Battle of Los Angeles
Part of American Theater

Photos from Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1942
Date24–25 February 1942
Location
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Casualties and losses

5 civilians died

The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, is the name given by contemporary sources to a rumored attack on the continental United States by Imperial Japan and the subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage which took place from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942, over Los Angeles, California.[1][2][3] The incident occurred less than three months after the U.S. entered World War II in response to the Imperial Japanese Navy's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after the bombardment of Ellwood near Santa Barbara on 23 February. Initially, the target of the aerial barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but speaking at a press conference shortly afterward, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called the purported attack a "false alarm". Newspapers of the time published a number of reports and speculations of a cover-up to conceal an actual invasion by enemy airplanes.

When documenting the incident in 1949, the United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent aloft at 1:00 am as having "started all the shooting" and concluded that "once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in".[4] In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of "war nerves" triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries. As an example of incompetence, the incident was derisively referred to as the "Battle of Los Angeles" or the "Great Los Angeles Air Raid".[5]

Background

In the months following the Imperial Japanese Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and the United States' entry into World War II the next day, public outrage and paranoia intensified across the country and especially on the West Coast, where fears of a Japanese attack on or invasion of the U.S. continent were acknowledged as realistic possibilities. In Juneau, Alaska, residents were told to cover their windows for a nightly blackout after rumors spread that Japanese submarines were lurking along the southeast Alaskan coast.[6] Rumors that a Japanese aircraft carrier was cruising off the coast of the San Francisco Bay Area resulted in the city of Oakland closing its schools and issuing a blackout; civil defense sirens mounted on patrol cars from the Oakland Police Department blared through the city, and radio silence was ordered.[7] The city of Seattle also imposed a blackout of all buildings and vehicles, and owners who left the lights on in their buildings had their businesses smashed by a mob of 2,000 residents.[8] The rumors were taken so seriously that 500 United States Army troops moved into the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California, to defend the famed Hollywood facility and nearby factories against enemy sabotage or air attacks.[9]

As the U.S. began mobilizing for the war, anti-aircraft guns were installed, bunkers were built, and air raid precautions were drilled into the populace all over the country. Contributing to the paranoia was the fact that many American merchant ships were indeed attacked by Japanese submarines in waters off the West Coast, especially from the last half of December 1941 through February 1942: SS Agwiworld (escaped), SS Emidio (damaged), SS Samoa (escaped), SS Larry Doheny (sank), SS Dorothy Phillips (damaged), SS H.M. Storey (escaped, sank later), SS Cynthia Olson (sank), SS Camden (sank), SS Absaroka (damaged), Coast Trader (sank), SS Montebello (sank), SS Barbara Olson (escaped), SS Connecticut (damaged), and SS Idaho (minor damage).[10][11] As the hysteria continued to mount, on 23 February 1942, at 7:15 pm, during one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats, Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled Ellwood Oil field in Goleta. Although damage was minimal (only $500 in property damage (equivalent to $9,000 in 2022) and no injuries) the attack had a profound effect on the public imagination, as West Coast residents came to believe that the Japanese could storm their beaches at any moment. (Less than four months later, Japanese forces bombed Dutch Harbor in Unalaska, Alaska, and landed troops in the Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu).[7]

Alarms raised

On 24 February 1942, the Office of Naval Intelligence issued a warning that an attack on mainland California could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening, many flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert was called at 7:18 pm, and was lifted at 10:23 pm. Renewed activity began early in the morning of 25 February.[12] Air raid sirens sounded at 2:25 am throughout Los Angeles County.[13] A total blackout was ordered and thousands of air raid wardens were summoned to their positions. At 3:16 am, the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade began firing .50-caliber machine guns and 12.8-pound (5.8 kg) anti-aircraft shells into the air at reported aircraft; over 1,400 shells were eventually fired. Pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command were alerted but their aircraft remained grounded. The artillery fire continued sporadically until 4:14 am. The "all clear" was sounded and the blackout order was lifted at 7:21 am.[14]

Several buildings and vehicles were damaged by shell fragments, and five civilians died as an indirect result of the anti-aircraft fire: three were killed in car accidents in the ensuing chaos and two of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long action.[15] The incident was front-page news along the West Coast and across the nation.[16]

Press response

Within hours of the end of the air raid, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox held a press conference, saying the entire incident had been a false alarm due to anxiety and "war nerves". Knox's comments were followed by statements from the Army the next day[17] that reflected General George C. Marshall's supposition that the incident might have been caused by enemy agents using commercial airplanes in a psychological warfare campaign to generate mass panic.[18]

Some contemporary press outlets suspected a cover-up of the truth. An editorial in the Long Beach Independent wrote, "There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter." Speculation was rampant as to invading airplanes and their bases. Theories included a secret base in northern Mexico as well as Japanese submarines stationed offshore with the capability of carrying planes. Others speculated that the incident was either staged or exaggerated to give coastal defense industries an excuse to move further inland.[19]

Representative Leland M. Ford of Santa Monica called for a Congressional investigation, saying "none of the explanations so far offered removed the episode from the category of 'complete mystification' ... this was either a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a political foundation to take away Southern California's war industries."[20]

Attribution

After the war ended in 1945, the Japanese government declared that they had flown no airplanes over Los Angeles during the war.[13] In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History concluded that an analysis of the evidence points to meteorological balloons as the cause of the initial alarm:[12]

During the course of a fireside report to the nation delivered by President Roosevelt on 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine rose out of the sea off Ellwood, a hamlet on the California coast north of Santa Barbara, and pumped thirteen shells into tidewater refinery installations. The shots seemed designed to punctuate the President's statement that "the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies." Yet the attack which was supposed to carry the enemy's defiance, and which did succeed in stealing headlines from the President's address, was a feeble gesture rather than a damaging blow. The raider surfaced at 1905 (Pacific time), just five minutes after the President started his speech. For about twenty minutes the submarine kept a position 2,500 yards offshore to deliver the shots from its 5½-inch guns. The shells did minor damage to piers and oil wells, but missed the gasoline plant, which appears to have been the aiming point; the military effects of the raid were therefore nil. The first news of the attack led to the dispatch of pursuit planes to the area, and subsequently three bombers joined the attempt to destroy the raider, but without success. The reluctance of AAF commanders to assign larger forces to the task resulted from their belief that such a raid as this would be employed by the enemy to divert attention from a major air task force which would hurl its planes against a really significant target. Loyal Japanese-Americans who had predicted that a demonstration would be made in connection with the President's speech also prophesied that Los Angeles would be attacked the next night. The Army, too, was convinced that some new action impended, and took all possible precautions. Newspapers were permitted to announce that a strict state of readiness against renewed attacks had been imposed, and there followed the confused action known as "The Battle of Los Angeles".

During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening many flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 pm, Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of "enemy planes, " even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano." From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance.

Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: "swarms" of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from "very slow" to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The dawn, which ended the shooting and the fantasy, also proved that the only damage which resulted to the city was such as had been caused by the excitement (there was at least one death from heart failure), by traffic accidents in the blacked-out streets, or by shell fragments from the artillery barrage. Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the incident quickly became as involved and mysterious as the "battle" itself. The Navy immediately insisted that there was no evidence of the presence of enemy planes, and [Secretary of the Navy], Frank Knox announced at a press conference on 25 February that the raid was just a false alarm. At the same conference he admitted that attacks were always possible and indicated that vital industries located along the coast ought to be moved inland. The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended, indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove "that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated." The Fourth Air Force had indicated its belief that there were no planes over Los Angeles. But the Army did not publish these initial conclusions. Instead, it waited a day, until after a thorough examination of witnesses had been finished. On the basis of these hearings, local commanders altered their verdict and indicated a belief that from one to five unidentified airplanes had been over Los Angeles. Secretary Stimson announced this conclusion as the War Department version of the incident, and he advanced two theories to account for the mysterious craft: either they were commercial planes operated by an enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or they were light planes launched from Japanese submarines. In either case, the enemy's purpose must have been to locate anti-aircraft defenses in the area or to deliver a blow at civilian morale.

The divergence of views between the War and Navy departments, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles Times, in a first-page editorial on 26 February, announced that "the considerable public excitement and confusion" caused by the alert, as well as its "spectacular official accompaniments", demanded a careful explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service. In the United States Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether the incident was "a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away Southern California's war industries." Wendell Willkie, speaking in Los Angeles on 26 February, assured Californians on the basis of his experiences in England that when a real air raid began "you won't have to argue about it—you'll just know." He conceded that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling of the Los Angeles episode a "recipe for jitters", and censured the military authorities for what it called "stubborn silence" in the face of widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army's theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert "explains everything except where the planes came from, whither they were going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them." The New York Times on 28 February expressed a belief that the more the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: "If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? ... What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?" These questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of American air defenses.

At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert, although submarine-launched aircraft were subsequently used over Oregon. A careful study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons—known to have been released over Los Angeles—may well have caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the fact that anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to have been airplanes. After the firing started, careful observation was difficult because of drifting smoke from shell bursts. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area testified that he had first been convinced that he had seen fifteen planes in the air, but had quickly decided that he was seeing smoke. Competent correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry witnessed the shooting and wrote that they were never able to make out an airplane. It is hard to see, in any event, what enemy purpose would have been served by an attack in which no bombs were dropped, unless perhaps, as Mr. Stimson suggested, the purpose had been reconnaissance.

According to historian Roger Lotchin, "the incident became derisively termed 'The Battle of Los Angeles' or 'The Great Los Angeles Air Raid' and is often cited as an example of the buffoonery that suffused the war effort in the state".[5]

Ufology

A photo published in the Los Angeles Times on February 26, 1942, has been featured in UFO conspiracy theories as evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation.[21] They assert that the photo clearly shows searchlights focused on an alleged alien spaceship; however, the photo was heavily modified by photo retouching prior to publication, a routine practice in graphic arts of the time intended to improve contrast in black and white photos.[22][23] Times writer Larry Harnisch noted that the retouched photo along with faked newspaper headlines were presented as true historical material in trailers for the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles. Harnisch commented, "[I]f the publicity campaign wanted to establish UFO research as nothing but lies and fakery, it couldn't have done a better job."[24]

Commemoration

Every February, the Fort MacArthur Museum, located at the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor, hosts an entertainment event called "The Great LA Air Raid of 1942".[25]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The Battle of Los Angeles". Military Museum. Retrieved 6 November 2015.
  2. ↑ Caughey, John; Caughey, LaRee (1977). Los Angeles: biography of a city. University of California Press. p. 364. ISBN 978-0-520-03410-5. great los angeles air raid.
  3. ↑ Farley, John E. (1998). Earthquake fears, predictions, and preparations in mid-America. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2201-5. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  4. ↑ Murphy, Col. John G. (May–June 1949). "Activities of The Ninth Army AAA – L.A. "Attacked"" (PDF). Antiaircraft Journal, the United States Coast Artillery Association. LXXXII (3): 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 November 2020. Retrieved 3 March 2016.
  5. 1 2 Lotchin, Roger W. (3 March 2003). The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego. Indiana University Press, Mar 3, 2003. ISBN 0253000483. Retrieved 4 November 2023.
  6. ↑ "Juneau During WWII Panel The Empty Chair: The Forced Removal and Relocation of Juneau's Japanese, 1941–1951". Archived from the original on 29 September 2019. Retrieved 8 May 2019.
  7. 1 2 Parzanese, Joe. "Battle of Los Angeles". Weird California. Retrieved 20 May 2021.
  8. ↑ Erik Lacitis (7 December 2016). "What happened in Seattle after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941". The Seattle Times.
  9. ↑ Moseley, Doobie (7 December 2015). "Pearl Harbor Changed Everything, Even the Disney Studio". Laughing Place.
  10. ↑ "California in World War II: The Attack on the SS Agwiworld". www.militarymuseum.org. Retrieved 20 May 2021.
  11. ↑ "California in World War II: The Attacks on the SS Barbara Olson and SS Absoroka". www.militarymuseum.org. Retrieved 20 May 2021.
  12. 1 2 Craven, Wesley Frank; Cate, James Lea (1983). ""West Coast Air Defenses", "The Battle of Los Angeles"" (PDF). The Army Air Forces in World War II: Defense of the Western Hemisphere. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C: Office of Air Force History. pp. 277–86. ISBN 978-0-912799-03-2. Archived from the original on 25 March 2009. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  13. 1 2 The Battle of L.A. turns 75: When a panicked city fought a Japanese invasion that never happened Los Angeles Times. 25 February 2017.
  14. ↑ Boissoneault, Lorraine. "The Great Los Angeles Air Raid Terrified Citizens – Even Though No Bombs Were Dropped". smithsonianmag.com. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 5 May 2018.
  15. ↑ Niiya, Brian, ed. (1993). "Battle of Los Angeles". Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present. p. 112. ISBN 978-0816026807.
  16. ↑ "The Battle of Los Angeles – 1942". Sfmuseum.net. 25 February 1942. Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  17. ↑ Los Angeles Times, 27 February 1942
  18. ↑ "California in World War II: The Battle of Los Angeles". Militarymuseum.org. 25 February 1942. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  19. ↑ Los Angeles Times, "Information, Please", 26 Feb. 1942, p. 1
  20. ↑ Los Angeles Times, "Knox Assailed on 'False Alarm': West Coast legislators Stirred by Conflicting Air-Raid Statements" 27 Feb. 1942, p. 1
  21. ↑ David G. Robertson (25 February 2016). UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 58ff. ISBN 978-1-4742-5321-5.
  22. ↑ Harnisch, Larry (13 March 2011). "Another Good Story Ruined: Saucers Over L.A.! – Part 7". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 3 April 2014.
  23. ↑ Ed Stockly. "TV Skeptic: 'Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files' looks at the real 'Battle of L.A.'". Los Angeles Times.
  24. ↑ Harnisch, Larry (21 February 2011). "Another Good Story Ruined – The Battle of Los Angeles". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 23 February 2013.
  25. ↑ "Fort MacArthur Museum: The Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942". The Fort MacArthur Museum Association. 1994–2010. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
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