The Great Los Angeles Air Raid: UFOs and the American Front in World War Two

“Anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, bursts of orange shrapnel.”

-from The Los Angeles Times February 25, 1942

The city descends into darkness.  It is a complete blackout.  Sirens wail; pedestrians hurriedly scamper for the nearest shelter and motorists turn off headlights then anxiously speed through unregulated intersections.

Soon searchlights can be seen criss-crossing the night sky making luminescent X’s across the high wispy clouds on the horizon.  Sounds are heard approaching from somewhere to the west--droning sounds growing louder and louder; getting closer and closer by the minute.  Engines?

Hastily trained civilian radar operators see blips begin to appear--multiple hazy dots across their tiny screens--and they begin to wonder what they are.  Are they enemy bombers?  Weather balloons?  Flocks of seagulls over the Pacific ocean?

Soon, everyone hears the distinct pop pop pop sound of anti-aircraft artillery shells exploding in the night sky.  The light of flames has joined the luminescence of seachights and the nervous radar operators believe that the war has suddenly come right to their doorstep.

That droning sound growing on the horizon, it would appear, is not the sound of a flock of seagulls out at sea, or the sound of rolling thunder in the distance.  That sound drawing closer and closer is the sound of enemy aircraft approaching the west coast of the United States from the Empire of Japan.

The date is February 24, 1942 and for the axis powers of Germany and Japan it is the high point of their success and worldwide hegemony.  To many in the United States it seems as if evil is closing in on all sides and that soon the Rising Sun of Japan and the Swastika of Nazi Germany will descend like an ominous curtain of doom over the entire planet.

For the allies: the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union-- it is the lowest point of the Second World War and the city that is under attack is the city of Los Angeles California.

Was this attack real?  Did the Japanese ever launch an attack on the American mainland during World War Two?

Well, the short answer to the first question is no.  The supposed attack on Los Angeles never actually happened.  The closest that Japanese aircraft carriers ever came to the mainland United States was at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

But, the short answer to the second question is, infact, yes--well, sort of.

There was a theater of operations during the Second World War that is very little known today.  It was called the American Theater of Operations.  And though nowhere near as well known, or as bloody as its counterpart theaters of operation in Europe and the Pacific its impact on Americans was just as real.  At the time, the American Theater of Operations was a cause for grave concern among military leaders,  It was a cause for concern, not only because it was truly a real theater of military operations, but also because the spectre of a possible Axis attack on the United States mainland was harrowingly real and it caused civilians to panic in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways as demonstrated by the supposed Japanese attack on the city of Los Angeles during the night of February 24-25, 1942.

Not all attacks and military actions in the American Theater of Operation were fake or caused by newly conscripted civilian radarmen and anti-aircraft gunners.  At the end of 1941 the Japanese did in fact invade and conquer the islands of Kiska and Attu off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Strait.  Nearly a year later the Japanese were repulsed from Kiska and Attu in a counterattack by the U.S. Army that cost hundreds of American lives.

An American family did tragically die on American soil, in Oregon to be exact, as a result of enemy action.  Near the end of the war the Japanese launched hot air balloons weighted down and filled with explosives that were designed to get caught up in the jet stream and be carried across the Pacific Ocean to the United States and Canada.  One of these so called “balloon bombs” actually succeeded in its mission and killed an American family that was out camping in the woodlands of the American northwest.

Both Japanese and German submarines routinely patrolled off the American coast in the years 1942 and 1943 and sank hundreds of thousands of tons of merchant shipping intended for the allied powers.  Axis submarines were a common sight off the coasts of New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, Florida and California.  One Nazi U-boat even landed near Jacksonville Florida, on some sort of sabotage mission, but its crew was promptly captured since they simply were not American enough to blend in with the population.  Dozens of times during the war German U-boats deposited spies and other fifth column agents on the eastern seaboard in the dead of night.

Though all of the incidents mentioned above were real, and caused American civilians to panic like nothing else especially at the beginning of the war, the supposed Japanese air raid on the city of Los Angeles was most certainly false.

It may have turned out to be a fake air raid but it did prove deadly.  The incident that the press quickly dubbed the Battle of Los Angeles accounted for 5 deaths--4 in automobile accidents caused by descending anti-aircraft artillery shells and one as a result of a shock induced heart attack.  This phony battle also left many homes and buildings destroyed as a result of errant American anti-aircraft fire particularly near the coast in the affluent neighborhood of Long Beach.  The Battle of Los Angeles may not have been militarily real but it certainly appeared real to all of those who lived through it at the time.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 United States Naval Intelligence issued warnings to all coastal defenses regarding the possibility of Japanese aircraft carriers approaching the west coast of the United States, particularly the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Additionally, at the beginning of the war most major U.S. cities on both the east and west coasts formed civilian run Civil Defense Forces to try and aid the Army and Navy with coastal defenses.  This proves that although the attack on Los Angeles on February 24-25, 1942 was fake the potential threat that an attack like it posed to American security was taken seriously by everyone at the time.

Between 7 and 11pm on the night of February 24, 1942 U.S. Naval Intelligence issued a warning of an impending submarine or aerial attack.  From 7pm onwards air raid sirens sounded all throughout Los Angeles based upon government orders, but this warning was promptly lifted at 11 pm after U.S. Naval Intelligence officers realized that what they had previously thought were approaching Japanese warships was in fact nothing more than floating debris out at sea.

However, only a few minutes past 11pm air raid sirens once again began to sound throughout Los Angeles as radar operators and sonarmen of the L.A. Civil Defense Force mistook the same floating debris and whales for approaching Japanese warships.  Unlike the Navy’s previous warning, this one by the civilian authorities was not lifted until 3 a.m. on the 25th, hours after five deaths had already occurred, hundreds of buildings had already been destroyed and thousands of rounds of ammunition had already been fired.

Should untrained civilians with jittery trigger fingers who sincerely wanted to defend their city from a Japanese invasion be blamed for the damage caused by the so called Battle of Los Angeles?  Not really.  Just a month before no less an authority than the Secretary of the Navy Henry Stimson had warned the citizens of Los Angeles of, “an imminent and impending attack,” and of, “occasional blows from the enemy,” on the American mainland.

Sometime after midnight reports of unidentified flying objects in the sky began to circulate among those watching the sky for approaching enemy aircraft all over Los Angeles.  Once these UFO’s were sighted that’s when all hell really broke loose and the night sky exploded in gunfire.

After the war the Battle of Los Angeles would become one of the first cases in which Americans began to question whether our government was trying to cover something up regarding flying saucers.  Press scrutiny of the cover up became so widespread that in 1948 the Department of Defense decided to do an investigation into the Battle of Los Angeles incident.

As it it turned out, civilian gunners did see objects in the sky that night and they did fire at real aircraft, of a sort, but the aircraft they fired at were not Japanese bombers or fighter planes--they were American weather balloons.  At least that’s what the United States government claimed when it investigated the matter after the war.

According to the government investigation, on the night of February 24-25, 1942 the Navy had released a fleet of meteorological balloons over the pacific ocean near L.A. in an effort to monitor weather conditions to aid the Pacific Fleet and merchant marine shipping.  It was these weather balloons that were mistaken by civilian gunners for Japanese bombers.

Keep in mind that just the year previous to the government report on the Battle of Los Angeles the Army Air Force had released its own investigation into the crash of an unidentified flying object in Roswell, New Mexico, in which it similarly claimed that the crashed UFO had been a high atmospheric weather balloon.  Coincidence?  Many today believe not, and interestingly enough, many Americans even in the late 1940’s believed that the government had something to hide when it came to the true cause of the Battle for Los Angeles.

Whether it was caused by civilian paranoia, a weather balloon, or something more other worldly, the truth about the Great Los Angeles Air Raid is that when the sun rose on February 25, 1942, the city of angels was left with homes destroyed, dud shells littering the streets, fires burning and a confused and fearful population.

As a result of what happened that night thousands of Japanese-Americans were summarily rounded up and sent off to internment camps where they would stay for the remainder of the war.  Papers and media in Los Angeles would continue to report on the story, and to hint at a possible government coverup, for years even decades to come.

Today though, the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, along with the entire American Theater of Operations of World War Two is largely forgotten.  These unique events that took place on American soil during the 20th century’s biggest conflict may have little historical value in terms of impact on the war itself, or in total number of lives lost, but perhaps we could all be served well by remembering the fear and paranoia that they engendered in the American population at the time.