Francisco, and that Californian Japanese were thereafter moved back from the coast.
If so, they were extremely lucky, for that spared them the blood bath that took
place in time line two, where more than 6o.ooo Japanese-Americans were lynched or
shot or (in some cases) burned alive between Sunday and Tuesday, 7-9 December 1941.
Did this affect what we did to Tokyo and Kobe later? I wonder.
Wars that start with sneak attacks are certain to be merciless; all the histories
prove it.
As one result of those lynch mobs, President Barkley placed California under martial
law. In April 1942 this was eased off and only the twenty-mile strip inland from the
mean hightide line was militarised, but the zone was extended up the coast to
Canada. In San Francisco this caused no special inconvenience – it was much like
living on a military reservation and a marked improvement over San Francisco’s usual
civic corruption… but after dark on the coast itself there was always a danger
that some sixteen-year-old boy in a National Guard uniform, armed with a World War
One Springfield, might get nervous and trigger happy.
Or so I heard; I never risked it. The beach from Canada to Mexico was a combat zone;
anyone on it after dark was risking sudden death and many found it.
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I had my youngest with me, Donald, four, and Priscilla, two. My school-age children
– Alice, Doris, Patrick, and Susan – were in Kansas City with Betty Lou. I had
thought of Arthur Roy as being school age (born 1924), but his cousin Nelson swore
him into the Marine Corps the day after the bombing of San Francisco, along with his
elder brother Richard (born 1914); they went to Pendleton together. Nelson was on
limited duty, having left a foot in Belleau Wood in 1918. Justin was on the War
Production Board, based in Washington but travelling rather steadily; he stayed with
us on Nob Hill several times.
Woodrow I did not see even once until the war was over. I received a Christmas card
from him in December 1941, postmarked Pensacola, Florida: ‘Dear Mom and Pop, I’m
hiding out from the Nips and teaching Boy Scouts how to fly upside down. Heather and
the kids are stashed for the duration at Avalon Beach, PO Box 6320, so I sleep home
most nights. Merry Christmas and have a nice war. Woodrow.’
The next we heard from Woodrow was a card from the Royal Hawaiian at Waikiki: ‘The
service here is not quite up to peacetime standards but it is better than that at
Lahaina. Despite any rumours to the contrary the sharks in Lahaina Roads are not
vegetarian. Hoping you are the same. W.W.’
That was our first intimation that Woodrow had been in the Battle of Lahaina Roads.
Whether he was in the Saratoga when she was sunk, or whether he ditched from the
air, I do not know. But his card implies that he was in the water at some point. I
asked him about this after the War. He looked puzzled and said, `Mom, where did you
get that notion? I spent the war in Washington, DC, drinking Scotch with my opposite
number in the British Aircraft Commission. His Scotch, it was – he had worked out a
scam to fly it in from Bermuda.’
Woodrow was not always strictly truthful.
Let me see… Theodore Ira, my World War One baby, went to active duty with Kansas
City’s 110th Combat Engineers and spent most of the war in Noumea, building
airstrips and docks and such. Nancy’s husband and Eleanor’s son, Jonathan, had
stayed in the Reserve but not in the Guard; he was a column commander in Patton’s
Panzers when they drove the Russians out of Czechoslovakia. Nancy helped organise
the WAAC and finished the war senior to her husband, to the vast amusement of all of
us – even Jonathan. George started out in the 35th Division HQ but wound up in the
OSS, so I don’t know what he did. In March 1944 Brian Junior made the landing at
Marseilles, caught a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh, and wound up back in