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Museum Pieces: When Japan Bombed Oregon [1]
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Date: 2025-07-08
In September 1942, the little town of Brookings OR became the victim of the first enemy bombs to reach the United States mainland during WW2.
Once the war began, however, the United States set up a dense network of shore defenses around the West Coast, making it virtually impossible for any surface fleet to approach undetected. Yamamoto realized that he could not simply perform a repeat of the Pearl Harbor attack using aircraft carriers, and decided that submarines offered the best way of slipping past the American defenses. And the great success at Pearl Harbor convinced him that aerial bombs could do the most damage.
In January 1942, Japan was riding high. It had control of most of the Pacific, and its attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor had been a severe blow. But Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy, knew that he had not won yet. He needed some way to take the battle to the American mainland, to terrorize the American people and convince them that negotiating a peace was preferable to a long and bloody war.
The concept already existed—the Japanese Type B1 submarines already carried a small Yokosuka E14Y floatplane that was used for reconnaissance and spotting. The floatplane had folding wings, allowing it to fit inside a small watertight compartment in front of the sub's conning tower, where it could be launched from a short catapult on deck. Yamamoto now decided to expand this concept into a superweapon. He ordered construction to begin on 18 I-400 class submarines, each capable of carrying three specially-designed bombers armed with 1800-pound bombs.
To work out a successful attack strategy, Yamamoto ordered a number of submarine attacks on the American West Coast. On February 23, 1942, the Japanese fleet submarine I-17 surfaced near Santa Barbara, California, and fired a number of shells from its deck gun at the Ellwood Oil Field. And on June 21, the Type B1 submarine I-25 shelled the US military base at Fort Stevens, Oregon, at the mouth of the Colombia River. These attacks did little damage, but they confirmed to Yamamoto that submarines could successfully penetrate US defenses and reach coastal targets.
The next step was to test the idea of an aerial attack. On September 9, the submarine I-25 again approached the US, where the crew strapped two small 76kg incendiary bombs to its Yokosuka floatplane. The bombs contained pellets of thermite, a mixture of iron and aluminum powder that burned at temperatures over 4,000F. The intent was to spark off a wildfire that would sweep over the forested mountains and consume large areas of timber.
At 6am the plane catapulted into the air with Chief Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita in the pilot’s seat and Petty Officer Shoji Okuda in the back as observer/gunner. Fujita had previously flown a number of photo-reconnaissance missions over harbors in Australia, New Zealand, and Alaska.
As he flew towards the Oregon coast, however, Fujita ran into a fog bank. After circling long enough to confirm that he was over forested land, he released both of his bombs and flew back to his submarine, where he landed in the water and was winched back aboard. Almost immediately after recovering the plane, though, the I-25 was spotted on the surface by an American patrol plane which attacked, forcing the sub into an emergency dive.
Nobuo Fujita standing next to his Yokosuka E14Y floatplane photo from Wiki Commons
Although Fujita had not been intercepted or fired upon during his flight, however, he had in fact been spotted. Two Forest Service lookouts on the tower at Mount Emily, Howard “Razz” Gardner and Bob Larson, had seen a small plane circling in the area, but could not make out what it was. Two other lookouts reported hearing a plane but could not see it in the fog. The reports were dismissed as sightings of American patrol planes that were known to be in the area.
At noon, however, as the fog lifted, Gardner spotted a thin column of smoke and reported a fire. He and several other lookouts were ordered to hike to the spot, at Wheeler Ridge on Mount Emily, about ten miles from the little town of Brookings OR. When they got there, they found a circular area with smoldering flames about 50-75 feet wide. There had been recent rain and the ground was still wet, which had dampened the effects of the fires.
Near the center they found a crater about three feet wide and a foot deep, which contained melted rock and some unignited thermite pellets. They also found some metal fragments scattered up to 100 feet away. All of this indicated an incendiary bomb (no evidence was ever found of Fujita’s second bomb). But once again the authorities came to a mistaken conclusion, assuming that the bomb had been accidentally dropped by an American plane. It was not until they found pieces the next day of the nose casing with Japanese markings that they realized what had happened. In all, the military and the FBI recovered about 60 pounds of bomb fragments and thermite pellets.
The War Department immediately tried to control the story and censor the local press reports, but the word had already gotten out that the Japanese had bombed the area. This was compounded when, just twenty days later on September 29, the I-25 repeated her attack. Once again, Fujita and Okuda were catapulted away in their bomb-laden floatplane, this time just after midnight about 50 miles west of the Cape Blanco Lighthouse, which served Fujita as a visual beacon in the dark. Fujita dropped both bombs and reported seeing flames on the ground as he left, but no trace of this attack has ever been found.
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