Archive for the ‘World War II’ Category
During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening a large number of flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 p.m., Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of “enemy planes, ” even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted “about 25 planes at 12,000 feet” over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.” From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance.
Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: “swarms” of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from “very slow” to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The dawn, which ended the shooting and the fantasy, also proved that the only damage which resulted to the city was such as had been caused by the excitement (there was at least one death from heart failure), by traffic accidents in the blacked-out streets, or by shell fragments from the artillery barrage.
Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the incident quickly became as involved and mysterious as the “battle” itself. The Navy immediately insisted that there was no evidence of the presence of enemy planes, and Secretary [of the Navy, Frank] Knox announced at a press conference on 25 February that the raid was just a false alarm. At the same conference he admitted that attacks were always possible and indicated that vital industries located along the coast ought to be moved inland. The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended, indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove “that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated.” The Fourth Air Force had indicated its belief that there were no planes over Los Angeles. But the Army did not publish these initial conclusions. Instead, it waited a day, until after a thorough examination of witnesses had been finished. On the basis of these hearings, local commanders altered their verdict and indicated a belief that from one to five unidentified airplanes had been over Los Angeles. Secretary Stimson announced this conclusion as the War Department version of the incident, and he advanced two theories to account for the mysterious craft: either they were commercial planes operated by an enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or they were light planes launched from Japanese submarines. In either case, the enemy’s purpose must have been to locate anti-aircraft defenses in the area or to deliver a blow at civilian morale.
The divergence of views between the War and Navy departments, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles Times, in a first-page editorial on 26 February, announced that “the considerable public excitement and confusion” caused by the alert, as well as its “spectacular official accompaniments, ” demanded a careful explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service. In Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether the incident was “a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away Southern California’s war industries.” Wendell Willkie, speaking in Los Angeles on 26 February, assured Californians on the basis of his experiences in England that when a real air raid began “you won’t have to argue about it—you’ll just know.” He conceded that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling of the Los Angeles episode a “recipe for jitters,” and censured the military authorities for what it called “stubborn silence” in the face of widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army’s theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert “explains everything except where the planes came from, whither they were going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them.” The New York Times on 28 February expressed a belief that the more the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: “If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them?… What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?” These questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of our air defenses.
At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert, although submarine-launched aircraft were subsequently used over Seattle. A careful study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons—known to have been released over Los Angeles —may well have caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the fact that anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to have been airplanes. After the firing started, careful observation was difficult because of drifting smoke from shell bursts. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area testified that he had first been convinced that he had seen fifteen planes in the air, but had quickly decided that he was seeing smoke. Competent correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry witnessed the shooting and wrote that they were never able to make out an airplane. It is hard to see, in any event, what enemy purpose would have been served by an attack in which no bombs were dropped, unless perhaps, as Mr. Stimson suggested, the purpose had been reconnaissance.
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Wake Island was an American outpost in the central Pacific. Wake is a coral atoll, made up of three islands. Wake Island itself is the largest, and forms two sides of a triangle. Peale Island and Wilkes Island extend the two arms of Wake Island. The three islands are tiny – only 2.5 square miles in area, but their location in the central Pacific gave them a strategic significance far beyond their size. The Marshal Islands to the south and most of the Marianas islands to the west had been in Japanese hands since the First World War, when they seized them from the Germans.
It had been annexed by the United States on 17 January 1899, but did not gain its first permanent settlement until 1935, when Pan American Airways built a small village and a hotel to service their flying boats. Wake Island became one link in Pan American’s China Clipper route, between Midway and Guam.
As tension rose in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy decided to construct a base on Wake Island. Work started in January 1941, but was incomplete when the Japanese attacked. Despite this, the first permanent garrison, just under 400 men from the 1st Marine Defense Battalion, arrived on 19 August. The airfield was ready to take aircraft by December, and on 4 December twelve Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats from Marine Fighting Squadron VMF-211 arrived on Wake. The air base was usable but not complete. There were no revetments to protect the aircraft from bombs. The island’s radar was still at Pearl Harbor. Commander W.S. Cunningham had 449 Marines (including pilots) to resist any Japanese attack.
His first problem was that Wake Island was within range of Japanese bombers based in the Marshal Islands. The Japanese plan took advantage of that, using land based bombers to support a small naval force (no battleships or carriers were involved) carrying just under 500 invasion troops. This fleet left Roi, in the Marshal islands, on 9 December, the day after the first bombing raid against the island.
That raid struck on 8 December, the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor (Wake is on the other side of the international date line, so the date is one day ahead of that on Hawaii). The garrison of Wake Island had received a warning from Pearl Harbor at 6.50 am. Lacking radar, it was decided to keep four of the Wildcats in the air. This saved them from destruction. At noon thirty six Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers attacked the airfield. Visibility was poor, and the four Wildcats in the air failed to spot the Japanese aircraft. Seven of the eight Wildcats on the ground were destroyed. VMF-211 lost 23 men dead and 11 wounded. No Japanese aircraft were lost. The next day a second, smaller, bombing raid met with less luck, losing two aircraft in combat with four Wildcats. The island was subjected to almost daily air raids for the rest of the battle.
The Japanese invasion fleet, under Admiral Kajioka, arrived off Wake Island early on 11 December. The attack went disastrously wrong. Despite the air raids, Wake Island still had teeth. A gun battery at Peacock Point on Wake Island scored direct hits on the Yubari, Admiral Kajioka’s flagship, forcing it to withdraw from the bombardment. Another battery on Wilkes Island did even better, destroying a Japanese destroyer, the Hayate, the first Japanese warship to be sunk by the Americans. Admiral Kajioka decided to withdraw. Before his force could escape, the remaining Wildcats launched an attack on his fleet. Two cruisers were destroyed, and a second destroyer, the Kisaragi, destroyed by a direct hit on depth charges stored on her deck. The Japanese had lost around 700 men. The naval bombardment of Wake had only caused four American casualties, none fatal. However, two of the four airworthy Wildcats were forced to crash land. Only two were left.
Wake was not left entirely to its fate. A relief force, led Admiral “Black Jack” Fletcher on the U.S.S. Saratoga, had been dispatched from Hawaii. However, its progress was slow. On 22 December the force was still 515 miles from Wake Island, and then had to spend a day refuelling. The next day the second Japanese invasion fleet reached Wake. The relief force was ordered back to Pearl Harbor.
This was a much more powerful force. Admiral Kajioka had been reinforced with two fleet carriers, the Soryu and the Hiryu. This meant that the attack would have fighter cover. The invasion force was now over 1,500 men strong. Two old destroyers were to be beached on Wake to allow the troops to land.
On 22 December the last two Wildcats were lost in combat with Zeros from the carriers (one in combat, one had to crash land due to damage suffered). During the entire battle, the Wildcats had shot down at least 20 Japanese aircraft, mostly land based bombers, but including at least two Zeros.
Before dawn on 23 December, the second Japanese attack went in. The two destroyers ran aground, and although one was destroyed by gunfire, by dawn 1,000 Japanese soldiers had landed. They quickly occupied the southern wing of the island, capturing the now-useless airfield. The situation was clearly hopeless. The marine commander, Major James Devereux, was now isolated on the northern part of Wake Island, and outnumbered by at least two to one (probably by more). With no hope of victory, Cunningham was forced to surrender.
Wake Island remained in Japanese hands for the rest of the war. The garrison finally surrendered on 4 September 1945. During the war they had been subjected to frequent bombing raids, and had been blockaded since 1944.
The first Japanese attack on Wake Island was the only amphibious attack to be repulsed by shore based guns during the Second World War. Even if the Japanese had landed, they were at best equal to the Marines in numbers and may well have been repulsed. The second invasion was on a much larger scale, and demonstrated how vulnerable the isolated American islands were in the Pacific. However, the Marine garrison had offered the first sustained resistance to the Japanese whirlwind that swept through the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. They offered a rare example of success, which was a great boost to Allied morale in the dark days of early 1942.
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Researchers think they have found the remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that probably fired on U.S. battleships on Dec. 7, 1941.
The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row.
That could settle a long-standing argument among historians.
Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery. But a variety of new evidence suggests that the fifth fired its two 800-pound torpedoes, most likely at the battleships West Virginia and Oklahoma, capsizing the latter. A day later, researchers think, the mini-sub’s crew scuttled it in nearby West Loch.
The loch was also the site of a 1944 disaster in which six tank landing ships preparing for the secret invasion of Saipan were destroyed in an ammunition explosion that killed 200 sailors and wounded hundreds more.
When the Navy scooped up the remains of the so-called LSTs and dumped them outside the harbor to protect the secrecy of the invasion, it apparently also dumped the mini-sub’s remains, which were mingled with the damaged U.S. ships.
“It’s not often that a historian gets a chance to rewrite history,” said marine historian and former Navy submariner Parks Stephenson, who pieced together the evidence for the television program “Nova.” “The capsizing of the Oklahoma is the second most iconic event of the attack. If one submarine could get in in 1941 and hit a battleship, who knows what a midget sub could do today. Iran and North Korea are both building them. It’s very worrying.”
Stephenson and his colleagues have put together a convincing chain of circumstantial evidence, but it is just circumstantial, said Burl Burlingame, a journalist at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and author of “Advance Force: Pearl Harbor.”
“There is a good chance that this is the Pearl Harbor midget, but I don’t think the case is closed on it,” Burlingame said. “At this point, it is not hard evidence.”
The two-man, 80-foot-long sub in question does not have a name of its own. Each of the five subs in the attack was carried by a conventional submarine and took its name from the mother boat. It is thus called the I-16-tou — tou being Japanese for boat. Powered by a 600-horsepower electric motor, the sub could reach underwater speeds of 19 knots, twice as fast as many of the U.S. subs of the day.
The three pieces of the sub were found during routine test dives between 1994 and 2001 by Terry Kerby, chief pilot of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory’s submersibles Pisces IV and Pisces V. But Kerby and others assumed they were a part of a war trophy that had been captured by allied forces at Guadalcanal or elsewhere, towed back to Hawaii and scuttled.
Stephenson got involved in 2007 because he was looking for the fifth Japanese mini-sub.
In 1941, a crewman on the I-16 had received a radio call from the I-16-tou at 10:41 p.m. on Dec. 8 reporting the success of its mission. That indicated to Stephenson that the mini-sub had found a calm place in the harbor and hidden until the next night before surfacing and sending the call.
The crew members would have then scuttled the craft because they could not get it out of the harbor. The West Loch would have been a good location to hide, but researchers could find no trace of the boat there.
A diver who had been looking for the mini-sub suggested that Stephenson talk to Kerby, who sent him pictures of his find.
“As soon as I saw the bow section with the distinctive net cutter, I knew that we had found the fifth midget sub,” Stephenson said. The Japanese navy modified net cutters on the subs for specific missions, and the one on the wreck was identical to those on the other mini-subs.
No torpedoes were found on the wreck, and evidence suggests that they were not present when the boat was sunk. A newly declassified photograph taken by a Japanese plane during the attack appeared to show a mini-sub firing a torpedo into Battleship Row. A report to Congress in 1942 by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz describes an unexploded 800-pound torpedo recovered after the battle. That’s twice the size carried by the torpedo bombers.
That torpedo was apparently a dud that missed the West Virginia.
But an examination of the remains of the Oklahoma shows that it apparently had underwater damage much larger than that associated with aerial torpedoes. An underwater blast would have caused it to capsize, Stephenson said. “Otherwise it would have settled to the bottom upright,” like the other sunken ships.
The 1944 disaster at West Loch occurred on May 21 as the Navy was preparing to invade the Mariana Islands in Operation Forager. The Navy clamped a top-secret classification on the incident to keep it from the Japanese, and few records are now available. What is known is that it was crucial to clear out the debris because the loch was by then the site of an ammunition dump.
Records from the salvage ship Valve showed that it was brought into the loch during the cleanup and its 250-ton crane was used for an undisclosed reason. Stephenson thinks it lifted the I-16-tou, but there are no records to confirm that.
The remains of the mini-sub were then dumped three miles south of Pearl Harbor along with those of the LSTs, to be found by Kerby 50 years later.
Bulkheads on the wreck are sealed, so researchers don’t know whether the mini-sub crew was trapped. But a map taken from one of the other mini-subs showed the location of a safe house in Pearl City, Hawaii, suggesting the crew might have scuttled the boat and escaped.
The “Nova” episode describing the search for the I-16-tou will air Jan. 5.
By Thomas H. Maugh II
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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One of Adolf Hitler’s first major foreign policy initiatives after coming to power was to sign a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934. This move was not popular with many Germans who supported Hitler but resented the fact that Poland had received the former German provinces of West Prussia, Poznan, and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. However, Hitler sought the nonaggression pact in order to neutralize the possibility of a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before Germany had a chance to rearm.
In the mid and late 1930s, France and especially Britain followed a foreign policy of appeasement. The objective of this policy was to maintain peace in Europe by making limited concessions to German demands. In Britain, public opinion tended to favor some revision of the territorial and military provision of the Versailles treaty. Moreover, neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight a war against Nazi Germany.
 German invasion of Poland, September 1939 |
Britain and France essentially acquiesced to Germany’s rearmament (1935-1937), remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936), and annexation of Austria (March 1938). In September 1938, after signing away the Czech border regions, known as the Sudetenland, to Germany at the Munich conference, British and French leaders pressured France’s ally, Czechoslovakia, to yield to Germany’s demand for the incorporation of those regions. Despite Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia, the Germans dismembered the Czechoslovak state in March 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement. Britain and France responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler responded by negotiating a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939. The German-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which stated that Poland was to be partitioned between the two powers, enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939. Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland’s border, had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. The demarcation line for the partition of German- and Soviet-occupied Poland was along the Bug River.
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