Martin Bender
In the darkness just before midnight on June 21, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-25 surfaced from the Pacific Ocean close to the mouth of the Columbia River. I-25’s mission was to disrupt shipping, gather intelligence and probe America’s defenses.
I-25’s deck gun was immediately aimed in the direction of Fort Stevens and Battery Russell, a shore defense gun emplacement on the Oregon side of the entrance to the Columbia River to protect the waterway and the military targets upstream toward Portland. I-25 fired two explosive shells.
All eyes aboard I-25 were focused toward Fort Stevens which, like most of the West Coast, was following a total black-out protocol. The fort’s commander elected to not answer I-25 as the muzzle flashes from the shore guns would telegraph their exact location and give I-25 a targeting solution.
I-25 continued the attack, firing a total of 17 shells. Fort Stevens remained dark and Battery Russell’s guns remained silent. Communications cables in one location and a beach ball size hole in the backstop at the fort’s baseball field was the extent of the physical damage caused by the bombardment.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, the entire U.S. west coast anticipated a land invasion. Fears were heightened in early June 1942 when the Japanese occupied Attu Island and attacked others in Alaska’s Aleutian chain. While I-25’s attack on Fort Stevens inflicted little physical damage, it had a definite psychological effect, further reinforcing invasion fear. The shelling of Fort Stevens on the night of June 21-22, 1942, was the first attack by an enemy warship on the continental United States since the War of 1812.
I-25 appeared again off the Oregon coast on Sept. 9, 1942, and launched a Glen floatplane that it carried in a watertight container on the forward deck. The plane, armed with two 168-pound incendiary bombs, flew inland dropping the bombs in a forested area just north of the Oregon/California border near the town of Brookings. The mission objective was to start a massive forest fire, but the humidity and calm winds enabled the forest service to quickly contain and extinguish I-25’s effort. Another bombing flight occurred on Sept. 29,, 1942, with like results.
The aerial bombing of the Oregon forest in September 1942 was the first ever aerial attack on the United States mainland. In late 1944 and early 1945, Japan tried a similar forest fire strategy using balloon bombs with little success.
Epilogue: The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-25 was sunk on Sept. 3, 1943, in the South Pacific off the islands of the New Hebrides by the destroyer USS Patterson.
In 1962, at the Brookings Oregon Azalea Festival, Nobuo Fijita, the pilot of I-25’s floatplane that dropped the incendiary bombs on Oregon in 1942, presented his family’s 400-year-old Samurai sword to the Brookings’ mayor as a gesture of friendship and peace. Nobuo Fujita returned to Brookings several times over the years and helped fund the building of the Brookings City Library.