The Defense Is at Rest : Military: In the fearful days of World War II, : Ft. MacArthur was the ‘guardian’ of the city. Now, the former Army site in San Pedro is a place of peace.

Standing at the top of a grass-covered hill at Angels Gate Park in San Pedro, looking down at the palm trees and the seaside strollers and the sailboats scudding along in the Catalina Channel, it’s difficult to believe that this was once a place dedicated to war.

Half a century ago, these hills where children now play bristled with trenches and machine-gun emplacements and anti-aircraft batteries. Thick concrete parapets concealed huge artillery pieces and mortars, all primed and ready for action, the gun crews on almost constant alert. Everywhere there were grim-faced men in uniform, anxiously scanning the sea and the skies, expecting at any moment the enemy to come steaming or flying over the horizon, guns blazing.

To those too young to remember those days, this may be just a park and some old Army buildings and a military museum. To an even younger generation, the old artillery bunkers may be more familiar as the backdrop for portions of a Madonna video than they are as the scene of tense wartime drama.

But in the fearful early days of World War II, this was Ft. MacArthur, the “Guardian of Los Angeles.” And throughout the city, and particularly in the South Bay, frightened citizens huddled behind blackout curtains and looked to the fort and its men as a first line of defense.

The origins of Ft. MacArthur date back to the days when strategic national defense was based not on missiles but on cannon. Designed to protect Los Angeles Harbor, Ft. MacArthur was to be the final link in the chain of harbor forts that ringed the nation’s coasts--what Tom Thomas, a volunteer at the Ft. MacArthur Military Museum, calls “the original Fortress America.”

Construction on the fort, named after the Civil War hero Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, father of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, began in 1914. The fort was geographically divided into three sections--the Upper Reservation on the hills west of Gaffey Street, the Lower and Middle Reservations farther east in San Pedro. By 1917, the Upper Reservation boasted four huge artillery pieces with 14-inch diameter bores that could hurl a 1,660-pound shell 13 miles out to sea, which theoretically meant that the fort’s guns could blast away at enemy ships long before the smaller guns of the ships could hit the harbor. Later, two 14-inch guns mounted on special railroad cars, which could send a shell 27 miles, were added to the fort’s armament.

Actually firing the massive guns was a problem, however, because the resulting concussion was so powerful that it could be felt as far away as Pasadena. John Zeisler of Torrance, who as a GI saw the guns fired back in the 1940s, recalls that “when they fired those guns, it busted every window in San Pedro.”

That’s a slight exaggeration, but irate local citizens did submit a flurry of damage claims every time the guns were fired in practice. In the isolationist days between the world wars, when the military in general did not rate high in the public esteem, historians say Ft. MacArthur was widely perceived as not only a window-buster but also an unnecessary drain on the public purse.

For the men who served there, Ft. MacArthur was an easygoing, almost sleepy place in the years before World War II. Martin Boone of Santa Monica, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was stationed at the fort as a second lieutenant in 1940, recalls that “Ft. MacArthur was a goldbricker’s paradise, a kind of rest area before retirement.” Only about 2,000 officers and enlisted men were stationed there. No one dreamed that the fort would actually be called upon to do what it had been designed to do a quarter of a century before: Defend the city from attack.

That changed Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor.

The news of Pearl Harbor created panic throughout the West Coast, and particularly in Los Angeles. It’s easy to dismiss the nervousness now, with the benefit of half a century of hindsight, but back then it was considered possible, perhaps even probable, that the next audacious attack would be on continental American shores. Los Angeles, with its harbor and its aircraft manufacturing plants, was considered a prime target. Ft. MacArthur was one of the few defenses against such an attack.

“Everything was in chaos” at the fort, Boone remembers. “We were supposed to defend the coast from Huntington Beach to Oxnard, but we didn’t have adequate communications, and a lot of our men were inexperienced draftees. None of the men were frightened or scared, they were more determined. But it was a tense time.”

There were some alarming incidents: A Japanese submarine torpedoed a merchant ship off San Pedro on Christmas Eve in 1941, right under the guns of Ft. MacArthur. In February, 1942, another sub surfaced and pelted some oil fields near Santa Barbara with ineffectual gunfire. And then on Feb. 23, 1942, there came the Great Los Angeles Air Raid.

“L.A. AREA RAIDED,” the Los Angeles Times front page blared, adding, in the accepted phraseology of the day, “Jap Planes Peril Santa Monica, Seal Beach, El Segundo, Redondo, Long Beach, Hermosa, Signal Hill.” The accompanying story reported that “large formations” of enemy aircraft had been spotted overhead. The antiaircraft batteries at Ft. MacArthur and other sites across the city had opened fire, and about 1,400 rounds were fired to repel the attackers.

The enemy aircraft reports turned out to be erroneous, and the only casualties from the air raid were several civilians killed or wounded by falling shells. But the fear of attack remained.

“There was a lot of panic,” remembers Don Young, a retired Hawthorne High School history teacher and one of the founders of the Ft. MacArthur Military Museum, who in 1942 was an 11-year-old boy living in Inglewood. “The day after the air raid I came home from school and my father was packing the car trunk with supplies, in case we had to head off for the Sierras. Of course, I was a young boy, so I thought the whole thing was great.”

The fear of enemy attack had other tragic consequences. People of Japanese descent, including many families living on Terminal Island, were ordered rounded up and interned.

Meanwhile, men and supplies and equipment were pouring into Ft. MacArthur, which became the hub of a network of bunkers and gun emplacements and observation posts that stretched from Pacific Palisades to Costa Mesa.

Ironically, however, the Pearl Harbor attack that had at first made the fort seem so important to Los Angeles’ defense actually had overnight made coast artillery installations like Ft. MacArthur obsolete. No longer did enemy ships have to come close to shore to destroy harbor installations or cities. Instead, they could stand far offshore, out of sight and out of range of even the biggest land-based artillery, and send aircraft to bomb shore installations.

Ft. MacArthur’s primary weapons, the 14-inch guns and the even larger 16-inch guns that subsequently were installed at White Point Military Reservation near Western Avenue and Paseo del Mar, had been rendered virtually useless.

As the war progressed and it became apparent that the Japanese navy was in no position to seriously threaten the West Coast, Ft. MacArthur’s strategic importance began to decline. After the war, the 14-inch and 16-inch guns were dismantled and cut up for scrap, never having fired a shot in anger.

The fort continued as a separation and recruit training center after the war, and for a time it was part of the Nike missile air-defense system. In 1974, the Upper and Lower Reservations were leased to the city of Los Angeles. The Lower Reservation was eventually dredged out for use as a municipal boat basin; the Upper Reservation became Angels Gate Park, jointly administered by the parks department and the L.A. Unified School District.

For a while, the old concrete bunkers at the fort were rented out to artists and musicians, which caused serious wear and tear on the structures. According to Thomas, the site also was used for filming a variety of projects, from the World War II epic “Midway” to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video. The Ft. MacArthur GIs of World War II undoubtedly would have enjoyed that one.

In 1985, Young was drafted to start a museum at the site of one of the old 14-inch gun batteries, Battery Osgood-Farley. Young and other volunteers collected an array of memorabilia from the World War II era that is now on display, and there are plans to build a replica of one of the 14-inch guns. The Ft. MacArthur Military Museum is open from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends only.

It’s a quiet place to spend a few weekend hours. And if you stand on top of one of the old gun batteries and let your imagination run loose, you can almost see Ft. MacArthur as it used to be, so long ago. You can almost see them, the gun crews and the machine-gunners and the aircraft spotters, staring out at the horizon, waiting for the enemy that never came.

Ft. MacArthur Designed to protect Los Angeles Harbor, Ft. MacArthur was to be the final link in the chain of harbor forts that ringed the nation’s coasts.

The History of Ft. MacArthur * Land acquired: 1888.

* Construction began in 1914, with the aim of protecting Los Angeles Harbor from attack by enemy ships.

* The fort was named after Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, a Civil War hero and father of World War II Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

* Armament (World War II): Four 14-inch rifled guns on mounts that could fire 1,660-pound shells 13 miles; eight 12-inch rifled mortars that could fire 700-pound shells 10 miles, and two 14-inch railway guns that could fire 1,400-pound shells 27 miles. Also numerous anti-aircraft batteries.

* Upper and Lower Reservations were leased to the city of Los Angeles in 1974; Middle Reservation transferred to U.S. Air Force in 1980. The Upper Reservation is jointly administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the city Parks and Recreation department as Angels Gate Park.