War Spawned Vast Changes for O.C.’s Near, Long Terms

The Japanese dive bombers that sent the battleship Arizona to the bottom of Pearl Harbor and left other navy ships afire 50 years ago brought war to the United States and changed the face of Orange County forever.

There were immediate short-term effects locally: rationing, blackouts and internment of Japanese-Americans. The longer-term effects were an end to agriculture as king of the county and a swelling of population.

One man who saw those changes is Robert E. Thomas of Orange.

Thomas won the U.S. Navy’s top award for bravery, the Navy Cross, for rallying the sailors and directing antiaircraft fire from his battleship, the USS Nevada, at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Two decades later he became the first county administrative officer in Orange County and today the county Hall of Administration building in Santa Ana bears his name.

Thomas, who retired as a Navy captain in 1964 and retired from county government in 1985, said the biggest factor in increasing the number of county residents was the Interstate 5 freeway. The freeway “provided access to the land” when it opened in 1955, he said, letting people from Los Angeles County zip on down the road and buy new houses in the county. They could either live and work here or commute back up to Los Angeles.

“The first place that kind of exploded was Garden Grove,” Thomas said. He remembered his mother visiting him and his wife in suburban Washington when Thomas was assigned to the Pentagon. His mother looked at the couple’s house in Virginia and said, “Well, in Garden Grove you could get a house like this, with a two-car garage, for $18,000,” less than the Virginia home cost.

“As more people could afford single-family houses in the Orange groves, they started coming,” he said. “When I got here in 1964, the population was significantly under a million, probably 900,000. Then it started growing at 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 people a year.”

Another contributor to more people? Disneyland, which also opened in 1955. “It had a big impact because it brought people down here to go see it,” Thomas said. “The I-5 provided access, and climate and topography did the rest. People took one look at this place and loved it.”

All those newcomers and all that new tract housing was far in the future when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Though the start of the war was as much a surprise to Orange County as it was to cities and towns across America, there had been some preparations for the conflict.

Cities established emergency committees and defense councils as early as 1940. A sprawling base to train Army Air Corps cadets was under construction in Santa Ana; the Navy was readying construction of an air field in Los Alamitos.

The war brought speedups on both projects, and as the fighting went on the Marine Corps bought land and built bases at Tustin and El Toro; the Navy added an ammunition depot at Seal Beach.

An immediate casualty of the war was the county’s Japanese-American population.

On the day of the attack, Dec. 7, Santa Ana police, sheriff’s deputies and two FBI agents arrested 30 Japanese working on ranches in the county and held all but three of them. Most apparently were American sons and daughters of Japanese.

A county history says that in 1940, there were 1,855 people of Japanese descent living in Orange County, most of them farmers and 1,178 of them American citizens. Of the 1,800 Japanese rounded up when the war began and shipped off to internment camps throughout the country, only 600 returned when the war was over.

Among those interned was Hiroshi Kamei. He was 14 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, a freshman at Huntington Beach High School, the son of vegetable farmers forced to work leased land because the law barred them from owning land. Though Kamei was American, the law also barred his Japan-born parents from becoming American citizens.

Kamei, now 64 and living in Anaheim Hills, was sent with his parents, grandparents and six brothers and sisters to Poston, Ariz., in April of 1942. It was more than three years before they were able to leave the camp. Kamei went on to Iowa for college in June of 1945, but the rest of the family was unable to leave the internment camp until November of that year.

The internment of the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, many of whom worked on farms in the county, and the drafting of other farm hands to fight the war led to the “bracero” program, with farmers bringing in laborers from Mexico to help harvest the crops, 1,650 of them in 1943. The next year, 1,600 men were brought from the island of Jamaica for the harvest. By 1945, 500 German prisoners of war were put to work bringing in the lima beans, oranges and strawberries.

The war brought a Coast Guard order to close Newport Harbor, lest enemy vessels be able to slip in. Two weeks later, the order was lifted, and Newport Beach resident and actor Dick Powell was pictured taking his yacht out of the harbor.

Gasoline, tires and nylon stockings were all rationed. So were canned fruits and vegetables, though back-yard “victory gardens” provided substitutes.

War-caused changes in education included an emphasis on preparing students to join the armed forces or defense industries after graduating. The Fullerton School District added technical courses and opened classes in auto mechanics, machine shop and welding to girls.

The need for wartime manpower also cut into college enrollments, with Fullerton Junior College starting the 1942 school year with 900 students and ending with 400. By 1944 the number was down to 225.

But as the student population dwindled, the transient military population increased. And even when the bases either closed or reduced their manpower at war’s end, many of the men who went back to Chicago, New York and Omaha eventually found their way back to Orange County.

“Thousands of servicemen had passed through Orange County during the war and remembered the warm climate and open spaces, the sandy beaches and suntanned girls, the thriving businesses and busy towns,” Pamela Hall-Gibson wrote in her book, “The Golden Promise.” She added: “To them, Orange County was a place of golden sunshine, rich in promise, where a young family might get its start.”

When the war began, the population was about 130,000. By 1950 it was up to 220,000. In another 10 years it had more than tripled to 704,000. The latest census puts it at 2.4 million.