Author: admin

Posted on

Coastside WWII: Excerpts From Letters Written By Staff Sergeant George Dunn, Jr.

February 1945

From the Half Moon Bay Review

(Note: S/Sgt Dunn is the son of Mr and Mrs. George Dunn, Editor and Publisher of The Review and Pebble. He has been stationed in the Pacific War Area for the past 18 months…S/Sgt George Dunn is with the Sixth Army Corps, the 160th Infantry of the 40th Division who landed on Luzon in an 800 ship convoy on January 9th when General Douglas MacArthur started the liberation of the Philippines.)

Letter from S/Sergeant George Dunn, Jr.

“If you don’t mind me writing in a “fox hole,” I’ll get a long delayed letter written to you. I expect my dear you know I am somewhere in the Philippines, in fact I suppose by now you even know, from the radio and newspapers, just where, and probably know just what we are doing.

“Our landing was most exciting, in fact, that word doesn’t express to well what we went thru that day.
“I’m getting a little ‘breather’ today, surely was tired for a few days. Haven’t had my clothes off yet, my change should be up from the ‘rear’ soon.

“The Filipino people are greeting us with open arms. They are very poor after three years of Jap control, but even so, they give us eggs, chickens and bananas in exchange for American cigarettes.

“They have been more than willing to dig my Message Center holes, believe me I have surely dug enough of them. It is a good thing they do help because we haven’t always had “quiet” time enough.

“I can tell you this much, a Jap is no one to have around until he is dead and I’ve seen plenty of them. Our Army and Navy Air Corps, and the boys up here in the front lines are really giving it to them.

“I had quite a night last night. It was raining very hard, in fact there were four inches of rain in my fox hole, thought I could stick it out tho until a small pig crawled in with me, that was too much. I got out and took cover under a shack. I traded my underwear for a barbecued chicken this noon, did tht ever taste good.

“You have no idea how it feels to get out of that jungle and see some civilization, at least this seems civilized to us after where we have been. There are a lot of very old churches here and very huge. All of the houses are built off of the ground and made of bamboo, but even they look good to me.

Continue reading “Coastside WWII: Excerpts From Letters Written By Staff Sergeant George Dunn, Jr.”

Posted on

Coastside WWII: “Most of the sailors coming down to my Dad’s bar in Moss Beach would walk,” recalls Elaine Martini Teixeira.

(Photo: Elaine Martini Teixeira at far right, with sister Loretta.)

“Some probably drove a vehicle, the sailors that were permanently stationed there. We got to know a few of them: a cook, butcher, and chief petty officer of the commissary; they drove down. The main group of sailors only stayed a short time to practice the gunnery, shooting at the target behind a plane, which took off from the local airfield at Princeton. It would make continuous trips around, coming in from the Half Moon Bay side, out over the ocean. You could hear it and see it because the tracers left their trail through the air.”

(Photo: Elaine’s father owned a bar near the corner of Sunshine Valley Road & Ethleldore.)

Posted on

Coastside WWII: All the way south to Davenport

Special thanks to John Vonderlin ([email protected]) for the following post.

From: Coast Dairies Property: A Land Use History, click here

“The Davenport cement plant (it became Pacific Cement and Aggregates in 1956, Lonestar Cement Corporation in 1965 and RMC Pacific Materials in 1988), brought immediate military attention to the North Coast following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Believing that Japan might attack the U.S. mainland, the military quickly posted guards and lookouts around Davenport and imposed stringent blackout requirements on its residents.

“Later in December, when the ship Agiworld was attacked by a Japanese submarine off Cypress Point south of Monterey, security along the coast was heightened. A Japanese submarine was also sighted off the coast a few miles north of Davenport, resulting in a brief skirmish between the submarine and a single plane from the Army Air Corps.

“Eventually a segment of the all-black 54th Coast Artillery was stationed at Davenport and regular night canine patrols were instituted at all the area beaches. In addition, four shore mounted guns were placed strategically around the Cement Plant. Two 75mm guns were mounted overlooking the pier and two 155mm Howitzers were mounted just to the east of Newtown. Many of the young people living in the area at the time became airplane spotters, spending long hours in the lookout stations posted along the coastal hills.”

Posted on

Coastside WWII: South Coast Tunnels

Bobbi Ballard Pimentel remembers:

My Dad, Robert (Bob) Ballard was born in Pescadero along with 11 other brothers and sisters….he took me to the tunnels on several occasions and told me that they were used to store guns and ammunition during the war. He helped ‘build’ them. I do not recall where the others were although I do remember that they were mostly on the water’s edge, but there were tunnels and observations points high above Gazos Creek…there was a military facility there too. That, my husband and I discovered in the early ’60’s that there is (or was ) a missile base in the Santa Cruz Mountains…we found it by accident while on a Sunday drive with our first child…Dad had a lot of memorabilia that he received from the military personnel stationed in the Pescadero area…When the troops left the area (I was very young at the time..(born 6/6/42)…they left a Springer Spaniel dog behind…he became my pet…Billy.

————–

Peering into a South Coast tunnel, photo by John Vonderlin

Posted on

Coastside WWII: Camp Miramar

When I first landed on the Coastside, and became intrigued with local history, I met with Louie Miguel, whose father, Joseph, was one of the masterminds behind the spectacular Palace Miramar Hotel. Louie offered good background info and also talked about the US military taking over his father’s buildings during WWII.

[The military moved into many of the Coastside’s public buildings, and most certainly, those located on the beach side of the highway, as the Palace was.]

Below: To visit the “California State Military�? website, click here

Camp Miramar

Story by Command Sergeant Major (CA) Dan Sebby

The former Camp Miramar was established on 21 April 1943 when the U.S. Army entered into leases with several land owners in order to provide for a camp to house infantry units assigned to the Western Defense Command. The 1 June 1943 edition of the Station List of the Army of the United States, issued by the Adjutant General of the U.S. Army, stated that a single rifle company, Company G of the 125th Infantry Regiment, was present at Camp Miramar.

At the time of acquisition, there were two major buildings that the U.S. Army took control of. The first was the Miramar School, a small elementary school that served the local faming community and located on the eastern parcel, between State Highway 1 and Valencia Street. The other major building was the Palace Miramar Hotel and Resort, a large redwood-shingled building located on the beach in the western parcel of the Site.

To these substantial buildings, the U.S. Army added several temporary barracks, mess halls and support buildings. These were of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) design developed by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in the late 1930’s. These prefabricated, wood framed buildings could be assembled in as little as three hours by joining components with lag screws. Creosote soaked posts served as the foundation for these buildings. With the CCC buildings included, the post had a capacity to house 495 soldiers.
Palace Miramar Hotel and Beach Resort in the 1920’s (www.halfmoonbaymemories.com).

In a letter to the Adjutant General, U.S. Army; dated 23 January 1944, the Western Defense Command identified the Site as vacant and excess to its needs. On 11 May 1944, Office of the Chief of Engineers at the War Department approved a request from the Bureau of Yards and Docks of the Navy Department for the six of the barracks and one on the latrine buildings. This transfer of the buildings to the Point Montera Anti-Aircraft Training Center was made without the U.S. Navy becoming responsible for restoration the land on which the buildings were situated.

From September until December 1944, the U.S. Army terminated its leases for the Site. A 1946 aerial photograph does not show any of the CCC buildings remaining. On 6 May 1952, the U.S. Army terminated its permits for water and sewer lines that ran along State Highway 1.

Building Schedule
Facility Name or Function Quantity Building Type Size
Mess Hall 2 CCC design 20′x130′
Barracks 3 CCC design 20′x130′
Barracks 2 CCC design 20′x120′
Barracks 3 CCC design 20′x100′
Officers Quarters 1 CCC design 20′x70′
Storage 1 CCC design 20′x40′
Storage 1 CCC design 20′x30′
Latrine 1 CCC design 20′x45′
Latrine 1 CCC design 20′x55′
Miramar School 1 Unlnown 3,500 square feet
Palace Miramar 1 Wood Frame

Sources: NARA Records, College Park, Maryland

Posted on

Coastside WWII: WASP Searches For Summer of 1944

(Photo at right: Shirley Thackara in the PQ14 at the Moss Beach military airstrip)

Former Air Force Service Pilot Shirley Thackara returned to the Coastside in 1993 to reclaim WWII memories of flying PQ14s, tiny planes, so tiny only one person could fit inside.

She flew the PQ14 out of a military airstrip in Moss Beach. Her scarey assignment three years after Pearl Harbor, she told me, “was supposed to be very hush-hush�?. What she did was tow targets behind the plane and military gunners on the ground practiced shooting at them— pretty dangerous if they missed as stray bullets could do damage to both civilians and Shirley herself– which was why the training occurred on the remote Coastside.

But when Shirley came back to Moss Beach almost 50 years later she said she couldn’t find anything she recognized.

The memories hid from her because the Coastside had grown up ,and the reminders swept away since the summer of 1944—when Shirley, a 5’11�? former Pan American Airways secretary– decided to turn in her manual typewriter and learn how to fly during WWII.

She trained at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts and after 200 hours of flight time she made the grade, became a member of the coveted Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPS) and was assigned to Moss Beach where she bunked at the edge of the flight strip with fellow WASPS Mary Lee Leatherbee and Mildred Toner. Women flying military planes was groundbreaking.

Moss Beach was in the countryside but even more remote than Shirley Thackara expected. When she saw her new home, an abandoned farmhouse with curtainless windows, her response was “….it was so awful, it was funny. Everything in dark wood, showing signs of once having been a bird house, three rooms, kitchen with nothing but a sink—and absolutely no furniture except three Army cots.�?

Parked outside what she dubbed “the fishing shack�? was Shirley’s 1941 Mercury convertible. She recalled driving along the cliffs to Half Moon Bay, but she couldn’t find the road in 1993. The “fishing shack�? was gone, the military strip wasn’t where she remembered it and even the road she had traveled had disappeared.

They flew the PQ14s at Moss Beach during WWII: L-R: WASPS Mildred Toner, Mary Lee Leatherbee, Shirley Thackara–with Army Air Force Lt. Nash.

(all photos Shirley Thackara–and thanks to the Spanishtown Historical Society for the introduction to Shirley)

Posted on

Coastside WWII: “We did see lots of convoys, army trucks,” says Elaine Martini Teixeira,

a child at the time. Elaine lived with her family in Moss Beach near Sunshine Valley Road (the lovely “connector” road between Montara and Moss Beach.) Dad owned a bar frequented by the sailors at the nearby naval station. Mom took care of her children and helped her husband.

“I guess the military men came down from SF, on their way to Fort Ord in Monterey. Sometimes only a few drove by, but often, there was a very long convoy, and they had the right of way,” explained Elaine.

“You did not get in between the vehicles. So, if we were coming on to the main road, Highway 1, from a side street, such as we did from our garage on Sunshine Valley Road, we had to wait for the convoy to finish, and it could be a long wait, maybe as long as 15-20 minutes. If you saw them coming, the best thing to do was to get out on the road, ahead of them.”

“There were mainly trucks,” remembered Elaine, “covered with canvas tops, with soldiers in the back, and an occasional jeep, in between. Some vehicles were around because they were stationed at local military installations, such as the airfield and Coast Guard in Princeton.

“On the coast road, at Devil Slide, there was a small army post up on a mountain top. You could see it from the highway. It was rather small; I believe it was there to track airplanes. There was a long narrow stairway leading from the road to the building. I have no idea how the men walked up and down that steep stairway without falling into the ocean, especially if they had been out celebrating!

It was there for several years after the war, and you can still the foundation of the structure. My then future sister-in-law, Hazel Dooley, married one of the fellows who was stationed there, O. B. Dooley.”

Top Photo: (At far right Elaine Martini Teixeria with sister Loretta.)

“

Posted on

Photo of Naval Station at Montara Stirs Memories of WWII

Memorial Day is a time when Americans typically reflect on their history, and WWII has a special meaning for the Coastside.

A few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the military arrived in Half Moon Bay. Soldiers occupied public schools and privately owned hotels. There was genuine fear of another surprise attack right here on the Coastside.

Overnight Half Moon Bay was transformed into a wartime setting, where secrecy prevailed, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the nation. You couldn’t read about Coastside military activities in the Half Moon Bay Review; a search through old issues reveals nothing at all.

Yet during the day locals volunteered as “spotters” watching the sea for enemy submarines and hostile aircraft in the skies. At night all Coastside windows were darkened with black-out paper.

There were barracks at Princeton-by-the-Sea, near the airport; the military occupied the Palace Miramar Hotel, Half Moon Bay, and several places on the South Coast, where, it is said, deep tunnels were constructed to store weapons.

There was a naval station at Montara, across the highway from the Montara Water & Sanitary District building.


In this photo, you can see the water and sanitary district building still standing today, overlooking the Pacific. Their website confirms the building was constructed by the navy in 1944.

If you look for remnants of the naval station today, you won’t find any. Highway 1, which was built in sections along the Coastside, mainly in the 1950s, has changed the surrounding terrain completely.

The land on which the naval station stood looks pretty level in the photo. Today a hedge-like dirt berm erases all memories of the naval station’s presence.

.

Posted on

“Lost” Painting of Frank Torres

Frank Torres, the Peruvian world traveler, who built the original Moss Beach Distillery in the late 1920s, lived near the restaurant in a house painted pink. Long after he sold the Distillery, he resided in the house, and one day shortly before his death, I paid the famous restaurateur a visit. I wanted to interview him for a historical piece. I brought a tape recorder but I must have pushed the wrong button because the result was hard to make out.

But what really struck me was a painting on the wall. I call it the “lost” painting because I don’t know what happened to the piece of art. It was a painting of Frank Torres, wearing a suit and tie, with Devil’s Slide or the cliffs of Moss Beach behind him. I remembered that, in the picture, Frank looked large, as if the artist wanted to convey his importance, his power on the Coastside.

In recent months, I’ve been in contact with Millie Muller, a tenacious researcher from the East Coast. Millie is related to Fannie Torres, and she has been looking high and low, and in every dusty corner, for information on the Moss Beach restaurant and the Torres family history. She’s a remarkable woman; she’s come up with a lot of new stuff–including this 1950s photo of Fannie and Frank, with the painting I saw in the Torres home. The painting is on the wall behind Fannie and Frank.

Here’s the photo (be sure to look closely at the background, at the painting on the wall.) Oh, I almost forgot: the Frank and Fannie Torres didn’t look like this all the time. In this photo they are dressed up to publicize Halloween events at their restaurant!

Do you know where the painting is? Do you have any interesting leads on the Torres family history for Millie?

(Photo: Millie Muller)

Email Millie: [email protected]