Memories of War Here at Home

It was a time when there were no freeways in Ventura County. When few women worked outside the home. When food was scarce, children dreamed of being soldiers and county residents worried that Japanese submarines would attack them.

The years of World War II were hardly the good old days: Many Americans watched from a distance, terrified that their husbands and sons would be killed overseas and that foreigners would invade. As a coastal region with valuable oil fields and well-stocked military installations, Ventura County was considered particularly vulnerable to enemy attack.

Fifty-six years ago today, when the Japanese government surrendered to American forces, residents of the quiet, rural county that was barely one-tenth its current population celebrated the end of a grim saga. But few would quickly forget the years of fear and food shortages, patriotism and propaganda--years that for many marked the end of a more-traditional era in American life.

“It was a time when everybody rallied around,” said Pat Brown, spokeswoman for the Southern California branch of the Confederate Air Force, a national organization that preserves World War II airplanes. “Everybody had a part, even those at home.”

In the late 1930s, Ventura County consisted of sprawling ranches and sleepy towns. Today’s five-lane thoroughfares were just dusty, two-lane roads. Where the Pacific View Mall now stands were lemon and walnut groves.

Before Dec. 7, 1941, local newspapers and cinema newsreels trumpeted that much of Europe and parts of Asia were embroiled in war. Many Americans feared German invasion would force America into the turmoil.

Few worried about tiny Japan.

That country’s attack on an American naval base in Pearl Harbor was unexpected--and devastating. More than 2,700 Americans were killed and nearly 1,200 wounded. Japanese Americans were immediately suspected of disloyalty.

Americans from Washington state to San Diego suddenly realized they were just a plane--or submarine--ride away from enemies to the west. Ventura County residents, many of whom worked in the region’s abundant oil fields, feared that its fuel supplies and the county’s coastal position made it a particularly likely target.

“If you wanted to shut down California, there were a few [ports] you would have to hit,” said Richard Senate, coordinator for historical programming for the city of Ventura. “San Pedro, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Port Hueneme.

“Everybody knew the war was coming,” Senate said. “But we were as unprepared for war as you can imagine.”

Fears of invasion escalated when, a few months after Pearl Harbor, as President Roosevelt was speaking live on radio, a Japanese submarine opened fire from its deck guns on the Ellwood oil fields just north of Santa Barbara. No one was injured.

“Their marksmanship was rotten,” Lawrence Wheeler, the proprietor of a roadside inn near the oil fields, told The Times after the Feb. 23, 1942, attack. “It started about 7:15 p.m. . . . We were serving dinners to customers and listening to the president’s speech, and he was about halfway through.

“We heard a load report, followed in a few moments by another. I went outside and ran over to a point where I could see the ocean. It looked like a submarine about a mile offshore, cruising slowly down the coast and firing at regular intervals.”

The Times called the incident the “first attack upon United States soil since this war began.” Further attacks were considered not only possible, but imminent.

“We felt we were going to be invaded,” said Denise Thompson, a health care worker from Camarillo who was 13 at the time.

Ventura County and the nation prepared.

The Camarillo Airport, a tiny, little-used airfield, became a bustling military center. Army personnel were transferred from nearby military bases to bolster local defenses and train soldiers for air attacks.

Soon after the war started, the Navy leased what is now Point Mugu from a private family to conduct missile testing and Army combat training, said Maxwell White, historian for the Point Mugu naval base. At the time, the site was a fishing village used mainly by Japanese Americans, who were removed and, like tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans, imprisoned in camps because their loyalty was questioned.

The Port of Hueneme had been a small, deep-water port used mainly to ship the county’s abundant produce--but three months after Pearl Harbor it was purchased by the Navy and began a massive expansion, said Carol Marsh, the Port Hueneme naval base’s historian.

Hueneme became key to the Navy’s war operations in the Pacific: Nearly all materials used to build bases throughout Asia were constructed, stored, tested and shipped from there, Marsh said.

“More construction materials were shipped through here [during the war] than any other port in the continental United States,” she said. “Before the war it was just one deep port in the middle of nowhere.”

Between 1942 and 1945, the base drew more than 34,000 people--military and civilian employees and their families, most new to the county--to port jobs. It increased the population of the county by 50%.

The port, and the war, changed the face of Ventura County.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the Navy’s decision to locate here during World War II was the catalyst for the urbanization of Ventura County,” Marsh said.

Today, on the beach just north of Seaside Park in Ventura, two large round concrete structures poke out of the sand. They are war relics, reminders that soldiers once were stationed round the clock on the Ventura coast with heavy artillery aimed at invaders from the sea. The guns could also swivel around to attack Ventura itself if the city fell to the Japanese, Senate said.

“A friend of mine from college was stationed up there at one of those,” said Margaret Stapleton, 79, a Ventura native. “They had their barracks and their guns, and there they sat to make sure no Japanese ships would come up the shore.”

The war also greatly affected those not enlisted or working at a military base. The sounds of airplanes roaring overhead and explosives detonated on training missions were not uncommon. White-capped sailors crawled the county’s small towns when not on duty, looking for a good time in the dance halls and officers’ clubs that sprouted everywhere. Housing was so scarce that the federal government funded the construction of thousands of units for those who had come to work in the war effort.

Every American was required to register for government-controlled food allotments of such products as meat, butter and sugar. Many grew so-called Victory Gardens: backyard vegetable plots that were promoted as an aid to the war effort. At a time when recycling was rare, citizens reused bacon fat, foil and newspapers--small steps that were meant to help win the war.

Leather was in short supply, so shoes were made of cloth or synthetic materials. Gasoline was also strictly controlled: 3 1/2 gallons per week per car, Senate said. Local people walked, rode bicycles and car-pooled without hesitation, saving their gas for emergencies and indulgences.

“It was the most patriotic time,” said Donna Kneeland, who grew up on a citrus ranch outside Camarillo and was about 10 when the war began. “We’ll never see anything like that again.”

She and her sister, Denise Thompson, and their cousin, Jenanne Holmes, who now live in the Bay Area, returned to the county recently to research family history--and each reminisced about the war days.

“You had to take a training course to identify different types of [military] airplanes,” Thompson said. Children were given playing cards decorated with pictures of dozens of different airplanes--American, German and Japanese--so they could spot potential enemy invaders.

“Unidentified planes--oh, you would never want to pick up the phone and have to report one of those,” Holmes said. “It was so scary for us.”

Kneeland and Thompson recalled their father, a local rancher, wearing a special armband and patrolling area beaches on horseback.

“We would lay on the floor and listen to the news reports,” Holmes said. “They didn’t want to scare the city, so it was all the good stuff.”

Indeed, American news outlets often downplayed American losses and highlighted victories--a propaganda technique common in wartime. Neither Holmes nor her family, for example, knew that thousands of Japanese bombs were launched toward the West Coast using large, durable balloons. Several landed, and one killed six people in Oregon. Another landed in Saticoy in January 1945, leaving a 12-foot-deep crater. No one was injured, and the event was not publicized for fear of inciting panic.

Throughout the war, Ventura County’s large farms continued to operate, but there were few workers available to tend and harvest crops. For the first time, many women and girls were recruited to work in the fields--and to do other work that had long been reserved for men.

“The more women at work, the sooner we win,” reads a war poster now on display at the Aviation Museum at the Camarillo Airport.

Stapleton, a homemaker, left Ventura before the war to attend college in Los Angeles. During summer recesses, as the war kicked into high gear, she recalls precautions taken by her family under government orders: On drives to Santa Barbara, they drove the maximum-allowed 25 mph and used only parking lights. Her mother put up curtains of thick black cloth for blackouts.

“We were very vulnerable,” she said. “We didn’t have much in the way of protection at all.”

As many of her friends and classmates were enlisting or leaving to work in factories making war equipment, Stapleton, too, left her art history classes at Occidental College to work at North American Aviation in Inglewood. She made $180 a month before taxes, Stapleton said, and she never regretted leaving college.

“It didn’t make sense to stay,” she said. “It was a completely different atmosphere. . . . There were other things that sounded as though they were more important.”

Ventura County never was directly attacked by the Japanese or any other enemy force during World War II. The war with Europe ended in May 1945, and the Japanese conflict ended three months later on Aug. 14, 1945.

In downtown Ventura, as news of the Japanese surrender spread, there was a five-hour spontaneous parade, Senate said. People burned their ration books. Hotels and restaurants offered free alcohol in the streets. Many wept with joy.

The war was over.