The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II Read Online Free PDF Page A

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