First Jitters

The scare started at dusk on Monday evening, a few hours after the U.S. declared war. It started in San Francisco.

A Japanese pilot, coasting down out of the sky, would have seen the billboards shining brightly on the roads leading into San Francisco. He would have seen the lights of Alcatraz, gleaming like an ocean liner on the black waters of the Bay. Over the downtown streets he would have seen the soft, red glow of neon signs.

For five days the Pacific Coast had its jitters. In Seattle, during the first blackout on Monday night, a mob of about 3,000 excited citizens gathered on a downtown corner, milled along the street, smashing 26 lighted shop fronts.

> A shipyard worker, driving with shrouded headlights through the fog in Portland's blackout, ran down a pedestrian and killed him. A fisherman, serving as a defense guard in the town of Depoe Bay, stepped out to flag a car, was killed. Portland's City Council passed an ordinance providing fines up to $500, jail terms up to six months for blackout violations.

> Patrolmen stamped out brush fires on the Olympic Peninsula, said they were set in the shape of arrows pointing toward Seattle and the Bremerton Navy Yard.

> Soldiers at Santa Cruz, Monterey and Carmel evacuated 1,000 householders along a 40-mile stretch of coast, sent them inland for safety.

> In San Francisco Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. sandbagged the front of its building (see cut).

> Radio stations were off the air as long as 23 hours at a time. One man was killed, more than 100 injured in blackouts around Los Angeles.

> By Army suggestion, the New Year's Day Rose Bowl game (Oregon State v. Duke) was moved from Pasadena, Calif., will be played instead at the Duke Stadium at Durham, N.C. Also canceled in California was the big winter racing season at Santa Anita.

Early Tuesday afternoon the Atlantic Seaboard had its own air-raid scare. Planes from Mitchel Field, L.I. took the air (see p. 61). Improvised sirens sounded in the streets of Manhattan. Civilian planes were grounded. Schoolchildren were sent home.

New Yorkers mostly took the alarm with skepticism or indifference although there was enough tension in the air so that a few grew hysterical. Yet office workers craned out of windows for a glimpse of enemy bombers. Shopping crowds on Fifth Avenue ignored the sirens. In Times Square spectators reading the news bulletins paid no attention when police ordered them off the street. On a street corner a couple of volunteer wardens got into an argument over whose corner it was. An angry passerby said to a policeman: "What the hell's the reason for scaring people to death?"

> A woman in Pelham, on her way to the beauty parlor, heard the Boston plane roar overhead as the sirens shrilled. She jammed on her brakes, was rammed by a truck, staggered into the beauty parlor, shrieked: "Hitler's coming!" and fainted.

> In East Providence, R.I., frightened children ran through the streets, crying.

> A Manhattan firm (Defense Blackout & Camouflage Co., Inc.) rushed into print, advertising a "blackout consultant service." > In Scarsdale, N.Y. mothers took up their vigil in parked cars outside the Scarsdale High School, to carry their children home if bombers appeared.

> Some misguided Washington patriot, unable to get at the Japs, emulated the Father of his Country and chopped down four of the lovely Japanese cherry trees along Washington's Tidal Basin.

English eyebrows were raised at the reports of these U.S. jitters. They knew that nuisance raids by German planes across the Atlantic are possible but improbable. Even when Britain, in her darkest hour, was evacuating her shattered troops from Dunkirk, there was no great hysteria in London. But a large part of the U.S., including even some of its interventionists, had convinced itself that the U.S. was immune to direct attack, a handicap from which Britain did not suffer.

Actually U.S. behavior did not compare unfavorably with Britain's behavior at war's outset (London and Berlin both had false air-raid alarms in September 1939).

By week's end, the first alarm was over. The jitters had subsided on the East Coast. The West Coast, which in World War I had had between it and war the vast bulwarks of the continent and the Atlantic, now found itself facing war on the frontier--war in the Pacific, war with the Japs, the war that Western boys had heard of all their lives. In more senses than one, it was the Far West's first war.

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