“The God of Death has come.” Shouted by a Japanese Imperial Naval Marine* upon seeing Marines landings on Betio, forever enshrined in the notes taken in interviews by MIS translators during the battle for Tarawa.
The filth, the crawling over sharp coral, running crouched, hunched over with every muscle in the body nearly rigid with fear, the noise which never stopped, artillery, flamethrowers, grenades and the constant pop of gunfire. Battleship shells weighing a ton, Destroyers nearly run up on the beach duking it out with gun emplacements at point blank range. A miss is a miss but the M-1 round still can kill at 6,500 yards, over 3.5 miles. The Japanese Arisaka type 99 rifle could kill at 3,700 hundred yards. No place on the island could be safe for the soldier. The air is full of them. There was no place safe. No one could think or conceive of any other universe. The Battle of Okinawa (Operation Iceberg) was the final major land battle of World War II, lasting 82 days from April 1 to June 22, 1945. It was a brutal, large-scale engagement where U.S. and Allied forces fought Japanese troops on the island of Okinawa, the last step before a potential invasion of Japan. The battle was exceptionally bloody, resulting in massive casualties for both sides, including a significant loss of civilian life among the Okinawan people, and heavily influenced the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons on Japan.
Soldiers are so young. Is it impossible that they should be able to process the situation they are in? When they awaken at the bottom of their waterlogged foxholes after dreams of home they understood there was no escape.
Witness this Marine Ambulance driver’s letter home written about half way through the invasion. He would celebrate his 19th birthday on Okinawa.
Dear Folks. I know you have been worried about me but as you see I’m still very much O K. I’ve had a few close calls but that can be expected on this Rock. They say in the stateside news that this island is secure but, but they still have eight more miles to go so you can figure that out. We are three miles back from the front licking our wounds now and waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe we go back and maybe we don’t. I guess I’ve seen most of this island so far—enough anyway.
Private John Brewster Loomis USMC, Headquarters company, 1st Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division. MOS 245, Truck Operator. Just before shipping out to the Pacific, 1944.
Shuri Castle was a rich joint and Naha used to be quite a town. I am sitting in Jap truck now that we picked up in our travels. It is something like a ton and a half and something like a Chevrolet but right hand drive. I’m a little thinner but feel alright. (He entered the Marines at 5′ 11″ and 160 lbs.) Instead of “Golden Gate in ’48, it’s from Hell to Heaven in ’47. Old Snowball, a friend, is still alright as far as I know. We sure took a beating but took our objective.
Dad I’m sorry I couldn’t write on your birthday but Happy Fathers day and Fourth of July.
The weather is better now, cold at night. Last night was the first time I got to take off my shoes when I hit the sack. They brought us a little better chow for a while. Boy! Am I tired of C-Rations. My old ambulance is still running but it doesn’t look the same-no windshield. bumpers, paint, top or sides-justone seat and the stretcher racks.
I had my picture taken the other day by Division. I don’t know if it will get in the papers or not. I sure didn’t look like much that day.
Well, folks, I’ll write when I can and I hope from now on that will be very often. Much Love John.**
Modified by Holden an Australian body building company, this is the Jeep type ambulance John Loomis drove on Okinawa. The Marine Corps used this much more, go anywhere ambulance instead of the big GM trucks used in Europe. The rugged terrain and mud sloppy roads couldn’t be navigated by trucks and Sherman Tanks were sometimes used as tow trucks if they didn’t sink in the mud holes themselves. Almost everything was hand carried by exhausted Marines themselves.
As the battle for Okinawa came to a close, many of the Nisei translators were ordered off the island. The almost complete annihilation of the defenders meant there was little to do. In preparation for the invasion of Japan there was a mountain of captured documents to be gone through and they were needed back at headquarters.
The Lieutenant gathered the Nisei translators in a shell hole covered with a tent fly then read the names of those who would take one of the LCIs out to the attack transport (APA-139, the USS Broadwater) for transport back to Manila for further orders. Hilo and his team were leaving the island.
MacArthurs headquarters were now in the ruins of Manila. After unloading at Cavite Naval base in Manila bay, the MIS boys were trucked to the city and reported for duty.
Hilo and his team were issued new orders and upon pulling them open with a mixture of excitement and dread inherent in the action were delighted and almost giddy with the news that they were to report to Subic Bay for immediate transport to Naval base Long Beach, California to begin a 30 day leave. They were being sent home to rest before the invasion of Japan.
USS Broadwater APA-139 and USS Bellepheron ARL-31, a landing craft repair ship at anchor, San Francisco 1944
They were going to be transported by one on the Navy’s APAs or Attack Transports such as the USS Broadwater APA-139. The APAs*** were the real workhorses of the Navy. They were designed and built on Liberty and Victory ship hulls for the purpose of transporting men and supplies. With their boats they were able to house, feed and land an entire marine battalion of fifteen hundred men. Anchored just offshore, in harms way, they would swing out the landing craft, load the Marines and their equipment and then the Cox’ns would drive them into the landing beaches. When they had unloaded they would wait to receive the wounded and other men pulled off the line and return them to base. Equipped as emergency hospital ships they would offload casualties to the larger dedicated hospital ships waiting outside the arc of Japanese artillery fire and Kamikaze air strikes.
An Aircraft carriers hanger deck loaded with casualties from Okinawa, April 1945. War Department Photo.
The Navy operated over three hundred of these ship along with freighters of the Liberty and Victory types, over fifty oilers, and a myriad of specialty support ships. This allowed the Navy, Marines, and the US Army to operate efficiently more than 7,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean where there was little infrastructure to support operations. The logistics of the operations are literally mind boggling.
The APA’s were to serve a special purpose beginning in the waning weeks of July and August 1945. In the service any action needs have a name to identify it. Most, such as Okinawa which was dubbed “Iceberg” and the invasion of Guadalcanal “Operation Watchtower” general have no meaning other than to confuse the enemy but the name for the last major movement of men was oddly prescient. Operation “Magic Carpet” would return veterans of the Pacific home. By August the allies had just over 23 million troops and support service men in the western Pacific. The Aussies, New Zealanders, British, French, Dutch and the Mexican Air Force were all going home. Magic Carpet would be the largest mass transport of men and women ever attempted. Every ship type was going to be utilized for transport.
On July 25th Hilo Fuchiwaki and his team boarded an APA in Subic bay. The boys must have leaned over the ships rail and watched the sailors on the dock cast of their lines and felt the ship begin to vibrate as she backed into the stream and headed for home.
Dear Dona Page 15 is next.
Cover Photo: Holden Jeep ambulance. Missing one fender, other one dented. Shrapnel hole in hood, broken windshield. The exhaust pipe is extended to get it out of the mud. No paint and tow strap wrapped around the bumper. Hard used.
*Rikusentai, Imperial Japanese Naval Marine Infantry.
**The letter must have been written after the the capture of the Katchin peninsula by the 1st Marines. The battle for the island still had about ten weeks of combat left. He was, after a short rest to participate in some of the most brutal fighting ever seen in WWII. Private Loomis earned the Bronze Star for his actions on Okinawa.
***The book “Away All Boats” which was made into a movie of the same name based on the 1953 novel by Kenneth M. Dodson (1907–1999), who served on the USS Pierce (APA-50) in World War II and used his experiences there as a guide for his novel. It is considered a classic in naval literature.
Michael Shannon is a writer and lives in Arroyo Grande, California.
White House Smithsonian Committee study group has released the first photos of the new “Slavery Was Nice” exhibit. Replacing the old “Nasty Slavery was Harsh” display will be the colored people who are the most famous in history as identified by the president’s council. No one has ever seen an exhibit like this, it’s great and perfectly demonstrates the Presidents vision of America’s people and their exceptional history where no bad things ever really happened like the terrible libs say they did.
Welcome to America sir, I expect you and your family had a good trip from the Congo.
Livin’ de good life down the plantation.
Shuck n’ jive Saturday night.
Playin’ wit de white chilluns.
Uncle Remus tellin’ dem stories, Hydee hi, hydee hay.
Easter Sunday, April 1st, 1945, and where were you? I was resting in my mother’s arms in Sisters Hospital Santa Maria California. Staffed with sisters from the Poor Clares, a Irish enclosed order of the Holy Roman Catholic church. The sisters carried me to my mother from the nursery wrapped in a blue blanket and a small green ribbon tied in a bow in my sprig of blond hair, the only child born on that day. It’s been my luck.
Half a world away on the same date the tenth United States army made up of three Marine divisions and four army divisions started going ashore on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Supported by the Navy’s Fifth fleet made up of three separate task force units and the British, Australian Royal Canadians and New Zealanders. The combined forces numbered nearly 541,000 troops, 184,000 thousand of them combat infantry. The invasion was supported by a fleet consisting of 18 battleships, 27 cruisers, 177 destroyers/destroyer escorts, 39 aircraft carriers (11 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 22 escort carriers) and various support and troop transport ships.
One of the great euphonius names of WWII commanded at Okinawa. Lt. General Simon Boliver Buckner jr. Named for his father he commanded the entire 10th Army. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute and the US Military Academy at West Point he had served in WWI and The Philippine Insurrection which I’m sure the Filipinos considered a war. His father Buckner sr. served in the Mexican war, the Civil war, was a Confederate General and Governor of Kentucky. General Buckner had iron clad credentials. Considered a soldiers General he was on the front lines with the 2nd Marine Division when he was warned by marines to remove his helmet with it’s three gold stars because they could see them a half mile away. He did. Moments later a small artillery shell hit near him and he was wounded by coral shards and died less than an hour later while being operated on in an aid station located in a shell hole.. He was one of four US Generals killed in WWII.
General Buckner was just one of the 200,000 deaths, including both military personnel and civilians. It was an orgy of killing and the newspapers back home listed casualties of such high numbers that the public which had become inured to the death toll was shocked into a stunned numbness. Marine casualties exceeded the total number of a single fully manned division. It was as if one of the three Marine divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 6th has been completely wiped off the face of the earth. The army suffered equally with over 19,000 dead and wounded. The Navy lost thirteen destroyers sunk by Kamikazes. Nearly sunk, the Essex class carrier USS Franklin, CV-13, the “Big Ben” lost 1,294 with 807 killed in the greatest single ships loss since the USS Arizona. Lest any one should think that support personnel were relatively safe 35,000 cooks, seabees, truck drivers, labor detachments, hospital corpsman and doctors were killed and wounded. The dead included two war correspondents.*
When the “Butchers Bill” was presented to the population of the United States and its government they were aghast. What was it going to cost to invade the Japanese homeland? You could scarcely drive down a street in the countries small towns without seeing small banners with gold and blue stars hanging in windows.
The Battle of Okinawa was a victory for the US but resulted in massive casualties on both sides. Japanese forces fought with the same fanaticism the Americans had witnessed in battles such as Iwo Jima and Peleliu. Rather than be taken prisoner, defenders often chose suicide. Okinawa was so close to home, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action. The battle created a humanitarian disaster for civilians as well. It is believed that the number of civilians casualties was greater than all battle casualties combined. Combatants on both sides, after three years of war were completely numb, bereft of any kind of humanity. Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge both wrote books about their experiences and told the same story. Marines and soldiers automatically shot Imperial Japanese soldiers who were wounded, they also shot the dead to be sure they stayed that way. They told of the absolute necessity in a cold, pragmatic way, emotionless. No combat rifleman wanted an enemy soldier playing dead to suddenly come back to life and jump into their foxhole at night.
Later in Vietnam, a marine sergeant told Lieutenant Phillip Caputo. “Sir, before you leave here you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy. Phillip Caputo was Marine officer who served as a platoon leader in Vietnam. He was right. It is a quote that describes soldiers as far back in antiquity as you choose to go. It could have been said by a Hoplite in Alexander the Greats Macedonian/Greek army two and a half thousand years ago.
For the last time the Nisei boys boarded assault ships and sailed for the islands of the Ryukyu Group of which Okinawa was the largest island, 66 miles long and seven miles wide on average it was to be the last major battle of the Pacific war though no one knew it yet. It was also going to be the deadliest.
MIS camp, Okinawa, 1945. Signal Corps photo
The Japanese Imperial Army wasn’t nearly on it’s last legs. The Military leaders in Tokyo had determined that they would not engage in offensive battle but rather set up defense in depth and attempt to bleed the Americans dry. They well knew that after three years of increasingly brutal fighting the American public was losing heart. Printed in the nations newspapers casualty lists were enormous. Though newsmen tried to put a positive spin on war news, the Battle of the Bulge had just ended and cost the American army 81,000 casualties. People were war weary. We were running out of children to sacrifice. The High School class of 1944 was just finishing training and was headed for the front.
Mom’s cousin Don Polhemus, lost on the USS Spence during typhoon Cobra, her brother headed for the western Pacific on a destroyer. My dad’s best friend Sgt. Harry Chapek, killed in France, and his cousin Bill Marriott had just left New Guinea and was headed for Okinawa . Jim Moore, son of the judge and my grandparent’s closest friends LST was bombed in the Pacific.The war was everywhere in our little county. There were military posts in literally every town and all along the coast. People don’t think about it much anymore but there were P-38’s at Santa Maria, flying cadets at Hancock field, Coast artillery units above Pismo Beach, a Rec. Center in Grover City where my mother volunteered. There was a Coast Guard bases in Morro Bay and Avila beach. Amphibious landing were practiced along the Atascadero Beach. Camp San Luis Obispo was the largest infantry training base in the country turning out ten thousand soldiers with every cycle. Camp Roberts in north county on the Hearst ranch and just to the south Camp Cooke where Patton’s tank Divisions had trained on the dunes above Lompoc before North Africa.. Mom said military convoys clogged the old highway and would go through Arroyo Grande, rumbling people awake at all hours. The list carried in the old Arroyo Grande Herald Recorder titled “Our Boys in the Service” was filled with nearly four hundred names in August of 1943. They were the last names of kids I would go to school with. The bus drivers, librarians and teachers in our schools, the postman, truck drivers, housewives, doctors and pharmacists, all listed. Those that would never come home marked with a small black star. There were more than a few. All from a town with a population of less than five thousand people.
The troops were weary too. The American leadership put no real censorship on the news and the people at home and their families wrote of neighbor boys who were dead, wounded and captured. Every day, every thought grounded in the agony of a war that seemed to have no end.
Hilo and his team must have worked frantically to translate all the information coming in from the Army and Marines. The temptation is to think that all this emphasis on information was at this point useless. We al know the end of the story. Thats the problem with history. Though we can study events for their meaning there is one thing we cannot do and that is see the future. Hilo and his team hadn’t the least inkling of where it would end. The man at the center of the hurricane has no idea where the way out is. Even the big brass in the Phillipines, Pearl Harbor and Washington DC had no crystal ball. The only thing they could do was to press ahead.
Planning for the invasion of the Japanese islands was well under way. The war in Europe would soon be over, there was no doubt of that. Germany was finished. The only question was how much longer would the insane self destruction continue. Even the Dogface trudging along German roads, still dying daily knew it was over. They all wanted to live, Japan was waiting. They knew that is was different fighting the Japanese than the Germans. No one wanted to go. But they did. The first Army Air Corps units had already arrived from England. The Generals had no doubt that when the time came they would go. Bill Matousek, some day to be my family doctor, as a fresh replacement tank driver who arrived on the line just days before the battle of the Bulge knew it. My sister in laws father had fought all the way from Sicily to Anzio to southern France, he knew it too. Del Holloway, Orville Shultz, John Loomis*** Arch and Leo Harloe, your father too, they all knew what the next step was going to be. It’s all they talked about. It seemed to them that it would last for years. “Golden Gate in ’48” they said.
They knew nothing of the Manhattan Project and the bomb. During the fight for Okinawa, FDR died .On April 12th the day of his death the first order of business for the new President, Harry Truman was to be told about the bomb. It would be up to him to decide.
Ernest “Ernie” Pyle, the soldiers friend killed on Okinawa April 18, 1945 RIP National Cemetery of he Pacific, “Punchbowl” 2177 Puowaina Dr. Honolulu, Oahu, Hawai’i
They lie supine in their regimented rows where once they stood. They are the waste. The war dead. Those who know nothing pass them by on the road. Only as long as the markers, the holy grail of the left living, be visited by those who remember will they signify the personal cost. On memorial days and anniversaries families may gather at the stones to remember their children who all too often were in their teens or early twenties when they died. But during the rest of the year they are noticed only by the caretakers who mow between the stones.
The consequences, the blind, the amputees, the depressed, the suicidal, these insane, these jobless, these homeless, the side effects and delayed effects whose very existence keeps memories of the war alive when most citizens can’t wait to forget, or, remember in a circumscribed vision for the burial of the dead is a burial of memory. The National Cemeteries fulfill a desire to set it all aside. No one can say that they are not moving places but the arranged beauty does not evoke any memory of terrible battles.
Perfectly aligned marble does not resemble the memory of the men who lived them, but rather masks the heaps of the dead and wounded, They lay in piles, in fragments, limbs broken and contorted, Burned, muddy clothes shredded or ripped from bodies by the sheer velocity of the man made forces that took their lives. This, the veteran of combat knows and of which he will not speak. The impossible knowledge cannot be conveyed to the living, the wives and children and grandchildren. Thats the secret, the wilderness of slaughter and death, put away as if in a box to be gradually forgotten. It speaks to the resiliency of memory, the ability by some to bury the scars so deep they can never be found.**
Punchbowl
Next, Chapter 14. Home, it’s all changed.
*During the Battle of Okinawa in World War II, Ernie Pyle, a renowned American war correspondent, was killed by enemy fire. He was covering the battle for American newspapers and was known for his deeply humanizing accounts of soldiers’ experiences. Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of the “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Ie jima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa. Another journalist, John Cashman, was killed in an aircraft crash on Okinawa on July 31, 1945,
**As far as I know I am the only living member of my family who recalls Corporal Edgar Green of the 2nd Australian Infantry whose grave is in the Baghdad North Gate military cemetery in Iraq. When I am gone so is Edgar, his incredible and brutal goes story with me. Markers are not for the dead but for the living.
Grandpa called Grandma from the phone in the Signal office on Orizaba Street. He gave her good news. She especially liked the idea of going back to Santa Barbara. As was the custom with them she started getting all that the little family would be taking with them together. Clothes for the girls and Bob, toiletries and whatnots, just what could be packed in a suitcase. The kids carried their own. My mother was twelve and Mariel thirteen. Bob had just turned ten so whatever they could carry was what they took. Moms piano and a little furniture would have to be shipped later. Uncle Marion would drive them down by the same route they had gone up to Madera. Marion was counting on Bruce to put him on a crew so it seemed like a good bet.
Following the work was the name of the game then just as it is today. My mother said it was normal for kids who had never known any other way. They kids knew how to make new friends and were all sociable at that age. It would never change as they grew.
Grandma could shake and bake. Get ’em packed, sacked and on the road. Rent a house, bring the goods and move ’em in. Enroll in school, do it in jig time too.
733 East Islay St, Santa Barbara. The 1930, Home to the Hall’s, Zillow photo
She had the whole thing down to a science. Grandpa would come home from work or get a phone call telling him he had to be at another rig the next day or two and he would leave right away, Eileen and the kids would follow. The house shown above was their home after arriving from Madera in 1930.
Sam Mosher had a specific purpose in mind when he hired Bruce. Whipstocking. Although the Ellwood field was already operating he had bought some abandoned and unproved leases at the very edge of the Ellwood field.
Other companies geologists had determined there was no oil to be had. It was a big gamble for a small operator but the leases were cheap and his geologist thought that there were oil deposits if they went just a bit deeper. There was also a possibility that the so-called safe lease would be a total disaster. One thing about Sam Mosher, he was not risk averse.
Mosher who was born in Pasadena in in 1892, just three years younger than my grandfather. His father sent him to the University of California at Berkekly where he earned a BS in Agriculture. Right out of university he leased and began farming seventeen acres of Lemons and Avocados in Pico Rivera. In 1918 all of what is now western Los Angeles was farmland with a few small towns dotted about. It was a struggle and Sam worked sixty to seventy hours a week and then used his Ford tractor to plow and disc for other farmers near by. He always said afterward that he “Didn’t know a darn thing about oil wells or the business.
A single event changed all that. On June 23rd, 1921, a wildcat well on the lower slope of Signal Hill announced itself with a massive plume of crude oil. Coming in with a roar like the passing of a steam locomotive and the unbelievable shaking and rumbling of an earthquake, Alamitos no. 1 borned itself and set off the mad scramble for discovery on what became the richest field ever found.*
A drifting fog of micro dots of oil spread eastward on the back of the northwest ocean breeze, depositing crude on every surface. Clothesline’s, cars in the driveway and the houses themselves soon were coated with the sticky black residue of decomposed plant life from a tropical earth gone away millions of years ago.
Bumper to bumper lines of cars from Los Angeles came out to see the well. It was an event that would grow the city in ways none anticipated. The 25 miles to Signal Hill were dotted with small towns and orchards like Mosher’s in Pico Rivera. Looking up from his tractor’s seat, Sam Mosher couldn’t have helped thinking that the drudgery of farming could be traded for riches from the oil patch.
Alamitos number one set off a frenzy of drilling that within a few years saw wells in the Dominguez Hills, Torrance, Santa Fe Springs, Long Beach, Belmont shores, Seal Beach, The Bolsa Chica and Huntington Beach. Bruce would work them all.
The Halls were getting settled in Santa Barbara, kids enrolled in school and Bruce was back at work. Lucky for them too. Because of the depression unemployment was pushing 25%. There was no unemployment insurance or Federal minimum wage and hordes of desperate men and boys, women too, hopped the side door pullmans as they rattled back and forth across the country. Midwest farmers abandoned their farms because if you could find a bank to loan you “Crop Money” the crop itself would, more than likely not sell for enough to pay off the loan. More farms abandoned or foreclosed every week. Banks failed because there was no FDIC to guarantee money to keep them solvent. Factories cut wages to the bone, seeing it as the only way to turn a profit. In many cases it just didn’t work. More families took to the road than ever before in our history searching for work, just something to put food on the tables. The government of president Hoover blamed it on the workers. “They are Communists, Unionists, Fascists, they don’t want to work” he said. Sound familiar?
The Knight Riders, the Ku Klux Klan which had existed in the old Confederacy rose up from its deathbed and reappeared all across the county. Burning, looting and lynchings occurred for the first time in decades. Their target, Blacks, immigrants, Jews and unionists. The government did very little to stop it. The FBI focused it’s energies on these same people as Hoover acted as an enforcer for the wealthy entrenched establishment.
Business, finance, the law and government acted as if it was business as usual. unable or unwilling to do anything except support the status quo. Hoover, promising “A chicken in every pot” was one of the more callous election promises ever made in this country. He couldn’t produce the promise and wouldn’t seriously try. The callousness of the sitting government was focus on protecting those that had and not those that didn’t. It would cost him the Presidency in 1932.
The Oil Patch was no different, wages were sinking, drilling was slowing dramatically. With car sales plummeting no one needed the gasoline no matter how cheap. Every one in oil production understood this but at first they could not slow down. Pure greed, especially by the big companies like Standard, Sinclair, Richfield who could only survive by drilling held sway. When it got to the point where high production was unsustainable they cut costs to the point where the independents were forced to quit, putting thousands of roughnecks, toolies and supers on the road with laid the off factory workers, tractored out farmers and small business failures.
Everyone went from unbridled optimism, where no amount of oil seemed too much to the point where wells were simply pumping it into earthen pits waiting for a price hike and when they didn’t come, they walking away from their wells. In many cases no one bothered to even plug the casings leaving the well heads wide open.
An oil sump, Signal Hill, 1930. Long Beach Historical Society
The land owners who had leased their mineral rights to oil companies took it in the shorts too. Your little farm where you had some fruit trees an a few acres of vegetables were suddenly covered in waste oil, abandoned machinery, derricks and muddy roads everywhere. The trees were long dead, the house coated in oil mist and you never saw a dime from your share of production. You were abandoned too.
So, fortunate Bruce was. After twelve years traveling the state chasing crude you at least had a job with a small company which was hell bent on surviving by taking on the riskiest of projects on the chance that they might, could, or would pay off. Sam Mosher had given up the lease on his little seventeen acres of fruit trees in Pico Rivera so for him it was do or die.
With some Signal stock and promise of a piece of production for capital he didn’t have he bought a lease north of Elwood, near Goleta that had never been “Proved.” At what geologists thought was the end of the underground pool at Elwood, he bought from a local attorney in Santa Barbara who had leased some ranch land right at the foot of the tidal bluff just north of Tecolote canyon. The attorney had no luck and wasn’t able to find anyone who would even contract to drill there.
Though Geologists at the time had more than a century of practical experience in finding oil the devices used today where nonexistent in 1930. They looked for areas where surface indications showed the presence of undersea creatures. Fossils, like Trilobites on the surface especially on a hill or hills called Anticlines** sometimes indicated oil pools below. Ancient seabeds where plant life once flourished turned out to be where you could get rich drilling. The San Jaoquin Valley and the southern coastal regions of California had massive oil pools if you could find them.
We have a box of prehistoric sharks teeth that grandpa Bruce collected from the many leases he worked, mostly from the Elk Hills which runs along the valley’s westside. He would come home and thrill his children with tales of an ancient world where enormous sharks patrolled a sea which was now dry and dusty hills baking in the San Jaoquin valley’s brutal summer heat. My mother kept the teeth all of her life and the little box now resides in a drawer of the desk I’m writing this story on.
In the get rich quick culture of the oil business, landsmen would go out to areas where oil was discovered or about to be and for a fee or a promise of a percentage of production for a specified time the underground rights to said property were purchased. This meant that the oilman could drill on the property and if they found enough oil and it was worth producing, they would kick back to the actual owner of the land a specified percentage of sales. Leases on Signal Hill were sometimes negotiated by the square foot and even, in a few instances, by the square inch. How anyone could understand this complex and inherently crooked system is anyones guess. Of course that was a win for the oil men and their lawyers.
There were almost no rules. Oil companies with sharp lawyers and accountants ran roughshod over property owners all the time. Getting the right to drill without any up front money was the key for the Landsmen and many an owner ended up with his lot trashed, steeped in waste and marked with an abandoned wooden derrick as tall as 82′ feet looming over his house. An absolute frenzy occurred every time their was a big strike. On Signal hill and the west Los Angeles fields most of the leases were on standard house lots. Each lot might be a different wildcatter. Some derricks on the hill were so close together that their legs were intertwined. Drill stings became entangled hundreds of feet underground with one company drilling right through the pipe and casing of another. It was fertile ground for lawyers. Fertile ground for roughnecks too who went to war with their neighbors, fists, pipe, ball bats and six shooters were not uncommon and close to hand.
Signal Hill, east Willow street, California 1930. Calisphere.
Property owners were basically ignorant of the actual doings of companies. Fast talking lease buyers, shifty drillers and sharp lawyers could end up, through slight of hand, leaving the poor small farmer householder holding the bag. There was a property owner in Long Beach who told his friend at the barbershop that he was no fool, “That danged lease man offered me 10 points of the profits, but I ain’t nobody’s fool I’m holding out for a 20th.” He was getting more than one shave he just didn’t know it yet.
Mosher and his company signed the documents for the lease in Goleta but in so doing apparently no one read the docs very carefully. Under California the law at the time a leaseholder had 12 months to “prove” a lease by beginning drilling before time ran out. After signing the documents a sharp eyed engineer noted that all but 28 days of the year had gone by. Signal had just 28 days in which to prove the lease on a piece of property with no access, no road and at the foot of a steep bluff that ran down to the hight tide mark. To make matters worse they would have to seek permission to cross the tracks of the Southern Pacific RR tracks which meant red tape that could take a year or more. The Southern Pacific was once known as the Octopus and for good reason. There was no doubt on Orizaba street that they would do just that, squeeze as much out of Signal as they could.
It would seem to be a lost cause. Mosher sent his Varsity Team a he called it, the first gathering of the young experts he had hired at Signal to scout out ways to to spud in a well before the 28 days ran out. There was no road down to the beach just a brush choked gully. Maybe an access road could be bulldozed down it to get equipment in but there was no way to cross the RR tracks legally. No dozer, no road, no road, no steam shovel to cut down to the beach, checkmate. The property owner keeps the payment and Sam Mosher takes it in the shorts as the old saying goes.
After a couple days of nosing around one of the engineers walking the track had to cross a gully alongside the tracks and found back in the brush, a stone culvert the SP had built in order to throw the track across the ravine which was active in the winter and couldn’t be blocked. He looked over, scrambled down the slope to the creek bottom, took out his measuring tape did a few calculations and then high tailed it back to Goleta and called Orizaba street and talked to Garth Young, Mosher’s young, chief engineer.
“Garth, I found a way in where we don’t have to get permission from the railroad. I figure our shovel will just fit with about five inches to spare, we can just drive her in.”
Sam Mosher and Garth Young. 1930. Signal Oil Company photos.
Young replied, “Well we can’t do that it’s still railroad property and we have to have permission.”
“Hell with the railroad Garth, let’s just do it and deal with them later. What are they going to do after its done, sue us?”
“Probably, but what the hell lets just go ahead. Our times running out and we need the well or it’s all lost anyway.”
“OK boss, we’ll roll the shovel up tonight and we’ll be down to the bluff before sunlight. Those railroad stiffs will never know.” Getting permission from the railroad to pass through this culvert would have also held them up, so Garth Young decided to do it without telling his boss, relieving Mosher of any personal responsibility.
Mosher had already gotten permission to pass through the Eagle Canyon Ranch from the owner, Louis Dreyfus, while his Engineer, Garth Young’s boys had discovered a passageway to the shore.
The Culvert on Eagle Canyon. Goleta Historical photo.
The heavy-duty self propelled power shovel made its way through the dry Eagle Canyon creek bed. As it approached the culvert, the operator lowered the boom to horizontal, the huge clamshell shovel blades mere inches off the ground. The prehistoric looking iron beast slowly crept through the dark stone tunnel, foot by foot, as Garth Young watched in suspense. Without a hitch, the giant piece of machinery clanking and squealing crawled carefully through the dark tunnel and emerged into the dark of midnight. Walking alongside with flashlights they maneuvered the iron monster down the dry creek bed and onto a shelf above the driftwood littered beach.
Taking the first bite of the bluff. 1929. Goleta Historical Society.
Time to go to work. Times running out. Young explained to the operator that he would have to wait for the tide to go out, then clear a way down the beach to the foot of the cliff below Hydrocarbon Gulch. He would quickly dig a foothold at the base of the cliff before the tide comes back up. If he didn’t his shovel would sink into the wet sand and the job would be over. The driver laughed at the crazy plan and said it would likely take him 10 days. He would drive back to the culvert every high tide and return on the next low. But Garth Young told him they didn’t have 10 days, it needed to be done, and done today. And if he didn’t succeed, they had insurance for the power shovel anyway. No problem there except they, had no insurance which was a bit of a necessary fabrication as Garth saw it. If they lost the shovel it was a moot point anyway….
*The Long Beach Oil Field is a large oil field underneath the cities of Long Beach and Signal Hill, California, in the United States. Discovered in 1921, the field was enormously productive in the 1920s, with hundreds of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and adjacent parts of Long Beach; largely due to the huge output of this field. The Los Angeles Basin produced one-fifth of the nation’s oil supply during the early 1920s. In 1923 alone the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, and in barrels produced by surface area, the field was the world’s richest. During the early stages of the field’s development, unlike most oil fields, land was leased by the square inch instead of by the acre. The field is eighth-largest by cumulative production in California, and although now largely depleted, still officially retains around 5 million barrels of recoverable oil and has produced 963 million out of 3,600 million barrels of original oil in place. 294 wells remained in operation as of the beginning of 2008, and in 2008 the field reported production of over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The field is currently run entirely by small independent oil companies, with the largest operator in 2009 being Signal Hill Petroleum, Inc. Sam Mosher’s old company.
**An anticline is simply the opposite of a decline, meaning a geographic feature characterized by a geological fold in rock strata where the layers bend upwards, forming a convex shape, resembling an arch or an inverted “U”. It’s the opposite of a syncline, which is a downward fold. Anticlines often form due to compressional forces that cause rocks to bend and buckle rather than break. In oil fields the fold is created by the upward and immense pressure from the gas created by the decomposition of vegetation underground. It’s important to know that not every hill overlies and oil field hence the often used word “Lucky” applied to wildcatters.
Michael Shannon is a grandson of Bruce and Eileen Hall. The life of oilmen was a serious topic when he was growing up and listening to his mother’s stories about growing up in the oil patch. He writes so his children will know where they came from and who they are.
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