Japan bombs America (9 September 1942)
The United States had just launched a massive and successful bombing campaign against Japan. Doolittle and his fellow raiders had stunned the Japanese Empire with their successful bombing raids. The Japanese could not allow for this to stand. It was a huge affront to their honor. It was demoralizing to the Japanese people to have the April bombings lodge in their memories, and the Japanese leaders could not afford to have such an event stand at a time when they needed the full support of the Japanese people to deal with the restraints the war effort and Allied blockades were causing.
And so the Emperor of Japan devised a daring scheme to settle the score. Japan would do something that no other country had done before. Emperor Hirohito wanted to bomb the American mainland. He wanted Japanese planes to drop their bombs on the continental United States. He wanted to bomb….Oregon.
The task fell upon Nobuo Fujita, a pilot in the Japanese Air Force. He was loaded up onto a submarine and traveled across the Pacific. Submarine operations on the West Coast were already conducted by the Japanese, though they were relatively unsuccessful. They did, however, prove that a submarine could pass through American coastal defenses.
Fujita’s plane took off from the Japanese submarine on 9 September 1942 and, loaded with its incendiary bombs, flew towards Oregon with the intent of fire bombing the forests. Its intent was to spread fear that the Japanese could again attack America as well as to demoralize the American people in their faith of the American coastal defenses. Though the bombs dropped, they did not cause any great fire and the news was quickly suppressed by the government to prevent panic. Similar small actions took place in Oregon, including some high altitude balloons that would attempt to once again burn the Oregon forests. The results were small and often failures, though one balloon did explode upon discovery by local residents, killing six. They were the only American civilian casualties on the continental United States during the war.
While the Fujita’s mission failed in almost every sense aside from being able to drop the bombs, he is still the only man in the history of the US to ever bomb the American mainland.
For a more complete look at this attack, its causes and ramifications, please check here.