Invasion Jitters

Military History Quarterly. Spring, 1992. Volume 4 #4.

Article title: Invasion Jitters, 1942.

The article is about how vulnerable the United States West Coast was to a Japanese attack near the start of World War II. On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine, the I-17, surfaced and fired a few shots at an oil refinery, doing no real damage.

A couple of days later came the Battle of Los Angeles. I have a fair bit of material on that here. It wasn't actually a Japanese attack, but many at the time were scared that it was.

A German torpedo had been found on March 2, 1942 on the Aruba beach. The torpedo had not gone off, but four bomb-disposal men were killed as they tried to neutralize the torpedo.

The article goes on to note that there were only 100,000 very poorly equipped American soldiers on the West Coast, and that, if Japan had invaded Alaska, they could have moved down and swept the length of the West Coast with relative ease. (They did take a few Aleutian Islands, but it wasn't a serious invasion - it was something to draw U.S. forces away from Midway. The weather up on the islands was terrible and any actual invasion would have had a lot of difficulty.

By summer of 1942, though, the threat of invasion was reduced due to the severe shellacking that the Japanese Navy took at Midway.

What is interesting is that the article makes no mention at all of the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry. Around 110,000 or more such persons were removed from the West Coast and relocated to various 'internment camps.' One of the reasons given for their removal was supposedly fear of a Japanese invasion and how the people would react; whether they would support the American forces or help the Japanese forces. ( Around 70% of these people were actually already American citizens and at most had visited Japan.)

It's a really good article.

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