On the evening of Monday February 23, 1942, millions of Americans gathered around their radios to listen to one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s familiar and folksy Fireside Chats.
Because George Washington’s birthday had fallen on the day before, Roosevelt chose comparisons of America in 1942 to Washington’s difficult winter at Valley Forge as his theme. He called it “a most appropriate occasion for us to talk with each other about things as they are today and things as we know they shall be in the future. . .Washington’s conduct in those hard times has provided the model for all Americans ever since—a model of moral stamina. He held to his course, as it had been charted in the Declaration of Independence.”
As he was reminding people 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,” on the Pacific Coast, enemy began the first bombardment of the United States by a foreign power since the War of 1812.
In the November 21, 1982, issue of Parade magazine, a small story appeared in a column edited by screenwriter and novelist Irving Wallace, along with his son and daughter. This story, whose source was not given, has been widely repeated since, and may well have been true, despite its apocryphal tinge. It told of an incident that had occurred in Santa Barbara County, California sometime in the 1930s. Kozo Nishino was the captain of a Japanese oil tanker that came to the United States to load crude oil at the Ellwood oil fields, near the town of Goleta, about eight miles north of Santa Barbara.
As Wallace told it, as Nishio was coming up from the beach to a formal welcoming ceremony for his crew, he “slipped and fell into a prickly-pear cactus. Workers on a nearby oil rig broke into guffaws at the sight of the proud commander having cactus spines plucked from his posterior. Then and there, the humiliated Nishino swore to get even.”
Whether this engaging element of local folklore is merely that, or is in fact a true story, Kozo Nishio did show up offshore from the fields of Ellwood on the night of on February 23, 1942. This time, however, he commanded the submarine I-17. In December 1941, Nishio and I-17 had attacked two American freighters off Cape Mendocino, and now he was back. Nishio had arrived from Kwajalein on February 19, when he made an audacious covert landing on Point Loma at the entrance to San Diego Bay without being detected to check his position, and had headed north.
“At 7:10 p.m. one large submarine came to the surface about one mile offshore and fired approximately 15 shells from a deck gun,” F. W. Borden, the superintendent of the Bankline Oil Company refinery in the Ellwood fields told 11th Naval District investigators. “One direct hit was registered on a well causing minor damage to the pumping unit and the derrick. There were several close misses on a crude oil storage tank and a gasoline plant. Apparently no damage was caused by those shells. . . no fires were started as a result of the firing. No tanks were hit. From fragments of shell on the ground it is believed a four or five-inch gun was used. The firing was done quite leisurely, apparently only one gun being used.”
In the few homes dotting this sparsely populated stretch of the coast, many people were listening to Roosevelt’s speech when the shells began to fall. A California Highway Patrolman stopped traffic on U.S. Route 101, the main coastal highway, which ran through the Ellwood fields, and the Southern Pacific Railroad halted its trains on the parallel tracks.
“The first explosion sounded distant,” recalled Lawrence Wheeler, the owner of Wheeler’s Inn, a motel on the ocean side of Route 101. “They grew nearer and nearer. Beginning with the third, they shook our building. I rushed out of the house and saw a shell explode against the cliff about three fourths of a mile from our place. . .Another shell whiled over my head and landed in the canyon on the Staniss place, which is across the road from us.”
“I was scared to death,” added Mrs. Wheeler. “Great fountains of dirt were shot into the air, just like pictures in the newsreels. The shelling was so heavy it shook the house, just like an earthquake.”
Over the course of twenty-five minutes, I-17 had fired with seventeen rounds, after which Nishio ordered the boat to submerge and leave the area. During the barrage, no one ashore heard any American aircraft coming to attack the attacker, so there was an eerie sense of vulnerability and abandonment as the huge submarine disappeared beneath the waves.
Through the night, there were numerous calls to local authorities from people who thought they had seen flashing signal lights from boats in the Santa Barbara Channel. As with stories of flashing lights that had populated news reports since December, these were attributed to “enemy agents.”
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles observed hopefully that “such stunts are hardly likely to have any effect on this country’s war effort.” While he may have been correct about the physical effects—damage was estimated at $500—it did have a serious effect on the morale of Pacific Coast residents, and it set the stage for the reaction the following night to what became known as the Battle of Los Angeles.
According to an obscure oral history document in the collection of the El Fornio Historical Society, I-17 apparently lingered in the vicinity of Goleta overnight. The following morning, Jess Ueda, a nisei farmer went out to check his six acres of strawberry fields located along the coast near the tiny town of El Fornio. Probably on his mind more than the attack at Ellwood was the fact that his family had been summoned to turn themselves in for expulsion from the land that he and his father before him had farmed.
When Ueda’s dogs began to bark, he noticed that they were reacting to a group of five men standing next to a small boat on the beach below. He assumed that they were fishermen. He followed his dogs as they ran toward the men, and finally he could see that they were wearing Japanese Navy uniforms. As he reached them, he heard them speaking Japanese. Ueda had learned some of the language from his father, but he was not fluent.
Soon, they were joined by Ueda’s wife Jane and some of the farm workers whom he employed. One of these men spoke fluent Japanese and engaged the sailors in conversation.
“I think they simply wanted to set foot on American soil and then make a clean getaway,” Ueda recalled. “They had come all the way across the Pacific in that submarine. In all of my astonishment, I started thinking—and I could see my wife, who was born here like me, felt the same way—here we are trying to explain to authorities that we are loyal Americans, with no political connection to Japan, and suddenly here I am talking to the Japanese military! I politely asked them to go. And they obliged. . .One of my colleagues brought them strawberries, which they took on board the boat, although I strictly forbade them from taking any pictures. Can you imagine? We were fortunate the light was bad because one of them had a camera. . . . The whole encounter lasted about five minutes, really. A long five minutes!”
The Ueda family surrendered for internment on May 7 and spent the duration of the war at the Manzanar Relocation Center, where their second son, John, was born. It was not until 1982 that John, now an attorney, finally won the battle to reclaim the family’s strawberry farm.
After the landing, I-17 headed north, mounting an abortive attack against the 8,298-ton Standard Oil Company tanker William H. Berg on March 1, and coasting as far north as Oregon’s Cape Blanco before returning to the waters off San Francisco. On March 12, I-17 departed for Japan.
After failing to attack I-17 on February 23, the IV Interceptor Command, then in the process of a leadership change from Brigadier General William Ord Ryan to Brigadier General William Ellsworth Kepner, put its units across Southern California on alert. At 7:18 p.m. on February 24, roughly twenty-four hours after the attack at Goleta, Ryan told the AWS to tell the media that his command was at a “state of readiness.” This was certainly in reaction to the night before when no aircraft were heard to respond to the shelling. The all-clear signaling an end to this show of force came three hours and five minutes later at 10:23 p.m.
The Battle of Los Angeles would begin less than five hours later.