Several times in December, and a few more times in January, unidentified aircraft were seen, heard, or probably just imagined over San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other places along the Pacific Coast. Each time, their presence, either real or perceived, went unchallenged by the Army’s antiaircraft guns. On the night of February 24–25, 1942, that would change.
As had been the case during the blackout of December 11, there was something that made Angelinos believe that tonight would be different, that tonight was not just another blackout.
A continuous stream of bad news from the Far East had darkened the public mood. Weeks of reports of Allied defeats—Singapore had fallen just a week earlier—and FBI raids on what seemed to be an infinite underworld of Japanese espionage had taken their toll on the public psyche. Then the Japanese had shelled Goleta, which constituted an actual attack against American soil. In the darkness of February 24–25, therefore, many people in the Los Angeles area had ample reason to think the Japanese were coming, and they were coming soon.
The yellow alert, warning that attackers were one hundred miles or twenty minutes away, came at 7:18 p.m. Curiously, this was exactly the same moment that the IV Interceptor Command had launched a show of force—probably meant to calm fears and instill confidence—over the Southland. Perhaps, the AWS observers detected the American aircraft, and their reports worked their way through the filter center without being cross-checked.
A blackout was ordered, but the all clear was issued 10:33 p.m. About four hours later, however, things became much more exciting. As Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate note in The Army Air Forces in World War II, radar “picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles.” The antiaircraft batteries of the 37th Coastal Artillery Brigade were alerted at 2:15 a.m. and were put on green alert, meaning ready to fire, shortly thereafter. Quoting the daily intelligence summary in the official history of the IV Antiaircraft Command, the radar tracked the approaching targets to within a few miles of the coast, and the regional controller transmitted the blackout order to local authorities at 2:21. Air raid sirens began wailing across the Southland within four minutes. Searchlight batteries sprang into life and soon probed the sky with their stark white light.
Craven and Cate write that “the information center was flooded with reports of ‘enemy planes,’ even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished.” They go on to say that at 3:06, “a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of antiaircraft artillery opened fire.” As the Los Angeles Times reported, “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.” The Battle of Los Angeles was on.
The Times told of Long Beach police chief Joseph Henry McClelland, atop City Hall beside a Navy observer, watching the passing of “a flight of nine silvery-looking planes from the Redondo Beach area across the land side of Fort MacArthur, and toward Santa Ana and Huntington Beach.”
A great many other people claim to have seen aircraft in the sky that night, although the numbers varied greatly. However, after their patrol on the evening of February 24, the American fighters remained on the ground throughout the Battle of Los Angeles. According to the Fourth Air Force Historical Study III-2 the IV Interceptor Command kept its aircraft out of the action “preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force.”
The balloon mentioned by Craven and Cate and other similar objects were also widely seen, drifting along the coast and inland. Some witnesses thought these might have been escaped barrage balloons, while others insisted they were not. In later years, UFO enthusiasts would, and still do, focus a great deal of attention on this aspect of the night’s excitement.
Times reporter Ray Zeman was at his father-in-law’s house in Inglewood when the fireworks began, and as the family headed for shelter in the basement, he realized that “this might be the biggest story in years” and that it might center on the huge North American Aviation aircraft factory in the city. He convinced his wife that they ought to try to walk to the Inglewood City Hall. In the dark, they stumbled across two policemen watching the searchlight beams above.
“Have you seen any planes?” Zeman asked.
“Plenty. They must be 25,000 or 30,000 feet high, out of range of the ack-ack guns.”
“How many planes?”
“Oh, 150 or 200, I guess. They came in great dark clouds. We haven’t heard any bombs dropped, though.”
Zeman and his wife continued on their way, and reached the Inglewood Police Station. There, they were met by several officers who had known Mrs. Zeman when she had been a reporter with the Times. When they reported what they had heard earlier, the policemen were incredulous.
“Two hundred planes?” one officer replied. “Why those men had hallucinations. There were seven planes, maybe nine.”
“Seven,” the jail matron interjected. “I counted them.”
Suddenly, there was a roar from a nearby antiaircraft gun, and then another.
The policemen told the Zemans where the guns were hidden, but hastened to add that it was a “military secret,” admonishing Zeman, “Don’t print that.”
Suddenly, there was a bright flash, which one man interpreted as a flare dropped by a submarine-hunting airplane. Another insisted that it was just an especially bright antiaircraft shell.
Just as unexpectedly, there was a moment of silence in the immediate area and as cigarettes were extinguished to comply with the blackout, talk turned to the policemen having witnessed some air-to-air combat between American and hostile aircraft. Others, however, insisted that there had been no such thing.
After a few moments, distant searchlights began stabbing the sky in the vicinity of Terminal Island the harbor at the Port of Los Angeles, and there was another round of antiaircraft file in that direction.
Zeman found a phone booth and attempted to phone the Times offices to report his story, but the telephone operator insisted that he give her the number from which he was calling.
“It’s dark in here,” he explained, his tone suggesting the unspoken qualification that they were in the midst of a blackout. There was a nearby explosion as the operator finally relented, and put the call through.
Across Los Angeles, another Times reporter, Marvin Miles, looked upward, watching as “objects in the sky slowly moved on, caught in the center of the [search] lights like the hub of a bicycle wheel surrounded by gleaming spokes.”
He went out onto the street to join his neighbors who had also been rudely awakened. In the intermittent light from the sky, he took notes of their comments.
“It’s a whole squadron.”
“No, it’s a blimp. It must be because it’s moving so slowly.”
“I hear planes.”
“No you don’t; that’s a truck up the street.”
“Where are the planes then?”
“Dunno. Must be up there, though.”
“Wonder why they picked such a clear night for a raid?”
“They’re probably from a carrier.”
“Naw, I’ll bet they’re from a secret air base down south [in Mexico] somewhere.”
“Maybe it’s a test.”
“Test, hell! You don’t throw that much metal into the air unless you’re fixing on knocking something down!”
Gene Sherman of the Times reported on the public’s reaction that night, writing that “the people you met weren’t rattled or scared or particularly nervous. But their eyes were turned unbelievingly southward toward those [searchlights] and bursting shells. They looked up. And they were awake—wide, wide awake.”
A Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle officer told Sherman, “Well, this might do the folks around here some good. This ain’t no picnic and now they know it.”
Later, during a ride-along in a squad car, Sherman and his hosts passed a brightly illuminated store on Wilshire Boulevard. Some bystanders asked what they should do, and the police gave them the green light to do what it took and they went looking for rocks.
In Huntington Park, a dozen store owners were later cited for leaving their display lights on through the blackout. In Santa Ana, twenty-one shopkeepers were fined $50 apiece for similar violations, but Judge Donald Harwood suspended $45 and let them off after a reproachful warning. The long arm of the law reached the other way, too. At First and Broadway in Los Angeles, a man was picked up for breaking out the window of Mandel’s Jewelry. He claimed that he was enforcing the blackout, but the arresting officers suspected he had “another motive.” Meanwhile, a dozen Japanese and Japanese-Americans—from Gardena to Glendale—were arrested for being associated with “suspicious lights” which witnesses thought might be attempts to signal enemy aircraft.
Area hospitals reported that fourteen babies had been born during the battle, but there had been numerous injuries and five fatalities because of the blackout. In Arcadia, for example, a milk truck driven by Goldie Wagner collided with the passenger car driven by Harry Klein, whose wife Zeulah was fatally injured.
As the antiaircraft shells were bursting above the Southland, two volunteer civil defense volunteers died of heart attacks in the line of duty. Henry Ayers, age sixty, was driving through Hollywood, his station wagon full of ammunition for his State Guard unit, when he slumped over his steering wheel and died. George Weil, age thirty-six, was on duty as an AWS warden when he was stricken. He later died at home. Several other air raid wardens suffered injuries, some serious, while enforcing the blackout or making their way through the darkness.
Blanche Sedgewick and her fourteen-year-old niece got out of bed to look at the fireworks, and while they watched, an enormous piece of shrapnel plummeted out of the sky and crashed into the bedroom they had just vacated. In Long Beach, the kitchen and home office of Dr. Franklin Stewart were demolished by falling debris—perhaps an unexploded shell. Numerous similar reports came in to police and the news media during the ensuing days.
The gunfire tapered off around 4:15 a.m., and at last daylight replaced the searchlights. All clear signals were sounded between 7:21 and 8:34 a.m.
The next morning, the public transit system was in disarray because more than two dozen streetcars had been stranded during the blackout. Los Angeles deputy police chief Bernard Caldwell reported the “worst transportation tie-up in the history of the city” as people who usually used public transportation attempted to drive to work. Looking at the bright side, Los Angeles deputy police chief Ross McDonald, in charge of the department’s “war activities,” credited the ten thousand wardens with “helping to prevent countless accidents in traffic during the blackout.”
Craven and Cate report that the 37th Coastal Artillery fired 1,440 rounds of antiaircraft artillery ammunition, and many sources recall .50 caliber machine guns also being in action.
In San Francisco, General DeWitt told Major General Fulton Q. C. Gardner, commander of the IV Anti-Aircraft Command, of his “gratification at the readiness of the officers and men to meet possible enemy action, as demonstrated by their alertness and ability to promptly open fire when called upon to do so during the blackout of the Los Angeles area . . . reports indicate very definitely that the officers and men of the antiaircraft units were prepared when the test came to meet with fire a hostile attack.”
But, had there been any “enemy action?” Were there really enemy airplanes in the sky to be hit? Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times, and Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle—later to become a legendary war reporter—both wrote emphatically that they had seen no aircraft at all. For many of those who went through the Battle of Los Angeles, however, there was no doubt. But where did these aircraft come from and where did they go?
The official word from the Western Defense Command in San Francisco via Major General Walter Wilson’s Southern Sector headquarters in Pasadena was that “the aircraft which caused the blackout in the Los Angeles area for several hours this a.m. have not been identified. . .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.”
The second phase of the battle would be waged in Washington, D.C. Secretary of War Henry Stimson told the Associated Press that there were “probably” unidentified aircraft over Los Angeles, but Navy Secretary Frank Knox announced that it was a “false alarm.”
“There were no planes over Los Angeles last night; at least that’s our understanding,” Knox told a press conference. “None have been found and a very wide reconnaissance has been carried out.”
The Associated Press reported that Knox used the opportunity to reiterate his belief that vital industries, specifically aircraft factories, would eventually have to be relocated to “safer inland regions.” However, in his comments to the Associated Press, Knox wrote off the Battle of Los Angeles as a case of “jittery nerves.”
“Whose nerves, Mr. Knox? The public’s or the Army’s?” The Los Angeles Times indignantly replied in a front-page editorial. “And just where, and the question is a fair one, did Secretary Knox get the information leading him to believe that the air raid was a phony? The official and only official source of such information in this case is the Army. What the Army’s information was has been made very clear, both by its own statement and by its vigorous action. It is not for a moment to be believed that the Army did not act in good faith in the matter. It is equally incredible that Secretary Knox would even remotely intimate anything of the sort. Least comprehensible of all is what the Navy head sees in the case to abet the desire of some government officials and some inland communities to transfer coastal industries to the latter.”
Los Angeles county sheriff Eugene Biscailuz took Knox to task, scolding him for “the very great damage done to our Civilian Defense morale by the reported statement. . .It is highly important that we deal in good faith with thousands of air raid wardens, auxiliary policemen and other volunteers in the defense effort.”
Stimson, meanwhile, seemed to have the evidence on his side when it came to his assertion that the enemy incursion was real. Referring to an assessment from DeWitt’s Western Defense Command headquarters that came to him by way of Chief of Staff General George Marshall, he said that “as many as 15 planes may have been involved, flying at various speeds from what is officially reported as being ‘very slow’ to as much as 200 miles an hour, and at an elevation of from 9,000 to 18,000 feet.”
Stimson even repeated the widely circulated theory, not discounted by DeWitt’s command, that the aircraft had been procured by enemy agents from commercial sources and were being flown from secret land bases, perhaps in Mexico.
“It is reasonable to conclude that if unidentified airplanes were involved, they may be some from commercial sources, operated by enemy agents for the purpose of spreading alarm, disclosing location of antiaircraft positions, or the effectiveness of blackouts. Such a conclusion is supported by [the] varying speed of the operation, and the fact that no bombs were dropped.”
As for the antiaircraft barrage, Stimson asked that “perhaps it is better to be too alert than not alert enough. In any case, they were very alert there [in Los Angeles].”
When asked whether his information had originated with DeWitt’s Western Defense Command on the Pacific Coast, Stimson explained that it had come to him directly from Chief of Staff Marshall, “and it is evidently a report from out there.”
United Press reported that Los Angeles city officials had demanded that “Army, Navy and civilian agencies ‘beat the brush’ throughout the West for possible [clandestine] air bases. Undersheriff [Arthur] C. Jewell [a thirty-year veteran of the department] speculated that the planes possibly may have come from secret land bases in Mexico, adding that the Mexican government was cooperating to the utmost in searching its territory for such possible bases. Civil authorities in Nevada and Arizona quickly denied the possibility that enemy agents might have secret aircraft bases in their states.”
Southern California Republican Congressman Leland Ford was furious when he heard the commercial airplane theory. Said he, “If it was thought that these were commercial planes operated by enemy agents, why [did not] our own planes . . . go after them, bring them down to a landing, or upon refusal to land, shoot them down, or at least find out where they came from and where they went. In this connection, our people [IV Interceptor Command] know, within a reasonable range, where these planes would have to come from and where they would have to land.”
Congressman Ford called for Stimson and Knox to provide a “proper explanation” for what had happened. “Our people ought to know whether this was a practice raid, whether it was a political raid, or what kind of a raid it was,” Ford told the House of Representatives, raising some worrisome questions. “Why were unidentified planes fired upon? This was either a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a political foundation to take away from Southern California its industries. . .[the people of California] are not jittery but are beginning to believe the Army and Navy are.”
A Congressional investigation was demanded by the Pacific Coast Congressional delegation, and on March 2, Secretary Knox went to Capitol Hill. Grilled about his “false alarm” comment, Knox walked back his previous statement, telling Congress that he had been “misquoted” or at least misunderstood. He added that since air defense was the Army’s job, they should have the last word.
However, that last word was muddled and unclear, as both Army and Navy tempered their initial, emphatic statements. Indeed, in the absence of facts, speculation became rampant.
“Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the event quickly became as involved and mysterious as the ‘battle’ itself,” wrote Craven and Cate when reviewing the incident after the war. “The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended [and received in Washington at 1:15 p.m. on February 25], indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove ‘that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated.’”
Nevertheless, after investigating the matter, the Western Defense Command continued to hold fast to the idea that as many as five unidentified aircraft had been over Los Angeles, despite this making the Army seem inept for its inability to shoot them down.
On February 28, the New York Times weighed in, asking that “if the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them?”
Craven and Cate point out that “these questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of our air defenses.”
When the dust settled, most people who had been there continued to believe that there had been aircraft in the sky that night, though there was never any hard evidence to confirm this. Craven and Cate mention that “at the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert.”
That said, the only possible Japanese aircraft that could have attacked the Los Angeles area that night were those carried by Japanese submarines. However, each submarine carried just one, and the I-17, which had shelled Goleta the night before, was still in the area and could have launched its single aircraft, but there was no other Japanese submarine in the area.
The interpretation of the cause of the Battle of Los Angeles that was advanced in the official history of the IV Antiaircraft Command was that the antiaircraft batteries were reacting to the balloon that had been seen by numerous people on the ground. It was later identified as a “weather balloon,” an explanation that would be used for numerous other incidents of unexplained aerial phenomena in the coming decades.
The conflicting initial assessments by Stimson and Knox were never really resolved; therefore, many people have assumed through the years that deliberate government obfuscation was in play. To this day, because of the many mysteries associated with that strange night, the Battle of Los Angeles “cover-up” still attracts its own small cadre of true believers whenever conspiracy theorists congregate.