Retaliation: Japanese Attacks and Allied Countermeasures on the Pacific Coast in World War II

Other countries intern their persons of Japanese ancestry

“The 24,000 Japanese-Canadians, including 7, 400 naturalized citizens, did not fare any better than the Japanese-Americans. There were about 22,000 Japanese in British Columbia, all but about 3,000 of them living along the coast or on islands, mainly Vancouver Island. Those within 100 miles of the coast were assembled at Kaslo, B.C., and assigned to resettlement areas in refurbished 'ghost towns' in the Kootenay Lake and Slocan Valley areas and in a new settlement called Tashme.”

”About 2,500 Japanese-Canadians were sent to Lethbridge, Alberta, for a sugar beet farming project aimed at relieving the sugar shortage caused by the war.”

”More than 1,000 evacuees were sent to Manitoba and a few hundred men on to Ontario. Others were placed on special status-42 repatriated to Japan, nearly 1,000 sent to road camp projects, and about 100 to hospital service. In October 1942, 57 were listed as 'in detention' in Vancouver.”

”Mexico moved its Japanese population inland from Baja California. Some of the Japanese in South America, particularly in Peru, were relocated in centers in the United States.”

Santa Barbara attack

The attack occurred at Goleta, which is a few miles west of Santa Barbara in southern California.

Estevan Point attack

Estevan Point is midway up the west coast of Vancouver Island. A lighthouse keeper, working in a lighthouse built in 1907, saw a smokescreen on June 20, 1942. It was the Japanese submarine I-26. It stopped opposite the lighthouse at 10:15 and started firing its deck gun.

There were around 17 shots fired, the first ones falling too short and the next set overshooting. Windows in the lighthouse were broken by the concussion of exploding shells, but that was about as serious as the damage got. The shelling lasted for about a half-hour.

Indirectly there was the loss of a plane. One of the planes sent to check out what was going on crashed during takeoff, but the crew all walked away from the crash.

This is the type of attack that seemed to be more for psychological purposes of scaring the Allies rather than any actual great focused attack on some highly important objective. Basically, all the Japanese attacks on North America were of this nature since none of them really accomplished anything militarily.

It also points up one of the major weaknesses of the Japanese military that definitely led to its defeat in the war, and that was that they could not really launch any type of effective attacks against the US mainland. All the war-related factories could continue to produce; all the farms could continue to produce; all the ship-building facilities could continue to produce. While the Japanese industrial machine was being bombed and fire-bombed over and over, the American war machine went untouched, allowing the US to replace any losses of planes and ships and, if nothing else, overwhelm Japanese forces by sheer numbers.

Fort Stevens attack

There were soldiers here who were ready to defend the beach if the Japanese tried a landing. The date was June 21, 1942 when the Japanese submarine I-25 attacked. The commander of the attacking sub was under the impression that there was a submarine base on the Columbia River, which would have made a reasonable military target.

The problem was, of course, that there was no submarine base there at all.

The outpost unit for the fort had some machine-gun implacements, but they were equipped with World War I machine guns.

The section describes how hard it was to convince the higher-ups that the Fort area was actually under attack.

The most important thing about this attack was the fact that the guns from the fort did not return fire. There is controversy about this fact, to say the least. A Captain Wood says the guns were loaded with armor-piercing shells. He asked for clearance to fire, and he asked for all the searchlights to be turned on. There were 17 rounds fired by the Japanese submarine, and not one single round from the American batteries in answer.

The Japanese shells did not really do much of any major damage. They did smash the backstop of a baseball diamond, and there was other minor damage, but that was about it.

Captain Wood, though, was never given permission to return fire. (Why should he have to ask permission anyhow? If it's wartime, and a place is under attack, then isn't it logical that you return fire? Apparently, though, that wasn't how the military was run. You had to get permission to fire. )

Then there is the question of whether or not the submarine was within range of the guns of the fort. Accounts from men on the sub itself indicate that they were actually within range of the fort's guns, but the higher-ups in the “authorities” in the US had decided that the sub was not within range.

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