Old Bunkers a Reminder of Earlier Fears

Colleen and her friends, six or seven teenagers, are fighting Friday night boredom. They have flashlights and they’re huddled near the marshes of Huntington Beach, talking in whispers. They are not sure they should be here, not sure it’s legal.

That is part of the thrill. They are suburban kids looking to cross certain lines. What they are about to do has the feel of something illicit, even dangerous.

At the end of Bolsa Chica St., where the road becomes dirt, is a place they want to explore: the dark rooms and tunnels of an old military bunker, left over from a prior era when America braced for a foreign attack. The bunker was built during World War II and has since fallen into disrepair. It has no lights or windows and lies beneath a dusty berm fringed by low trees. The entrance is a rusted door cut into the hillside, in plain view but not easily found.

Word has spread. Colleen, Brandon and Allyson, all 16, have heard about it in the usual ways, at school and over the phone. They have been in the bunker before and tonight they’re showing it to other friends.

The door stands barely a foot ajar, unmoving. Dirt is banked against it. Someone has jammed a metal plate into the entrance to keep it passable, and there is a knotted rope tied to the top so you can lower yourself several feet to the main tunnel.

“How long’s this place been here?” asks a kid named Ben, who is not part of Colleen’s group but happens to be here with other boys.

“Since the Civil War,” Colleen says jokingly. She angles her flashlight and moves inside.

The main tunnel reaches 40 yards to a series of rooms. Concrete walls are awash with graffiti. Here and there the floor is treacherous, with square pits up to 4 feet deep, possibly for storage. Moving deeper inside, you get the feeling that you may never get out again. Except for the flashlights, the blackness is absolute.

“It’s like ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ” one girl says.

Fear was the motivation for this and scores of other bunkers up and down the California coast, set up mainly to defend harbors from enemy invasion. The installations date back more than a century. Ft. MacArthur, on the headlands of San Pedro, was founded in 1888 and later grew to contain more than a mile of tunnels, as well as massive guns and mortars.

Large numbers of bunkers were built during World War I and still more during World War II, creating a wall from San Diego to Seattle.

“Today they look like isolated concrete boxes . . . [but] what we had was an elaborate and expensive system of coastal defense,” says Stephen Nelson, director of a tiny museum tucked into Ft. MacArthur’s decommissioned gun batteries.

Although much of the antiquated network has been torn out or cemented over, some vestiges remain--decaying reminders that today’s anxieties are nothing new. Terrorism may be a different threat, but nothing from Al Qaeda so far conjures up the dread that spread across Los Angeles after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Few now recall, but just three weeks after that assault, Nelson says, a U.S. ship was torpedoed near Point Fermin. In early 1942, a Japanese submarine lobbed shells into an oil refinery in Ventura, and coastal guns were fired at planes that were never firmly identified as friend or foe. That incident, “the Great L.A. Raid,” came at a time of such paranoia that nighttime blackouts were imposed.

Alice Ridenour, now 82, remembers keeping the curtains drawn and the porch light off. There were no street lights. Cars crept along without headlights, navigating by moonlight.

The stolid machine-gun nests and tunnels of that era hold a powerful mystique for men like Ron Howlett, who grew up in the 1960s in Rancho Palos Verdes. His parents were shaped by World War II. His own generation endured the Cold War. As a kid, Howlett liked Army fatigues and combat movies. He often rode his bike to the abandoned machine-gun nests at Portuguese Bend.

“It was like, ‘Wow, this is the real thing . . . it’s not like some amusement park,’ ” he says. “They weren’t lit up . . . they were dug into the ground. You’d go from room to room and didn’t know if you’d trip over some old bones or something.”

Author Stephen Cooper was a teenager of the same era and remembers “there was always, in the air, stories about World War II, and part of the lore included tales of these concrete bunkers.” He later used a bunker as the focal point of a short story, “Terminal Island,” in which a young man about to go to war accompanies his mother into a pillbox overlooking the sea. He learns that he was conceived in there.

“The way they crop out of bleak and rugged landscape does something to the imagination,” says Don Wallace, a writer who contributes to Naval History Magazine. He first explored bunkers on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and in Huntington Beach and later toured others in Hawaii and France.

The remnants of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” are much like American bunkers, with the same barren functionality, Wallace says. “It makes you realize history is alive and you are standing on something that represents, essentially, a close call--a close brush with history,” he says.

The Huntington Beach emplacements were built during World War II but never fully completed, Nelson says. The main batteries--now closed--were intended to house twin 16-inch guns even larger than those at White Point in San Pedro, capable of firing 2,000-pound shells to the far beaches of Catalina Island.

It’s likely, Nelson says, that the modest bunker the teenagers have found was created for a lesser purpose, such as storing munitions.

The flashlights fix on spots of graffiti as the teens move warily into the main room, about 30 feet square, littered with a bike wheel, a broken chair and other debris.

“What do you think they’re going to do with this place?” someone asks.

Ben suggests a private club.

The boys cross the room to an alcove. A ladder inside leads upward. It once reached the surface, but a massive bolder has been jammed in from above.

Screams erupt. The girls, in another room, are shrieking, the sounds reverberating. Flashlight beams move crazily, some toward the tunnel entrance, others toward that back room, no larger than a walk-in closet. A dead electrical box fills part of a wall. Empty light sockets cling to the ceiling. On the floor are two sets of stripped bed springs.

“She stepped on the springs,” someone says, accounting for the uproar. Which girl? It’s unclear and doesn’t seem to matter.

The boys are already moving themselves, hurrying along the wall to the exit.