Part 17 (2/2)

That is the situation of California from the side of the Pacific Ocean.

What is it from the land side?

If j.a.pan contemplated an invasion of our territory, how many are there who realize that just five dynamite bombs exploded in the right places would block a tunnel on every one of the railroads leading into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley?

The California and Oregon from the north.

The Southern Pacific from the south.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Central Pacific and the Western Pacific from the east.

Blow up one tunnel on each line and do the job thoroughly and well as the j.a.panese would do it,--that's the j.a.panese way,--and it would be weeks and perhaps months before one single train could be got in or out of California.

We may rest a.s.sured also that the j.a.panese, when they undertook that job, would not stop with blowing up one tunnel. They would blow up a dozen on every one of the railroads mentioned, and bridges and culverts and trestles. With a little dynamite, mixed with the reckless daring of the j.a.panese, California could be made inaccessible to an army from the east, except by sea, for a longer time than it would take to transport an army from Asia to America.

No doubt the idea will occur to some that soldiers could be transported from the Atlantic Coast to California through the Panama Ca.n.a.l in time to meet such an emergency. But what would we transport them in? We have no s.h.i.+ps. And it is no sure thing that the j.a.panese would not get the Panama Ca.n.a.l blown up and stop that channel of transportation, if war was begun between them and the United States. It would require nothing more desperate to accomplish it than we know the j.a.panese are ready for at any time the opportunity offered--nothing more desperate than Hobson's feat at Santiago.

The j.a.panese are a farsighted people and war with them is an exact science.

They master every detail in advance. They proved that in their war with Russia. There can be no doubt--not because they have any hostile intentions towards the United States, but merely because it is a part of the duty of their professional military scientists--that the plans are now made in the war office at Tokio, for every detail of the whole project outlined above for dynamiting every railroad into California and blowing up the Panama Ca.n.a.l, in the event of war between the United States and j.a.pan. And it is quite probable that the men are detailed for the job and the dynamite carefully stored away with which to do the job, if the necessity arose for it.

_The j.a.panese do not want a war with the United States._

Neither did they want a war with Russia. But it is a part of their religion to be prepared for war. It is the thorough j.a.panese way. Their way is not our way. They take no chances. We do nothing else but take chances. Because what we are doing or have done for national defense is as nothing.

All we spend on our navy is wasted, so far as any possible trouble with j.a.pan is concerned. If war came, it would come like the eruption of Mont Pelee, so unexpectedly and quickly that escape was impossible. The people of the United States, if we have a war with j.a.pan, will awaken some morning and read in all their morning papers that the Panama Ca.n.a.l has been blown up, and that tunnels on all the railroads into California and the Colorado River Bridges at Yuma and Needles have been blown up; that the 50,000 or more j.a.panese soldiers in California have mobilized and intrenched themselves in impregnable positions in the mountains of the coast range near the ocean; that j.a.panese steamers have landed 10,000 more j.a.panese soldiers to reenforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, aeroplanes, and a complete equipment for a field campaign by this j.a.panese army of 60,000 men; that those j.a.panese steamers have landed at some entirely unfortified roadstead in California: Bodega Bay or Tomales Bay or Purissima or Pescadero or Santa Cruz or Monterey or Port Harford or any one of a dozen other places where they could land between San Diego and Point Arena.

The j.a.panese making this landing would within two days make a junction with the j.a.panese already in California. Then an army of occupation of 60,000 veteran soldiers is in military control of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley.

How surprised the good people would be who have been so anxious to get enough of the ”inferior people” who are willing to do ”squat labor” for the American _owners of the country_, which had just been taken away from them by the j.a.panese. Does it make any American proud to contemplate that the whole situation above outlined is not only possible but that it is the exact thing that would happen if we had a war with j.a.pan?

Soldiers for defense? We could not get them there in time, and we cannot maintain a soldier in idleness in a barracks in California for every j.a.panese who is industriously earning his living in a potato field, doing ”squat labor” and thinking the while that he wishes his country would make it possible, as she could so easily do, for him to own a potato patch himself. Let no one imagine he is not thinking about it. The j.a.panese are a farsighted and subtle people, with brains four thousand years old.

And with this army of occupation of 60,000 j.a.panese veterans in possession of the great central valley of California, what would the j.a.panese do with our coast fortifications and the big guns that cost so much money and were designed to riddle j.a.panese battles.h.i.+ps miles at sea?

Why, the j.a.panese would just laugh at them. They would not be worth taking.

If they thought they were they would take them, just as they took Port Arthur and Tsing Tau. But they would not try to do that until they had landed a couple of hundred thousand more veteran j.a.panese troops on the Pacific Coast. Then they would take our coast fortifications from the land side not so much by storm as by _swarm_.

What would the California Militia be doing all this time?

_It is better not to dwell on unpleasant subjects._

Most probably they would be defending San Francisco or Sacramento from invasion while the j.a.ps were intrenching themselves in the appropriate places to control every pa.s.s across the Siskiyous or the Sierras or the Tehachapi Mountains, making it impossible to get across those mountains with an army, even though the army could first be got across the deserts to the mountains.

In winter the Siskiyous and the Sierras would be made impa.s.sible by Nature's snow and ice and avalanches, without any other defenses being built by the j.a.panese.

But one of the first things the j.a.panese would do would be to organize a force of aeroplane scouts with bombs to swoop out and down from their mountain aeries and dynamite culverts and bridges on every railroad approaching the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. They could make it impossible to keep open railroad communication in any way other than by an adequate force to repel an aeroplane attack stationed at every bridge and culvert across a thousand miles of desert. Once the bridges across the Colorado River at the Needles and Yuma were blown up, the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe would be out of commission for months.

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