Japanese incendiary bombs over Oregon

Many chronologies state under 28 August 1942 that incendiary bombs dropped from a Japanese floatplane started a forest fire in Oregon. American and Japanese sources do not confirm this date. In August the Japanese submarine I-25, which carried out the attack, was still on her way: she had sailed from Yokosuka on 15 August. The bombs fell on the forests near the small town of Brookings on 9 September, and a second time on the night of 29 September 1942, and neither of these raids started a real fire. Even so, they have gone down in history as the only aerial bombing by an enemy of the 48 states of the contiguous United States in the entire war.

A submarine with an aircraft in its hangar

I-25 was a large ocean-going submarine of the B1 type. Forward of the conning tower she had a watertight hangar and a catapult for a folding Yokosuka E14Y reconnaissance floatplane, known to the Americans as the “Glen”. The submarine was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Akiji Tagami, and the aircraft was flown by Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita, an experienced naval aviator. The crew already had a long war behind them. In December 1941 I-25 patrolled north of Oahu during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then hunted merchant ships off the west coast of America. In February and March 1942 Fujita flew reconnaissance flights from her over Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Wellington and Auckland, and in May over the bases on Kodiak Island ahead of the attack on Dutch Harbor and the expedition to the Aleutians.

In June I-25 appeared off the coast of North America once more. On 20 June, off Washington State, she torpedoed the Canadian freighter Fort Camosun, which stayed afloat despite the hit. On the night of 21–22 June, following fishing boats through the minefields, she approached the mouth of the Columbia River and fired 17 rounds from her deck gun towards Fort Stevens near Astoria. The fort’s commander forbade his men to return fire so as not to give away the position of batteries that could not have reached the submarine anyway. The shells fell mainly on a baseball field and in marshland, cut a few telephone cables and injured no one. It was the only wartime shelling of a military base on the territory of the contiguous United States; two weeks earlier Japanese submarines had also shelled Sydney and Newcastle.

The idea of setting the forests alight

According to Japanese accounts, it was Fujita himself who proposed that submarine-borne aircraft should bomb targets on the American mainland. The naval command chose an unusual target: the vast forests of the Pacific coast. Oregon remembered the great fires of the 1930s, and the planners hoped that westerly winds would fan a blaze that would tie down forces and cause panic. According to some authors, it was also meant as a symbolic answer to the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April. I-25 took on the voyage six 76-kilogram incendiary bombs, filled with hundreds of thermite pellets that were meant to scatter over a wide area when the bomb burst.

The submarine reached the area of Cape Blanco at the beginning of September, but for several days rough seas made it impossible to assemble and launch the aircraft.

9 September: Mount Emily

On the morning of 9 September the sea calmed. Fujita and his observer, Petty Officer Shōji Okuda, were catapulted off, flew over the coast and headed inland into the wooded mountains east of Brookings, near the California border. The aircraft was spotted by the lookouts in the Forest Service fire tower on Mount Emily, Howard Gardner and Bob Larson, and many of the town’s inhabitants heard its engine. Around noon Gardner saw smoke. Together with a lookout from a neighbouring tower he made his way to the fire on Wheeler Ridge, some 16 kilometres east of Brookings, and the two men watched over the flames through the night until a firefighting crew arrived in the morning.

The fire was small. It had rained the previous evening, the forest floor was wet, and the bombs had been dropped from the wrong height, so the bursting charges started only a few scattered fires. The second bomb was never found. Some 27 kilograms of fragments bearing Japanese markings were collected at the site and handed over to the military. The army and the FBI investigated, and on 10 September Western Defense Command announced that fragments of an incendiary bomb of Japanese origin had been found; the press carried the news, though without details.

That same day I-25 was spotted and attacked with bombs by an American Lockheed Hudson patrol aircraft. The submarine took refuge on the seabed off the coast near Port Orford and suffered only minor damage.

29 September and the return

Fujita carried out the second raid by night, on 29 September. Guided by the beam of the lighthouse on Cape Blanco, he flew inland and dropped two bombs; he reported visible flames, but in America the attack was not even noticed. The remaining two bombs were never used. At the beginning of October I-25 torpedoed the tankers Camden and Larry Doheny off the Oregon coast, and on her way home, on 11 October, she sank a submarine she took for an American one. It was in fact the Soviet L-16 (PL), on passage from Vladivostok across the Pacific to the Panama Canal, even though Japan and the USSR were not at war.

Place in the war

The Japanese raids on Oregon had no military significance whatsoever. No one was killed, not a single building burnt down, and the damage was limited to a few scorched hectares of forest. Yet, together with the June attack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, they were the only occasion on which enemy aircraft dropped bombs on United States territory in North America, and the only one in the 48 contiguous states. The Japanese navy returned to the idea of submarine-launched aircraft with the giant I-400-class submarines, which were to attack the Panama Canal, but it ran out of time to carry it out. The idea of setting American forests on fire was taken up in 1944–1945 by the army, which released thousands of Fu-Go balloon bombs, carried eastwards by the jet stream. One of them killed six people from a Sunday school outing in Oregon in May 1945.

I-25 disappeared without trace in 1943 in the waters of the New Hebrides. Fujita survived the war, trained kamikaze pilots towards its end, and afterwards ran a hardware shop. In 1962 local civic leaders invited him to Brookings, although his visit was controversial. He brought with him his family’s katana, 400 years old according to family tradition, which, by later accounts, he had taken with him so that he could commit suicide if he were arrested or humiliated in America. He presented it to the town as a token of reconciliation. He returned several more times, in 1992 planted a tree at the spot where his bomb had fallen, and shortly before his death in 1997 was made an honorary citizen of Brookings. In 1998 his daughter buried some of his ashes on Wheeler Ridge.