This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Los Angeles, one of the scarier and more absurd moments in the city’s World War II efforts.
This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Los Angeles, one of the scarier and more absurd moments in the city’s World War II efforts.
Following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, war jitters swept the Southland. By February 1942, air-raid sirens, searchlights and antiaircraft guns filled Los Angeles. Blackouts and drills were common.
Then on Feb. 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced and shelled oil installations at Ellwood, north of Santa Barbara.
Longtime Times columnist and Los Angeles observer Jack Smith explains what happened next in a February 1992 column:
The Battle of Los Angeles speaks to what fear can do in wartime.
This month also marks the 75 th anniversary of Japanese internment. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans — many from California — in internment camps.
A year later in 1943, Los Angeles witnessed the so-called Zoot Suit riots, when roving gangs of U. S. servicemen attacked and stripped Mexican Americans they spotted wearing the ornately tailored zoot suits.
Internment and the Zoot Suit riots are now cited by historians as grim examples of how panic and mob rule can take hold in times of war.
