2006jul08. Turns out we bombed the Japanese first.
[ ... ] The catwalks were completed by the beginning of October [1935]. [ ... ] For the first time, it was possible for men to walk across the Golden Gate. [ ... ] It soon became common, but never ordinary, to cross between San Francisco and the Marin shore on foot. The views, when the fog permitted them, were almost airborne: the jagged Farallon Islands, some twenty-eight miles out to sea, the distant headlands at Point Reyes and Pedro Point; to the east, the whole sweep of the bay, with San Francisco, Oakland, and the less-tall Bay Bridge in their entirety; and below, the ship traffic now model-like beneath one’s feet. It was as if everything had been placed there in anticipation of this view.
There were, from the catwalks, sunrises that suggested the first day of the world, thundering Wagnerian sunsets and afterglows that summoned up suggestions of the last, and with the theatrical drama of a rising and falling curtain, the tumbling cataracts and sudden ghostly disappearances of fog.
Upon this spectacular and dramatically changing setting, the required routines of work were now imposed. A tow rope was added to the west footwalk, like an escalator, to assist men carrying materials up the steep gradient. At intervals along the walks, sheds were erected to store equipment and offer shelter from the wind and cold. There were even portable toilets, hundreds of feet in the air, on a footbridge suspended between two towers. The waste was collected in traps, giving rise to the temptation to open a full trap, as a kind of bomb, on the ships passing below.
The target selected was the Shensu Maru, a visiting Japanese freighter. It was, in part, a political gesture: this was a time of deteriorating relations between the United States and Japan; the Japanese, who had seized Manchuria in 1931, were now threatening to invade the rest of China and represented a growing threat to American interests in the Far East. The combined appeal of scatology and patriotism proved irresistible.
The Shensu Maru’s schedule was studied. On the footwalks, timing and measurements were secretly calculated. The plan was to open a trap directly over the Shensu’s smokestack. On the Shensu’s departure day, everything on the footwalk was prepared. The Shensu appeared on schedule, steaming toward the Gate in the northern, or outbound, shipping lane. The trap, whose bombardier remains unknown, was opened. The contents missed the stack but hit the ship, giving rise to immediate and outraged protest, but no formal diplomatic complaint. Although the perpetrators were never caught, it was the last larking incident of this particular nature on the determinedly high-class bridge project.
-- The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, John Van Der Zee