During the panicked weeks following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans were told that enemy raids on the continental U.S. could be next! On the West Coast, pilots and radar had started mistaking fishing boats and even whales for Japanese destroyers and submarines. Two months after the Pearl Harbor attack, on 25 February 1942, residents of Los Angeles woke up to air raid sirens, bright searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, and thunderous explosions in the air. The Battle of Los Angeles has begun.
Civil defense ordered all city lights extinguished. As artillery exploded overhead, it filled the air with smoke and scattered shrapnel across the city. Dressed in robes and pajamas, confused citizens stood in their yards, squinting at the night sky, seeing what looked like a battle raging above their heads. The loud booms of more than 1,400 rounds of ammunition shells exploded in the night sky. Panic and chaos reigned in streets – the Japanese must be attacking Los Angeles!
By the time the “all clear” was given at dawn, five people were dead, many injured, and dozens of houses damaged by falling shells. What the military did not find was any downed enemy aircraft … because there had not been any to begin with. They had fired for two hours at nothing but thin air. The “Battle of Los Angeles,” left California, and the country, shaken.
How did such a major blunder happen?
On December 7th, 1941, the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor was hit by a surprise attack from the Japanese Navy. Twenty-one ships were sunk or damaged and 2,403 Americans lost their lives. The United States had been it on its home turf. Los Angeles, a major center for military manufacturing, feared it would be hit next. Tensions were high after U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned Americans that cities should be prepared to accept “occasional blows” from the enemy.
The U.S. government and military then began to view its own Japanese born citizens with suspicion and paranoia. On 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt signed an Executive Order allowing the internment of all first and second generation Japanese Americans.
Then on 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. It fired over a dozen artillery shells at the Ellwood oil field and refinery on-shore. While the attack caused only minor damage, and no one was injured, it marked the first time that the continental U.S. had been bombed during World War II.
This small Japanese attack was a victory of psychological warfare.
The Japanese military made it clear that all the West Coast could potentially be attacked at any time. Naval intelligence instructed military units on the California coast to ready themselves for another potential Japanese raid. The day after the oil field bombing, the Battle for Los Angeles began.
At 7:18 p.m. on February 24th, just 24 hours later, Army coastal radar installations detected objects over a 100 miles off the coast, moving rapidly toward Los Angeles. Coastal command called for a military “yellow alert.” But then at 10:33 pm an “all clear” sounded. All remained calm for the next few hours.
Then, shortly after 2:00 am on February 25th, military radar again picked up what appeared to be an enemy contact some 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Air raid sirens sounded for the first time and a citywide blackout was put into effect. Within minutes, troops manned anti-aircraft gun batteries and began sweeping the skies with bright searchlights. The Battle for Los Angeles was on!
It was just after 3:00 am when the firing began. Following reports of an unidentified object in the skies, troops in Santa Monica unleashed a barrage of anti-aircraft and .50 caliber machine gun fire. Before long, many of the city’s other coastal defense weapons, hearing the big guns, had joined in the barrage.
“Powerful searchlights from countless stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers,” the Los Angeles Times later wrote, “while anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.”
Chaos and panic reigned for the next several hours. It appeared that Los Angeles was under attack, yet many who looked skyward saw nothing but smoke and the glow of shell fire. A mixture of paranoia and imagination revealed threatening shapes in the sky, even though NO planes of any type were actually there—friend or foe.
According to one conversation reported in the LA Times, one observer speculated, “Maybe it’s just a test.” In response, another onlooker said, “Test, hell! You don’t throw that much material into the air unless you’re fixing on knocking something down.”
For many, the threat appeared to be very real.
Reports poured in from across the city describing Japanese aircraft, bombs falling, and even enemy paratroopers! There was even a claim of a Japanese plane crash in the streets of Hollywood. “I could barely see the planes, but they were up there all right,” coastal artilleryman Charles Patrick later wrote. “Naturally, all of us fellows were anxious to get our two-cents’ worth in and, when the command came, we fired.”
The barrage continued for over almost two hours. By the time a final “all-clear” order was given at dawn, Los Angeles artillery batteries had fired over 1,400 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition into the night sky. Then in the light of day, military units made an embarrassing discovery: there appeared to have been NO enemy attack.
Nevertheless, the military’s Western Defense Command on the ground in Los Angeles stated, “The aircraft which caused the blackout in the Los Angeles area for several hours have not yet been identified.”
The only damage during the Battle of Los Angeles had come from American fire. Anti-aircraft shrapnel had rained down across LA, through some house rooftops and shattering windows. One dud artillery shell landed on Long Beach golf course and embedded itself in a fairway. Another dud landed in the Santa Monica driveway of Mr. George Watson. Soldiers blocked off the street with stark warning signs: “Danger Unexploded Ordinance.”
Surveying the city the next morning, LA reporters documented the damage of “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid.” Five people were killed. Two of them had suffered heart attacks during the blackout. Three were killed in car accidents, including one police officer. The overhead barrage had distracted frantic drivers looking to the sky. In a preview of the hysteria soon to come, authorities arrested 20 Japanese-Americans for violating the blackout and allegedly trying to signal the nonexistent aircraft.
Some Los Angeles residents had their homes partially destroyed.
In three cases, people’s bedrooms were hit either by fragments or exploding shells. Luckily they had gone outside to watch the spectacle in their skies. One farmer spent hours rounding up his stampeding herd of cattle after an explosion killed one of his cows. As cleanup continued, it became clear that every bomb that had fallen on LA had been fired by the U.S. military.
Yet there were still the hundreds of soldiers and civilians who claimed to have seen aircraft. Many eye witnesses claimed to have witnessed a slow-moving, balloon-like object, most visible when “caught in the center of the search lights. Others described seeing anywhere from dozens to “hundreds” of high-flying planes amongst the shrapnel, illuminated by the searchlights and explosions.
Per a declassified military report from February 1942, “At 0243 the Gun Officer reported unidentified planes between Seal Beach and Long Beach. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was reported over Santa Monica and fired upon on orders of the Controller. A total of 482 rounds of 3″ shells were expended at the planes … without visible result.”
The same report goes on to list aa craft appearing over Long Beach, and other areas, each time eliciting hundreds of rounds of ammunition fire. In total, the report lists more than 16 military eyewitness describing everything from weather balloons to 30 Japanese planes flying in a menacing V formation over the city.
A later statement from the Army’s Western Defense Command stated: “Although reports were conflicting and every effort is being made to ascertain the facts, it is clear that no bombs were dropped and no planes were shot down.” From Washington, Navy Secretary Frank Knox admitted at a press conference that it was all just a false alarm and there were no planes over Los Angeles that night.
Knox blamed the incident on “jittery nerves.”
Over the next few days, government and press issued contradictory reports. Secretary of War Henry Stimson said that at least 15 planes had buzzed the city and the actions taken were justified. He even promoted a theory that they might have been commercial aircraft “operated by enemy agents.” Stimson later backtracked on this claim.
On February 26th, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial titled: “Information, Please: More specific public information should be forthcoming from the government, if only to clarify their own conflicting statements.”
One article in the February 26th LA Times reported: “One official source said American planes quickly went into action. Another said no United States Army planes took off because of the danger from their own anti-aircraft fire.”
In Washington, President Franklin Roosevelt was equally unsatisfied. He received a report from Army Chief of Staff George Marshall that “as many as 15 planes may have been involved,” some of them possibly commercial. The lack of wreckage remains proof of no attack as it is doubtful any aircraft could have survived the volume of explosions across the night sky. The most logical explanation is that early radar technology and nervous, trigger-happy soldiers produced the false alarm.
Over the decades, a series of bizarre conspiracy theories involving the government, military and, you guessed it, even flying saucers and extraterrestrials sprouted up like mushrooms. Thanks to years of embarrassed government silence, conspiracy theorists were almost gifted the Battle of Los Angeles. It was just one more fantasy story to come out of Southern California’s Hollywood region.
Regardless, the Battle of Los Angeles offered stark evidence of the fear and vulnerability that most Americans felt during World War II. After the war ended, the Japanese government stated it had never sent any aircraft over the continental U.S. The “Great Los Angeles Air Raid” soon faded into obscurity.
In 1983, the Office of Air Force History noted that meteorological balloons had been released prior to the barrage to help determine wind conditions. Their lights and silver coloring could have triggered the alerts. Once the shooting began, the searchlights, smoke and anti-aircraft flak led gunners to believe they were firing on Japanese planes, even though none existed. As long as the night sky was clouded by smoke, soldiers believed the Japanese were still there and kept firing until dawn revealed no planes.
That explanation, however, was hardly the sort of thing the government wanted to admit to, or the public wanted to hear. A few reporters noted that it was appropriate that the incident had taken place near Hollywood. The New York Times wrote that as the “world’s preeminent fabricator of make-believe,” Hollywood played host to a battle that was “just another illusion.” In fact, the Steven Spielberg movie comedy, “1941,” starring Dan Aykroyd, exploited the Battle of Los Angeles for its comic absurdity.