The Battle of Los Angeles

Evening. I work at the Fort MacArthur Museum down in San Pedro, been here going on twelve years now. I've spent most of that time researching one particular incident, and I think your listeners need to hear about it. February 1942. The Battle of Los Angeles. Now, I know some folks call it a false alarm, mass hysteria, whatever. But I've talked to the people who were there. I've read the declassified reports. And here's the thing, none of it adds up to just nerves. You gotta understand what Los Angeles was like back then. Pearl Harbor had happened less than three months before. The city was the biggest aircraft producer in the country, and everybody knew it. Five hundred Army troops were stationed at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank just to protect against sabotage. Japanese submarines were prowling the coast, sinking merchant ships. The SS Montebello went down on December 23rd. The Absaroka got hit the very next day, killed one of the crew. People weren't just nervous. They had reason to be terrified.

Then February 23rd happened. The night before everything went crazy. A Japanese submarine, the I-17, surfaced about a thousand yards off Santa Barbara and started shelling the Ellwood oil field. Commander Kozo Nishino fired maybe sixteen, twenty shells at the refinery. Didn't do much damage, missed the main fuel tanks completely. But that wasn't the point. The point was to scare people. And it worked. military bases on high alert shows the scale - Maya' The next day, February 24th, Naval Intelligence issued a warning. They said to expect an attack on mainland California within the next ten hours. That evening, people started reporting flares and blinking lights near the defense plants. An alert went out at seven eighteen in the evening. They lifted it around ten twenty-three. Everyone thought the danger had passed. They were wrong.

At about one forty-five in the morning on February 25th, coastal radar picked up something. An unidentified target, 120 miles west of Los Angeles, heading straight for the city. By two fifteen, two more radar stations confirmed it. Ten minutes later, every air raid siren in Los Angeles County started screaming. A total blackout was ordered. Thousands of air raid wardens rushed to their posts. I talked to a woman named Clara who was a volunteer warden back then. She told me she got a phone call from her supervisor asking if she could see anything strange in the sky. She went to her window, and there it was. Something glowing, moving slowly over the coast. She couldn't tell me exactly how big it was, that part was fuzzy for her even then. But the color, she remembered that perfectly. Orange. A deep, steady orange light drifting toward the city.