The Battle of Los Angeles and other West Coast problems

From With Courage: The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, 1994.

“During the early months of 1942, the West Coast of the United States seemed even more vulnerable than Hawaii to a sudden Japanese raid. Erroneous reports of warships off California and recurring false radar sightings contributed to the uneasiness. Then, on the night of February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California. Concerned that the shelling was intended to divert attention from some more dangerous attack, the local commander held most of his aircraft in reserve and dispatched only three Army bombers, which conducted a search but failed to locate the submarine. Early on the morining of February 25, when radar indicated aircraft approaching Los Angeles, a blackout went into effect and, although no interceptors took off, searchlights and bursting shells illuminated the skies over the city, as antiaircraft batteries fired some 1,400 rounds. Rumors of flaming Japanese bombers crashing into the city proved groundless; the only damage was self-inflicted; shell fragments punctured roofs, traffic accidents occurred in the blacked-out streets, and the excitement contributed to at least one fatal heart attack. A subsequent investigation indicated that weather balloons released in the city and picked up by radar had caused the panic.”

“Despite the fierce barrage thrown up to meet the phantom raiders during this so-called Battle of Los Angeles, the defenses of the West Coast were extremely porous. When Arnold left March Field, California, for Washington, D.C. on the afternoon of December 7, he made sure that the squadrons based in the area were on wartime alert; indeed, he could do little else until he returned to his desk and began shifting reinforcements westward. In the days immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bases defending California, Oregon, and Washington had only fourteen B-17s (intended for the Philippines), some seventy-five medium bombers, and forty-five pursuits. Arnold concluded that the greatest immediate need was for fighters, and within three weeks he sent an entire group of P-38s from Selfridge Field, Michigan. The buildup continued, and by the spring of 1942, more than 400 fighters and almost 300 bombers operated from airfields on the Pacific Coast.”

The report talks about how poorly the radar detection was on the West Coast. It then discusses the attack in the fall of 1942 by the Japanese submarine I-25 using a float plane to drop incendiary bombs on the forests of Oregon. Japanese attacks on West Coast shipping were far less troublesome than German U-boats.

The article then talks about the balloon bombs used by the Japanese between November of 1944 and May of 1945. According to his article, around, around 9000 were launched with 285 known to have reached the U.S. (This means only around 3% of the balloons actually made it here. I would think than any war device that had essentially a 97% failure rate would be considered not very effective.) Six picnickers were killed by one of the bombs. (In effect, it took 1500 balloon bombs to kill one person; no major fires were started and no other major damage happened.)

(The article does not discuss the possibility, though, that the balloon bombs could have been used as agents of biological warfare, although their effectiveness would still have been questionable since when and where they would detonate was pretty much a matter of chance.)



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