(1942/02/25) Battle of Los Angeles

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The Battle of Los Angeles ...

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

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

• ATS - J Edgar Hoover admitted Army recovered downed UFO
• ATS - The Smoking (Anti-Aircraft) Guns (of Los Angeles, 1942)

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Transcluded from Wikipedia

Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1942. The photo in the top left, the only one taken of the "battle," has been used by conspiracy theorists. However, the photo was heavily modified prior to publication.^[1]

The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, is the name given by contemporary sources to the rumored enemy attack and subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage which took place from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942 over Los Angeles, California.^[2][3] The incident occurred less than three months after the United States entered World War II as a result of the Japanese Imperial Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after the Bombardment of Ellwood on 23 February.

Initially, the target of the aerial barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but speaking at a press conference shortly afterward, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called the incident a "false alarm." Newspapers of the time published a number of reports and speculations of a cover-up. Some modern-day UFOlogists have suggested the targets were extraterrestrial spacecraft.^[4] When documenting the incident in 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of "war nerves" likely triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.

[edit] Alarms raised

Air raid sirens sounded throughout Los Angeles County on the night of 24–25 February 1942. A total blackout was ordered and thousands of air raid wardens were summoned to their positions. At 3:16 am the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade began firing 12.8-pound anti-aircraft shells into the air at reported aircraft; over 1,400 shells would eventually be fired. Pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command were alerted but their aircraft remained grounded. The artillery fire continued sporadically until 4:14 am The "all clear" was sounded and the blackout order lifted at 7:21 am

In addition to several buildings damaged by friendly fire, three civilians were killed by the anti-aircraft fire, and another three died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long bombardment. The incident was front-page news along the U.S. Pacific coast, and earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation.^[5]

[edit] Press response

Within hours of the end of the air raid, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox held a press conference, saying the entire incident was a false alarm due to anxiety and "war nerves". Knox's comments were followed by statements from the Army the next day^[6] that reflected General George C. Marshall's belief that the incident might have been caused by commercial airplanes used as a psychological warfare campaign to generate panic.^[7]

Some contemporary press outlets suspected a cover up. An editorial in the Long Beach Independent wrote, "There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter." Speculation was rampant as to invading airplanes and their bases. Theories included a secret base in northern Mexico as well as Japanese submarines stationed offshore with the capability of carrying planes. Others speculated that the incident was either staged or exaggerated to give coastal defense industries an excuse to move further inland.^[8]

Representative Leland Ford of Santa Monica called for a Congressional investigation, saying, "...none of the explanations so far offered removed the episode from the category of 'complete mystification' ... this was either a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a political foundation to take away Southern California's war industries."^[9]

[edit] Attribution

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In 1983, the Office of Air Force History concluded that an analysis of the evidence points to meteorological balloons as the cause of the initial alarm:^[10]

During the course of a fireside report to the nation delivered by President Roosevelt on 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine rose out of the sea off Ellwood, a hamlet on the California coast north of Santa Barbara, and pumped thirteen shells into tidewater refinery installations. The shots seemed designed to punctuate the President's statement that "the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies." Yet the attack which was supposed to carry the enemy's defiance, and which did succeed in stealing headlines from the President's address, was a feeble gesture rather than a damaging blow. The raider surfaced at 1905 (Pacific time), just five minutes after the President started his speech. For about twenty minutes the submarine kept a position 2,500 yards offshore to deliver the shots from its 5½-inch guns. The shells did minor damage to piers and oil wells, but missed the gasoline plant, which appears to have been the aiming point; the military effects of the raid were therefore nil. The first news of the attack led to the dispatch of pursuit planes to the area, and subsequently three bombers joined the attempt to destroy the raider, but without success. The reluctance of AAF commanders to assign larger forces to the task resulted from their belief that such a raid as this would be employed by the enemy to divert attention from a major air task force which would hurl its planes against a really significant target. Loyal Japanese-Americans who had predicted that a demonstration would be made in connection with the President's speech also prophesied that Los Angeles would be attacked the next night. The Army, too, was convinced that some new action impended, and took all possible precautions. Newspapers were permitted to announce that a strict state of readiness against renewed attacks had been imposed, and there followed the confused action known as "the Battle of Los Angeles."

During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening a large number of flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 p.m., Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of "enemy planes, " even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano." From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance.

Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: "swarms" of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from "very slow" to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The dawn, which ended the shooting and the fantasy, also proved that the only damage which resulted to the city was such as had been caused by the excitement (there was at least one death from heart failure), by traffic accidents in the blacked-out streets, or by shell fragments from the artillery barrage.

Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the incident quickly became as involved and mysterious as the "battle" itself. The Navy immediately insisted that there was no evidence of the presence of enemy planes, and [Secretary of the Navy], Frank Knox announced at a press conference on 25 February that the raid was just a false alarm. At the same conference he admitted that attacks were always possible and indicated that vital industries located along the coast ought to be moved inland. The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended, indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove "that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated." The Fourth Air Force had indicated its belief that there were no planes over Los Angeles. But the Army did not publish these initial conclusions. Instead, it waited a day, until after a thorough examination of witnesses had been finished. On the basis of these hearings, local commanders altered their verdict and indicated a belief that from one to five unidentified airplanes had been over Los Angeles. Secretary Stimson announced this conclusion as the War Department version of the incident, and he advanced two theories to account for the mysterious craft: either they were commercial planes operated by an enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or they were light planes launched from Japanese submarines. In either case, the enemy’s purpose must have been to locate anti-aircraft defenses in the area or to deliver a blow at civilian morale.

The divergence of views between the War and Navy departments, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles Times, in a first-page editorial on 26 February, announced that "the considerable public excitement and confusion" caused by the alert, as well as its "spectacular official accompaniments," demanded a careful explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service. In the United States Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether the incident was "a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away Southern California’s war industries." Wendell Willkie, speaking in Los Angeles on 26 February, assured Californians on the basis of his experiences in England that when a real air raid began "you won’t have to argue about it—you’ll just know." He conceded that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling of the Los Angeles episode a "recipe for jitters," and censured the military authorities for what it called "stubborn silence" in the face of widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army’s theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert "explains everything except where the planes came from, whither they were going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them." The New York Times on 28 February expressed a belief that the more the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: "If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? ... What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?" These questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of our air defenses.

At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert, although submarine-launched aircraft were subsequently used over Seattle. A careful study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons—known to have been released over Los Angeles—may well have caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the fact that anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to have been airplanes. After the firing started, careful observation was difficult because of drifting smoke from shell bursts. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area testified that he had first been convinced that he had seen fifteen planes in the air, but had quickly decided that he was seeing smoke. Competent correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry witnessed the shooting and wrote that they were never able to make out an airplane. It is hard to see, in any event, what enemy purpose would have been served by an attack in which no bombs were dropped, unless perhaps, as Mr. Stimson suggested, the purpose had been reconnaissance.

— The Army Air Forces in World War II, prepared under the editorship of Wesley Frank Craven, James Lea Cate. v.1, pp. 277–286, Washington, D.C. : Office of Air Force History : For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1983 [1]

[edit] Commemoration

Every February, the Fort MacArthur Museum, located at the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor, hosts an entertainment event called "The Great LA Air Raid of 1942."^[11]

[edit] See also

• The Bombardment of Ellwood, the events that happened the previous day.
• Attacks on North America during World War II
• 1941, a 1979 film by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on the Battle of Los Angeles.
• Battle: Los Angeles, an action/sci-fi film.
• Battle of Los Angeles, an action/sci-fi film attempting to capitalize on the above.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "The Battle of Los Angeles" at Saturday Night Uforia
• San Francisco virtual museum article
• The Army Air Forces in World War II

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