The “Battle of Los Angeles,” or the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, occurred during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. It has been portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 slapstick comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The farcical movie is about all younger generations today know of the Battle of Los Angeles and conditions prevailing along the West Coast following Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The film leaves the impression that Japan, except for one nutty submarine commander and his crew of harmless sailors, never waged war on America’s West Coast, and that fear of such attacks was nothing more than wartime hysteria. This is exactly the tack taken by those today who dismiss the evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast as a racist and hysterical overreaction to the threat of attack—forgetting, of course, that German and Italian aliens, including Joe DiMaggio’s mother, were also evacuated, and that the MAGIC intercepts revealed there were resident Japanese supplying Japan with intelligence.
In reality, the Battle of Los Angeles was preceded by ten Japanese submarine attacks on American ships off the California coast and one attack on an oil field. The attacks left the coastal population apprehensive, if not unnerved. Few people today can appreciate how vulnerable America’s West Coast was during the first year of the war. In December 1941 the United States, with nearly 1,300 miles of Western coastline to defend—840 in California alone—could put only a handful of warships into the water and fewer than 50 modern fighters and 85 bombers into the air. Active-duty ground forces amounted to but a few thousand troops. They were equipped and armed with relics from World War I, rarely had enough ammunition to conduct firing exercises, and nearly all lacked combat experience. What would become Camp Pendleton was still Rancho Santa Margarita, with thousands of cattle but nary a Marine. Our harbors and shipyards were especially vulnerable, and there were no antiaircraft batteries defending any of the aircraft plants—Boeing in Seattle, Douglas in Santa Monica, Lockheed in Burbank, and Consolidated in San Diego.
The first Japanese attack in California waters occurred an hour before dawn on December 18, 1941, when the submarine I-17 struck the freighter SS Samoa about 15 miles off Cape Mendocino. Samoa sustained only minor damage but, in the darkness and mist, appeared sinking. The sub commander, Nishino Kozo, satisfied that Samoa was on her way to the bottom, radioed I-15, the flag submarine of the Japanese attack force on the West Coast, that he had sunk an American freighter. I-17 struck again two days later, also off Cape Mendocino. This time her target was the Standard Oil tanker SS Emidio.
Understanding that the West Coast was weakly defended, Kozo attacked on the surface in broad daylight using his 5.5″ deck gun. Working his key rapidly, W.S. Foote, the radio operator of Emidio, got off an SOS before the radio antenna was shot away. With other shells hitting Emidio, Capt. Clark Farrow had a white flag hoisted and ordered the crew into lifeboats. The Japanese sub now turned her deck gun on the fleeing lifeboats. Three men were killed, but before the Japanese could finish off the others, two American planes appeared, and Nishino took I-17 down. That didn’t end the action, however. Kozo let loose with a torpedo—and it hit with a loud explosion. At the time, Foote had just finished jury-rigging another antenna and was back at his key. Seemingly unfazed by the blast, he tapped out a second SOS and added “Torpedoed in the stern.” He then made his way to the deck and jumped overboard. When the torpedo hit, there were still three men in the engine room who had not gotten the word to abandon ship. Two were killed, but the third, B.F. Moler, despite three broken ribs and a punctured lung, swam and climbed to the deck and leaped into the ocean. He and Foote were both picked up by lifeboats. The 31 survivors of the attack rowed for 16 hours before being rescued by the Coast Guard. Badly damaged but not sunk, Emidio drifted for several days and 85 miles before running aground on a reef off Crescent City.
While the sailors of Emidio were rowing for their lives off Cape Mendocino, I-23 was stalking a Richfield Oil tanker, SS Agwiworld, off Monterey. The action was so close to shore that golfers on the famous Cypress Point course could see it. At about two in the afternoon, I-23’s commander, Genichi Shibata, confident that he could attack on the surface in broad daylight, unlimbered his deck gun and started firing. Fortunately for Agwiworld, heavy seas made accurate sighting of the gun impossible. Eight shells splashed perilously close to the ship, but none hit her as she zigzagged into the harbor at Santa Cruz. Although the town’s Sentinel-News ran the headline, “Jap Submarine Shells Tanker Off Monterey Bay,” the Twelfth District Naval Headquarters in San Francisco would neither confirm nor deny the attack.
A third oil tanker, SS H.M. Storey, was attacked off Point Arguello by I-21 on December 22—again, in broad daylight. Like Kozo and Shibata, I-21’s commander, Kenji Matsumura, used his deck gun in a surface action. Witnesses on shore said the sub was no more than two miles off the coast. Storey laid a smoke screen that may have saved her. When I-21’s deck gunners couldn’t get the range right, Matsumura fired three torpedoes. Two narrowly missed Storey’s stern, and one passed in front of the bow. The arrival of a Navy plane ended the attack.
Matsumura had better hunting the following day, when he intercepted the SS Montebello about ten miles southwest of San Simeon, home to the Hearst Castle. A Union Oil tanker with three million gallons of crude aboard, Montebello was steaming north from the oil dock at Port San Luis. At 5:30 a.m., the tanker’s captain, Olaf Eckstrom, received word from the watch that they were being stalked by what looked like a sub. “I saw a dark outline on the water, close astern of us,” said Eckstrom.
It was the silhouette of a Jap submarine, a big fellow, possibly 300 feet long. I ordered the quartermaster at the wheel, John McIsaac, to zigzag. For 10 minutes we tried desperately to cheat the sub, but it was no use. She was too close . . . [and] let a torpedo go when we were broadside to her.
Forty-five minutes later she was on the bottom. Protected by poor visibility the captain and 36 crewmen made it to shore in lifeboats, although I-21 fired at them with a machine gun. I-21 remained in the area and later in the day attacked and damaged another oil tanker, the SS Idaho.
At the same time that I-21 was doing her work, Nishino Kozo and I-17 attacked, damaged, and ran the tanker SS Larry Doheny aground at Cape Mendocino. On December 24, Genichi Shibata and I-23 shelled and damaged the freighter SS Dorothy Phillips. Early on Christmas morning, Narahara Shogo and I-19 fired torpedoes at but missed the freighter SS Barbara Olson off the coast of Orange County. Later the same day, Shogo torpedoed and damaged the freighter SS Absoroka off Point Fermin near San Pedro harbor. The sub attacks were relentless, and the Japanese seemed to have perfect intelligence on ship movements.
The first attack on the mainland occurred on the night of February 23, 1942, when Kozo and I-17 shelled the Ellwood oil field, west of Santa Barbara, leaving an oil rig ablaze, a pier damaged, and nearby ranches pockmarked with shell craters. The next day U.S. Naval Intelligence issued a warning that another and larger Japanese attack against land targets could be expected during the night.
Such a warning had a particularly chilling effect on my family and other residents of seaside communities, who since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had been waiting for a similar air raid. An uncle was an air-raid warden, one of several who patrolled Pacific Palisades nightly to see that every house had air-raid curtains tightly drawn, emitting no light. When night fell on the 24th, it was reported that flashing lights were seen in the vicinity of aircraft plants, including the Douglas plant in Santa Monica. The greater Los Angeles area was on edge. At 2 a.m., radar intercepted an unidentified inbound target 120 miles off the coast. The target continued inbound, but radar contact was inexplicably lost a few miles shy of the coastline. Then a large balloon with a red flare was spotted over Santa Monica, and four batteries of antiaircraft artillery opened fire. Their shell bursts were illuminated by searchlights, causing those on the ground to mistake the aerial pyrotechnics for Japanese planes, and more firing erupted. The firing only ceased with the coming of dawn. It was thought that the Japanese had launched planes from submarines. U.S. Rep. Leland Ford, a family friend who lived in the Palisades, demanded an investigation. It was later suggested that weather balloons, released earlier over Southern California, were the objects fired upon.
Treated comically today, the action in the skies over Los Angeles has obscured Japanese attacks on the coast and on coastal shipping that continued until the end of the war, although not with the intensity or success of the first few months. On June 20, 1942, Minoru Yokota and I-26 shelled the Estevan Point lighthouse and RDF station on Vancouver Island. The next night, Meiji Tagami and I-25 shelled Fort Stevens at the mouth of the Columbia River. On September 9, I-25 launched Nobuo Fujita in a floatplane armed with two thermite incendiary bombs. In the first air strike in history on the mainland of the United States, Fujita dropped the bombs into dense timber inland from Gold Beach, Oregon, hoping to ignite a forest fire. Blazes erupted immediately, but quick action by forest-service crews soon had the fires controlled. Fujita flew a second mission three weeks later with similar results.
The Army and the FBI investigated Fujita’s attacks, swearing residents of the area to secrecy, a pattern that would continue throughout the war, and making an accurate accounting of Japanese attacks difficult. There were at least several dozen—and nearly 400 if the balloon-bomb attacks are counted. Japan launched some 9,000 balloon-bombs into the jet stream, resulting in nearly 350 recorded strikes along the West Coast and a few as far inland as Iowa and Illinois. The most deadly of these strikes occurred on May 5, 1945, when children at a church picnic tried to pull down one of the large balloons that had lodged in a tree in Oregon. Their tugs triggered the unexploded bomb, killing a mother and five children from four different families.
All this was anything but comical for those living on the West Coast.
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