Tora! Tora! Tora! over SF: When Imperial Japan 'attacked' the city 75 years ago, air raid hysteria gripped the Bay Area

On Dec. 9, 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japanese forces launched their second surprise air attack — this time on the U.S. mainland at San Francisco.

Or at least that's what the Chronicle reported at the top of the front page: "JAPANESE PLANES NEAR S.F. - 4 RAID ALARMS" screamed the bold banner headline.

The paper quoted Brigadier Gen. William Ord Ryan of the Fourth Interceptor Command:

"There was an actual attack. A strong squadron was detected approaching the Golden Gate. It was not an air raid test. It was the real thing."

Only it wasn't. Tojo had not unleashed his Mitsubishi Zeros and "Val" dive bombers over the Bay Area. Rather, the U.S. Army had came down with bad case of the jitters in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.

The Dec. 9 Chronicle reported that enemy planes had approached San Francisco in what an army general called "an actual attack." The Dec. 9 Chronicle reported that enemy planes had approached San Francisco in what an army general called "an actual attack." Photo: Getty Images Photo: Getty Images Image 1 of / 103 Caption Close Tora! Tora! Tora! over SF: When Imperial Japan 'attacked' the city 1 / 103 Back to Gallery

The alarm sounded in the early hours of Dec. 9.

"The planes are heading toward shore and so far as we know, they are still coming." the Chronicle quoted an Army spokesman as saying. The report of Japanese planes had been authenticated, according to army officials.

The report triggered blackout sirens and a general panic across San Francisco and the East Bay.

Nineteen minutes after the first blackout order was given at 2:31 a.m., a "blue" standby signal was issued indicating that enemy planes were approaching. "Almost immediately the roar of planes were heard — particularly in Marin County, in Berkeley and in San Francisco," the Chronicle reported.

Radio stations were ordered off the air. All lights on the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge were flipped off, and traffic halted. Oakland Port pier lights couldn't be turned off, so they were shot out by a rifleman.

Eyewitness reports of dogfights proved to be unfounded.

A number of neon lights remained on during the blackout, so later in the day Mayor Angelo Rossi banned neon signage after dusk.

Seven people used the Twin Peaks tunnel as a bomb shelter, sleeping in it overnight.

But no bombs fell, no streets were strafed and not a single ship was found burning off the Embarcadero in the morning. As sneak air raids go, this was a major dud.

With Fisherman's Wharf not reduced to smoldering ruins, the Fourth Army Command needed to explain itself. But instead of admitting the false alarms, it doubled down.

In a press conference at City Hall that was more of a temper tantrum than an information briefing, Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, commander of the Fourth Army and Western Defense Command, lambasted the city's response to the "attack."

"You people do not seem to realize we are at war," DeWitt told the Chronicle and other reporters. "So get this: Last night there were planes over this community! They were enemy planes! I mean Japanese planes" And they were tracked out to sea.

"You think it was a hoax? It is damned nonsense for sensible people to assume that the Army and Navy would practice such a hoax on San Francisco."

When asked why the alleged Japanese planes would come so far without dropping a single bomb, he suggested that the incursion was a reconnaissance mission.

He insisted that enemy units were detected both north and south of the Bay Area.

"I don't think there's any doubt they came from a carrier," he said. But he said Interceptor Command was unable to follow them back to the carrier. (Because the rendezvous spot would have moved, he said.)

Although there had a been a near full moon the previous night, which would have easily revealed possible targets to Japanese fliers, DeWitt faulted the city's first blackout, calling it a "flop."

"We will never darken this community nor sound an alert unless enemy planes are threatening," he said. "When your hear that signal TURN OUT YOUR LIGHTS!"

The next day, Dec. 10, the army again sent out alerts for air raids and again the Japanese planes failed to materialize. The Chronicle reported that the city "was plunged into almost total darkness by an almost 100 per cent effective blackout."

In his book "Panic on the Pacific," about the West Coast's response to the Pearl Harbor attack, Bill Yenne notes that San Francisco Police Chief Charles Dullea "had gone so far as to caution drivers not to touch their brakes while stopped to prevent brake lights from coming on, and to keep their doors closed because of interior lights."

Meanwhile, reports came in that a half-dozen flares had been dropped over the city and one in Marin County, presumably by enemy planes. One of the "flares" turned out to be blue flames shooting from trolley wires when the blackout cut power.

That night, Los Angeles was subjected to its own fake air raid, with an ensuing blackout. Several pedestrians were run over by blacked-out vehicles and killed.

Yenne writes that as the phony air raids piled up, Gen. Ryan tried to backpedal, suggesting that San Francisco had overreacted to the Aircraft Warning Service bulletin. The about-face came only days after DeWitt's tirade excoriating the city for underreacting to the alert.

DeWitt, however, refused to admit any mistakes. "Every blackout in San Francisco has been genuine, based on official military information," he told the Los Angeles Times.

Through a subordinate, he informed Major Gen. Joe Stilwell, commander of Army ground forces in California, in no uncertain terms that the main Japanese battle fleet was 164 miles off San Francisco, with 34 warships including several aircraft carriers.

Yenne tells of Stilwell's reaction in his book:

"'I believed it, like a damn fool,' Stilwell wrote in his diary. '..The first reaction to that news was like a kick in the stomach — the unthinkable realization that our defenses were down, the enemy at hand, and that we not only had nothing to defend ourselves with, but that time was against us. We could not ship the ammunition in time, nor could we evacuate the three million people in this area.'"

Although he technically did not have the power to do so, DeWitt ordered the Rose Bowl and Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena canceled. Also nixed was the annual East-West game in San Francisco and all horse racing from Bay Meadows in San Mateo to Santa Anita in Southern California.

Private boats were banned from sailing on the bay.

New sirens were installed at the Ferry Building, which Chronicle columnist Herb Caen described as making the "goldardest noise you ever heard; each one can be heard for six miles."

In his Dec. 18 column, Caen wrote:

"Who'd have thought, that the friendly town crier that marked the hour of our day — the Ferry Building siren — would become the grim announcer of possible disaster....That we who see would stumble and grope blindly along paths that we thought we knew so well — while the blind move about in confidence on our traffic-free streets... That this or any generation to come would see the Bay Region as dark as the first night a Spanish explorer looked upon this same mountain-ringed spot. That the beam of a tiny flashlight could carry so far or that a shooting star could so easily be interpreted as a flare dropping from an enemy plane ... That the sight of street lights coming on could make a San Franciscan feel that here was a good and precious friend he'd taken for granted too long. ... Who ever would have thought it? Well, not me."

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI began "alien enemy drives" rounding up Japanese, Germans and Italians who weren't American citizens.

The G-men were assisted by local police and in some cases, by neighborhood informants.

On Dec. 11, the Chronicle reported, "A Jap, carrying a large camera, with which he was taking photographs of San Francisco, was arrested on Twin Peaks yesterday and held incommunicado at Park Police Station."

After Pearl Harbor and throughout World War II, the ethnic slur "Jap" was regularly used in Chronicle headlines and articles.

Twin Peaks residents called police to have the the "well-dressed" man picked up.

The Chronicle also noted that Nathaniel J.L. Pieper , FBI agent in charge, "reported that the alien enemy drive has placed a total of 92 Japs, 59 Germans and 18 Italians in custody in San Francisco."

A week after Pieper's report , on Dec. 18, Gen. DeWitt recommended to the War Dept. to round up "all alien subjects 14 years of age or over, of enemy nations and remove them to the Zone of the Interior," because the West Coast had become a wartime Theater of Operations. He wrote "that there are approximately 40-thousand of such enemy aliens and it is believed that they constitute an immediate and potential menace to vital measures of defense."

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