On This Day: Japanese Submarine Attacks Oregon

The Japanese were retaliating against America for the Doolittle Raid, a surprise attack by U.S. B-25 bombers on the Japanese mainland only months earlier, HistoryLink.org writes. The American air raid caused minimal damage but humiliated Japan and bolstered U.S. confidence after Pearl Harbor and a string of U.S. defeats, freelance writer Dale Fehringer stated.

The Japanese high command sent submarines to the Pacific Northwest, ordering them to attack naval vessels headed to Alaska and the Aleutians. On June 21, one of the subs navigated through a fishing fleet near the Oregon coast, avoiding U.S. minefields off the Columbia River, and then moved in to fire its 5.5-inch deck gun at Fort Stevens.

The Oregon State Archives reported that Japanese shells damaged the fort’s baseball diamond, missing a nearby battery of 10-inch guns.

Despite initial confusion, the U.S. guns were soon manned—but no order to fire back at the Japanese was ever given. The enemy ship was mistakenly thought to be out of range, and the fort’s commander also claimed he didn’t want to give away the location of U.S. defenses, according to the Oregon State Archives Web site.

A number of other theories have arisen as to why U.S. Major Robert Huston gave the order not to fire back against the Japanese submarine, including speculation that the officers had been drunk and that the Army would have to give the soldiers combat pay if they engaged the enemy, writes Fehringer.

By midnight, the Japanese stopped the shelling, departing after firing an estimated 17 rounds.

No one was injured, but the attack shattered any belief that the American mainland was impenetrable. HistoryLink.org explained, “The attack on Fort Stevens illustrated a flaw in U.S. coastal defense strategy. Despite the efforts of military engineers, enemies could always develop weapons with longer ranges than coastal guns. The I-25’s small deck gun could outshoot the big rifles and mortars in the fort.”

The country boosted security on both coasts, and Americans became wary of Japanese-Americans living in the country—a bias that later contributed to the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese-American civilians.

Named for its leader, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, the raid was a risky American mission that had bombers take off from short aircraft carrier decks in the darkness with minimal fuel to take out key targets in Tokyo. Seen as American revenge for Pearl Harbor, the raid had little strategic impact but was “a tremendous boost to American morale, which had been severely tested by four long months of defeat and loss,” The USS Enterprise CV-6 Association explained.

A video clip of footage from The National Archives reports on the April 18, 1942, Doolittle Raid, in which 16 B-25 “Mitchell” medium bombers took off from the U.S.S. Hornet aircraft carrier in the Pacific, in a surprise attack on Tokyo.

The official Web site for Fort Stevens State Park details the history of the Fort from its creation in 1863 to its dismantling in 1947. Oregon State Parks leased the Fort in 1975. Originally, the fort was built to protect the region from an invasion via Canada if the British had sided with the Confederates during the Civil War. "In its long history, Fort Stevens never fired its guns in anger," the site explained.

The shelling of Fort Stevens “went into the history books as the only hostile shelling of a military base on the U.S. mainland during World War II and the first since the War of 1812,” the Oregon State Archives stated. A few months later, Japanese seaplanes, also launched from submarines, dropped bombs into Oregon, causing forest fires on two separate occasions. In one attack, Howard “Razz” Gardner, a forest service lookout, “heard what sounded to be a Model A Ford backfiring,” and saw a plane circling. When he called to report it, the operator “assumed that it was one of many patrol planes that passed up and down the coast.” U.S. authorities later found bomb fragments with Japanese writing on them.

The Japanese launched balloons loaded with bombs across the Pacific against the United States during World War II, meant to cause forest fires and create chaos. The U.S. government successfully quieted much of the news regarding such bombs so that the Japanese, thinking the bombs were ineffective, eventually halted their use. However, 9,000 of these balloon bombs made it across the Pacific, and on May 5, 1945, an Oregon woman and her five children were killed by an exploding balloon bomb.

A 2006 article in the magazine America in WWII describes the highly effective German U-boat presence on America’s Atlantic coast during World War II. “Ship by sinking ship, the Nazis achieved a victory over the United States comparable to and even more devastating than the one the Japanese had enjoyed at Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier. … Meanwhile, the American people were not being told how close they were to disaster.”