Battle of Los Angeles

Battle of Los Angeles

Type	Case (false alarm)
Also known as	Great Los Angeles Air Raid
Date	Night of 24–25 February 1942
Place	Los Angeles County, California
Shells fired	About 1,400 (1,433 or 1,440 by different counts)
Deaths	Five civilians, indirectly
Explanation	Weather balloons and "war nerves"

The Battle of Los Angeles, also called the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, was a false alarm on the night of 24–25 February 1942, less than three months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when U.S. Army anti-aircraft batteries fired about 1,400 shells into the sky over Los Angeles at enemy aircraft that were never there. No bombs fell and no planes were shot down, but falling shell fragments damaged buildings and cars, and five civilians died indirectly.^[1][4]

The Navy called it a false alarm caused by "war nerves", while some newspapers suspected a cover-up. Later official accounts blamed weather balloons, with shell bursts lit by searchlights then mistaken for planes. Decades later a heavily retouched newspaper photograph of searchlights converging in the sky was presented by UFO writers as showing an alien craft, making the episode a fixture of UFO lore.^[1][2][5]

Background

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the United States entered the Second World War the next day, fear and suspicion grew across the country, especially on the West Coast, where a Japanese attack or invasion was considered a real possibility. Blackouts and air-raid drills became common, and anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and bunkers appeared around Los Angeles.^[1][4]

Rumours ran ahead of the facts. In Juneau, Alaska, residents were told to cover their windows after stories of Japanese submarines off the coast. Reports of a Japanese aircraft carrier off San Francisco Bay led Oakland to close its schools and black out the city, with sirens on police cars blaring through the streets. Seattle blacked out too, and a mob of 2,000 people smashed businesses that left their lights on. Five hundred Army troops moved into the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank to guard it and nearby factories against sabotage or air attack.^[1]

The fears were fed by real attacks. From late December 1941 through February 1942 Japanese submarines attacked many American merchant ships off the West Coast, sinking several, including the Larry Doheny, Cynthia Olson, Camden and Montebello, and damaging others. Then, at 7:15 p.m. on 23 February 1942 — during one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats — the Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced near Santa Barbara and shelled the Ellwood oil field at Goleta. The damage was slight, about $500, and no one was hurt, but the attack convinced many West Coast residents that the Japanese could storm their beaches at any moment.^[1][4]

The alarms

On 24 February the Office of Naval Intelligence warned that an attack on mainland California could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening many flares and blinking lights were reported near defence plants. An alert was called at 7:18 p.m. and lifted at 10:23 p.m.^[1]

Early the next morning the alarms began again. At 2:25 a.m. on 25 February, on a clear, moonlit night, the Army announced the approach of hostile aircraft and air-raid sirens sounded across Los Angeles County — the first time the city's warning system had gone into action in the war. A total blackout was ordered, and thousands of volunteer air-raid wardens tumbled out of bed and rushed to their posts. Tens of thousands of residents, woken by sirens and gunfire, ignored the blackout and switched their lights on.^[1][4]

The barrage

At 3:06 a.m., according to the Office of Air Force History, a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four anti-aircraft batteries opened fire, at which point "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano". From 3:16 a.m. the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade fired .50-calibre machine guns and 12.8-pound anti-aircraft shells at reported aircraft. Searchlights swept the sky. Pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command were alerted, but their aircraft stayed on the ground. Firing continued on and off until 4:14 a.m. In all about 1,400 rounds were fired — 1,433 by one count and 1,440 by another. The all-clear sounded and the blackout was lifted at 7:21 a.m.^[1][4]

Accounts of what was being shot at varied wildly. The Air Force history describes "swarms" of planes, or sometimes balloons, numbering anywhere from one to several hundred, at heights from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000, moving at speeds from "very slow" to over 200 miles an hour. There were reports that four enemy planes had been shot down, and that one had landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection.^[1]

Damage and casualties

No bombs were dropped and no aircraft were found. Several buildings and vehicles were damaged by anti-aircraft shells that failed to explode in the air but went off on hitting the ground, destroying a garage here and a patio there and blowing out the tyre of a parked car. Five civilians died as an indirect result of the barrage: three in car crashes as drivers raced about the blacked-out streets, and two of heart attacks blamed on the stress of the night. Others were injured hurrying to their posts: a radio announcer ran into an awning and cut his eye, and a police officer kicked in the window of a lighted Hollywood shop and cut his leg.^[1][4]

The sheriff, to his later embarrassment, helped the FBI round up several Japanese nurserymen and gardeners who were supposedly caught signalling to the enemy planes. The incident was front-page news across the country.^[1][4]

Official explanations and the press

Within hours, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox told a press conference that the whole incident had been a false alarm caused by anxiety and "war nerves", and that there was no evidence of enemy planes. The city's sense of having met its first taste of war turned first to embarrassment and then to outrage, and the Army was accused of shooting up an empty sky. The next day the Army issued statements reflecting the view of its chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, that enemy agents might have used commercial aircraft to spread panic; the Secretary of War said that, while there had been no enemy aircraft, fifteen commercial planes flown by "enemy agents" were believed to have crossed the city. Few believed this, but most agreed it was better to be too alert than not alert enough.^[1][4]

Some newspapers suspected a cover-up. An editorial in the Long Beach Independent complained of a mysterious reticence and some form of censorship. Theories about the invaders included a secret base in northern Mexico and Japanese submarines able to carry planes, while others suggested the raid had been staged or exaggerated to give coastal defence industries an excuse to move inland. Representative Leland M. Ford of Santa Monica called for a congressional investigation, saying no explanation so far had removed the episode from the category of "complete mystification".^[1]

What caused it

After the war ended in 1945, the Japanese government said it had flown no aircraft over Los Angeles during the war. In 1949 the United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent up at 1:00 a.m. as having "started all the shooting", and concluded that once the firing began, imagination created all kinds of targets and everyone joined in. An Army document at the end of the war gave two causes: numerous weather balloons carrying tracking lights had been released over the area that night and were mistaken for enemy aircraft, and shell bursts lit up by searchlights were also taken for planes.^[1][4]

In 1983 the U.S. Office of Air Force History concluded that the evidence pointed to weather balloons as the cause of the first alarm, and described the event as a case of "war nerves" made worse by stray flares and by shell bursts from neighbouring batteries. It noted that the "mysterious forces" dropped no bombs and suffered no losses despite the barrage, and that dawn ended both the shooting and the fantasy. According to the historian Roger Lotchin, the incident became derisively known as the "Battle of Los Angeles" and is often cited as an example of the buffoonery of California's war effort.^[1][2]

The photograph and UFO claims

On 26 February 1942 the Los Angeles Times published a photograph of searchlight beams converging on a bright spot in the sky. Many years later, UFO writers presented it as clear evidence that the searchlights had caught a large alien craft. But the photo had been heavily retouched before publication — a routine practice at the time to improve contrast in black-and-white pictures — and the white paint added to show where the beams met was later mistaken for a solid object.^[1][5]

Los Angeles Times writer Larry Harnisch noted that the retouched photo, along with faked newspaper headlines, was presented as genuine history in trailers for the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles, and remarked that a campaign aiming to show UFO research as nothing but lies and fakery could hardly have done better.^[1][5]

Legacy

The raid was played for laughs in Steven Spielberg's 1979 comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and John Candy, which was billed as "A Comedy Spectacular". It also features in James Ellroy's 2019 novel This Storm. Every February the Fort MacArthur Museum, at the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor, holds an event called "The Great LA Air Raid of 1942".^[1][4]

Historians link the episode with other wartime panics in California at the time, including the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, and the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, as examples of how fear can take hold in wartime.^[4]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Battle of Los Angeles”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.