The Battle of Los Angeles

February 25, 1942

Less than three months after Pearl Harbor, in the early hours of 25 February 1942, air-raid sirens sounded across Los Angeles for the first time in the war. Searchlights swept the sky, and anti-aircraft batteries fired about 1,440 shells at what were thought to be Japanese aircraft. By dawn no bombs had fallen and no planes had been shot down. Nobody could agree on what, if anything, had been up there.

What people reported

Southern California was on edge. According to the official US Army Air Forces history, as reproduced by the California State Military Museum, naval intelligence had warned on 24 February that an attack could be expected within ten hours. That evening flares and blinking lights were reported near defence plants, and an alert called at 7:18 p.m. was lifted at 10:23 p.m.

In the early hours of the 25th, radar picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Anti-aircraft batteries were alerted at 2:15 a.m., and at 2:21 a.m. the regional controller ordered a blackout. The air raid warning system went into action for the first time in the war; as the Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith later recalled, the city's sirens tore the night open. The radar target itself seems to have vanished, but the information centre was flooded with reports of enemy planes. A coast artillery colonel reported 'about 25 planes at 12,000 feet' over the city.

At 3:06 a.m., the Army history says, a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica, and four anti-aircraft batteries opened fire: 'the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano'. For the next three hours, witnesses reported swarms of planes, or sometimes balloons, numbering from one to several hundred, at heights from a few thousand to over 20,000 feet and speeds from very slow to over 200 miles per hour. There were reports that four planes had been shot down and one had crashed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents along a 40-mile arc of coast watched from hills and rooftops.

The barrage was not harmless. The Los Angeles Times of 26 February 1942 reported that only two people were wounded by falling shell fragments, but listed four deaths linked to the blackout: a State Guardsman and an air raid warden who died of heart failure, a woman killed in a car-truck collision in Arcadia, and a Long Beach policeman killed in a crash on the way to duty. Later accounts, including the California State Library and Jack Smith's 1992 column, give five deaths: three in traffic accidents and two from heart attacks. Unexploded shells also damaged homes, garages and cars when they hit the ground.

What investigators found

The government could not agree. On 25 February the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, told a press conference that, as far as he knew, the whole raid was a false alarm that could be attributed to 'jittery nerves'. The Army's Western Defense Command insisted otherwise: its statements, reported by the Los Angeles Times, said the aircraft that caused the blackout had not been identified. After a day of interviewing witnesses, local commanders concluded that from one to five unidentified planes had been over the city, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson suggested they might have been commercial planes flown by enemy agents from secret fields, or light planes launched from Japanese submarines.

The official Army Air Forces history, published after the war, is far more sceptical. It notes that the Fourth Air Force had believed there were no planes over Los Angeles, and that the Western Defense Command's first report to Washington had predicted that most reports would prove 'greatly exaggerated'. It suggests much of the confusion came from anti-aircraft shell bursts lit up by searchlights, which were themselves mistaken for planes, and drifting smoke made observation even harder. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft brigade testified that he at first thought he saw fifteen planes, then quickly decided he was seeing smoke. The war correspondent Ernie Pyle and the journalist Bill Henry watched the shooting and never made out an aircraft.

After the war, the history records, Japan stated that it had sent no planes over the area at the time. The Army historians concluded that weather balloons, known to have been released over Los Angeles, may well have caused the initial alarm, noting that gunners were officially criticised for wasting ammunition on targets moving too slowly to be aircraft.

In later decades the Battle of Los Angeles was taken up by UFO enthusiasts, some of whom cite a photograph published in the Los Angeles Times on 26 February 1942 as evidence of something unearthly. The documentary record points to something less exotic but still alarming: a city primed for attack, a barrage of about 1,440 rounds, and, as the Army's own historians admit, an exposure of how weak America's air defences were in early 1942.

Further reading

• California State Military Museum: The Battle of Los Angeles (from the official AAF history)
• Los Angeles Times: From the Archives, the 1942 Battle of L.A.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles
• https://www.militarymuseum.org/BattleofLA.html
• https://laist.com/news/battle-of-la-75-years
• https://obscurantist.com/texts/los-angeles-times-army-says-alarm-real/
• https://www.latimes.com/visuals/framework/la-me-fw-archives-1942-battle-la-20170221-story.html
• https://celebratecalifornia.library.ca.gov/february-24-1942-the-battle-of-los-angeles-2/