Kit: Lest We Forget by ScrapsNPieces Font: Minion 3 Medium Mask: April23 by Papier Studio (modified)
Until the Japanese attacked in the Pacific, the United States had counted on its Hawaiian bastion and on the Pacific fleet to provide a secure barrier against any serious attack on the continental west coast. After Pearl Harbor it seemed, at the outset, that this barrier had been broken and that the 1,300-mile length of the west coast could be attacked by the Japanese in strength and almost at will. The most vital installations along this coast were military aircraft factories that had sprung up during the prewar years at Los Angeles and San Diego in the south and at Seattle in the north. In December 1941 nearly half of the American military aircraft production (and almost all of the heavy bomber output) was coming from eight plants in the Los Angeles area. The naval yards and ship terminals in the Puget Sound, Portland, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego areas, and the California oil industry were of only slightly less importance to the future conduct of the war. In the first two weeks of war it seemed more than conceivable that the Japanese could invade the coast in strength, and until June 1942 there appeared to be a really serious threat of attack by a Japanese carrier striking force. These calculated prehensions were fanned in the first few days of war by a series of false reports of Japanese ships and planes on the very doorsteps of the Pacific states. This was the outlook that persuaded the War Department to establish the Defense Command as a theater of operations on 11 December and that led it to concentrate its first attention after Pearl Harbor on the rapid reinforcement of the Army's ground and air garrisons along the west coast. The Army moved two additional divisions and many lesser types of ground combat and service units to the west coast before the end of December and made the 3d Division, already there, available for defense use. As a result of these moves the Western theater's major Army combat units in January and February 1942 included six infantry divisions, a brigade of cavalry, about fourteen antiaircraft regiments, and the equivalent of three pursuit and three bombardment groups. The troop strength of the Western Defense Command numbered about 250,000 at the beginning of February, and of these nine-tenths were ground troops. Approximately 100,000 of the ground forces were actively engaged in manning harbor antiaircraft defense equipment, in maintaining a beach and forward patrol along the coast line, in patrolling the Southern Land Frontier, and in performing antisabotage duties at vital installations. Many of these troops, like Dad, had been meant to go to the Philippines.
