Jap Pilot Bombed US
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we are vets We-Are-Vets.us The Japanese Pilot Who Bombed Mainland America Nobuo Fujita aimed to kill Americans in a fiery blaze, but his actions yielded a far different result. JAPANESE SUBMARINE I-25 bobbed in the ocean swells 33 miles off the Oregon coast as the submarine’s crew wrapped up flight preparations. It was the early morning of September 9, 1942; from the cockpit of his floatplane aboard the sub, 31-year-old Warrant Flight Officer Nobuo Fujita watched as a faint orange glow suffused the eastern horizon. Before sliding the canopy closed, he reached down to pat the ancestral samurai sword stowed beside his seat—a talisman always by his side on operations. At 5:35 a.m., the catapult officer pulled the launch lever and the little Yokosuka E14Y shot into the air. As Fujita gained altitude, he could begin to make out the undulating contours of the Klamath Mountains. It was there that he was headed; there that he intended to drop the two incendiary bombs mounted beneath his wings. His mission was nothing less than to set southern Oregon’s vast, virgin forests of Douglas fir ablaze in hopes of creating an unstoppable maelstrom that would devastate the region, destroy towns, kill people. It was Japan’s intention to spread panic among mainland Americans by demonstrating that the empire could bring the war directly to their doorsteps. If he pulled it off, he would be the first person to ever bomb the Lower 48. In September 1942, Warrant Flight Officer Nobuo Fujita made the only manned aerial bombing of the mainland U.S. when he used a sub-borne floatplane to strike the forests of southern Oregon NOBUO FUJITA stood barely five feet tall. His chiseled face revealed a calm, confident countenance. Born in 1911 on a farm in central Japan, he was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in 1931 and after boot camp went to the Kasumigaura Naval Air School. In the mid-1930s he tested experimental seaplanes and in 1937 served six months in China flying rescue missions along the Yangtze River. He returned to Japan the following year as a flight instructor, joining the submarine aviation unit in 1941. Before deploying, his father entrusted him with the family’s precious, centuries-old sword. Fujita’s launch platform, submarine I-25, was one of 29 “Type B” boats designed to carry a small reconnaissance plane. The thinking behind these submersible aircraft carriers was that the plane would extend the sub’s scouting range by hundreds of miles. Though other nations had conducted similar experiments before the war, the IJN was the only major power to deploy them. The Type Bs were powerful submarines, superior in many ways to the American Gatos class, the standard U.S. fleet submarine at the beginning of the war. They were, at 356 feet in length, 45 feet longer; weighed 1,100 tons more; had a range of 14,000 miles—3,000 more than the Gatos; and with a top speed of 23.5 knots, could outrun them. The E14Y “Type 0” seaplane—a low-wing, two-seat monoplane with a top speed of 150 mph, range of 547 miles, and bomb load of 336 pounds—was carried in sections inside a streamlined steel hangar just ahead of the sub’s conning tower. A seven-man aircrew could assemble its 12 components in about 15 minutes and launch it from a compressed-air catapult on the foredeck. On November 21, 1941, I-25 left Japan’s sprawling Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, 30 miles south of Tokyo, to join a 27-boat force in route to Hawaii to support the IJN’s First Air Fleet for its attack on Pearl Harbor. Fujita’s floatplane (above, at Yokosuka shipyards with Fujita and observer Shoji Okuda) was stored in sections in a hangar in front of the sub’s conning tower (here, sister ship I-26) and then assembled for flight. A plane thought to be Fujita's takes off. SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1941, proved to be a peaceful day for I-25. It was stationed 140 miles northeast of Oahu with a trio of other subs on the lookout for any American ships trying to escape the chaos at Pearl. Instead of being at the controls of his airplane, searching the seas for fleeing enemy ships, pilot Fujita was relegated to stand regular watches in the ship’s control room, a duty he found a waste of his valuable flying skills. A more promising assignment emerged one week later, when the crews of nine of the 27 subs received exciting news: they were to sail to the United States’ West Coast to take up positions off strategic locations from Seattle to San Diego and seek out targets of opportunity. It was during this ocean transit that Fujita conceived of a way for Japan’s aircraft-equipped submarines to make a more valuable contribution to the war effort. He reckoned that instead of just scouting, the planes—already armed with bombs—could fly well ahead of the subs to go on the attack, striking Allied shipping, Panama Canal locks, or aircraft factories along the West Coast. He shared his vision with the ship’s executive officer, who encouraged him to send his idea to the IJN High Command. “I laughed,” Fujita recalled. Who “would listen to a mere farm boy?” But he wrote it up anyway, and the officer promised to forward it to headquarters. In the meantime, Fujita executed his duties while itching for more. I-25 reached its post—the mouth of the mighty Columbia River marking the border between Oregon and Washington—on December 18. The IJN had a special holiday treat in mind for American citizens: a Christmas Day bombardment. The group of nine was ordered to fire 30 shells each at West Coast targets of their choice. Then the IJN received intel that the U.S. was sending reinforcements through the Panama Canal; they canceled the shelling at the last minute and instead redeployed all nine subs to intercept the incoming American vessels near Los Angeles. But the intel was faulty, the enemy did not appear, and the group was instructed instead to sail to the naval base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. After a refit there, I-25 embarked on a mission more to Nobuo Fujita’s liking: an aerial reconnaissance of harbors in Australia and New Zealand to determine the numbers of Allied ships at each place. On February 17, 1942, in the predawn darkness 100 miles southeast of Sydney, Fujita’s Type 0 was ready to launch. Just after 4:30 a.m., as the submarine cut through the sea at 18 knots, he took off. He throttled back and for the next hour flew at 90 knots on a northwest heading toward the Australian mainland. He crossed over the beaches at Botany Bay on the south side of the city, then made a slow, wide arc above Sydney Harbor. While the pilot kept a watchful eye for enemy fighters, his observer, Petty Officer Shoji Okuda, made a careful plot of the ships he saw below him—23 in all, including several warships. By then the sun was beginning to rise, and the pair grew anxious that Sydney’s antiaircraft defenses would spot their plane. As Fujita later recalled, “We were in constant fear of discovery.” To their relief they weren’t spotted over Sydney and, by 7:30 a.m., the plane was back in its hangar and the flight crew sat snugly in the mess sipping cups of hot tea. During a flight they made over Melbourne in early March, their aircraft was discovered twice—first by the Royal Australian Air Force, which scrambled two fighters that were unable to locate it, then by an antiaircraft gun crew, who were still seeking permission to open fire when Fujita unknowingly flew out of range. The reconnaissance of Tasmania, New Zealand, and Fiji went smoothly. The following month, I-25 was awaiting routine repairs in drydock back at Yokosuka when a flight of American B-25s suddenly appeared from out of the east. It was April 18, 1942; Doolittle’s raiders had come calling. I-25, a sitting duck, was not hit, though other ships around it sustained serious damage. It was a sobering experience for Fujita, and he vowed to seek revenge. He flew again at the end of May during I-25’s third war patrol, this time to scout military facilities at the American base at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in advance of the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands on June 3. He was set to go when a faulty valve on the catapult mechanism prevented launch. Just then, lookouts saw an American cruiser steaming on a parallel course barely a mile away. I-25 couldn’t submerge—the plane was still on deck—so the captain prepared to shoot it out. He would have been murderously outgunned, but after a few tense minutes the enemy warship instead turned away. The faulty part repaired, Fujita made a reconnaissance flight the next morning. Then I-25 sailed southeast toward the Oregon coast for the second phase of its mission. On June 21, the submarine was again at the mouth of the Columbia River, this time with orders to shell the submarine base at Astoria in the far northwest corner of Oregon. And once again, Japanese intelligence proved faulty—there was no such base. It’s unclear what I-25’s captain thought he was shooting at that night, but he lobbed 17 5.5-inch rounds shoreward.