Searchlights Over the Harbor

In the weeks after Pearl Harbor the American coasts waited for the next attack. Blackouts were enforced, antiaircraft batteries dug in beside the ports, and searchlight crews slept by their lamps. On the evening of 23 February 1942 a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and shelled an oil field. The next night the Los Angeles area went to alert.

Shortly after 3:00 a.m. on 25 February the searchlights came on and the guns opened up. For about an hour the batteries fired some 1,400 rounds at targets nobody could identify. No bombs fell and no aircraft was found.

The Navy called it a false alarm the next morning. People who had stood on their roofs and watched the beams cross over the harbor were not so sure.

The picture is built out of straight white lines on near-black. Searchlight beams fan up from below the frame and cross each other high in the night, with flak bursts hanging between them like burnt paper. Tracers rise in thin dotted arcs. Down in the bottom left corner, a rooftop water tower and three small silhouettes anchor the scene — this is a city, and people are standing outside to watch. The harbor glimmers faintly along the bottom edge.