Japanese Bomb Oregon
On September 9th, 1942, submarine I-25 of the Imperial Japanese Navy surfaced 33 miles off the coast of Oregon, directly abeam of the Cape Blanco lighthouse.
Nobuo Fujita
As his seaplane was being unpacked and assembled from its hold in front of the conning tower, pilot Nobuo Fujita placed a strand of his hair into a small wooden box.
“If I were to die and my body could not be recovered,” he recalled after the war, “these ‘remains’ would be sent back to my wife.”
When his plane was assembled and on its catapult, Fujita tucked his 400-year-old family Samurai sword against the sidewall wall of his cockpit, a tradition he began in flight school.
While Fujita would rather have dropped his ordinance on nearby Fort Stevens, his orders were to drop his incendiary bombs into dense Oregon forest, causing an anticipated runaway fire near the small lumbering town of Brookings.
With 520 thermite pellets housed in each of his two bombs, Japanese war planners hoped that the resultant 2,700 degree heat from the twin detonations would match the September 1936 fire that destroyed 287,000 acres of Oregon forest, while burning the coastal town of Bandon to the ground.
The Japanese Attempt to Destroy Brookings, Oregon
The tactic was intended to scare the Americans, forcing the U.S. Navy to divert war assets away from the Solomon Islands to defend the Western United States from future attacks.
After catapulting from the submarines midget flight deck and flying a good ways inland near Mount Emily, Fujita ordered his weapons officer Shoji Okuda to drop the first bomb, followed by a second release a mile or so away.
The detonations caused multiple clusters of fires, but thanks to the watchful eyes of forest fire spotters and a godsend blanket of rain, the fires were quickly extinguished by the combined hand of man and mother nature.
Twenty years later, a group of Jaycees from the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Brookings, Oregon invited Fujita and his wife to visit where Fujita made history as the first and last Japanese fighter to reach American soil, and on May 24th, 1962, after Oregon governor Mark Hatfield and President John F. Kennedy approved the goodwill visit, Fujita and his wife Ayako closed another chapter from the bloodiest period in world history.