A New History Blog and a Little History

Earlier this year the U.S Naval Institute and the Naval History & Heritage Command joined together to create the Naval History Blog. The blog is designed as a place to honor our naval heritage, explore its unresolved debates, uncover new information, and respectfully stimulate an honest, thoughtful discussion. It is also meant to be a meeting place where renowned scholars and self-taught history buffs linger and share ideas and perspective on naval events that shape nations.

I've added a link to the blog in the list on the right, you may want to bookmark it and check it out every now and then.

And speaking of history, here is a little WWII history that involves the the Pacific Northwest.

Up in the Sky - it's a bird, it's a plane; No, it's a Japanese submariner!

Throughout World War II, the Japanese Admiralty clung tenaciously to the desire to attack the continental United States. When the opportunity did present itself, of course, the responsibility for the attack fell to the Japanese submarine force.

At the start of the war, eleven Japanese submarines were outfitted with deck hangers, designed to carry one single-engine, catapult-launched, two-man floatplane; the Yokosuka E14Y (code named Glen by the Allies). The Japanese nicknamed these aircraft the ‘Geta’ because of the resemblance of their floats to a common Japanese clog-like shoe of the same name. The Geta had a top air speed of only about 150 knots and was capable of staying in the air for a little over 3 hours. These small planes were stored for transport in 12 separate pieces and assembled just prior to launch. Recovery took place when the aircraft returned to the mother ship, landing nearby on its floats, was pulled aboard by crane and then disassembled and re-stowed.

A Yokosuka E14Y 'Glen' in flight

While originally designed to assist the host submarine in long range recon missions for the fleet, a resourceful submariner-pilot eventually concluded that by attaching a few bombs to the aircraft, the Geta might be put to a more lethal use. This idea is attributed to Warrant Officer Nubuo Fujita who was then stationed aboard the Japanese submarine I-25. While Fujita's original idea was to arm the Geta for use in assisting attacks upon the U.S. surface ships in fleet actions (he believed that by doing this he could not only find the ships but attack them as well), when the Japanese Admiralty got wind of the idea, they had a grander mission in mind.

Briefed by no less than Prince Takamatsu, the Emperor's brother, Fujita was instructed to test his theory's effectiveness on the American mainland itself! However daring this mission would be, it quickly became one of strategic convolution - rather than a direct attack on one of the many targets of significance along the U.S. west coast, the orders given to Fujita were to drop his bombs in one of the forests in the Pacific Northwest!

The reason for the Japanese decision was recorded as ‘Rather than inflicting limited damage on industrial targets, since the northwestern U.S. is full of forests, we will start a blaze in the deep woods. The resulting forest fire will be very difficult to stop. Whole towns will be destroyed, creating panic in the population.'

After many months of training and fitting out the Geta with incendiary bombs, I-25 began its slow transit of the Pacific, arriving off the coast of Oregon in late August 1942. Ten days were spent on station by the anxious crew with seas too high to launch the floatplane. Finally, it calmed sufficiently to execute the mission. On 9 September, 1942, Warrant Officer Fujita and his observer, Petty Officer Shoji Okuda boarded their Geta and set off for the forests of Oregon.

The Japanese Submarine I-25

Flying 50 miles inland, completely undetected, Fujita and Okuda became the first and only Japanese aircraft to successfully bomb the continental U.S. during World War II. They returned safely to I-25 to report that both bombs exploded perfectly and two large fires were burning. However, what Japanese intelligence either did not know or failed to account for was that the target area in Oregon had been saturated with several weeks of recent rains and the fires quickly burned themselves out with negligible damage to the forests. No towns were destroyed and, for the most part, the attack went unnoticed. However, the U.S. government did learn about the attack, but kept the bombing secret until after that war.