remember the movie 1941?? well maybe it wasnt so off the mark...
( and actually it is in a book...found one of my dad's old paperbacks and researched the pilot)
THE DAY THE JAPANESE BOMBED THE AMERICAN WEST COAST
Lt. Nobuo Fijita
It could have been a great book, a book about a Japanese WWII pilot who bombed the American West Coast. That’s what I heard, that he actually flew his warplane over the coast and dropped bombs on the America mainland. I had the chance, but I missed out writing that book.
A Greyhound bus driver told me the story and I didn’t believe him. I was sitting directly behind the driver, nearing Brookings en route to San Francisco, when he said, “Japanese aircraft bombed this place during World War II.”
The Japanese did launch a series of ill-directed high-altitude balloon bombs destined for North American and one or two fell harmlessly but the Japanese never bombed the mainland––or so we believed. I perked up when the bus driver mentioned the Japanese pilot had made a return visit to the US and the newspaper in Brooking ran the story. I had to check it out.
Later, I went to the newspaper. “That’s right,” the editor said, “one of those war secrets; would still be hush-hush had not the pilot come for a visit.” I could hardly believe it. The newspaper carried a photograph of Lt. Nobuo Fujita, 78, was appearing in Brookings, “nearly 48 years after he flew the only successful bombing mission against the US mainland.”
Secret or not, this had to be one of the most daring feats to come out of the war. From the editor I got the pilot’s address and wrote to him. He agreed to meet with me. I was flying from San Francisco to Bangkok and stopped in Tokyo and made the two-hour train trip to his village, and there I met Nobuo Fujita, a fail and soft-spoken man. I could hardly believe he had to tell me. He spoke some English, with the help of a dictionary.
He told how that bombing mission on California wasn’t his first against America. On November 21, 1941, he had sailed aboard I-25, an attack submarine, under orders to proceed to Pearl Harbor and join forces in the attacked on December 7. Aboard I-25 was his small Zero-type reconnaissance seaplane.
The plane was kept in a sealed deck hanger. It had to be assembled on deck and taken apart when it returned. Once assembled, the plane was catapulted with compressed air down a ramp on the deck. Top speed was barely 150 mph, and its only armament was one machine gun. But it did carry two 76-kg bombs.
After Pearl, I-25 returned to Yokosuka whereupon Fujita was ordered to report to Naval Headquarters. He was nervous when he entered the commander’s office. He was informed his next mission was to bomb the American mainland. He laughed when he told me the story. Where would it be, he asked himself, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles? Disappointment followed. He was to fly to Oregon-California border, drop incinerary bombs and set the forests on fire. Forest fires, not a city.
1-25 sailed from Yokosuka on August 15, 1942, and on an early morning in September sighted Cape Blanco light¬house. The submarine surfaced due west of the Oregon-California border and nipped into a cove. The aircraft was assembled and armed. With two 76 kg incendiary bombs aboard, Fujita was soon airborne. The sun was rising above the fog as he climbed to 2,500 metres. When they reached a heavily wooded area, he released the bombs.
On the return Fujita took the plane down to treetop level and hedgehopped back to awaiting submarine. They were beginning to submerge when the duty officer sighted an enemy airplane coming out of the sun.
I-25 dove and was 18 metres under the surface when the first bomb exploded. The submarine rolled sharply and the lights went out. Another bomb dropped by but missed. Fortunately damage was minor and repairs could be made later. That night they surfaced and made repairs.
Since they still had four incendiary bombs left, Fujita decided to make a second bombing mission. Knowing it was dangerous to fly during daylight hours he planned a night flight.
Before midnight, 50 miles west of Cape Blanco, I-25 surfaced and the crew assembled and armed the plane. Fujita took off in the dark, flew inland for about half and hour and dropped his bombs in a forest area east of Port Orford. He saw the explosions of red fire in the dark.
On the return flight, Fujita was very careful to avoid being seen. He turned off the engine when he reached the coast and glided well out to sea before starting the engine. Once safely aboard Fujita reported the success of the mission.
They spent the rest of the patrol time attacking merchant shipping. I-25 sank two tankers, one on October 5 and another on October 6. Not until they were down to their last torpedo did they decide to return home. Then on October 11, they fired their last torpedo at one of two submarines travelling on the surface about 80 miles off the Washington coast. The submarine, a Soviet L 16, blew up in a terrific explosion.
How was it possible that an enemy plane could fly over US territory and not be spotted? And why weren’t the bombings ever made known? For the answer, I had to go back to the archives in America.
The truth is Fujita in his low-flying plane was spotted by four people and reported in each incident. A milkman was driving his truck when there was a break in the fog and he saw an airplane coming in over the coast. He called the Coast Guard and was told he didn’t know what an airplane looked like.
A teenager who was out hunting instead of being in school saw the plane but was afraid to report it.
An unidentified soldier at Cape Blanco saw the plane and wondered what stupid fool was flying around in a putt-putt with a Japanese insignia trying to frighten the daylights out of everyone. His CO told him to get some sleep
A Forest Service officer on watch heard what sounded like a Model A Ford backfiring looked up to see a pontoon plane. He called headquarters but the operator attached “no significance to the report.”
The most interesting report concerned the US bomber. The twin-engine Lockheed neared the California-Oregon border when the pilot saw something dark in the water ahead. He made a pass and seeing that it might be an enemy submarine, dropped two 300-pound bombs. He then banked and made another approach but did not see any damage or oil on the water. It was long after the war that he learned he had not only seen a submarine and dropped a bomb on it, but that he had actually hit and damaged it.
What Nobuo told me next during my visit in Japan I could hardly believe. After the Pearl, he flew reconnaissance missions launched from I-25 over Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand and other Pacific ports that included Suva in the Fiji Islands and Noumea in New Caledonia––and was never detected.
I wanted to visit Nobuo again. There were so many questions I had to ask, and maybe even write his biography, if he agreed.
A few year later I was in Tokyo and thought I’d like to see Nobuo again. I phoned his home. It was too late. Nobuo Fujita had passed away some weeks before.
All that remains is a plaque on the California-Oregon border, a wooden marker on a mountainside, and the memories of a few people who are still alive. But even those will soon be forgotten. The full story will never be told and a part of history is lost forever.
an interesting footnote to the story
TOKYO, Oct. 2— Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot who flew bombing runs over Oregon in 1942, apparently the only time that an enemy aircraft has ever bombed the American mainland, died on Tuesday at a hospital near Tokyo. He was 85.
The cause was lung cancer, family members said.
Mr. Fujita, whose incendiary bombs set off forest fires in Oregon's coastal range, played the key role in a quixotic plan by Japanese military commanders to put pressure on America's home turf in World War II. The idea was that the United States Navy would then be obliged to retreat from the Pacific to protect the West Coast.
A quiet, humble man who in his later years was deeply ashamed of his air raids on the United States, Mr. Fujita eventually forged a remarkable bond of friendship with the people of Brookings, the small logging town whose surrounding forests he had bombed. Last week, as he lay dying, the town council of Brookings hailed Mr. Fujita an ''ambassador of good will'' and proclaimed him an ''honorary citizen'' of the town.
On his first postwar visit to Brookings in 1962, Mr. Fujita carried with him a 400-year-old samurai sword that had been handed down in his family from generation to generation. He presented the sword, which he had carried with him throughout the war, to Brookings as a symbol of his regret, and it now hangs in the local library.
Mr. Fujita's daughter, Yoriko Asakura, said today that there was a bit more to the story. She recalled that her father had been very anxious before that visit, fretting about whether Oregonians would be angry at him for the bombing, and so he had decided to carry the sword so that if necessary he could appease their fury by committing ritual suicide, disemboweling himself with the sword in the traditional Japanese method known as seppuku.
''He thought perhaps people would still be angry and would throw eggs at him,'' Mrs. Asakura recalled, adding that ''if that happened, as a Japanese, he wanted to take responsibility for what he had done'' by committing seppuku.
Mr. Fujita's grandson, Fumihiro Asakura, said his grandfather had been deeply moved that the people of Brookings treated him hospitably, showering him with affection and respect that he felt he did not deserve. From this remarkable mutual magnanimity, Mr. Fujita began the metamorphosis from an enemy bomber of Brookings to its honorary citizen.
Brookings is a remote town of 5,400 on the southern Oregon coast, focused on logging and farming, but it now has an excellent selection of Japan books in its local library.
''He gave $1,000 to the library to purchase books about Japan for children, so that there wouldn't be another war between the United States and Japan,'' Nancy Brendlinger, the Mayor of Brookings, said by telephone. ''He was always very humble and always promoting the idea of peace between the United States and Japan.''
Churches and businesses in Brookings contributed $3,000 to pay for Mr. Fujita's trip to Oregon in 1962, and when he could afford to, he responded by paying for several local people to visit Japan. He also made three more visits to Brookings over the years, planting trees to mark the spot where he dropped the bombs and taking part in a 1994 ceremony to dedicate a state historical marker near the site.
In the war, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, of course, and even bombed some islands off Alaska. But the air raids on Oregon were the only attacks by Japanese airplanes on what were states at that time.
A submarine carrying a crew of about 100 and a small plane with folded wings slipped across the Pacific to the unprotected waters off the Oregon coast. In the predawn darkness of Sept. 9, 1942, the crew assembled the plane and shot it into the air with a catapult. Mr. Fujita, who was a warrant officer, oriented himself with the Cape Bianco lighthouse and flew over the coastal range, dropping two 168-pound fire bombs over the forests in the hope of setting terrible forest fires.
Mr. Fujita's plane had been spotted from the ground, but no one had anything better to shoot at it with than a deer rifle, and so he flew back to the submarine -- and was horrified to discover that it was not there. He feared that it had been discovered and forced to leave him behind, but he eventually found it and landed in the water on the plane's floats.
The submarine's crew members quickly stowed the plane and dived to 250 feet, where they stayed quietly -- listening to American depth charges -- as the United States Navy searched frantically for them.
Three weeks later, Mr. Fujita flew an almost identical mission and dropped two more bombs. None of the bombings, on either mission, caused much of a fire, but they did provoke alarm up and down the coast.
Although Mr. Fujita's were the only air raids on the American mainland, Japan did release thousands of balloons carrying bombs. The winds carried the balloons across the ocean to the western United States, where they landed and set small fires. The only fatalities were a group of people on a church outing in Oregon and perhaps a woman in Montana.
Mr. Fujita's air raid was regarded in Japan as heroic. The main front-page article in the Asahi newspaper's evening edition on Sept. 17, 1942, carried a headline: ''Incendiary Bomb Dropped on Oregon State. First Air Raid on Mainland America. Big Shock to Americans.''
After the war, Mr. Fujita started a hardware store in Ibaraki Prefecture, near Tokyo, but it eventually went bankrupt. He later worked at a company making wire, and he rarely talked of the war or of his younger brother, who was killed in the fighting. Mr. Fujita's survivors -- in addition to his daughter, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild -- do not even know where the brother was killed.
His family members did not even know that he had bombed Oregon until he abruptly announced in 1962 that he had been invited to Brookings and would be going for a return visit -- with his sword, just in case.