Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Unfolding the Map

As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) eats breakfast under a pair of two silent watchtowers from the World War II era, I will devote this post to the rapidly disappearing living history of World War II.  It's a little late for Veterans Day, but I hope it helps honor this important generation who didn't wish for a worldwide conflict to be thrust upon them, but answered the call with humility and courage all the same.  To see where these relics of the war are located, take aim and target the map.  (Note: I guessed at the site based on the fact that LHM wrote that he was "south" of Rehoboth Beach and there are two towers within site.  However, there is another likely site north of Rehoboth Beach where two towers sit in sand near the water and each other.)

Book Quote

"South of Rehoboth Beach, I stopped to eat breakfast on the shore.  Even though the sky was clear, the windy night still showed in the high surf.  At my back rose two silo-like concrete observation towers, relics from the Second World War.  At the top of each were narrow openings like sinister eyes.  A battering of starlings flew in and out of the slits, the shrill bird cries resonating weirdly in the hollow stacks.  The towers were historical curiosities, monuments to man's worst war, one that never reached this beach; yet nothing identified them.  To the young, they could be only mysteries.  Had they come from the more remote and safer history of the Revolutionary or Civil wars, they would have been commemorated.  Just when is history anyway?"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

One of the World War II observation towers in Dewey Beach, Delaware. Photo by "royal19" and housed at Flickr under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to go to host page.Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

We are just a few days past Veterans Day as I write this post, and the quote above is quite timely.  Since my father and uncles served in the military (my father was in the Army and stationed at Saipan), I have always found the World War II era to be one of the most interesting to study.  When I was in grammar school, my friends and I always drew "war pictures" complete with planes screaming down on soldiers and buildings, or fighting each other in the sky, and heroic men charging with guns blazing into battle against the Germans or the Japanese.  Given that we were in school at the tail end and just after the Vietnam War, we hardly ever considered that war as a subject for our artwork.  It was always World War II.  We supplemented our knowledge of World War II from the myriads of movies that were on television on lazy weekend Saturdays.  I think that my preteen years were spent mostly watching World War II movies or football games.

Yet as I think about it, LHM is right.  As a country, we have extensively memorialized other great wars, such as the Revolutionary War which freed the United States from Britain, and the Civil War, which reunited a fractured country (and the wounds of which we are still healing).  But the great wars of the last century - World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - do not get much in the way of physical memorials.  In many towns across America, you might find a pillar memorializing the men from the town or region that fought in World Wars I and II.  Sometimes they have been kept up, and sometimes they are woefully neglected, sitting unobserved in plain sight.  There are monuments to World War II, including an impressive one in Washington DC, and it has been celebrated in cinema and television.  The Vietnam War has a wonderful memorial, but being in Washington DC it is not accessible to most people.  But as we move farther away from World War II, a war which might have saved democracy and civilization itself, and as its veterans pass away into history we are beginning to suffer amnesia.  We forget how a country prone to isolationism shook itself and took up the mantle of defender of democracy and in the process became a superpower.

Why do we forget?  Perhaps it's because the 20th century wars were mostly fought in foreign lands, and therefore the United States does not bear the scars of those wars on its own turf like the great battles of the Civil War and Revolutionary War.  Perhaps it's because we live in our version of a modern world, where history seems to take a back seat to technology and young people are not interested anymore in the exploits of their grandfathers.  Perhaps it's because we've turned Hitler and the Nazi movement into a comic caricature, especially on movies and television, that trivializes the horrific dangers the world faced if he had triumphed.  Perhaps it's because we didn't have any battles on American soil.  Maybe it's because we won the war which ameliorated, somewhat, the pain and anguish faced by those who lost family members and loved ones in the struggle.  And perhaps it's because as a society, we have not done as much as we can to keep this history alive.

Every once in a while, something comes along to jar our collective memories.  Books like Band of Brothers or The Greatest Generation.  Movies like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List.  The death of a Navajo code talker or a Bataan Death March survivor.  The discovery of unexploded ordnance in Europe in a river or at a construction site.  Certainly, not everyone was a hero in World War II.  Most of the soldiers fighting that war just did their jobs.  Many died, many more did not.  We celebrate the extraordinary exploits of a few, and honor the sacrifice and the commitment of the many regardless of whether they singlehandedly took out a platoon of Germans or an entrenched gun emplacement on Iwo Jima, or simply cooked (like my father) in a mess tent on a barren rock in the middle of the Pacific.

I remember thrilling to stories that my father told me about B-29s taking off from Saipan laden with bombs, sinking at the dropoff at the end of the runway toward the ocean.  He described the breathless seconds before the planes climbed back up and lumbered toward Japan, and how occasionally an overloaded one would fail to gain altitude and splash into the bay.  I remember him telling me about a group of Japanese soldiers, after the war ended, getting drunk in a cave where they were holed up. The next day, dirty, hungry and hung over, they marched into the American camp to surrender.  I remember his description of a under a parachute.  My wife's father, who served in the Navy on a minesweeper, has told stories of braving Japanese island guns to clear the waters of mines before invasions, and being in the sites of a Japanese kamikaze.  Both of these men were reluctant to bring up these stories, not wanting to boast and simply, humbly, considering it just something that they had to do.

We hear these stories because we ask about them.  How many stories are still unheard?

Yet a spirit of remembrance is coming alive as that generation dies. In New Orleans, the National World War II Museum was dedicated a few years ago.  It is a magnificent repository of memories and stories and a testament to the history and motivations behind the war.  Compared to that memorial, the unmarked lookout towers along the Delaware shore, an important part of the past effort to hold vigilance against our enemies in World War II, seem unimportant.  Yet they are part of an important collective history.  Thankfully, since LHM ate breakfast in their shadows, a movement has begun to save the Delaware lookout towers.  One of the towers, Tower 3 in Dewey Beach behind the spot where LHM ate his breakfast, is the subject of a campaign for renovation.  The plans call for a visitor center and a museum that will honor veterans of World War II.  As our World War II veterans march off, platoon by platoon, to their rest, perhaps we will realize what we've lost and creatively and respectfully honor them as they deserve.

Musical Interlude

One of the biggest selling songs during World War II, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra jarred me when I first heard it.  It seems uber-patriotic but, when I think about what the troops needed while deployed on ships, in tanks, in planes, and on the ground during World War II, I think that it probably gave them quite a lift to their spirits and helped them believe that even in the darkest days, they would eventually prevail.

If you want to know more about the Delaware shore

Beach-Net.com: Delaware Beaches
Delaware Tourism: Delaware Beaches
Newsday: The Delaware Shore
Wikipedia: Delaware Beaches

Next up:  Ocean City, Maryland

Blue Highways: Fort Stevens, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon mentions Fort Stevens in this chapter even before he gets to Haystack Rock and Seaside, Oregon, but I wanted to put it in correct trip chronological order.  I'm not really sure he visited Fort Stevens rather than just mention it, so I am including it as a blue marker on the map.  It's an interesting story, however, and it shows that the United States wasn't as invulnerable to attack as we may have thought we were.  To see where Fort Stevens lies on the trip, explore the map.

Book Quote

"...Fort Stevens to the north of Tillamook Bay earned the distinction of being the last place in the forty-eight states attacked by a foreign power when the Japanese shelled it in June of 1942."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 5

Fort Stevens, Oregon. Photo by Bob J. Galindo and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Stevens, Oregon

I'm pretty good at World War II history.  I'm not an expert, but I can name several engagements in both theaters of war, and I have a good timeline of events.  I understand what the motivations of each side were, and how they planned to accomplish them.  I knew that the Japanese had made some attacks on a US state.  The most notable that I knew of was the Japanese takeover of the islands of Kiska and Attu in the Aleutian Islands, some say as a feint to draw US forces away from the Battle of Midway while others say it was to protect Japan's northern flank and possibly serve as a staging ground for attacks on the US mainland.  I also knew that there were some sporadic attacks on Oregon, but I didn't know how or where.  LHM's quote gave me the impetus to look up some of this information, which I'll share with you.

In June of 1942, the US was on its heels in the Pacific.  The Japanese seemed to be taking over island after island.  The US fleet had been pounded at Pearl Harbor but luckily, its aircraft carriers had survived.  The Japanese goal, as I understand it, was to create a "Co-Prosperity Sphere" in the western Pacific and, knowing that the US was a rival, Japan's aim was to significantly weaken the US so that it would present little threat to Japanese ambitions.  Japan, having little in the way of natural resources, wanted a way in which they could wield regional power and preserve it.  The Japanese hope was that their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would so weaken the US that it would have little recourse than to watch the Japanese build their empire.  However, the US was not as weakened as Japan hoped after Pearl Harbor, and the onset of war kickedstarted the massive US economy, which fired up to defeat the Japanese menace.

However, none of the outcome of the war was guaranteed in June, 1942.  Everything seemed to be going Japan's way, and the takeover of the two Aleutian Islands continued its string of successes.  Japanese leaders wanted to send a message to the United States that its isolation due to vast oceans could not protect it.  Accordingly, they dispatched two long-range submarines to the West coast of the United States to engage US warships heading for the Aleutians and to engage US forces on land if possible.

One of the subs, the I-25, in order to avoid minefields, shadowed fishing boats heading back into harbor and surfaced near the mouth of the Columbia River opposite Fort Stevens.  The sub fired 17 rounds from it's 5.5 inch deck cannon at the fort, which did not fire back in order to not give away its defenses.  The only real damage was to a set of power poles and the baseball field.  A B-17 was dispatched to look for and bomb the submarine, but the sub avoided the bombs and got away by diving.

The good news was that nobody was killed.  However, it was the first attack on the US mainland by a foreign power since the War of 1812.  In reality, the US had little to fear from a Japanese invasion, because at the time the logistics and costs needed to mount a successful invasion of the US mainland would have been prohibitive.  The only reason the US was invaded during the War of 1812 was due to British troops being stationed in Canada, and therefore Britain had a staging ground from which they could send out ships and troops.  In reality, had we been at war with Spain or France at that time, they might have been able to mount an invasion of the US as well given their territories in the New World.  As US expansionism occurred, however, and Canada became a friendly neighbor, these risks grew more remote.  The US used aggression to remove the threat of Mexican invasion, though Pancho Villa raided across the border in the early 1900s, though not sponsored by the Mexican government, necessitating an unsuccessful return incursion of US troops into Northern Mexico to find and catch him.  However, the fact that it might be prohibitive to launch an invasion against the US did not stop the public from experiencing a West coast invasion scare at the time.

By the 1940s, the US had built itself into a fortress that was, in effect, protected by two large oceans serving as vast moats.  The Japanese hoped to stoke fear and panic by making the US doubt its safety.  Later that year, in August, the I-25, which was one of eleven Japanese subs equipped with a seaplane, sent the plane on a mission over Oregon.  Loaded with incendiary bombs, the mission was to start forest fires in Oregon which would divert US manpower toward fighting them.  The bombs were dropped, the first of only two bombings of mainland America in the war, but factors including weather and two fire lookout personnel kept the fires from doing much damage.  In September, the I-25 launched the seaplane again which unloaded some incendiary bombs on another part of Oregon, but it seems as if the bombs either never exploded or the intended fires never caught.

Later, as the US military muscle exert itself and the Japanese gains were halted and then slowly reversed, Japanese leaders embarked on another program to strike terror into the US.  A Japanese scientist some years before had, through observations of balloons launched near Mount Fuji, discovered the existence of the jet stream.  With this knowledge, throughout 1944 and 1945 Japan launched over 9000 balloons into the jet stream carrying bombs that they hoped would hit forests and cities in the US.  Each carried either incendiary or antipersonnel bombs, and the Japanese hoped that 10 percent of the bombs would reach American targets.  In reality, about 300 of these balloon bombs were observed in North America, but they caused a few deaths.  One tragic set of deaths occurred in Oregon, when a minister and his family were on a forest outing.  One of the children found a bomb lodged in a tree and not knowing what it was, tried to get it down.  The resulting explosion killed the minister's wife and all of his children.

The facts of the attacks on the United States by the Japanese were kept from the American public until after the war was over, which is partly why even today so few people know that the Japanese carried out such attacks.  In reality, the best the Japanese could have hoped for was to be able to shell some American cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles...the West coast, however, was highly patrolled by the Coast Guard and the Japanese called off such a planned exercise.  But, it is an interesting facet of the Pacific War that the mainland US came under attack from Japanese forces, and escaped with very little damage.

Musical Interlude

I'm sure that that all the men at Fort Stevens were singing this song as they cheerfully went to their stations under the shelling of Japanese sub I-25 in the middle of the night.  Okay, probably not, because the song didn't come out until 1943.  But I'm sure that they were thinking in this vein.  Okay, they probably weren't thinking anything like this, either.  But we'd like to think they did.  Enjoy Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra!

If you want to know more about Fort Stevens

ColumbiaRiverImages.com: Fort Stevens
Fort Stevens State Park
Visit Fort Stevens
Wikipedia: Fort Stevens

Next up:  Fort Clatsop, Oregon