The Battle of Los Angeles: The History of the Notorious False Alarm that Caused an Artillery Barrage over California during World War II review

Charles River Editors.

The book opens up talking about collective delusions and then goes into the Fatima situation where three girls claimed they say Mary, the mother of Jesus, and talked to her. Then later only one of the girls was able to communicate with her. The crowd that formed saw different things rather than everyone seeing the same object or objects.

An example of mass hysteria, like collective delusions, is when there was a radio broadcast in 1938 about the book The War of the Worlds done in a newscast form. Some people started to panic and claimed they saw things that weren't there.

So the question becomes did the Battle of Los Angeles revolve around something physical flying overhead, like a UFO, or was it also a situation of mass hysteria. The people were already terrified about the Japanese possibly attacking the coast, there was a lot of hatred or Japanese Americans and to some this might have seemed like an attack by Japanese planes or balloon bombs.

The book goes into how something (real or imagined) caused the anti-aircraft batteries to open fire with spotlights convering on what they were shooting at. Over 1400 rounds were fired with shrapnel falling to the ground and causing damage here and there.

The book notes that radio stations were shut down which, at least in my mind, wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do as it left people with no source of information (remember, no televisions, no cell phones, no Internet, etc.) which left things open to pure speculation.

The book does say something that I have not seen in other books, though, and which is important. Some people claimed to have seen shells bounce off an object, doing no damage to it. This part is incredibly important. The government later tried to claim it was a weather balloon but, at least as far as I know, if a shell hits a weather balloon, it's game over for the balloon.

The book notes five people did die, four from heart attacks and one in a car crash.

Now here's something I think the book should have brought up. If the whole thing was nothing but a weather balloon, then why did it happen only this one time? Surely weather balloons were used more than once to check the weather during over the Los Angeles area more than one single time during the entire war.

The book also includes online resources and a bibliography. I think the book did a pretty good job on this situation.

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