The West at War

There was a hand-scrawled sign on the fence post of a cross-roads farm: come in for coffee and cake.

There were any number of signs like it in the Far West. Soldiers stationed near by, passing along the gravel roads, miles from nowhere in the middle of winter, saw them even when they could not stop. Over the U.S. last week people saw their soldiers in a new light. But the change was greatest in the West, where the war seemed nearer, where the whole region was a military area and where, outside the cities, the line between the soldiers and the people dissolved and all but disappeared in the countryside of scattered farms, small towns, big trees and rain.

War made the Pacific Coast conscious of its own immensity. Nearly ten million people live on the 318,000 square miles between Bellingham and San Diego. But four million of them are concentrated in the ten big cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Diego, Long Beach, Spokane, Tacoma, Sacramento); the others are spread out over a territory as big as France and the United Kingdom combined.

At forest-fire lookout towers, in little tarpaper-covered shacks scattered on the hills along the coast, spotters watched the grey skies, 24 hours a day, in three-hour shifts. In the forests, the biggest remaining forests in the U.S., trees crashed as trails were cut up the slopes of commanding peaks. In the dripping, head-high underbrush of Oregon grape, salal, devil's club, under the giant trees that reach as high as 20-story buildings, in the jungle thickets where only the Indians feel at home, the Northwestern countryside reached a sense of war.

On Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, on the channel to Bremerton, farmers kept watch all night on volunteer beach patrols, moved into shacks when the wind blew down their tents, tending cows when not on patrol.

At every lumber mill the tower of the refuse burner glows day & night. In a big lumber town like Aberdeen, suddenly a strategic point (see p. 18), the dull red domes of these burners stand out on a rainy evening as bright spots in the gloom, looking like a dozen autumn moons simultaneously rising. During the blackouts men with fire hoses rushed in, doused the fires. It took 25 barrels of crude oil to get each fire burning again, and there are more than 500 burners in the lumber country.

No one could say where, in the continental vastness, the West Coast's sense of the closeness of war dissolved. It was still present in Arizona. Towns along the Colorado blacked out with the Coast cities. The cowboys herding Arizona's 147,000 beef cattle became airplane spotters. Texas ranchers felt their isolation and formed bands called the Guerrillas, each member being required to have a high-powered rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and a tankful of gasoline for his car.

Last week, when the first frantic blackouts ended, West Coast citizens argued about whether they had done well or badly. In Seattle they were talking about Brigadier General Carlyle Wash, boss of the Second Interceptor Command, who ordered the blackouts, ordered radio stations off the air. When listeners complained, General Wash snorted: "To hell with entertaining people. We're trying to save their fool lives." They talked about one blackout crime: a man posed as an air-raid warden, raped a Chinese girl. They talked about the storm that swept the coast--one of the worst in years--of which no mention appeared in the papers until long after it had passed.

In Portland they were talking about the Mauna Ala, which grounded while groping for the mouth of the Columbia River in a blackout, and the 60,000 Christmas trees which washed ashore while the freighter broke up. In San Francisco they were talking about flares dropped from an enemy plane, about lack of fish, shrimps, crabs (because the fishing fleets could not put out), about the Governor's fight with the Attorney General on what a state of emergency meant.

In Los Angeles they talked about Albert Koons, who heard a loud "whoosh" in his back yard, found an unexploded antiaircraft shell buried in the ground. People in Los Angeles who believed the blackout a failure pointed to the 650% increase in automobile accidents. People who considered it a success pointed out that this meant only that there had been 45 accidents on the first night--only one serious --instead of the usual seven.

Technically, the West Coast had done well in its blackouts. Reporter Ernie Pyle, veteran of many a London raid, climbed the hills of San Francisco, said it was blacker than London. London permitted traffic, inside lights, hooded street lights; on the West Coast no lights inside or outside were permitted, cars were halted. "The city might be the dusty remnants of a city dead and uninhabited for a hundred years." The West was learning that it could do what was necessary for "defense," learning too that defense was not enough.

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