historiblogography

the year they almost destroyed california

In comments over at law professor Eric Muller's blog, a former Navy Reserve officer named William J. Hopwood has for many months been defending the WWII internment of Japanese-American citizens. Supporting Regnery hack Michelle Malkin's depiction of a perfidious Japanese fifth column and its preparations to support an assault by the Japanese military, Hopwood has insisted that the threat of an armed attack against the west coast of the continental United States was very real and very dangerous.

Pressed this week to discuss the logistics behind a significant Japanese attack on California, Oregon, or Washington, Hopwood instead finally described specifics regarding the kind of crushing assault that Japan had in store for those weak and poorly defended American coastal outposts:

As late in the war as the final months of 1944 one such plan, a Kamikaze mission, called for a landing in California of over 200 specially trained troops who were to have been transported by submarines and landed near Santa Barbara. Their mission was to shoot their way into Los Angeles, destroy Douglas and Lockheed aircraft factories, and kill as many Americans as possible, fully expecting to be finally annihilated themselves.

You read that right: The Japanese had over 200 soldiers being readied to race up the beach and attack California.

Puts a whole different spin on the mistreatment of 80,000 American citizens, doesn't it?

posted by Chris Bray @ 5:21 PM