San Mateo County in World War II: region’s roles on exhibit

Ruth Marzotto, a young woman living in Redwood City, was spending a quiet Sunday listening to music on the radio.

[...] the music stopped.

Marzotto’s radio, a white Packard Bell table model, is one of the smaller artifacts of a new exhibition called Peninsula at War!

The war is important to remember, said Carmen Blair, deputy director of the San Mateo County Historical Association.

The exhibit “should open up some eyes,” about the county’s wartime role and the way the war had an impact on every citizen, said Mitch Postel, president of the historical association.

On Dec. 8, the day President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, the student body president at San Mateo Junior College told an assembly of all the students they should keep calm, wait and see what might happen, and think clearly, not emotionally,

Among them was James Swett, who played soccer at the college and left to join the Marines.

Les Williams, a Redwood City man, joined the Army Air Corps, learned to fly and was one of the first African American bomber pilots as part of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen.

There is also a mannequin wearing the flight suit and the faded leather bomber jacket of Allen Brown, who dropped out of San Mateo Junior College to join the Air Corps.

Brown, a bomber pilot, was shot down over Europe, and lived to fly in combat again in the Korean War.

There was also an antiaircraft gun training center at Montara Point, and even a place in San Carlos that trained dogs for wartime duty to carry messages and detect mines.

The saddest part of the exhibition is behind a wire fence, a replica of portions of the Tanforan Racetrack, where up to 10,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in horse stables as part of a temporary detention camp after Roosevelt ordered that people of Japanese descent be evacuated from the West Coast.

The displays are accompanied by recordings of war veterans, people who were held in Tanforan, men and women who went through wartime training, and housewives, who had to deal with food rationing during the war.

Marzotto, who heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio, remembers that government agents came to the house in Redwood City after Benito Mussolini’s Italy declared war on the U.S., four days after Pearl Harbor.