A 900-Foot Deep Secret

I was born in the first wave of Baby Boomers. I grew up in coastal Southern California where the leftovers of war were being surplussed and cleared away. New businesses popped up in leftover Quonset huts, hundreds of huge gray ships huddled together in "mothball fleets" in the harbors, and--most shocking to a small girl--constant reruns of the liberation of German concentration camps were shown on TV stations that apparently had nothing else to show between "Victory at Sea" episodes.

Our 1950s homes were the epitome of tiny modernity and everyone's dad had a shiny new car in the driveway. The dads all seemed to work at one of the many local aviation companies. My mother got excited whenever she saw a "Flying Fortress" overhead because she had helped build them. I thought everyone's mom could recognize airplanes in the sky.


I remember seeing piles of huge round black buoys at the Seal Beach (CA) Naval Depot. Boys at school swore they were explosive mines. "If they blew, they'd blow everything to kingdom come!" one male classmate said, eyes shining. I didn't then--and still don't--understand why boys liked to see things blow up.

One day when we were on our way to the beach, I pointed at the dark globes and asked my mom, "What are those?"She said she wasn't sure, but she thought they were floats to hold up underwater submarine nets. Oh, I said. But I always wondered: Did Japanese submarines come to California beaches during the war? It was weird to think about. My mom didn't know. Of course, she was only 14 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She said there weren't any reports in the paper about ships being sunk off our coast. She lived in San Diego, where she and her friends visited the beach as a regular part of their recreation. They were too busy taking pictures of each other in bathing suits to think about Japanese submarines.

As told in an AP Wire story a couple of days ago, the Japanese submarines were there, all right. They even sank a few of our ships, one of which was a very large oil tanker named the SS Montebello. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, it was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Cambria, near Hearst's Castle. The 39 crew members all survived, thanks to the residents of Cambria, who waded out through rocks and treacherous surf with ropes to help them ashore from their bullet-riddled lifeboat. It was big news in the local paper. But the story never made it to the national news . Why? Because, as the government admitted around 1988, they didn't want to create "hysteria" in the populace. Fair enough. People might have indeed panicked if they'd known enemy subs were close enough to watch through periscopes as they ate their dinners. Even with sturdy submarine nets in place, a couple of miles offshore seems uncomfortably close.

The danger of keeping a secret like that for too long was revealed in the recent news article. It seems the SS Montebello--and its three million gallons of oil--lies in 900 feet of water dangerously close to the Montery Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Government agencies are mounting an expedition to test the oil--which they think is the consistency of peanut butter by now--to see if it's a danger to wildlife if the tanks give way. (My thought is: how would it not be? But what do I know?)

My childhood question has been answered, and I don't like the results. My conspiracy-theorist friends are probably having a field day with this one. I chose to exercise my imagination in a different way: I wrote a short fiction story about a fifteen-year-old girl seeing a Japanese sub off the coast of her beach in 1941. People don't believe her because it wasn't on the news. Maybe I should give her a camera...