Battle of Los Angeles

File:La air raid.gif

The image on the front page of the Los Angeles Times after the "Air Raid"; the caption read "SEEKING OUT OBJECT - Scores of searchlights built a wigwam of light beams over Los Angeles early yesterday morning during the alarm. This picture was taken during blackout; shows nine beams converging on an object in sky in Culver City area. The blobs of light which show at apex of beam angles were made by anti-aircraft shells."

The West coast air raid, sometimes referred to as the Los Angeles air raid or The battle of Los Angeles, was an unidentified flying object event which took place from late February 24 to early February 25 1942 in which eyewitness reports of an unknown object or objects over Los Angeles, California triggered a massive anti-aircraft artillery barrage.

Initially the target of the barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but it was later suggested to be a lost weather balloon, a blimp, a Japanese fire balloon or psychological warfare technique, staged for the benefit of coastal industrial sites, or even an extraterrestrial aircraft. The true nature of the object or objects remains unknown.

Alarms Raised

Prior to the incident in Los Angeles, the Ellwood shelling, in which a Japanese submarine fired on a oil production facility near Santa Barbara, had occurred on February 23, 1942. Reports indicated that afterwards the submarine was heading south, the general direction of Los Angeles.

Unidentified objects were reported over Los Angeles during the night of February 24 and the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. Air raid sirens were sounded throughout Los Angeles County at 02:25 a.m. and a total blackout was ordered. Thousands of air raid wardens were summoned to their positions.

At 03:16 a.m. on February 25, the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade began firing 12.8 pound anti-aircraft shells into the air at the object or objects; over 1400 shells would eventually be fired . Pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command were alerted but their aircraft remained grounded. The artillery fire continued sporadically until 04:14 a.m. The objects were said to have taken about 20 minutes to have moved from Santa Monica to Long Beach. The "all-clear" was sounded and the blackout order lifted at 07:21.

In addition to several buildings damaged by friendly fire, three civilians were killed by the anti-aircraft fire, and another three died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long bombardment.

The incident was front-page news along the U.S. Pacific coast, and earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation. One Los Angeles Herald Express writer who observed some of the incident insisted that several anti-aircraft shells had struck one of the objects, and he was stunned that the object had not been downed. Reporter Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times wrote , "I was far enough away to see an object without being able to identify it ... I would be willing to bet what shekels I have that there were a number of direct hits scored on the object."

Editor Peter Jenkins of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported, "I could clearly see the V formation of about 25 silvery planes overhead moving slowly across the sky toward Long Beach." Long Beach Police Chief J.H. McClelland said "I watched what was described as the second wave of planes from atop the seven-story Long Beach City Hall. I did not see any planes but the younger men with me said they could. An experienced Navy observer with powerful Carl Zeiss binoculars said he counted nine planes in the cone of the searchlight. He said they were silver in color. The group passed along from one battery of searchlights to another, and under fire from the anti-aircraft guns, flew from the direction of Redondo Beach and Inglewood on the land side of Fort MacArthur, and continued toward Santa Ana and Huntington Beach. Anti-aircraft fire was so heavy we could not hear the motors of the planes."

Official Response

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox announced that the entire incident was a false alarm due to anxiety and "war nerves". Many in the press doubted this explanation, some suspecting a cover up. An editorial in the Long Beach Independent wrote, "There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter."

Others speculated that the incident was either staged or exaggerated to give coastal defense industries an excuse to move further inland . And if there truly was nothing to the incident, the possibility that Navy personnel had fired heavy artillery shells for nearly an hour at nothing at all — killing three civilians in the process — led some critics to suggest that U.S. Navy men were dangerously incompetent.

Identification Elusive

Proposed explanations of the event have included misidentification of weather balloons, sky lanterns, and Japanese fire balloons [1], but the latter did not exist in 1942. Multiple objects were reported by some people, not a single object like a weather balloon; furthermore, it is arguably unlikely that a weather balloon could have survived such a massive bombardment. Some speculated that the purportedly slow-moving object was a blimp, but expert engineers thought this unlikely, as Japan was believed to have little interest in blimps.

An image published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times purported to show one of the Air Raid unidentified objects caught in searchlights as artillery shells exploded in the vicinity; see photo on this page for the full accompanying caption. It has been argued that the searchlight beams all stop at a central point, leading some to speculate that the image was artificially created or retouched; it remains unclear if this explanation was ever proposed in print by anyone with formal training in optics, photography or a related field. A better copy of the Times photo can be found at optical physicist Bruce Maccabee's website; Macabee's argument (admittedly preliminary due to several unknown factors regarding the photograph) is that a metallic object about 100 feet (30 meters) broad is depicted in the photo.

FOIA Request

In 1974, due to a Freedom of Information Act request, a memorandum regarding the incident was released. Written by General George C. Marshall for President Franklin Roosevelt, and dated February 26, 1942, Marshall wrote that the "Air Raid" incident was due to "unidentified airplanes, other than American Army or Navy planes [which] were probably sighted over Los Angeles [and moved from] 'very slow' to as much as 200 mph and from elevations of 9000 to 18,000 feet." Because the objects did not seem to be part of any attack, Marshall speculated that the craft might have been commercial airplanes used as a sort of psychological warfare campaign to generate panic.

Some documents, perhaps of dubious authenticity, have suggested that the Los Angeles incident inspired the formation of an Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU). While the IPU did exist, according to the Air Force Directorate of Counterintelligence, it is unknown if it had any connection to the Los Angeles incident.

References to the Air Raid in other media

The incident was part of the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's World War II comedy 1941.

See also

• Attacks on North America during World War II
• History of the west coast of North America

References

• Bishop, Greg (March 2, 2006). Weird California (Weird). Sterling Publishing. ISBN ISBN 978-1-40-273384-0. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• San Francisco virtual museum article
• West Coast Air Raid: Unidentified Object
• Dr. Bruce Maccabee's analysis of L.A. Times photo with some transcripts of original articles
• The Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942