Submarines Were In Place to Deliver
'Unhappy Christmas' Message to United States
By Roger M. Showley
San Diego Union-Tribune
Bart Roggensack was aboard the USS Medusa, a Navy repair ship,
in Pearl Harbor and his wife Elna was living with her parents
and infant son in East San Diego.
As Bart witnessed the surprise Japanese
attack that early Sunday morning, Elna heard the news on the
radio.
Little did they or the rest of America
know, then or now, that the Japanese intended to strike a blow
close to home two weeks later, in a Christmas raid that targeted
San Diego and other West Coast ports.
It was an attack that came within hours
of happening, and one which could have set back the U.S. response
beyond the havoc caused at Pearl Harbor.
According to accounts published after
the war, the Japanese submarine command was planning a Christmas
Eve raid on San Diego and other significant ports. Eight subs
were under orders to continue east from Pearl Harbor. They halted
at locations 20 miles or so off the West Coast.
The assignment to shell San Diego on December
24 was given to the Japanese Imperial Navy's submarine I-10.
The Japanese Sixth Fleet's Vice Admiral
Mitsumi Shimizu, whose flagship was the submarine, HIJMS I-10,
wanted to accompany the shelling with a radio greeting in English
to wish President Franklin D. Roosevelt an "unhappy Christmas"
but no one was available onboard to make a proper translation.
Shimizu requested help for the message from Tokyo.
When admirals in Tokyo got wind of the
plan, they spiked it and the subs headed for home waters.
There have been two explanations as to
why the attack was called off.
First, after weeks at sea the subs were
running low on fuel and facing increasing anti-submarine activity.
Second, some officials thought it would be inappropriate to "mock"
the Christian holy day."
The Tribune-Sun published an extra edition to report on
the Japanese attack against the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Wrote John Deane Potter in "Admiral of the Pacific: The
Life of Yamamoto," the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor
attack, "Although they felt the stuffy old admirals could
not see a joke, the submarine commanders reluctantly dropped
the idea. Only one submarine disobeyed. She shelled San Diego
on Christmas Eve, setting some fuel tanks on fire."
No other wartime accounts or subsequent
histories mention such a shelling and there were no reports in
the newspapers of the time of any suspicious fires.
Bruce Castleman, a retired Navy officer
and history professor at San Diego State University, called the
Potter account unreliable and guessed the British author, whose
book was published in 1965, might have confused the story with
a submarine shelling near Santa Barbara in February 1942.
Still, war planners in Japan before the
outbreak of hostilities against the United States had developed
various scenarios for raids, if not an invasion, targeting the
West Coast.
A 1940 book, "How Japan Plans
to Win," translated into English and published in the
United States in 1942, did not receive much attention at the
time.
But its author, Kinoaki Matsuo, spoke
of a strategy that would include uprisings against the United
States in Mexico, Japanese seizure or destruction of the Panama
Canal, the defeat of the U.S. fleet and occupation of the Hawaiian
Islands.
"If, in the meantime, the Japanese
fleet haunts the Pacific Coast and bombards or threatens the
United States merchant marine, the United States will be dealt
a heavy blow," Matsuo wrote.
In his book, Matsuo also provided a geography
lesson on the West Coast, including this passage about San Diego:
"There is also the famous city of San Diego, the southernmost
naval harbor of California, 126 miles from Los Angeles; this
harbor as a naval base has excellent accommodations."
Although the Japanese navy received a
blow in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 from which it never
recovered, plans continued throughout the war to harass the U.S.
mainland.
Late in 1944, the Japanese launched about
9,000 balloon bombs. Some of the weapons floated across the Pacific
and landed in the Northwest, setting off a few minor forest fires.
On May 5, 1945, six picnickers were killed in Oregon when a balloon
bomb they dragged from the woods exploded.
In the summer of 1945, a more bizarre
plot was developed by the Japanese navy. Called "Cherry
Blossoms at Night," the plan was for kamikaze planes to
drop plague-infected fleas on San Diego on September 22.
This operation only came to light in a 1995 newspaper article
based on interviews with those familiar with Japan's germ warfare
effort.
The end of the war in August 1945, after
two atomic bombs had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, put an end
to the plan.
The story of the aborted West Coast raid,
and other attempts to bring the Pacific war to the U.S. mainland,
provide the fodder for countless what-if debates among military
strategists and history buffs.
But for the dwindling numbers of Pearl
Harbor survivors and their families, like the Roggensacks, it's
the memories of the actual events – where they were and
what they did – that resonate 63 years later. They lived
through an experience whose intensity others can only imagine.
"You just never forget something
like that," said Elna, 85. "It's always with you. It's
in the back of your mind, but some little thing will trigger
something and you'll recall the things you remember that happened."
The couple, now living in the Fletcher
Hills area of El Cajon, have given their World War II photos
and memorabilia to their son Bart Jr. But they don't need snapshots,
clippings and letters to recall the events of that Sunday morning
– just as a younger generation of Americans will always
remember the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
Elna received news of the Japanese attack
as she was sitting in a rocking chair with her 4-month-old son
at her parents' Central Avenue home. Her father came in and,
without a word, switched on the radio about 11 a.m. that Sunday.
"Pretty soon . . . it dawned on me
that they were talking about Pearl Harbor," she said. "Whoa,
I just couldn't believe it. We just didn't know what to do or
think."
Unable to reach her husband, she took her mind off the news by
accompanying her brother and his wife on a short drive to the
then-barren flats of Kearny Mesa.
"We just walked around out there
and talked and prayed," she said. "Then we went back
home and all we could do was just wait."
Three days later, a three-word, censored
Western Union cablegram arrived from Bart. It said, "I am
safe." He didn't see his wife and son for 22 months.
Bart , now 89, recalled the Pearl Harbor
attack, which began minutes before 8 a.m. Hawaii time.
"I heard gunfire when I was down
on the second deck," he recalled. "I saw the planes
and was looking right at two torpedo planes with a big red ball
on the fuselage and knew we were in trouble."
He escaped injury but he saw the destruction
all around and learned later that some of his best friends had
been killed.
Word of the attack flashed from Hawaii
to the Navy's radio towers at Chollas Heights in San Diego and
then to the nation's capital. Within three hours, the news had
become public.
Soldiers and sailors returned to their
bases. Blackouts began the next night. An anti-submarine net
was dropped at the entrance to San Diego Bay.
By midweek, the Navy had taken over much
of Balboa Park with plans to turn its museum buildings into wards
for the naval hospital, the receiving point for many of the Pearl
Harbor wounded.
On December 8, 1941, the front page of
The San Diego Union included this headline: "Coast on Alert
for Sneak Blow." A story described a city "tense –
listening – greedy for more news, exact news, news that
was revolting, yet news that you had to listen to."
Ramona's Chamber of Commerce discussed
how to accommodate evacuees fleeing San Diego if an attack ensued.
In San Diego, the shock from the outbreak
of the war gradually faded as the United States slowly took the
offensive. Still, Elna Roggensack said it took at least a year
before she felt secure. By then, San Diego had settled into an
era of rationing, censorship and victory gardens.
Elsewhere, the mood was different. Elna
visited her parents in Iowa in 1942 and said she was shocked
at what she found to be a lack of concern.
"You just didn't feel like there
was a war," she said. "Being in San Diego where the
ships were coming and going and the military was here, you knew
there was a war going on. Back there, they were quite distant."
Her husband did not see her until 1943
– and it took some time to convince son Bart Jr., then 2
years old, that he had a father.
Bart Roggensack, who had enlisted in 1936,
stayed in the Navy until 1958, then took a civilian job overseeing
ship repairs and retired in 1972.
As the outgoing president of the 155-member
Pearl Harbor Survivors Association local chapter, the largest
in the United States, Bart Roggensack will lead a service at
the Veterans Memorial Center in Balboa Park at 9 a.m. today and
relinquish his post tomorrow.
Since he'll turn 90 in March, he said
it's time to slow down.
But he'll continue one ritual.
On the third Sunday every month, he joins
other Pearl Harbor survivors to read the names of service personnel
who have died in Iraq.
"When you hear those names, 18, 19
years old, it really gets to you," he said. "You just
shed a tear, a tear rolls down your cheek. You think of those
kids."
Just as he thinks of the kids he knew
whose lives were cut short 63 years ago in a war that touched
everyone.
December 7, 2004
Search
our Site!
Questions and comments concerning
this site should be directed to the Webmaster