At first light on 11th December, the Japanese fleet commenced bombardment of these two prosperous and populous cities with every gun that could be brought to bear, while every aeroplane capable of flight took off on bombing and strafing missions into their harbours and business and residential quarters. Complete surprise was attained. Of the initial salvoes, one heavy shell struck almost the precise centre of what was at that time the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, opened only four years earlier, the Golden Gate Bridge at the entrance to San Francisco harbour. The bridge sustained great damage and there was some loss of life.
After a prearranged interval, the two forces ceased fire, turned into line abeam and steamed inshore, a change of location designed partly to permit greater accuracy and to conserve aircraft fuel, but also, at least as important, to leave the helpless citizens in no doubt of who and what it was that brought them destruction and death. The ships of the battle-fleet went to their new stations and recommenced bombardment, whether of the cities themselves or of shipping and harbour and other installations. The aerial attacks had continued without pause.
Shortly before 10.00 hours a tender or other small boat was observed approaching the waterborne forces bearing a rough-and-ready white flag. This impudent excursion, which could have claimed nothing conceivable in the way of legal standing or significance, was swiftly and properly dealt with. On orders of the Admiral himself, the destroyer Shimakaze closed with the intruder at top speed and rammed her amidships, cutting her clean in two. The remnants rapidly sank, those persons who had survived the impact being helped on their way by small-arms fire and grenades from Shimakaze’s deck.
By then or soon afterwards, large parts of both cities and their outskirts were ablaze. Visibility on this clear, sunny winter’s morning had at first been excellent; now heavy clouds of smoke drifted across the target and ascended hundreds of feet into the air. Massive explosions occurred at intervals. One especially severe and prolonged disturbance in the San Francisco area has been taken to indicate a seismic shock induced by the bombardment in an area notoriously subject to earthquakes, but material evidence is lacking.
Despite increasing difficulties of ranging and targeting, the Japanese warships and warplanes prolonged their assault on the two coastal cities until breaking off the action shortly before noon. Already large parts of the afflicted areas had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of their people lay buried in the rubble or lay dead or dying in what had been their streets. Sentimentalists have suggested that the attack was needlessly prolonged and excessive damage and slaughter inflicted, perhaps forgetting the first objective of the Californian operation, viz. the delivery of the maximum possible shock, not only locally but throughout the United States. It could be asserted with some confidence, in the light of subsequent events, that those Americans who lost their lives in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco did so, albeit unknowingly, in the service of their country.
When the cease-fire came and all aircraft were safely returned, the fleet drew off. The whole of it with one exception began the long voyage home across the Pacific under the command of Vice-Admiral S. Toyoda. The exception, the giant battleship Yamato, whose ammunition had been conserved, started off on her way to a fresh target some 3,500 miles to the south-east, a target of such importance that Admiral Yamamoto had insisted on attending to it personally.
The naval forces assaulting the Californian cities had met with negligible resistance. A number of obsolete US warplanes made feeble, uncoordinated attempts to close with the vastly superior Japanese aerial armament, but in almost all cases these were shot out of the sky at ranges too great for them to return effective fire. Even considered solely by the standards of warlike profit and loss, the Pacific operation was the most successful in history.
II – The Atlantic Operation
Twenty-one hours in real time after the Japanese had launched their first attack, at first light on 12th December, the German battleship Tirpitz, having eluded the vigilance of the Royal Navy in slipping out of European cover and crossing the Atlantic, commenced bombardment of the city of New York.
At 41,700 tons and with eight 16-inch guns as primary armament, Tirpitz was clearly a ship on a rather smaller scale than the mighty Yamato, and hers was a solitary adventure; nevertheless the damage and loss of life she inflicted were considerable and bore closely upon events.
Tirpitz concentrated her fire on the island borough of Manhattan, though she caused some damage to the US Navy Yard on the farther side of the East River. Her shells destroyed or severely damaged several of the city’s loftier buildings, including the 102-storey Empire State Building. Two considerable fires were started. At a later stage, making up in boldness for what she lacked in firepower, Tirpitz actually sailed some distance up the Hudson, bombarding the shore at point-blank range with every gun available. A salvo from her secondary armament of 5.9-inch guns reduced the famous Statue of Liberty to fragments.
Amid growing but still largely ineffectual signs of resistance, Tirpitz discontinued the action just before 09.00 hours and retired. Out in the North Atlantic once again she turned southward, her mission in that ocean not yet accomplished. While in transit she successively launched from her catapult the four aircraft she carried, each of them an Arado 196A-3 twin-float seaplane carrying two 110-pound bombs. The two-man crews had been carefully selected and intensively trained for what was perhaps the most important part of the entire Western operational sector.
It had been decided with some reluctance that a regular naval attack on Washington, DC, though infinitely tempting, must be ruled out as too hazardous. Approach via the Potomac River or the Chesapeake Bay was finally rejected as too difficult and remote, with a risk that the encroaching force might be trapped and destroyed before it could withdraw. Such an outcome was unacceptable in view of the necessity that the enemy be denied any countervailing success, however small in proportion, on this day of his humiliation.
Accordingly, the four seaplanes delivered a short-range, low-level and deadly accurate attack on the White House on the late afternoon of a day that had filled it with Service and civilian chiefs of every description. No one who witnessed it would ever forget the unheralded approach at nearly one hundred yards per second of a warplane flaunting the insignia of a distant but hostile Power and firing a machine gun as it came. The story goes that one such round, penetrating a conference room by its shattered window, struck the wheelchair in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt sat and, ricocheting, hit and killed an air-force general standing behind him. Whether literally true or not, the supposed incident has great metaphorical force.
After completing a number of strafing runs at their target, and having dropped on it their collective bomb-load, amounting to something not far short of half a ton of explosive, the seaplanes rendezvoused with the Tirpitz. Two airmen were lost. Those killed in and around the White House ran into scores, but the moral effect of such a daring stroke was incalculable.
Now, by an assiduously reconnoitred route, Tirpitz continued her long journey to the south. Round the tip of Florida she steamed, through the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico, then down the Caribbean to her third and final objective.
III – The Combined Operation
During the night of 16th/17th December, Yamato and Tirpitz took up their stations off the two ends of the Panama Canal, each vessel out of range of the shore defences. At a previously agreed time close to first light, both commenced bombardment of the sections of canal nearest them. After two hours the Tirpitz, whose primary ammunition had started to run low, discontinued fire, and a little later Yamato followed suit.
There were altogether six double locks in the canal system, each of great mass and strength. All lock walls rested on rock foundations and were over 80 feet in height. In the case of the outermost locks, the walls contained over two million cubic yards of concrete. Nevertheless the concentrated broadsides of the two great battleships caused multiple breaches in both
. What with severe consequential flooding and damage to permanent installations, it was estimated from reports reaching the Washington office of the canal that, even under normal conditions, repair and reopening could be expected in months rather than weeks.
Before the preliminary investigations were complete, Yamato and Tirpitz had reached home and safety, having accomplished their part in the shaping of history.
IV – The Sequel
The Empire of Japan had declared war on the United States of America in a proclamation date-timed 11.30 p.m. on 11th December, but unfortunately delayed for some hours before it reached the US Government. At two o’clock that afternoon Joachim von Ribbentrop, as Foreign Minister, had read out to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin the text of Germany’s declaration of war.
The combatant Powers continued in a state of war seven full days. At 11.00 a.m. on 18th December, President Roosevelt delivered an address to both Houses of Congress and, by simultaneous radio broadcast, to the nation at large. The text ran, in part:
It is with a heavy heart, my fellow Americans, that I stand before you this day. You will all share my feelings of shock, sorrow and indignation at the appalling carnage that resulted from the Japanese surprise attack on the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The German raids on the East Coast cities of New York and Washington, DC, though smaller in scale, were no less dreadful and demoralizing. In the nation’s capital I myself came under enemy fire, for a single instant only, but long enough to kindle in me a special sympathy with those men, women and children who really suffered.
America was still reeling from these heavy blows when the news arrived of the virtual destruction of the Panama Canal. That canal . . . is in a very real sense America’s lifeline. Denied it, my Service heads advise me that the possibility of one day defeating in war two such powerful and such implacable adversaries as Imperial Japan and the German Third Reich is not non-existent but is hopelessly small, far too small for the substantial risk of total defeat to be run. Therefore, as your Commander-in-Chief, I hereby order all American forces to lay down their arms totally, finally and forthwith, pending the signing of a peace treaty. My fellow Americans, the war is over!
Now, I call upon you all to join with me, at this late hour, in returning henceforth to our traditional path of neutrality amid foreign conflict. Let us forgo any thought of revenge and pursue the proud role of beacon of liberty and democracy, by whose light other nations may in the end return to the paths of peace and goodwill.
Necessary adjustments in the status of certain of our overseas territories, and in some of our domestic arrangements, are in the process of being settled and agreed. As soon as the details shall be finalized . . .
The adjustments referred to by the President turned out to comprise the cession to Japan of all America’s Pacific territories, including the Hawaiian Group with the Pearl Harbor base, Guam and Wake Island, and to Germany of Puerto Rico, while the Panama Canal Zone passed under the tripartite authority of the United States, Japan and Germany. The domestic arrangements concerned were naval installations in the continental United States. The US Navy was to be progressively reduced to fishery-protection and coastguard vessels.
When these details were after some days released to the American public, some revulsion of feeling occurred, and there were riots and disturbances from ocean to ocean, though not as violent or prolonged as those that followed the original bombardments.
Besides, it was too late.
From A History of the Second Great War, 1939/A–1943/A by Michael Bridgeman
Josef Goebbels Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford
AFTERWORD
This piece by Kingsley Amis originally appeared as the Introduction to the 1987 edition of Collected Short Stories.
These are nearly all the short stories I have ever published; I omit ‘The Sacred Rhino of Uganda’ (1932) as uncharacteristic. I wish there were more of them, and not only because I should be that much richer if there were. For one to an extent committed to the novel of standard length (which I take to be in the region of 75,000 words) and to producing fairly regularly too, setting out on something of a different order of size, something that hardly need do more than get as far as a second page in order to have being, is a busman’s holiday certainly, but still a holiday. From having to keep twenty Indian clubs in the air at once you suddenly find yourself given licence to get by with two. And if you drop one of those, what does it really matter? A couple of botched pages can be filed sine die or even scrapped; a couple of hundred – well, I hope it never happens to me.
If shorts are so angst-free, why not write more of them, perhaps switch to them? Partly because (for that very reason, I suspect) short-story ideas or starting-points come to me rarely, as can be seen. Novel ideas turn up with no greater frequency but, in their different case, quite fast enough (touch wood). Each sort of idea declares itself as such instantly, simultaneously with its dawning. For instance, the moment I thought of the word that Courtenay says to Barnes near the end of ‘The House on the Headland’ I knew I had a short story and also that it would be, or seem to be, a secret-service story. Whereas, when once in Tottenham Court Road a taxi hailed by an Asian ignored him and stopped for me instead, I knew I had a novel coming and also that it would be about a rich fellow of progressive views.
All the same, a glance will show that my kind of short story has a strong affinity with the novel; its scale is different but its internal proportions, the relative parts played by dialogue, narrative, description, are alike and make the two read alike. And the stories are telescoped novels in that it would be feasible, however savagely boring the result (and the process), to draw them out to near standard length. Potter’s earlier life in the timber yard and something of his marriage could be stuck on to the front of ‘Dear Illusion’, but Sue Macnamara could not be brought into any of that and so the structure would be deformed. The one story here that has to begin and end where it does is ‘Mason’s Life’ – almost true too of the four SF-drink pieces. Anyway, the things that only the short story can do, the impression, the untrimmed slice of life, the landscape with figures but without characters, make little appeal to me. This collection is really one of chips from a novelist’s work-bench. I say so without complacency. A novel may, indeed in certain respects does, call for not only more sustained but also more intensive effort than a story; even so, a volume of Kipling’s stories, say Life’s Handicap, offers stiff competition on merit to Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Almayer’s Folly or any other novel of the period. Well, few writers move with equal facility in both forms. Graham Greene seems to, though.
Mention of Kipling leads me to wonder whether, if he were today to produce ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ or another masterpiece from the book referred to, he would find its magazine publication as easy as he actually did in 1890. Then and for long afterwards, weeklies and monthlies entirely or largely devoted to new fiction, for the most part short stories, flourished in both Great Britain and the United States. Now, notoriously, a tale of any length has to fight for a place alongside political articles, interviews with film directors, cookery columns and soft porn. Just as notoriously a hardback or paperback collection usually does worse commercially than a novel by the same author. This last fact was once explained to me by a publisher (not one of mine) as reflecting readers’ dislike of having to acquaint themselves with a new set of characters a dozen times over in the course of the book, instead of getting shot of the trying task for good at the beginning. Can that be right? Have readers got worse? – after all, there are more of them. Or have short-story writers got worse? – after all, writers of everything else have. But then novels go on getting read, or at least bought. But then again, not in hardback very much. Perhaps the vestigial puritanism that breeds reluctance to fork out £11.95 on a mere (book-length) story breeds outright refusal when the merchandise is a lot of little stories. Perhaps.
My other possible partial expla
nation takes account of another fact, that of course the short story of the 1980s is to be seen not only among tits and bums, etc., but also in those pale and sickly present-day equivalents of the Victorian fiction magazines, the periodicals subsidized by the Arts Council or one of its offspring. A writer, or any other kind of artist, who partly or largely need not depend on pleasing the public, who in effect has his fee guaranteed whatever the quality of his product, is tempted to self-indulgence and laziness. You may maunder on at your own sweet will in prose or verse (or something called verse) and get your money regardless. But when it comes to a book and the public, a larger public, is invited to pay the full price, even that of a paperback, it jibs. It turns to a novel, which as yet is unlikely to contain any material subsidized by the Arts Council.
The above has at any rate the merit of heeding a third fact: when people decline to buy something, they usually do so because they see insufficient merit in what is on offer. And word gets round; I should guess that the term ‘short story’ has become a fully fledged consumer-deterrent in its own right, like ‘sensitive study’ in a different context. Short-story writers need another Kipling to restore their image. But Rudyard resurrected would have a plenitude of more urgent business on his hands.
In reprinting these pieces I have followed the policy of altering nothing material, merely supplying omissions and rectifying stylistic and factual erros. In particular, ‘Who or What Was It?’ retains its original form of radio script. Let me say here that the broadcast had an interesting and mildly appalling sequel. My intention had been to fool listeners into thinking it was a factual account until three-quarters of the way through and then, with luck, induce them to suspend their altogether necessary disbelief for the last few minutes. The detail about the cross was put in partly to make incredulity inescapable and final. For some, it missed its mark most grievously. An old friend, himself a novelist, the late Bruce Montgomery (‘Edmund Crispin’) telephoned to ask if the story was true; when I demanded to know how he could have thought that it could conceivably be true, he disarmingly shifted his ground by saying he wondered if I had had a go of DTs. A television producer telephoned to suggest using it for one of a new series of programmes on the supernatural. I asked how it was proposed to set about this. ‘Well,’ came the reply, ‘I thought we might start by taking the cameras along to the pub.’ I said, ‘Pub! What pub?’ and there was a great silence.
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