Pease, Howard "Black-out."
The alternate title to this interesting World War 2 novella is “The Adventure in the Black-Out.” The story is set in early Summer 1942 (we know this because mention is made of the Battle of Midway Island as well as the Japanese landings on the island of Attu in Aleutians, both events having taken place in June 1942) and San Francisco – and indeed the entire West Coast – is jittery wondering whether Japanese air raids are iminent. 3rd Mate Moran of the freighter ARABY is in port and just had just hopped aboard a cable car en route to dinner with a friend (none other than Howard Pease himself!) when the city is suddenly blacked-out and air raid sirens begin wailing. Though ultimately a false alarm, Tod is forced to disembark from his cable car and walk his way home. He soon finds himself involved in an “adventure” involving an unscrupulous boardinghouse landlady out to fleece a possible orphan (Julie is the girl, and her father had been captured by the Japanese on Wake Island and not heard from since) out of an inheritance.
Pease’s slim plot aside, what today’s reader will most appreciate are the author’s “you-are-there” descriptions of what black-outs and air raid warnings were like those early days of the War. Also of interest are Pease’s rather brave (for 1942) attack, oblique though it may be, at the government’s removal of California’s Japanese-American citizens to the Mazanar relocation camp. He also has a thing or two to say about tinpot patriots objecting to Italian-Americans serving as air-raid wardens (one of the story’s characters is a Tony Gallo, an Italian-American shipyard worker by day and air-raid warden most nights on Larkin Street). By the time the all clear siren has sounded, Tod Moran has solved the boardinghouse mystery, though both Pease and his fictitious hero know that a final “all clear” is years into the future:
“Tod peered through the shadows toward the window. But he didn’t hear the sounds of traffic even though the city was beginning to move like a gigantic animal roused from sleep. Neither did he see the glow from the lights coming on below. For the black-out, he knew, wasn’t really over. Not for Julie, not for Tony and his family, not for anyone at all. No, it wouldn’t be over until this war had been won and ended.”
And with the realization that land-bound Americans, too, were making immense sacrifices for the war effort, 3rd Mate Moran went back to his own business of war – as a merchant mariner.