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Forgotten but True: Japan Attacks the American Mainland
By Jack Kelly
Soldiers examine a crater left by the attack.
(National Archives)
Sixty-five years ago today, on June 21, 1942, Japan attacked the United States—and not in Hawaii but in Oregon. It was the first hostile action against a military installation on the American mainland since the War of 1812.
The attack was against Fort Stevens. The U.S. Army had built Fort Stevens on a peninsula at the mouth of the Columbia River during the Civil War, to guard against the possibility of Confederate raids on river traffic. Soldiers had thrown up earthworks and built a moat and drawbridge for defense on the landward side, but guns hadn’t arrived until after the war was over.
In 1897 the Army modernized the fort, installing concrete batteries with big 10-inch cannon on carriages that lowered the barrels out of sight for reloading. These guns could heave 600-pound shells nine miles. Defending the coastline with such guns was standard military practice at the time. The Coast Artillery Corps traced its roots back to 1794, and such forts ringed the nation. Fort Stevens, on the Oregon side of the river, was backed up by two additional forts on the Washington side. When World War II broke out, 2,500 men, mostly from local National Guard units, were assigned to the fort, and longer-range guns were installed.
The attack of June 21, 1942, had been provoked two months earlier, in April, when Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his squadron of B-25 bombers attacked Tokyo. The raid, a jab in response to the body blow at Pearl Harbor, infuriated the Japanese. Now the enemy was about to jab back, sending two I-class long-range submarines to harass naval and commercial shipping off the Northwest coast. The I-25, under Cmdr. Meiji Tagami, had torpedoed a freighter the day before but failed to sink it.
On the evening of June 21, Tagami snuck the I-25 past a minefield under a screen of fishing vessels. He surfaced in the dark, and his crew used its 5.5-inch deck gun to fire toward land. Relying on faulty intelligence, Tagami thought he was dropping shells on an American submarine base. “I did not use any gunsight at all—just shot,†he said later.
The resulting explosion roused personnel at Fort Stevens from their weeks of tedious duty and instantly erased their complacency. Searchlights went on, and lookouts spotted the submarine at sea. Senior Duty Officer Robert M. Huston decided not to return fire, since his plotters erroneously gauged the sub to be beyond the range of the fort’s main guns and he didn’t want to fruitlessly give away his battery positions. His men were frustrated, but the decision was prudent.
In any case, the attack had little effect. The I-25 fired 17 shells; the closest hit damaged a baseball backstop about 80 yards from one of the gun emplacements. The attack was over by midnight.
News of the incident heightened nervousness up and down the West Coast, where rumors of a Japanese invasion had been in the air since Pearl Harbor. It reinforced the uneasiness that had already led authorities to round up Japanese-Americans and transfer them to internment camps inland.
The Japanese didn’t give up. In September the I-25 was back along the Oregon coast, carrying a disassembled seaplane in a pod in front of its conning tower. After being assembled, the plane was catapulted from the ship on the morning of September 9, and the pilot dropped incendiary bombs over the thick Oregon forests, intending to start fires. However, unusually heavy rains had drenched the woods, and the fires were quickly controlled. It was the first aerial bombing of the continental United States by a foreign power.
Beginning two years later, increasingly desperate Japanese commanders tried yet another tactic. From Japan’s home islands they released 33-foot-wide hydrogen balloons calibrated to ascend to 30,000 feet and travel the jet stream all the way across the Pacific. Each balloon was equipped with a small bomb that would drop and detonate automatically when the balloon descended to a certain altitude. Again, the intention was to ignite fires across the Western United States.
A few of the 9,000 balloons released between November 1944 and April 1945 did make it across. Some traveled as far as Wyoming, and one reportedly reached Detroit, but they did little damage. One potentially hazardous attack occurred on March 10, 1945, when a balloon descended near the laboratory in Hanford, Washington, that made plutonium for the Manhattan Project. It knocked out power to the pumps that cooled Hanford’s nuclear reactors, but backup power, fortunately, kicked in almost immediately.
The worst incident took place near Bly, Oregon, in May 1945, when the Rev. Archie Mitchell and his wife were taking five Sunday-school children for a picnic in the woods. One of the children found a balloon partly intact. While Mitchell was returning to his car, his wife Elsie and the children hurried to examine the find and were killed when it exploded. They were the only deaths from enemy action on the American mainland during the war.
Through the entire nineteenth century and half of the twentieth, coastal forts armed with massive guns formed the core of the strategic defense of the United States. The events of World War II proved the system to be obsolete. Planes and ballistic missiles could easily leapfrog fortifications and strike blows far inland. Most Coast Artillery units had been disbanded by the war’s end. The world had become a more dangerous place, and the need for the United States to extend its defenses outward and to remain engaged in world affairs was clear.
Today travelers along the coast can still see the remnants of this earlier era of national defense, from Fort Knox in Maine to Fort Jefferson in Florida and Fort Point in San Francisco. Fort Jay looks out on New York Harbor less than two miles from the site of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Fort Stevens, the only coastal fort to see action during the twentieth century, became a state park in 1975.
By Jack Kelly
Soldiers examine a crater left by the attack.
(National Archives)
Sixty-five years ago today, on June 21, 1942, Japan attacked the United States—and not in Hawaii but in Oregon. It was the first hostile action against a military installation on the American mainland since the War of 1812.
The attack was against Fort Stevens. The U.S. Army had built Fort Stevens on a peninsula at the mouth of the Columbia River during the Civil War, to guard against the possibility of Confederate raids on river traffic. Soldiers had thrown up earthworks and built a moat and drawbridge for defense on the landward side, but guns hadn’t arrived until after the war was over.
In 1897 the Army modernized the fort, installing concrete batteries with big 10-inch cannon on carriages that lowered the barrels out of sight for reloading. These guns could heave 600-pound shells nine miles. Defending the coastline with such guns was standard military practice at the time. The Coast Artillery Corps traced its roots back to 1794, and such forts ringed the nation. Fort Stevens, on the Oregon side of the river, was backed up by two additional forts on the Washington side. When World War II broke out, 2,500 men, mostly from local National Guard units, were assigned to the fort, and longer-range guns were installed.
The attack of June 21, 1942, had been provoked two months earlier, in April, when Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his squadron of B-25 bombers attacked Tokyo. The raid, a jab in response to the body blow at Pearl Harbor, infuriated the Japanese. Now the enemy was about to jab back, sending two I-class long-range submarines to harass naval and commercial shipping off the Northwest coast. The I-25, under Cmdr. Meiji Tagami, had torpedoed a freighter the day before but failed to sink it.
On the evening of June 21, Tagami snuck the I-25 past a minefield under a screen of fishing vessels. He surfaced in the dark, and his crew used its 5.5-inch deck gun to fire toward land. Relying on faulty intelligence, Tagami thought he was dropping shells on an American submarine base. “I did not use any gunsight at all—just shot,†he said later.
The resulting explosion roused personnel at Fort Stevens from their weeks of tedious duty and instantly erased their complacency. Searchlights went on, and lookouts spotted the submarine at sea. Senior Duty Officer Robert M. Huston decided not to return fire, since his plotters erroneously gauged the sub to be beyond the range of the fort’s main guns and he didn’t want to fruitlessly give away his battery positions. His men were frustrated, but the decision was prudent.
In any case, the attack had little effect. The I-25 fired 17 shells; the closest hit damaged a baseball backstop about 80 yards from one of the gun emplacements. The attack was over by midnight.
News of the incident heightened nervousness up and down the West Coast, where rumors of a Japanese invasion had been in the air since Pearl Harbor. It reinforced the uneasiness that had already led authorities to round up Japanese-Americans and transfer them to internment camps inland.
The Japanese didn’t give up. In September the I-25 was back along the Oregon coast, carrying a disassembled seaplane in a pod in front of its conning tower. After being assembled, the plane was catapulted from the ship on the morning of September 9, and the pilot dropped incendiary bombs over the thick Oregon forests, intending to start fires. However, unusually heavy rains had drenched the woods, and the fires were quickly controlled. It was the first aerial bombing of the continental United States by a foreign power.
Beginning two years later, increasingly desperate Japanese commanders tried yet another tactic. From Japan’s home islands they released 33-foot-wide hydrogen balloons calibrated to ascend to 30,000 feet and travel the jet stream all the way across the Pacific. Each balloon was equipped with a small bomb that would drop and detonate automatically when the balloon descended to a certain altitude. Again, the intention was to ignite fires across the Western United States.
A few of the 9,000 balloons released between November 1944 and April 1945 did make it across. Some traveled as far as Wyoming, and one reportedly reached Detroit, but they did little damage. One potentially hazardous attack occurred on March 10, 1945, when a balloon descended near the laboratory in Hanford, Washington, that made plutonium for the Manhattan Project. It knocked out power to the pumps that cooled Hanford’s nuclear reactors, but backup power, fortunately, kicked in almost immediately.
The worst incident took place near Bly, Oregon, in May 1945, when the Rev. Archie Mitchell and his wife were taking five Sunday-school children for a picnic in the woods. One of the children found a balloon partly intact. While Mitchell was returning to his car, his wife Elsie and the children hurried to examine the find and were killed when it exploded. They were the only deaths from enemy action on the American mainland during the war.
Through the entire nineteenth century and half of the twentieth, coastal forts armed with massive guns formed the core of the strategic defense of the United States. The events of World War II proved the system to be obsolete. Planes and ballistic missiles could easily leapfrog fortifications and strike blows far inland. Most Coast Artillery units had been disbanded by the war’s end. The world had become a more dangerous place, and the need for the United States to extend its defenses outward and to remain engaged in world affairs was clear.
Today travelers along the coast can still see the remnants of this earlier era of national defense, from Fort Knox in Maine to Fort Jefferson in Florida and Fort Point in San Francisco. Fort Jay looks out on New York Harbor less than two miles from the site of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Fort Stevens, the only coastal fort to see action during the twentieth century, became a state park in 1975.