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The Attack that Never Came

The second Sino-Japanese War had been raging in China since 1937 and then in 1939 war had broken out in Europe as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. America remained staunchly isolationist as these conflicts grew, and life continued here in the San Francisco Bay Area relatively unaffected. Despite the Isolationist sentiments, war production was stepping up due the threat of the growing conflict. That increased production was taking the edge off a decade long depression that had ravaged the country. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was completed in 1936, then in 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge was finished. Treasure Island had been constructed on land that was filled in on the bay north of Yerba Buena Island for the 1939 to 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. Despite the depression, that event would draw visitors from around the world. Then the relative peace was shattered on December 7, 1941 as word reached the mainland of a mass armada of Japanese warplanes appearing from nowhere to devastate the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Word of the Japanese attack had a similar electric effect as the news coverage of the second airliner slamming into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In a single instant an entire nation knew that everything had changed and there was no escaping the insanity raging overseas. Those advocating isolation and appeasement were instantly silent. The following morning the country was glued to their radio sets as President Franklin Roosevelt declared War on Japan. In his speech they would learn that Japan had successfully launched attacks throughout the Pacific. Ships were reported torpedoed between San Francisco and Honolulu, Japanese forces had attacked Malaya, Honk Kong, Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island and Midway Island. The question in everyone’s mind was: When would the Japanese appear off of our coast? In fact, nine Japanese submarines were already lurking at strategic points along the Pacific Coast attacking shipping.

Meanwhile around the San Francisco Bay Area the threat of attack on the mainland was taken very seriously and false alarms were occurring constantly in those opening hours of the war. The Army's Western Defense Command received a report of a Japanese fleet 30 miles off the Golden Gate. All radio stations were ordered to stop broadcasting so attacking aircraft couldn’t home in on their signals. The first night saw four air raid alerts in San Francisco and the next day Japanese aircraft carriers and submarines were reported off the city as more air raid alarms were sounded. Off-duty personnel were recalled to their units and the army harbor defenses were put on full alert as National Guard Regiments were brought in from as far away as Minnesota and Texas to man antiaircraft and fixed batteries around the harbor. Soldiers could be seen filling sandbags, digging trenches and stringing barbed wire to construct beach defenses everywhere. The Army began positioning mobile antiaircraft guns, searchlights and radars on nearly every hill overlooking the harbor entrance. A nearly four-mile-long antisubmarine net was strung all the way from Sausalito in Marin County to Fort Mason in San Francisco and a huge minefield consisting of over 600 mines was placed outside of the Golden Gate.

At Mare Island Naval Shipyard in the North Bay the threat of air attack was taken so seriously that within days the 1,800 man 211th Coast Artillery, First Corps of Cadets, arrived by rail to guard against a feared aerial attack. Anti-aircraft guns were set up throughout the city of Vallejo along with the spotlights, and acoustic sound detectors. All lights were required to be extinguished and blackout curtains installed so that no light could be seen outside homes and buildings. Wardens were assigned to patrol neighborhoods to find and correct any infractions and night-time blackout drills began immediately to ensure citizens knew how to interpret emergency alarm systems.

Within six months, an Army 1,300 man 309th Coast Artillery Barrage Balloon Battalion arrived from Tennessee to protect Mare Island Naval Shipyard with a network of anti-aircraft barrage balloons. Concrete bomb shelters were hastily constructed throughout the shipyard in anticipation of an enemy air attack. That air attack would never come to the San Francisco Bay Area. During the war a couple of submarines surfaced to shell the mainland but did little damage. In another effort a Japanese submarine carrying a float plane surfaced off the coast of Oregon and made a couple bombing runs over forested areas of the mainland with firebombs in hopes of starting massive forest fires. The bombs were dropped successfully, but no forest fires resulted. Here in the Bay Area the anti-aircraft defenses did more damage than the enemy when one of the hydrogen-filled balloons exploded in the early morning hours severely damaging a housing complex in Vallejo.

Dennis Kelly