The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942: The Mystery Air Raid

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Contents 1 Detailed accounts of what happened 1.1 Sunday 2-23-92 2 Snippets relating to downed crafts 2.1 NO PLANES SHOT DOWN! 2.2 THE NIGHT L.A. BOMBED 2.3 L.A. THEN AND NOW 3 Notes 4 References 5 Further Reading 6 External Links

Detailed accounts of what happened

Sunday 2-23-92

...

Sequence of Events

Then, as documented in military reports, come this sequence of events on Feb. 25th:

1:44am -- Radar near Santa Monica picks up an "unidentified aerial target."

2:00am -- Army information center's operation board shows "an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles ... well tracked by radar."

2:15am -- All anti-aircraft guns go on a ready-to-fire alert. The Air Corps keeps its pursuit planes and bombers, manned and with propellers turning, on the ground to "await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing any of its limited force."

2:21am -- Blackout is ordered by the Army's regional controller, and sirens wail throughout the area.

2:27am -- Target tracked to "within three miles of the Los Angeles area." Then the information center is "flooded with reports of enemy planes even [though] the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have disappeared."

(NOTE: Some quick math reveals the object would have had be to moving at 260 mph to go from 120 miles out to 3 miles in 27 minutes)

2:43am -- A gun officer reports planes "between Seal Beach and Long Beach." An artillery colonel reports "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over the Los Angeles area.

3:06am -- A balloon carrying a red flare is reported over Santa Monica, and four batteries are ordered to fire on it. They fire 482, 3-inch shells, and one battery reports setting a plane on fire. "The air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano," said an Army Air Corps report on the incident.

3:28am -- Battery G of the brigade's 78th Regiment reports 25 to 30 heavy bombers over the Long Beach Douglas Aircraft Co. plant.

3:33am -- Fifteen planes are reported over Artesia. Eight batteries fire 581 rounds from 3-inch guns, and 38 rounds from 37mm guns, "before they, the supposed targets, passed out to sea over Long Beach."

3:55am -- Two batteries fire 100, 3-inch shells, at another balloon over Santa Monica.

4:00am -- Batteries at Fort MacArthur fire five rounds, shower shipyards on Terminal Island with shell fragments.

4:03am -- The 78th's Battery G, the same that made the 3:28 am sighting, reports 15 planes approaching the Long Beach Douglas plant. Three batteries fire 2463-inch at this "target" before it disappeared out to sea.

4:09am -- That same Battery G again reports 16 planes approaching the Douglas plant.

4:13am -- More words from hyper-alert Battery G 16 planes are over the Douglas plant but too high for the battery's 37mm guns.

4:55am -- A report says that "the Douglas plant at Long Beach had been bombed but suffered no hits."

6:12am -- The Navy relays a report of "several" planes downed at 190th Street (185th) and Vermont Avenue, near where the Harbor and San Diego freeways now intersect. This report is later denied and a reporter for the Daily breeze that morning finds a large crowd there, but no trace of a downed plane.

7:21am -- The blackout is lifted, which is just as well because its daylight

In the hours from 3:06am to 4:05am that Wednesday, some 60 guns fired 1,400 shells (482+581+38+100+5+24=1,452), nearly all of them 3-inch rounds that burst into fragments with razor-sharp edges.

I was a high school student living between the Douglas plant and where the supposed planes went seaward. I foolishly ventured onto our chilly front for a better view of the awesome pyrotechnics, but soon retreated to the covered porch after a jagged piece of metal nicked through, the fronts of a nearby Canary Island palm. The shard is somewhere among my mementos.

Not all of the shells exploded in the air. One intact shell whistled down to gouge a 3-foot-deep hole through the concrete driveway of a house in the 1300 block of Maple Avenue in Santa Monica. Others plunged through roofs and detonated in two houses Long Beach. Another exploded in a North Long Beach street and damaged a Bank of America branch. Three southwest Los Angeles houses were damaged by shells bursting near them.

Only one person was slightly injured in these incidents, but six people died of indirect causes during the barrage. A Long Beach policeman was killed in a head-on car crash, a Los Angeles man was fatally hurt when he walked into a moving car and an Arcadia woman died in a traffic collision in the blackout. A Civil Defense volunteer and two other people died of heart attacks. Scores of people were hurt when they fell in the darkness or were gashed by shell fragments.

Police and federal authorities received reports of flares and flashing lights from such widely scattered points as Redondo Beach, San Pedro, Gardena, Burbank, Tarzana, Beverly Hills and Orange County.

...^[1]

Snippets relating to downed crafts

NO PLANES SHOT DOWN!

Reports, widely circulated in Los Angeles, that a Japanese plane had been shot down, created the "worst traffic tangle we've ever seen," according to the highway patrol.

"Police ran down several reports that planes had been shot down, but reported all proved to be false alarms.

Wild rumors of aircraft plants and other industries being bombed, and of Japanese planes being shot down in the Palos Verdes Hills, San Pedro and South Los Angeles during the air-raid, were declared untrue by the Western Defense Command at San Francisco.

It was reported that a Japanese plane had been downed at 180th or 190th street and Vermont Avenue. A check revealed that no such incident had occurred. The California Highway Patrol reported every highway leading to the intersection was clogged with sightseeing traffic. Eight officers stationed at the intersection spent several hours in an effort to untangle the tie-up.

Director James M. Carter of the State Division of Motor Vehicles criticized the gathering of curiosity seekers, in the vicinity of reported incidents relating to the war. As a result, the California Highway Patrol was instructed to cite motorists for blocking the road. "If this shameful situation persists," Carter added, "These curiosity seekers will have to pay the fines resulting from the citations."^[2]

THE NIGHT L.A. BOMBED

by Jack Smith (Los Angeles Times), Tuesday 4-08-1975

"I've been reading The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester," writes Carol Cecchini of Glendale, "and on page 323 (pg. 264) he says Jap submarines shelled Seattle, and 15 carrier-borne Zeroes bombed Los Angeles in early March. Do you remember this really happening? I would be interested in knowning if Manchester has his facts right."

I am grateful to Mrs. Cecchini for giving me an excuse for reviewing the facts of what was certainly among the most wonderful diversions of World War II: the Great Los Angeles Air Raid.

First, I looked in to Manchester's book myself to make sure that Mrs. Cecchini had quoted him correctly. She had (said) Manchester even goes on to add his own personal appraisal of the actions he described: "Militarily," he says, "the attacks were only a nuisance value, but as psychological thrusts they were brilliant."

Actually, the Great Los Angeles Air Raid did not occur in March, but on the night of February 26, 1942 (the raid took place on night of 25th). It began at 2:25am when the U.S. Army announced the approach of hostile aircraft and the city's air raid warning system went into effect for the first time in World War II. (The first L.A. air raid was on Dec 11, 1941). Suddenly the night was rent with sirens. Searchlights began to sweep the sky. Minutes, later gun crews at Army forts along the coastline began pumping the first of 1,433 rounds of ack-ack into the moonlight.

Thousands of volunteer air raid wardens tumbled from their beds and grabbed their boots and helmets. Citizens awakened to the screech of sirens and, heedless of the blackout warning, began snapping on their lights. Policemen turned to. Reporters rushed in to the streets.

The din continued unabated for two hours. Finally the guns fell silent. The enemy, evidently, had been routed. Los Angeles began to taste the exhilaration of its first military victory. The Times was on the streets at daylight with a dramatic account of that gaudy night:

"Roaring out of a brilliant moonlit western sky, foreign aircraft flying both in large formation and singly flew over Southern California early today and drew heavy barrages of anti-aircraft fire the first ever to sound over United States continental soil against an enemy invader."

But the second paragraph was rather a letdown: "No bombs were reported dropped." However the account went on, "At 5am, the police reported that an airplane had been shot down near 185th St. and Vermont Avenue Details were not available ..." Neither, as it turned out later, was the airplane. Though no bombs had been dropped, the city had not escaped its baptism of fire without casualties, including five fatalities. So many cars were dashing back and forth in the blackout that three persons were killed in automobile collisions. Two others died of heart attacks.

A radio announcer named Stokey, hurrying to get to his post in the dark, suffered a deep laceration over his eye when he ran into an awning. A policeman named Larker, seeing a light on in a Hollywood store, kicked in the window and suffered a deep half-inch laceration on his right leg. A Times reporter, hurrying from his Inglewood home to the nearby police station, underestimated the height of a curbing and jolted his backbone.

The toll was particularly high among air raid wardens, who were said to have acted with valor throughout. In Pasadena, a warden named Hoffman feel from a 5-foot wall while looking into a lighted apartment and fractured a leg. Another named Barber jumped a 3-foot fence in Hollywood to reach a house that had a light on and sprained his right ankle. A warden named Cambell fell down his own front stairs and broke his left arm.

There were also scattered structural damage. Several roofs were holed by ack-ack projectiles which had failed to explode in the sky, but worked fine as soon as they struck ground, demolishing a room here, a patio there, and in one case blowing out the tire of a parked automobile.

Exultation turned to outrage the next day when the Secretary of the Navy said there had been no enemy planes at all. It was just a case of "jitters." The Army, being thus accused of shooting up an empty sky, was outraged. Los Angeles authorities were outraged, especially the sheriff, who had valiantly helped the FBI round up numerous Japanese nurserymen and gardeners who were supposedly caught in the act of signaling the enemy planes.

At length the Secretary of War came up with a face-saving theory. There had been no enemy military planes, but it was believed there had been 15 "commercial" planes flown by "enemy agents." Though no one believed this romantic fancy, most agreed with the Secretary of War that "it was better to be too alert than not alert enough."

No, Mrs. Cecchini, Manchester doesn't have his facts right. There was no carrier. There were no Zeroes. There were no bombs. There was no raid. But it was glorious night, if only a dream."' ^[3]

L.A. THEN AND NOW

by Cecilia Rasmussen (Los Angeles Times), Sunday 12-17-2000

Saucers, bathtubs, hubcaps stars,

Russian space ships, men from Mars?

Bananas, headlights, silver spoons,

Hallucinations, or weather balloon?

Close encounters of the strangest kind are, of course, a fact of life in Los Angeles. So, it comes as no surprise that the area was an epicenter for one of the late 20th century's genuinely eccentric preoccupations: unidentified flying objects.

In fact, a few days after the region endured one of its most mysterious wartime traumas -- the so-called "Battle of Los Angeles" -- UFO enthusiasts were suggesting that extraterrestrial tourists rather than Japanese aviators, had flown across the basin's sky early on the dark morning of Feb. 25, 1942.

Memories of Pearl Harbor were fresh, and just two days after a Japanese submarine surfaced and shot 16 shells at an oil field 12 miles west of Santa Barbara, radar stations picked up an unidentified object over Santa Monica Bay at 2:26 a.m. The region's antiaircraft batteries -- the largest at Ft. MacArthur -- went fully into action, blindly firing nearly 1,500 rounds into the suddenly searchlighted skies.

As The Times wrote the next day: "At 5 a.m. the police reported that an airplane had been shot down near 185th street and Vermont Avenue. Details were not available..." Five persons died in the "air raid," three in car crashes and two from heart attacks.

To this day the real story of the "Battle of Los Angeles remains unknown. The Japanese deny that their warplanes ever flew over Los Angeles; official U.S. wartime records are inconclusive. Although some residents later claimed that they had indeed seen a globular or triangular craft in the sky, military officials blamed the whole thing on jittery nerves and a wayward meteorological balloon. No bombs were dropped or shot fired from the Air.

... (snipping rest of article) ... "^[4]

Notes

References

• Sword, Terrenz (2002). The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942: "The Mystery Air Raid". New Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications. 

Further Reading

External Links