Before dawn on September 9, 1942, a Japanese submarine off the Oregon coast catapulted a floatplane whose pilot dropped two bombs on a forest ridge near Brookings — the only aerial attack on the U.S. mainland during all of World War II.

Nobuo Fujita had a submarine, a folding airplane and two bombs built to start a forest fire.

What he did not have was a target anyone in Washington was watching for.

What the submarine carried

The I-25 was one of Japan's long-range "cruiser" submarines, built with a watertight hangar behind the conning tower for a single disassembled airplane. Before dawn on September 9, 1942, it surfaced off the southern Oregon coast, and its deck crew bolted together a Yokosuka E14Y floatplane (a two-seat scout the Allies later nicknamed "Glen") in under twenty minutes. A catapult flung it off the bow.

Fujita, a 31-year-old warrant officer, took the controls. Petty Officer Shoji Okuda rode behind him as observer. Between them sat two 168-pound thermite incendiary bombs, and Fujita's family's antique short sword, which he had brought along rather than leave behind in case the mission failed and he had to end it the old way.

Why didn't the bombs start a bigger fire?

The plan was arson, not conquest: ignite a wildfire big enough in the Siskiyou National Forest to force the U.S. to divert troops and firefighters away from the Pacific war. Fujita flew inland for close to fifty miles, found Wheeler Ridge on Mount Emily, and dropped both bombs. One landed and started a small fire about ten miles east of Brookings, Oregon. The other has never been found.

It rained the night before.

The forest floor was too wet to carry a real blaze, and U.S. Forest Service crews reached the smoke and put it out within a day. Fujita circled back three weeks later, on September 29, and tried again with the same load and the same result: a little smoke, no fire worth the name.

Who saw it happen

The only witness who mattered was a man in a wooden box on a mountaintop. Howard "Razz" Gardner staffed the Mount Emily fire lookout tower for the Forest Service, and he watched the plane pass low overhead before the bombs fell. He later said the engine sounded like "a Model A Ford backfiring": not the roar of a warplane, just an old jalopy sputtering across a ridge nobody expected to matter that morning.

Gardner and a colleague, Keith Johnson, hiked toward the smoke rather than run from it. Neither man carried a weapon or expected to need one; the job was to find the fire before the fire found the timber.

Was this really the only bombing of the U.S. mainland?

Japan had already reached American soil once that year without dropping a bomb on it, and would reach it again with a very different weapon: unmanned balloons carrying incendiaries, drifted across the Pacific on the jet stream starting in late 1944, one of which killed six people in Oregon in 1945. Fujita's flight over Mount Emily stands apart from both. It is, by the National WWII Museum's own account and every serious history of the war, the only time a piloted enemy aircraft dropped bombs on the continental United States during the entire war.

The White House knew, and said nothing. Franklin Roosevelt's press office kept the story out of the newspapers for weeks, worried that news of a working bombing run on American soil would do more for Japanese morale than the fire itself ever could. When it did leak, most of the country had already moved on to bigger news from the Pacific.

Some historians tie the timing directly to the Doolittle Raid, the April 1942 bombing of Tokyo that had humiliated the Japanese high command five months earlier; Fujita himself said later that he saw the mission as a kind of answer to it. Others treat that as an after-the-fact tidiness rather than a documented order, since the plan for a submarine-launched floatplane predated Doolittle's raid by months. The record does not settle which is true, and honest accounts say so rather than picking the better story.

The pilot who came back with a sword

Fujita went home and spent the rest of the war training naval aviators. By most accounts, he assumed the people of Brookings hated him, if they remembered him at all.

They had not forgotten. In 1962, the Brookings Junior Chamber of Commerce learned that the man who bombed their forest was still alive and invited him to the town's Azalea Festival. A hundred and forty-one residents signed a newspaper ad objecting; several were combat veterans who wanted no part of hosting a former enemy pilot as a guest of honor.

Fujita almost did not go. When he decided to, he brought his family's short sword (the same one, by most tellings, that had ridden in the cockpit twenty years earlier) and gave it to the city as an apology, in the old samurai custom of surrendering a blade to seal a peace. The gesture worked where an ad campaign could not have. Brookings gave him the key to the city and flew him over Mount Emily so he could see the ridge from the air without a bomb bay under him. The Jaycees named him an honorary ambassador of goodwill.

He kept coming back. In 1985 he sponsored a trip to Japan for Brookings high school students; he returned to the town again in 1990, 1992 and 1995, and in 1992 planted a tree at the bombing site with his own hands. The Brookings City Council voted him honorary citizenship in 1997, not long before he died that fall. His daughter later scattered some of his ashes on Wheeler Ridge, at his request, so that a piece of him would stay where the bombs had fallen.

Where it stands now

The sword hangs today in the Chetco Community Public Library in Brookings, a short drive from the ridge where two bombs failed to do what they were sent to do. A historical marker on Highway 101 tells drivers what happened here in three sentences, which is roughly what most people know of it: a submarine, a floatplane, two bombs, a fire that never caught.

What the marker leaves out is the part that makes the story worth telling twice: an act of war undone, decades later, not through an apology alone but through a decade of one man showing up. Brookings still holds an event most years tied to the anniversary, and the tree Fujita planted on Mount Emily has had over thirty years to grow into something taller than the man who put it there.

Sources

• "Lookout Air Raids," Wikipedia, accessed 2026, citing U.S. Forest Service and Imperial Japanese Navy records
• Finn J.D. John, "A Town's Special Friendship with Its Would-Be Destroyer," Offbeat Oregon History
• "Japanese Bomb U.S. Mainland," History.com, This Day in History
• Bill Powell, "81 Years Ago, Single Japanese Pilot Launched Only Bombing of US Mainland During World War II," Stars and Stripes, September 29, 2023
• "The Bombing of Oregon: 80th Anniversary of the Japanese Attacks on the State," DVIDS, U.S. Department of Defense
• Marc Tyler Nobleman, Thirty Minutes Over Oregon: A Japanese Pilot's World War II Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)