Why, the Japanese 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 Japanese 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 Japs were intrenching themselves in the appropriate places to control every pass 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 impassible by Nature's snow and ice and avalanches, without any other defenses being built by the Japanese. But one of the first things the Japanese would do would be to organize a force of aëroplane 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 aëroplane 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. What it would mean to get an army across the mountains into the great central valley of California cannot be appreciated by anyone who is unfamiliar with the stupendous canyons and chasms and the towering peaks of the Siskiyou and Sierra Nevada Mountains. Those who toiled over them with the Donner party could have told the tale to those who calculate on scaling those mountains with an army in the face of Japanese batteries defending every pass. It would be a task greater than the capture of Port Arthur to capture one pass and get it away from the Japanese after we had got into motion and started in with the job of reconquering California. The difficulty of getting an American army into Southern California after the Japanese had once occupied it, is described by Homer Lea in "The Valor of Ignorance" in the following warning words: "Entrance into southern California is gained by three passes--the San Jacinto, Cajon and Saugus, while access to the San Joaquin Valley and central California is by the Tehachapi. It is in control of these passes that determines Japanese supremacy on the southern flank of the Pacific coast, and it is in their adaptability to defence that determines the true strategic value of southern California to the Japanese.