Bombs Over Brookings

While searching through a stack of old pictures of an antique store in the coastal Oregon town of Brookings, I found a photo I thought was rather curious.  I asked the owner of the store if she knew where the small, creased and aging black and white picture came from.

She told me that it was of a Japanese airplane and that it had played a historical role by being the only foreign aircraft to ever bomb the U.S. mainland.  She also told me, being a life-long Brookings native, that the bomb-site still existed and she gave me directions to the spot.

Furthermore, she told me her brother had taken the picture and that he still had the negative stored away in his home. I bought the picture, plus another of her brother leaning on a Duece-and-a-half, for a dollar each.

The 1942 Lookout Air Raids, as it was later dubbed by U.S. Intelligence, was not the last attack on the civilian population of the U.S. Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Japanese Navy launched over 9,000 fire balloons toward North America.

Five children and a woman became the only deaths due to enemy action to occur in mainland America during World War II when one of the children touched a bomb from a balloon near Bly, Oregon and it exploded. The site is marked by a stone monument at the Mitchell Recreation Area in the Fremont-Winema National Forest.

Perhaps as retribution for the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo, on September 9, 1942, a Japanese plane, a Yokosuka Glen, dropped a bomb just north of the Brookings Harbor area. The crew included Chief Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita and Petty Officer Shoji Okuda and their plane was launched from an offshore submarine.

Okuda would die in action later in the war while Fujita would return to civilian life. The bombing was commemorated in 1994 with an on-site historical marker, three years before Fujita passed away in his native Japan.

Imagine my disappointment to learn that the aircraft that attacked the town returned to the submarine, not once, but twice and didn’t crash somewhere north of Brookings, as the photo suggests.  Still, it wasn’t a bad sales pitch or a bad story for a couple of bucks.