"Eyewitness to History: The Battle of Los Angeles"
Eyewitness to History: The Battle of Los Angeles
C. Scott Littleton
SOTT
Thu, 24 May 2007 08:19 EDT
Los Angeles Times Feb. 25, 1942I'm Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. I joined the Oxy Faculty in 1962 and retired at the end of the spring semester, 2002, after forty years of teaching anthropology classes, as well as a variety of Cultural Studies courses and seminars in Oxy's Core Program in the Liberal Arts.
My professional specialties range across a wide spectrum and include comparative Indo-European mythology and folklore, cognitive and symbolic anthropology, urban anthropology, the origin and distribution of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends, and Japanese culture, both ancient and contemporary, with an emphasis on Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion. Indeed, I've spent close to three years in Tokyo studying a neighborhood Shinto shrine and its annual matsuri, or festival. I've also had a long-standing interest in the UFO phenomenon and its possible implications for mythology and folklore.
In terms of the current spectrum of anthropological theory and method, I would define myself as a "postmodern materialist," which is a fancy way of saying that I'm extremely eclectic in my approach to the discipline. Indeed, in my humble opinion, one of the most important problems facing contemporary anthropology is an unwillingness on the part of all too many of its practitioners to take seriously theories and methods that lie outside their own narrow specialties.
I'm a native Californian. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Hermosa Beach, and it was an incident during my growing up years that I want to talk about here: the "Battle of Los Angeles," the night that a UFO was fired upon by the U.S. repeatedly, with no apparent effect. I was an eye witness. What follows is adapted from a chapter in my as yet unpublished memoir entitled "2500 Strand: Growing up in Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II."
"Air-Raid Drills. As 1942 dawned, the war news continued to be bad. We were retreating in the Philippines; the British were retreating in North Africa; and although the Russians had held before Moscow and Leningrad, their chances looked slim.
In Southern California, and particularly in the beach communities, the threat of invasion was still palpable, if not imminent, and a great many folks - including the military - still expected us to be bombed in the near future. For that reason, the whole of Santa Monica Bay, from Malibu to Palos Verdes, was soon ringed with anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight brigades. The guns banged away almost every night, shooting at targets that were towed across the sky over the ocean by specially designed planes. The targets would be pinpointed by the searchlight beams, which also illuminated the exploding shells. It was a grand show that usually lasted about half an hour and rarely continued after 10:00 p.m., out of respect for the local populace.
At first, we'd watch the action with great fascination, but after a few nights in early January the noise of the guns and the exploding shells soon became routine, as predictable as the sound of the waves in the winter. Most people learned to sleep through the cacophony with few problems. It gave us a sense of security; our brave anti-aircraft gunners would quickly save us from any hostile attempt to penetrate our airspace, let alone bomb us. Meanwhile, the government had also organized the Civil Defense Program, the core of which was a cadre of dedicated air raid wardens. My father joined up shortly before the end of the year, and was soon assigned to monitor the Strand between 27th Street and 22nd Street in case of an air attack. However, he was also expected to enforce the blackout during air raid drills, which we soon began to have regularly, as well the so-called "dim-out," which required those who of us who lived in houses facing the water (both on the Strand and on the hill that rose behind Hermosa Avenue) to keep their front blinds drawn from dusk to dawn. The idea was to reduce the glare against which a tanker or merchant ship would be silhouetted and thus become an easy target for a Japanese submarine. This meant that he went out on "patrol" almost every evening shortly after sundown.
Shortly after Cov joined the program, there were some training sessions in the auditorium at Pier Avenue School, the local junior high school, which I would attend in a couple of years. As you might expect, the new wardens wanted practical instruction in first-aid, fire suppression, and all the other things their London counterparts had had to learn the hard way during the Blitz. They did eventually learn something about these things, but my father always laughed at the fact that the first two sessions were devoted to a learned discourse on the history of the Common Law! It seems that air raid wardens had a limited power of arrest; that is, they could detain persons who refused to pull their drapes or who had no business being on the street during a blackout and refused to go home - Hermosa had its share of the latter, especially in the vicinity of the downtown bars - and the guy who made this presentation was a USC law professor and former Superior Court judge. As my father liked to say, the whole business could have been boiled down to a ten-minute talk, simply laying out the circumstances under which an arrest could be made, and the extent to which force could be used in the processes. They didn't need to know the history of the laws of arrest from the time of Alfred the Great to 1942!
It was precisely this kind of mentality that that caused the system to break down totally in the early morning hours of February 25. Blackout drills, which were always announced well in advance (at least to the wardens), usually went pretty well. My father would get the word, and then an hour later the siren would sound. He'd put on his helmet, grab his flashlight, and start patrolling the Strand. But when the "real thing" came along, the system totally collapsed.
* * *
The Thing in the Sky. The early evening of February 24, 1942, was unremarkable. The guns fired a few practice rounds and then fell silent well before 10:00 p.m. I remember going to bed shortly thereafter, reading for a few minutes by the light of a small flashlight I kept hidden under my bed, and then falling asleep.
Around 3:15 a.m., I awoke to the sound of what I initially assumed was distant thunder. But as I came fully awake, I realized that the guns were firing again. At first, I thought they were simply doing another drill, though it seemed awfully late. Moreover, there was something about the rate and intensity of the bombardment that just didn't seem right, especially after I glanced at my clock. My small bedroom was directly over the front door and faced south . Thus, my view of the ocean was oblique. However, what I could see of the sky as I lay there was filled with blinding searchlight beams and the bright flashes of exploding rounds. I was, of course, thoroughly familiar with both, thanks to all the target practice I'd witnessed. But heretofore, the searchlights and the explosions had always been well out over the ocean and, for the most part, invisible from my bedroom windows when I was in bed. This time everything seemed much closer. I soon heard my parents talking in the hall, and poked my head out. My father looked worried and said it didn't make any sense. He tried to get through by phone to Civil Defense headquarters, but nobody answered (we later learned that the alert had been called at 2:25 a.m., but nobody bothered to get the word out to the local air raid wardens). So, he put on his gear, and went outside to see what was happening. Somewhere in the distance an air raid siren was wailing.
Cov returned looking even more worried and told my mother to get me, Gagie (my grandmother Littleton), Gaga, and my Grandfather Hotchkiss, who'd been staying with us for a couple of weeks (my Grandmother Hotchkiss had passed away the previous fall), down to the bomb shelter ASAP. Normally, Grandpa Hotchkiss was slower than the Second Coming of Christ in his personal habits. But when my father said "Mr. Hotchkiss, I think this may be the real thing," he was down in the basement in thirty seconds flat!
I was equal parts scared and excited and desperately wanted to know what was going on. By this time, my father was back on the street and, belatedly, over the continuing gunfire, the local siren finally sounded. My mother escorted her in-laws and father down to the fortified dressing rooms, and I followed along, despite the fact that I was dying to slip outside and watch "the real thing."
My mother felt the same way. As she said later, after about ten minutes in such cramped quarters - the benches upon which we sat also contained survival items such as a first-aid kit, water bottles, and some canned food - and surrounded by the halitosis exuded by the older generation, she was ready to brave a Jap bomb or two. Our first thought was that an enemy squadron was overhead, as we began to hear the roar of aircraft engines over the din of the barrage. But they were almost certainly our own pursuit planes.
When she exited the basement through the door that led to the beach, I followed close behind her. Although my mother was apprehensive about my safety, at the same time she understood why I desperately wanted to see what was happening and let me stay.
The two of us stood side by side in front of the house, huddling together in the chill night air and staring up into the sky. The planes we'd heard were not in sight, but what captured our rapt attention was a silvery, lozenge-shaped "bug," as my mother later described it, whose bright glow was clearly visible in the searchlight beams that pinpointed it. Although it was a clear, moonlit night, no other details were visible, despite the fact that, when we first saw it, the object was hanging motionless almost directly overhead. Its altitude is hard to estimate, especially after all these years, but I'd guess that it was somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. This may explain why we didn't see the orange glow reported by several eyewitnesses in Santa Monica and Culver City, where the object was apparently much lower.
For the rest of the story click here
C. Scott Littleton
SOTT
Thu, 24 May 2007 08:19 EDT
Los Angeles Times Feb. 25, 1942I'm Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. I joined the Oxy Faculty in 1962 and retired at the end of the spring semester, 2002, after forty years of teaching anthropology classes, as well as a variety of Cultural Studies courses and seminars in Oxy's Core Program in the Liberal Arts.
My professional specialties range across a wide spectrum and include comparative Indo-European mythology and folklore, cognitive and symbolic anthropology, urban anthropology, the origin and distribution of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends, and Japanese culture, both ancient and contemporary, with an emphasis on Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion. Indeed, I've spent close to three years in Tokyo studying a neighborhood Shinto shrine and its annual matsuri, or festival. I've also had a long-standing interest in the UFO phenomenon and its possible implications for mythology and folklore.
In terms of the current spectrum of anthropological theory and method, I would define myself as a "postmodern materialist," which is a fancy way of saying that I'm extremely eclectic in my approach to the discipline. Indeed, in my humble opinion, one of the most important problems facing contemporary anthropology is an unwillingness on the part of all too many of its practitioners to take seriously theories and methods that lie outside their own narrow specialties.
I'm a native Californian. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Hermosa Beach, and it was an incident during my growing up years that I want to talk about here: the "Battle of Los Angeles," the night that a UFO was fired upon by the U.S. repeatedly, with no apparent effect. I was an eye witness. What follows is adapted from a chapter in my as yet unpublished memoir entitled "2500 Strand: Growing up in Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II."
"Air-Raid Drills. As 1942 dawned, the war news continued to be bad. We were retreating in the Philippines; the British were retreating in North Africa; and although the Russians had held before Moscow and Leningrad, their chances looked slim.
In Southern California, and particularly in the beach communities, the threat of invasion was still palpable, if not imminent, and a great many folks - including the military - still expected us to be bombed in the near future. For that reason, the whole of Santa Monica Bay, from Malibu to Palos Verdes, was soon ringed with anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight brigades. The guns banged away almost every night, shooting at targets that were towed across the sky over the ocean by specially designed planes. The targets would be pinpointed by the searchlight beams, which also illuminated the exploding shells. It was a grand show that usually lasted about half an hour and rarely continued after 10:00 p.m., out of respect for the local populace.
At first, we'd watch the action with great fascination, but after a few nights in early January the noise of the guns and the exploding shells soon became routine, as predictable as the sound of the waves in the winter. Most people learned to sleep through the cacophony with few problems. It gave us a sense of security; our brave anti-aircraft gunners would quickly save us from any hostile attempt to penetrate our airspace, let alone bomb us. Meanwhile, the government had also organized the Civil Defense Program, the core of which was a cadre of dedicated air raid wardens. My father joined up shortly before the end of the year, and was soon assigned to monitor the Strand between 27th Street and 22nd Street in case of an air attack. However, he was also expected to enforce the blackout during air raid drills, which we soon began to have regularly, as well the so-called "dim-out," which required those who of us who lived in houses facing the water (both on the Strand and on the hill that rose behind Hermosa Avenue) to keep their front blinds drawn from dusk to dawn. The idea was to reduce the glare against which a tanker or merchant ship would be silhouetted and thus become an easy target for a Japanese submarine. This meant that he went out on "patrol" almost every evening shortly after sundown.
Shortly after Cov joined the program, there were some training sessions in the auditorium at Pier Avenue School, the local junior high school, which I would attend in a couple of years. As you might expect, the new wardens wanted practical instruction in first-aid, fire suppression, and all the other things their London counterparts had had to learn the hard way during the Blitz. They did eventually learn something about these things, but my father always laughed at the fact that the first two sessions were devoted to a learned discourse on the history of the Common Law! It seems that air raid wardens had a limited power of arrest; that is, they could detain persons who refused to pull their drapes or who had no business being on the street during a blackout and refused to go home - Hermosa had its share of the latter, especially in the vicinity of the downtown bars - and the guy who made this presentation was a USC law professor and former Superior Court judge. As my father liked to say, the whole business could have been boiled down to a ten-minute talk, simply laying out the circumstances under which an arrest could be made, and the extent to which force could be used in the processes. They didn't need to know the history of the laws of arrest from the time of Alfred the Great to 1942!
It was precisely this kind of mentality that that caused the system to break down totally in the early morning hours of February 25. Blackout drills, which were always announced well in advance (at least to the wardens), usually went pretty well. My father would get the word, and then an hour later the siren would sound. He'd put on his helmet, grab his flashlight, and start patrolling the Strand. But when the "real thing" came along, the system totally collapsed.
* * *
The Thing in the Sky. The early evening of February 24, 1942, was unremarkable. The guns fired a few practice rounds and then fell silent well before 10:00 p.m. I remember going to bed shortly thereafter, reading for a few minutes by the light of a small flashlight I kept hidden under my bed, and then falling asleep.
Around 3:15 a.m., I awoke to the sound of what I initially assumed was distant thunder. But as I came fully awake, I realized that the guns were firing again. At first, I thought they were simply doing another drill, though it seemed awfully late. Moreover, there was something about the rate and intensity of the bombardment that just didn't seem right, especially after I glanced at my clock. My small bedroom was directly over the front door and faced south . Thus, my view of the ocean was oblique. However, what I could see of the sky as I lay there was filled with blinding searchlight beams and the bright flashes of exploding rounds. I was, of course, thoroughly familiar with both, thanks to all the target practice I'd witnessed. But heretofore, the searchlights and the explosions had always been well out over the ocean and, for the most part, invisible from my bedroom windows when I was in bed. This time everything seemed much closer. I soon heard my parents talking in the hall, and poked my head out. My father looked worried and said it didn't make any sense. He tried to get through by phone to Civil Defense headquarters, but nobody answered (we later learned that the alert had been called at 2:25 a.m., but nobody bothered to get the word out to the local air raid wardens). So, he put on his gear, and went outside to see what was happening. Somewhere in the distance an air raid siren was wailing.
Cov returned looking even more worried and told my mother to get me, Gagie (my grandmother Littleton), Gaga, and my Grandfather Hotchkiss, who'd been staying with us for a couple of weeks (my Grandmother Hotchkiss had passed away the previous fall), down to the bomb shelter ASAP. Normally, Grandpa Hotchkiss was slower than the Second Coming of Christ in his personal habits. But when my father said "Mr. Hotchkiss, I think this may be the real thing," he was down in the basement in thirty seconds flat!
I was equal parts scared and excited and desperately wanted to know what was going on. By this time, my father was back on the street and, belatedly, over the continuing gunfire, the local siren finally sounded. My mother escorted her in-laws and father down to the fortified dressing rooms, and I followed along, despite the fact that I was dying to slip outside and watch "the real thing."
My mother felt the same way. As she said later, after about ten minutes in such cramped quarters - the benches upon which we sat also contained survival items such as a first-aid kit, water bottles, and some canned food - and surrounded by the halitosis exuded by the older generation, she was ready to brave a Jap bomb or two. Our first thought was that an enemy squadron was overhead, as we began to hear the roar of aircraft engines over the din of the barrage. But they were almost certainly our own pursuit planes.
When she exited the basement through the door that led to the beach, I followed close behind her. Although my mother was apprehensive about my safety, at the same time she understood why I desperately wanted to see what was happening and let me stay.
The two of us stood side by side in front of the house, huddling together in the chill night air and staring up into the sky. The planes we'd heard were not in sight, but what captured our rapt attention was a silvery, lozenge-shaped "bug," as my mother later described it, whose bright glow was clearly visible in the searchlight beams that pinpointed it. Although it was a clear, moonlit night, no other details were visible, despite the fact that, when we first saw it, the object was hanging motionless almost directly overhead. Its altitude is hard to estimate, especially after all these years, but I'd guess that it was somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. This may explain why we didn't see the orange glow reported by several eyewitnesses in Santa Monica and Culver City, where the object was apparently much lower.
For the rest of the story click here
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