The Lookout Air Raid, When the Japanese Tried to Set the Pacific Northwest on Fire
The United States was unique, and exceptionally fortunate among the major WW2 combatants, in that it did nearly all of its fighting outside its territory, and far away beyond its borders. As the war raged on in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, the continental United States, and pretty much the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, remained largely untouched.
Some of the few exceptions to that inviolability occurred in September of 1942, when the Japanese launched a pair of air raids that dropped incendiaries on the forests of Oregon, hoping to ignite uncontrollable wild fires. The mission was entrusted to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Lieutenant Commander Meiji Tamagi, captain of the IJN submarine I-25.
Tamagi’s submarine, which had a range of 16,000 miles, was specially built with a small aircraft hangar in front of the conning tower, that housed a seaplane. On the morning of September 9th, 1942, the I-25 surfaced off Oregon’s Cape Blanco to launch its seaplane. It was piloted by a Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita, and armed with a pair of 168 pound incendiary bombs.
Fujita’s plane was spotted by a lookout in a forest tower as he flew to the Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon. The Japanese pilot dropped his incendiaries, but did so from an incorrect height, resulting in only a few scattered fires. Between that bombing error, recent rains that kept the area damp, and the efforts of fire lookouts and Park Rangers, the flames were contained and extinguished within a few hours. A few weeks later, on September 29th, Fujita returned and dropped another load of incendiaries, but the second raid’s results were just as negligible as the first.