I want to make sure that this day, Dec. 7, does not pass unremarked.
A lot of good men and women died so that we could enjoy the freedoms this country has to offer. Including the brother of my next door neighbor.
And since so much fault is found with our military and our leaders today, I thought I'd post the following, since
the enemy we face today is even less merciful, and has more potent weapons..
Japan in 1941
Japan scuttled '41 raid on S.D. Bay
Submarines were in place to deliver 'unhappy Christmas' message to U.S.
By Roger M. Showley
STAFF WRITER
December 7, 2004
Soldiers guarded a San Diego power facility after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Years later it was learned that the Japanese planned a Christmas Eve raid on West Coast ports.
The date was Dec. 7, 1941.
Bart Roggensack was aboard the Medusa, a Navy repair ship, in Pearl Harbor and his wife Elna was living with her parents and infant son in East San Diego.
As Bart witnessed the surprise Japanese attack that early Sunday morning, Elna heard the news on the radio.
Little did they or the rest of America know, then or now, that the Japanese intended to strike a blow close to home two weeks later, in a Christmas raid that targeted San Diego and other West Coast ports.
It was an attack that came within hours of happening, and one which could have set back the U.S. response beyond the havoc caused at Pearl Harbor.
According to accounts published after the war, the Japanese submarine command was planning a Christmas Eve raid on San Diego and other significant ports. Eight subs were under orders to continue east from Pearl Harbor. They halted at locations 20 miles or so off the West Coast.
The assignment to shell San Diego on Dec. 24 was given to the Japanese Imperial Navy's submarine I-10.
Sub fleet Adm. Mitsumi Shimizu, whose flagship was the I-10, wanted to accompany the shelling with a radio greeting in English to wish President Franklin D. Roosevelt an "unhappy Christmas" but no one was available onboard to make a proper translation. Shimizu requested help for the message from Tokyo.
When admirals in Tokyo got wind of the plan, they spiked it and the subs headed for home waters.
There have been two explanations as to why the attack was called off.
First, after weeks at sea the subs were running low on fuel and facing increasing anti-submarine activity. Second, some officials thought it would be inappropriate to "mock" the Christian holy day."
Still, war planners in Japan before the outbreak of hostilities against the United States had developed various scenarios for raids, if not an invasion, targeting the West Coast.
A 1940 book, "How Japan Plans to Win," translated into English and published in the United States in 1942, did not receive much attention at the time.
But its author, Kinoaki Matsuo, spoke of a strategy that would include uprisings against the United States in Mexico, Japanese seizure or destruction of the Panama Canal, the defeat of the U.S. fleet and occupation of the Hawaiian Islands.
"If, in the meantime, the Japanese fleet haunts the Pacific Coast and bombards or threatens the United States merchant marine, the United States will be dealt a heavy blow," Matsuo wrote.
In his book, Matsuo also provided a geography lesson on the West Coast, including this passage about San Diego: "There is also the famous city of San Diego, the southernmost naval harbor of California, 126 miles from Los Angeles; this harbor as a naval base has excellent accommodations."
Although the Japanese navy received a blow in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 from which it never recovered, plans continued throughout the war to harass the U.S. mainland.
Late in 1944, the Japanese launched about 9,000 balloon bombs. Some of the weapons floated across the Pacific and landed in the Northwest, setting off a few minor forest fires. On May 5, 1945, six picnickers were killed in Oregon when a balloon bomb they dragged from the woods exploded.
In the summer of 1945, a more bizarre plot was developed by the Japanese navy.
Called "Cherry Blossoms at Night," the plan was for kamikaze planes to drop plague-infected fleas on San Diego on Sept. 22.
This operation only came to light in a 1995 newspaper article based on interviews with those familiar with Japan's germ warfare effort.
The end of the war in August 1945, after two atomic bombs had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, put an end to the plan.
The story of the aborted West Coast raid, and other attempts to bring the Pacific war to the U.S. mainland, provide the fodder for countless what-if debates among military strategists and history buffs.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Bart Roggensack was stationed at Pearl Harbor. His wife, Elna, was home in East San Diego and heard of the Japanese attack while listening to the radio.
Unable to reach her husband, she took her mind off the news by accompanying her brother and his wife on a short drive to the then-barren flats of Kearny Mesa.
"We just walked around out there and talked and prayed," she said. "Then we went back home and all we could do was just wait."
Three days later, a three-word, censored Western Union cablegram arrived from Bart. It said, "I am safe."
He didn't see his wife and son for 22 months.
Bart , now 89, recalled the Pearl Harbor attack, which began minutes before 8 a.m. Hawaii time.
"I heard gunfire when I was down on the second deck," he recalled. "I saw the planes and was looking right at two torpedo planes with a big red ball on the fuselage and knew we were in trouble."
He escaped injury but he saw the destruction all around and learned later that some of his best friends had been killed.
Word of the attack flashed from Hawaii to the Navy's radio towers at Chollas Heights in San Diego and then to the nation's capital. Within three hours, the news had become public.
Soldiers and sailors returned to their bases. Blackouts began the next night.
As the outgoing president of the 155-member Pearl Harbor Survivors Association local chapter, the largest in the United States, Bart Roggensack will lead a service at the Veterans Memorial Center in Balboa Park at 9 a.m. today and relinquish his post tomorrow.
Since he'll turn 90 in March, he said it's time to slow down.
But he'll continue one ritual.
On the third Sunday every month, he joins other Pearl Harbor survivors to read the names of service personnel who have died in Iraq.
"When you hear those names, 18, 19 years old, it really gets to you," he said. "You just shed a tear, a tear rolls down your cheek. You think of those kids."
Just as he thinks of the kids he knew whose lives were cut short 63 years ago in a war that touched everyone.
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