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Silent Siege III: Japanese Attacks on North America in World War Ii-Ships Sunk, Air Raids, Bombs Dropped, Civilians Killed-Documentary
Attacks by the Japanese against North America WWII
- GenresWorld War II
301 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 20, 2021
Just when you think you know everything there is to know about a topic you stumble onto something that blows your mind away. That was how I felt about "Silent Siege - II."
In the dark days after Pearl Harbor when the military forces of the Empire of Japan were running amok through Asia and the Pacific, the war was brought home to the west coast of the continental US. Not only did the Japanese bomb and invade the Aleutians but their submarines were sinking ships right off the coast. One sub actually surfaced and fired on shore targets creating quite a ruckus and panic.
Having the largest subs in the world, the Japanese had a hanger on the front from which they could launch small planes. One plane bombed west coast forests in the attempt to start forest fires. Luckily it was the wet season.
Between the subs and their planes American nerves were on edge and hence the Battle of Los Angeles, when army gunners were blasting imaginary planes in the sky and showering the landscape with spent shrapnel.
Some say that in response to the Doolittle raid the Japanese finally figured out a way to strike back. Understanding the jet stream at high altitude, the Japanese began launching balloons that could cross the Pacific in about four days and release high explosive and incendiary bombs at preset times. These ingenious devices could release sandbag ballast if needed to maintain height and could self-destruct. There may have been as many as 6000 balloons launched and they ranged as far as a suburb of Detroit and from Alaska to Mexico. Only some 300 or so balloons have ever been accounted for so where are the rest? Even if only half ever reached land, that is a lot of potentially unexploded ordnance just waiting to be disturbed. Surprisingly, the only casualties known to date are 5 children and a Sunday school teacher who stumbled onto an unexploded bomb and disturbed it. They all died. One bomb just missed a house. Another balloon crash landed knocking out a transformer causing a three day disruption at Hanford plutonium processing plant! Believe it or not, the Japanese ended their balloon offense as they were counting on big mouth Americans (their words) telling them their results, but patriotic Americans kept their mouths shut. One could only imagine something like this happening today and all the idiots committing treason by posting things on their social media.
There was one more topic covered in great detail here and that was the placing of Japanese families from the west coast in camps. This program as presented today is misrepresented in so many ways. Sensationalism is the reason. To begin with, newspapers and editors fanned the flames of racism. The social media of the day called for a witch hunt. While it was true that there was a fear of Japanese on the west coast, the same applied to others of Axis descent. Joe Dimaggio's mother, being Italian, was forced to move.
Camps were set up with barbed wire that were meant to protect the people within from those who wanted to hurt them. Finding a place for these camps were difficult due to various organizations such as labor unions and even American Indians. Those within could leave the camps. Some 40,000 Japanese families requested placement in camps where they had free food and many other benefits while other Americans had rationing. One old Japanese woman told the author she was working 16 hours a day until she entered the camp. She missed it.
Several thousand young American-born Japanese who were educated and brainwashed in Japan wished to return to Japan to enlist in the military, and kill Americans. These and those who were known to be dangerous were rounded up and confined in camps. (The US could read secret messages.) The families of those rounded up could join them if they wished. This is probably where the sensationalism comes into play as they claimed they were locked up in concentration camps.
This review is long enough. Before closing I will say that the author has painstakingly dug up information that is referenced in this book. Photos are included as well as maps. This book is worth the purchase price. Some of this material can only be found here.
In the dark days after Pearl Harbor when the military forces of the Empire of Japan were running amok through Asia and the Pacific, the war was brought home to the west coast of the continental US. Not only did the Japanese bomb and invade the Aleutians but their submarines were sinking ships right off the coast. One sub actually surfaced and fired on shore targets creating quite a ruckus and panic.
Having the largest subs in the world, the Japanese had a hanger on the front from which they could launch small planes. One plane bombed west coast forests in the attempt to start forest fires. Luckily it was the wet season.
Between the subs and their planes American nerves were on edge and hence the Battle of Los Angeles, when army gunners were blasting imaginary planes in the sky and showering the landscape with spent shrapnel.
Some say that in response to the Doolittle raid the Japanese finally figured out a way to strike back. Understanding the jet stream at high altitude, the Japanese began launching balloons that could cross the Pacific in about four days and release high explosive and incendiary bombs at preset times. These ingenious devices could release sandbag ballast if needed to maintain height and could self-destruct. There may have been as many as 6000 balloons launched and they ranged as far as a suburb of Detroit and from Alaska to Mexico. Only some 300 or so balloons have ever been accounted for so where are the rest? Even if only half ever reached land, that is a lot of potentially unexploded ordnance just waiting to be disturbed. Surprisingly, the only casualties known to date are 5 children and a Sunday school teacher who stumbled onto an unexploded bomb and disturbed it. They all died. One bomb just missed a house. Another balloon crash landed knocking out a transformer causing a three day disruption at Hanford plutonium processing plant! Believe it or not, the Japanese ended their balloon offense as they were counting on big mouth Americans (their words) telling them their results, but patriotic Americans kept their mouths shut. One could only imagine something like this happening today and all the idiots committing treason by posting things on their social media.
There was one more topic covered in great detail here and that was the placing of Japanese families from the west coast in camps. This program as presented today is misrepresented in so many ways. Sensationalism is the reason. To begin with, newspapers and editors fanned the flames of racism. The social media of the day called for a witch hunt. While it was true that there was a fear of Japanese on the west coast, the same applied to others of Axis descent. Joe Dimaggio's mother, being Italian, was forced to move.
Camps were set up with barbed wire that were meant to protect the people within from those who wanted to hurt them. Finding a place for these camps were difficult due to various organizations such as labor unions and even American Indians. Those within could leave the camps. Some 40,000 Japanese families requested placement in camps where they had free food and many other benefits while other Americans had rationing. One old Japanese woman told the author she was working 16 hours a day until she entered the camp. She missed it.
Several thousand young American-born Japanese who were educated and brainwashed in Japan wished to return to Japan to enlist in the military, and kill Americans. These and those who were known to be dangerous were rounded up and confined in camps. (The US could read secret messages.) The families of those rounded up could join them if they wished. This is probably where the sensationalism comes into play as they claimed they were locked up in concentration camps.
This review is long enough. Before closing I will say that the author has painstakingly dug up information that is referenced in this book. Photos are included as well as maps. This book is worth the purchase price. Some of this material can only be found here.
February 28, 2016
This is a quite complete book about aspects of World War II that are somewhat obscure. Most people probably don't realize that the U.S. Mainland was actually attacked by Japan on more than one occasion during World War II. Fort Stevens and an area near Santa Barbara were shelled; the Oregon forest area came under direct Japanese bombing attack in an attempt to start massive fires, and an entire program of balloon bombs was used, with thousands of bombs launched from Japan and aimed to descend on the US mainland for the purpose of starting fires, killing people and creating panic.
The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of the devices, and includes lots of material on what things were done when, along with numerous footnotes. This is the single best book I've seen on the topic, and the most complete book.
One of the most fascinating parts is "The Battle of Los Angeles" where it seemed that LA was coming under massive Japanese bombing. I'm also interested in the balloon bomb program, and there's lots of material on that.
All of that said, there is one chapter that I am concerned about, and that's chapter 10. which is about the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war, when they were gathered up on the US west coast and shipped to assembly centers and then to internment camps situated inland. I have numerous book reviews about these camps in this section of my site.
The publisher of this particular book, though, has a decidedly anti-Japanese sentiment in the description of the camps (indeed, the publisher has an entire book on the camps), which tend to make the camps look like they really weren't that bad at all, and it is only historical revisionists that attempt to make them look bad.
Normally, I don't play the numbers game, but in this case, when, say, sixty or seventy books tend to describe the progress of evacuation and internment in considerable detail, and when those books are written by a wide variety of authors (most of them non-Japanese), and when I can verify those books from newspaper articles and government documents, then I would tend to believe that mass of evidence rather than this publisher's views on the issue.
That aside, the book, as I said, is, with the exception of this one chapter, an incredibly good source of information on an obscure but endlessly fascinating aspect of World War II
The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of the devices, and includes lots of material on what things were done when, along with numerous footnotes. This is the single best book I've seen on the topic, and the most complete book.
One of the most fascinating parts is "The Battle of Los Angeles" where it seemed that LA was coming under massive Japanese bombing. I'm also interested in the balloon bomb program, and there's lots of material on that.
All of that said, there is one chapter that I am concerned about, and that's chapter 10. which is about the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war, when they were gathered up on the US west coast and shipped to assembly centers and then to internment camps situated inland. I have numerous book reviews about these camps in this section of my site.
The publisher of this particular book, though, has a decidedly anti-Japanese sentiment in the description of the camps (indeed, the publisher has an entire book on the camps), which tend to make the camps look like they really weren't that bad at all, and it is only historical revisionists that attempt to make them look bad.
Normally, I don't play the numbers game, but in this case, when, say, sixty or seventy books tend to describe the progress of evacuation and internment in considerable detail, and when those books are written by a wide variety of authors (most of them non-Japanese), and when I can verify those books from newspaper articles and government documents, then I would tend to believe that mass of evidence rather than this publisher's views on the issue.
That aside, the book, as I said, is, with the exception of this one chapter, an incredibly good source of information on an obscure but endlessly fascinating aspect of World War II
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews