During the Second World War, the United States had the advantage that we were fighting this
war far from our shores. Our population was protected by the Atlantic and the
Pacific Oceans but that didn't mean of course that the United States was free from attack,
most notably the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese Army and Navy attacked the US Pacific
territories. They occupied the Alaskan Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu, and the German U-boats
hunted in American territorial waters in sight of American shores, but less well remembered is
the fact that the Axis were able in the Second World War to directly attack the continental
United States. And while those attacks didn't do a lot of damage, they did cause fear and paranoia,
and affected Allied decision-making. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had ambitious plans at the start of the Second World War. Much like the
American Doolittle raid in April of 1942, their goal was to demonstrate that the US mainland was
vulnerable to attack. To spread panic, disrupt military operations, and commerce and force the
redeployment of war resources. On December 14th 1941, orders were given to a submarine flotilla,
under the command of Rear Admiral Tsutomu Sato, to launch a coordinated attack on US
West Coast cities on Christmas Eve. Nine Japanese submarines were ordered to fire 30 shells each,
an attack that would likely have caused widespread panic, but the attack never
materialized as the submarines were busy pursuing enemy shipping and eventually ran low on fuel,
and had returned to their bases to resupply. But the idea had not been forgotten. On February 22nd
the type B1 submarine I-17 received orders from Admiral Mitsumi Shimizu the commander
of Japanese submarine forces to shell a US West Coast target of its choice, the next day.
The US had been suffering a string of defeats in the Pacific, in fact the same day, February 22nd,
President Roosevelt had given the order for General Douglas MacArthur to evacuate the
Philippines. On the 23rd, FDR was going to do one of his famous fireside chats intending to raise
national morale, the Japanese attack was intended to commence during Roosevelt's speech. There are
conflicting stories regarding why the I-17 chose the target they did, the Ellwood Oil Fields near
Santa Barbara California. The simplest explanation is that the boat's Chief Engineer suggested the
target as providing easy access and an escape route. An alternative story suggests that the
captain of the I-17, Imperial Japanese naval commander Kozo Nishino had visited the oil fields
as a merchant mariner before the war and had been embarrassed by some American oil workers there
who laughed at him after he tripped into some prickly pear cactus, and was out seeking revenge.
The Type B was a cruiser submarine, they were large displacing more than a thousand tons more
than the US Gato class submarine. They had a cruising range of some fourteen thousand
nautical miles, mounted six torpedo tubes and had a relatively large 140 millimeter deck gun. The
I-17 had a crew of 101 officers and men. Perhaps most interesting the Type B cruiser submarines
carried a single Yokosuka E14Y floatplane, which they would disassemble and fit into a watertight
hangar in front of the conning tower. The seaplane would be launched by a catapult,
and was primarily intended for reconnaissance, but mounted a single 7.7 millimeter machine gun,
and could carry two incendiary bombs. The Ellwood Oil Field lay about 12 miles west
of the California city of Santa Barbara. Oil was first discovered there in 1928,
and the field had been named after Elwood Cooper, an early rancher in the area. The oil
field was highly productive through the 1930s and helped to drive development in the Santa
Barbara area. More importantly, the location of the oil fields along the coast and into the
Santa Barbara Channel allowed easy access for a submarine attack. The I-17 opened fire with its
deck gun around 7:15 p.m. targeting fuel tanks belonging to the Bankline Company Oil Refinery
along the shore. They continued firing for about 20 minutes, firing an estimated 12 to 25 rounds.
Contemporary newspaper reports said that the attack was first reported to police by a Mrs.
George Heaney of San Marcos Pass who observed the submarine through binoculars and reported it was
about a mile offshore. Firing in the dark, the shells mostly landed far off. One impacting on
pasture land of a ranch three miles inland leaving a crater, but damaging no structures. As many
as two-thirds of the rounds landed harmlessly in the water. The attack missed the refinery,
but did minor damage to a derrick and pumping station about a thousand yards inland and
caused no casualties. The submarine escaped before there could be any military response.
The attack on Ellwood was the first bombardment of the continental United States by the Axis powers
of the Second World War. While it did little damage the attack had a psychological impact.
Two factors end up becoming significant. First, witnesses reported that flares had
apparently been fired from the shore in an apparent attempt to signal the submarine,
and another witness claimed to have seen the submarine giving light signals as it fled,
apparently signaling to someone on shore. None of these reports turned out to be reliable and
it is unlikely that the I-17 had any assistance on shore, but some claimed that the reports
solidified public support for the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States.
A second rumor also had an impact as one of the witnesses claimed that they saw the
submarine leaving heading south towards Los Angeles. The military and the civilian press
concluded that either the submarine attacking Ellwood was moving towards Los Angeles,
or that the attack was a diversion from a larger attack. The next day, Naval Intelligence issued
a warning that an attack on Los Angeles could be expected within the next 10 hours. The air raid
sirens started blaring at 2:25 a.m. on the 25th, and the so-called Battle of Los Angeles began in
earnest at 3:16 a.m. as the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade opened fire at Japanese planes coming to
attack the city. The battle raged for almost an hour with over 1400 shells fired. The battle cost
the lives of five Los Angeles area civilians. The Japanese had managed to attack the mainland
United States with “war jitters”. There were no Japanese planes over LA. The firing, it seems,
was precipitated by an errant weather balloon. The civilian casualties were all the result of
the ensuing chaos. 3 died in car accidents and 2 died of heart attacks. In addition,
buildings and property were damaged by the falling anti-aircraft artillery fragments. The Imperial
Japanese Navy, it seems, had found some success in their goal of panicking the US population.
But that doesn't mean that the Imperial Japanese Navy was not capable of actually attacking the
US shore. The following June another type B-1 submarine, the I-25, followed a group of
fishing vessels to avoid minefields and came within 10 miles of the shore of the mouth of
the Columbia River, at the border between Oregon and Washington. It was a strategically important
spot as Liberty ships vital to the war effort were being produced on the Columbia River in
Portland. Defending the mouth of the Columbia on the Oregon side was Fort Stevens. Fort Stevens had
originally been built in the 1860s to defend the Columbia from a potential attack by the
British over boundary disputes. It had had new batteries installed but its coastal guns were
largely outdated turn of the century era pieces. The I-25 fired 17 shells against the Fort and its
Battery Russell. The I-25 was firing from miles offshore and reportedly thought the Fort might
be a submarine base. The garrison was roused but found it difficult running around in the dark.
The Battery Commander, Captain Jack R. Wood later said of the incident, “We looked like hell, but we
were ready to shoot back in a couple of minutes.” But the fort garrison was ordered not to respond,
instead ordering a blackout. The location of the submarine was still not clear and revealing the
location of the battery guns, and possibly their vulnerabilities, would have been more dangerous
than the few 5.5 inch rounds lobbed at the fort. The shots did little damage, downing some power
lines and destroying the backstop of the fort's baseball field. It was the only time that the
Axis powers attacked a continental United States military installation during the war,
and the first time that the state of Oregon was directly attacked by a wartime enemy.
But it was not the last that the state of Oregon would see of the Japanese submarine
I-25. Having already attacked the US military on US Shores, the I-25 had another plan of attack.
The following September the I-25 was back off the coast of Oregon. Their plan was to have their E14Y
floatplane drop incendiary bombs in the Siskiyou National Forest starting forest fires that would
destroy timber resources and divert manpower. The plane piloted by Warrent Officer Nobuo Fujita,
with observer Petty Officer Okuda Shoji, manning the rear facing machine gun, made two bomb raids,
each time dropping two 168 pound incendiary bombs. But September is not forest fire season,
and there had been substantial rain making it difficult to start fires. In addition,
forest rangers had seen at least one of the bombs and had gotten to it quickly, and controlled
the fire. The raids caused negligible damage, but they were the only time during the Second
World War that the continental United States suffered an air-raid attack by enemy forces.
The I-17 did do some more appreciable damage off the coast of Oregon where it sunk two merchant
vessels, killing six merchant mariners. Perhaps the most frightening of the Japanese attacks on
the continental United States were the Fu-Go fire balloons. Made from traditional paper,
these thirty three-foot diameter, unmanned hydrogen filled balloons leveraged the jet stream,
and required a complex and ingenious combination of ballast, and a self-regulating release to
maintain altitude for the approximately three-day trip from Japan to the United States. The wind
conditions were only suitable for some 50 days out of the year. After three days the balloons
would drop their ballast igniting a fuse that would destroy the balloon and release its bombs,
usually a mix of incendiary and fragmentation bombs. Over 9,000 such balloons were launched
with the goal of causing terror and possibly starting forest fires. They were the first
weapons of war with a truly intercontinental range. They landed as far inland as Nebraska,
as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. On May 5th 1945, in rural Eastern Oregon,
five teenage students from a sunday-school class and their pregnant teacher were killed when they
discovered a downed balloon, and apparently handled the apparatus, causing it to explode.
More terrifyingly, there had been plans to arm the balloons with biological weapons,
anthrax bubonic plague, cowpox, but the Emperor himself refused to allow the deployment of the
biological weapons. US scientists were able to determine the location of where the balloons
were being launched by analyzing the sand in the ballast, and US bombing raids destroyed two
hydrogen production plants nearby. A tight news blackout of the threat convinced the
Japanese that the campaign had failed and they stopped the launches after about six months.
The Japanese attacks on the US mainland did minimal damage during the Second World War,
but they did raise invasion fears, caused panic and caused some large deployment of
resources. For example, 2,700 US servicemen, many of them conscientious objectors,
were deployed to fight forest fires in the Pacific Northwest that were started by the balloon bombs,
and one member of that detachment did die fighting forest fires. Hundreds of miles of
barbed wire were laid across the California coast for fear of the non-existent Japanese invasion.
At times the response was greater than the attack. When a Japanese submarine
fired at the Estevan Point Lighthouse in Western Canada in June of 1942 they
did no damage to the lighthouse. As a response, authorities decided to turn
out the lighthouse lights to protect it from further attack. That caused a shipping hazard,
and de facto, had the same result as if the attack had destroyed the lighthouse.
Perhaps the largest impact was to increase American mistrust of Japanese Americans.
There were all sorts of rumors of people on shore collaborating with these attacks,
and while those rumors have been discredited,
they did help to solidify American resentment towards its own citizens.
Forestry workers in British Columbia discovered the wreck of a Japanese balloon bomb in 2014.
Demolition experts destroyed it with explosives. That raised the prospect that the wrecks of some
of the balloons, and their deadly payloads, may still be out there in remote areas where they
still could potentially be a hazard. Of over 9,000 balloons launched only around 300 have been found.
In a strange twist, the town of Brookings Oregon, which was nearest the spot were the
Japanese conducted bombing raids on the Oregon forests asked the pilot who dropped those bombs,
Nobuo Fujita to come and visit their town. The invitation caused some controversy in Brookings
as there were still several World War two veterans living there. Fujita was afraid that they were
going to accuse him of committing war crimes, but instead they treated him warmly, and thus
began a friendship that began to symbolize the reproachment between the American and
Japanese peoples following the Second World War. Fujita donated his samurai sword to the town of
Brookings where it's on display in the Brookings Public Library, which Fujita helped to raise funds
to build. He sponsored Brookings Area High School students to come and visit Japan, and he came back
and visited the town many more times. Fujita passed away in 1997 at the age of 85 and his
daughter brought a portion of his ashes back to be interned in Brookings Oregon where he had been
made an honorary citizen. A passage in Fujita's diary reads, “If we knew each other, if we
understood each other as friends, this foolish war would never have happened. I sincerely hope that
the time would come when everyone can overcome their differences with talking, and not fighting.”
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