When we ran the story by PETER MARVIN (4483-1995) about the only time the US was attacked during World War II, I knew we would have some sharp-eyed historians dispute this. The story by PETER was accurate and was a great story, but the US mainland was attacked on other occasions during the War. There are other stories about other attacks, but we decided to run this one from the AUSTRALIAN SUBMARINES ASSOCIATION (5155-1997) because it has additional information for our Russian Navy friends on a question they asked me some years ago and for which we did not have the answer. Here is the letter from PETER SMITH, the Hon. National Secretary of this organization.

“Concerning the statement made in PETER MARVIN’s first person story in KTB #123, the attack on the Elwood oil field, Santa Barbara was certainly the first, but not the only attack on the United States of America mainland.

The submarine involved in the first attack was I-17 under the command of Commander Kozo Nishino. I-17 entered the Santa Barbara Strait on 24 February 1942 and lay submerged off the kelp beds doing periscope reconnaissance until the following day when the captain ordered battle surface and shelled the oil field with seventeen rounds of 5.5 inch shells.

The second attack on mainland USA occurred on 9 September 1942. The submarine involved this time was I-25 under the command of Commander Meiji Tagami. I-25 was a B-1 Type scouting submarine with a hangar for a Type 96 scout float plane and catapult. The pilot was Warrant Flying Officer Nobuo Fujita and his crewman was Petty Officer Shoki Okuda.

Prior to I-25’s mission to the United States, I-25 was scouting off the coast of Australia where Fujita and Okuda flew reconnaissance flights over Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, Australia; Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand and Suva, Fiji. This was a lead up to the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour on the night of 31 May - 1 June 1942 where a torpedo meant for the cruiser USS CHICAGO missed and detonated against the dockyard wall, sinking the ferry KUTTABUL (used as a naval accommodation ship) killing 22 sailors.

After scouting in Southern waters, I-25 was ordered to proceed to the North American coast and fire-bomb the State of Oregon forests. Fujita’s airplane had been fitted with bomb racks and six bombs individually weighing 154 pounds, each containing 512 tiny incendiary bombs were loaded into the submarine.

I-25 surfaced off the Oregon-California border in sight of Cape Blanco lighthouse, the scout plane (nicknamed the ‘GETA’) loaded with two bombs was catapulted off at sunrise and flew approximately 50 miles inland and dropped the first bomb. He then flew on for another 10 minutes and dropped the second bomb. Fujita turned back his plane and flew low over the landscape to land alongside I-25 and reported that the bombs had burst in white light scattering the small firebombs. This action being the first time that the mainland of North America had been attacked from the air.

On 29 September 1942 I-25 returned to Cape Blanco and Fujita flew a second sortie, this time at night dropping two more bombs on Oregon’s forests.

While waiting for the weather to clear sufficiently to launch the aircraft so Fujita could drop the last two bombs, I-25 cruised off the coast between Seattle and San Francisco. Between 5 and 10 October, Commander Tagami attacked three ships, sinking two. It was decided then that the Americans would be too alert for another air attack to be successful and turned west. On 11 October Tagami detected two submarines on the surface some 500 miles west off Seattle and fired his last torpedo and one of the submarines exploded. The mine-laying submarines L-15 & L-16 were Russian, on the way from Vladivostok to the Baltic Sea via the Panama Canal. Tagami sunk L-16. At this time, Russia and Japan were not at war, Russia being an Allied nation stated that the ‘cruel and foul blow’ against L-16 could have been struck by either a US submarine or a submarine belonging to Japan - ‘which was neutral as far as we were concerned’.

HARRY’S NOTE - Several Russian Navy Admirals asked this question of me when I visited Moscow in 1991, when it was still the Soviet Union. I did not have the answers, but now - thanks to the Australian Submarine Association, here is the answer.

‘The rationale behind the fire-bombing of America’s forests was to force the United States to draw its ships back from the West Pacific to protect her own coastlines from further attacks. How successful the attacks were are hard to judge as I do not have access to the reports on the fires, however in one report intercepted by the Japanese from a San Francisco broadcast described how an airplane, presumably Japanese, had dropped incendiary bombs upon Oregon forest areas, causing some casualties and much damage to the woodland.”

HARRY’S NOTE - As reported in our KTB Magazine months ago, it was this fire-bomb attack that prompted the US Government to invent ‘Smokey the Bear’ whose motto has become familiar to Americans over the past fifty years; ‘Only you can prevent forest fires.’

Many thanks to PETER SMITH and the AUSTRALIAN SUBMARINES ASS’N for this great update on history.

First Person: Attack On America WWII