’s staff and that of Brigadier General E. R. Mittelstadt of the 40th Infantry Division in San Diego over whether or not to send troops into Mexico.
Before anything could happen, however, the Mexican Army sent a seven-man delegation, including General Juan Felipe Rico Islaz, the army’s commander in Baja California, across the border to sit down with Stilwell and other American officers. In turn, Major General Charles Price, who succeeded Clayton Vogel as commander of the 2nd Marine Division, traveled to Tijuana in mid-December to meet with Brigadier General Manuel Contreras, Rico’s man for northern Baja.
The Mexicans were nervous about their own vulnerable coastline and willing to work with the Americans to protect their country, but with reservations. In The Framework of Hemisphere Defense, Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild note that the “local Mexican commanders either were uncertain of their authority to commit the [Mexican] federal government or were reluctant to accept instructions from Mexico City; the difficulties and delays in obtaining full permission for a reconnaissance in Baja California were inauspicious. . . . Actually, the Mexican commanders made clear their willingness and desire to cooperate, and if they were reluctant to place their names to a document committing them to joint action, they made it plain by word of mouth that in an emergency they would call on General DeWitt to send American troops into Mexico.”
By the end of December, the Mexican Senate was considering legislation to legalize the operations of American ground and naval forces south of the border.
On December 22, Stilwell was suddenly summoned to Washington, D.C., writing in his diary that “I am to shove off at once for work on a war plan, for some expeditionary force.” He turned the reins of the Southern Sector over to General Walter Wilson and was in the nation’s capital by Christmas Eve. At first, Stilwell was considered for a combat command against the Germans in North Africa, but his previous experience in China meant he would spend the war fighting the Japanese in the Far East. On February 15, General Wilson moved the headquarters of the Southern Sector of the Western Defense Command to Pasadena.
General DeWitt began moving some of his own command as well. On December 20, Lieutenant Colonel W. S. Conrow, DeWitt’s “spokesman,” announced that the headquarters of the Ninth Corps Area, specifically Major General Jay Benedict and 150 military and civilian personnel from his staff, would be moving from the Presidio of San Francisco to Fort Douglas on the east side of Salt Lake City, Utah, “because it is the center of a railroad network over which supplies can be readily distributed to the entire coastal region.”
“Normally,” Conrow explained, “a theater of operations consists of a combat zone nearest the enemy and a communications zone to the rear. Until now the communications zone had not existed in the Ninth Corps [Area] and creation of this element in Salt Lake City is a prime purpose of the change.”
The new location was around 750 rail miles “to the rear.” DeWitt now had his “communications zone.”