by Mark Felton
The Fujita Plan
The Fujita Plan
Mark Felton
Pen & Sword
MILITARY
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Mark Felton, 2006
ISBN 1 844 154 807
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been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
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Dedicated with love to Fang Fang
Contents
Introduction
1.
The Best Laid Plans
2.
Steel Coffins: 7 December 1941
3.
Target California
4.
The Empire Strikes Back
5.
Bombarding America
6.
Target Sydney
7.
Air Raid Oregon
8.
An Overview of Japanese Submarine Operations off Australia during 1943
9.
Storm From a Clear Sky
Appendices
1
Organization of Japanese Submarine Forces 1941–42
2
The Japanese Balloon Bomb Campaign against the United States
3
A Japanese Landing in Australia
4
German U-boat operations around Australia
Sources and Bibliography
Index
Introduction
The ‘Fujita Plan’ is named for a fairly minor member of Japan’s wartime armed services, a man who was not even an officer. Chief Warrant Officer (Flying) Nobuo Fujita, a former test pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy conceived a plan of such daring and such possible rewards for Japan’s arms that its worth was immediately seized upon by far more senior officers who perhaps enjoyed Fujita’s boldness that was in the finest traditions of the samurai. The plan was Fujita’s, but the eventual missions that the pilot undertook were the product of careful planning involving even a member of the Japanese royal family, and the mission was simple: to bomb the mainland of the United States. The ‘Fujita Plan’ is the title of this book, but it is more than just an examination a single navy pilot’s unique missions over the United States, the book examines the often bungled efforts of the Japanese to extend the Pacific War to the very shores of the United States and Australia. Fujita provides a link between the two operations, as he was the only Japanese pilot to fly over both Australia and America during the Second World War, and his amazing idea forms the core of the story of Japan’s war on the American and Australian home fronts. Many of the submarines detailed throughout the pages of this book were active at various times during 1941–43 off the coasts of the United States and Australia, often alternating patrols between the two far-flung localities. This book has drawn together the strands of these two separate but intertwined operations into a single narrative. The Japanese made half-hearted efforts to isolate both the continent of Australia and the United States west coast from external trade, they made a series of largely uncoordinated attacks on both nations, and they employed the full gamut of specialist equipment on these ‘missions impossible’, from two-man midget submarines to tiny submarine-launched floatplanes, balloons loaded with bombs to huge submarines surfacing offshore and unleashing shells from their deck-guns. Merchant ships were sunk or damaged as the Japanese tried to employ their submarines as commerce raiders along the coasts of Oregon and California, and all around Australia. They behaved like the world’s most successful merchant ship hunters, Germany’s U-boats, but failed to emulate the high kill ratios recorded by their erstwhile allies. In these operations the Japanese Navy off the coasts of the United States and Australia attempted and committed war crimes, as submarine skippers grew increasingly frustrated by their lack of success. One submarine skipper appeared to sail to California’s coast thirsting for revenge against a place where he had suffered a grave loss of face before the war. While some Japanese were a disgrace to their uniform and their country, others displayed courage beyond what was expected of them at the time by their superiors, as the young men determined to infiltrate Pearl Harbor and Sydney Harbour in tiny submarines demonstrated, or to take to the skies in little floatplanes and go gallivanting over protected enemy airspace searching out secrets and targets, and nearly every man involved in these operations perished for almost no overall result for the Japanese war effort. In the case of the midget submarine raiders they had already accepted the likelihood of a one-way mission even before they boarded their tiny craft. For Fujita, long after the war was over he was to rediscover the places in Oregon he had tried so hard to destroy, and in an extraordinary act of reconciliation and friendship between himself and local Oregonians, eventually become an honoured citizen and bridge of understanding between the two cultures.
Only a few books have been written in the recent past about the Japanese submarine attacks on the United States and Australia, and they have tended to concentrate on one particular nation or the other. Australian writers have taken a particular interest in the Japanese midget submarine attacks on Sydney and the operations of submarines around the coasts of the great continent, and of particular note are the excellent Australia Under Siege: Japanese Submarine Raiders 1942 by Steven L. Carruthers and David Jenkins’s Battle Surface! Focusing on the immense bravery and daring of the midget submarine crews who conducted the Pearl Harbor and Sydney attacks any student of this period of history should read Peggy Warner and Sadao Seno’s emotive and well-named book The Coffin Boats: Japanese Midget Submarine Operations in the Second World War. For American historians Fujita’s attacks and the activities of Japanese submarines along the west coast have been largely ignored in print. I have been fortunate to receive the assistance of local history groups along the west coast in attempting to reconstruct the events of 1942, notably the Port Orford Historical Society and the James Scott’s excellent website Harbor Defenses of the Columbia River During the Second World War (www.csus.edu). For unpublished sources concerning the midget attacks on Sydney Harbour the Australian War Memorial at Canberra contains an extensive collection of reports and photographs, and I have also utilized local newspaper coverage extending to the shelling of Sydney and Newcastle by Japanese I-class submarines following the events in Sydney Harbour. For any author attempting to write about Japanese submarines and their operations during the Se
cond World War one source above all others has consistently and reliably assisted this writer, making sure my dates, specifications, movements and skippers are all recorded correctly within the overall story. This is Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp’s www.combinedfleet.com, a labour of love for the subject that is an invaluable reference source for researchers, filling in many of the gaps caused by the paucity of written material on Japanese submarines. Great books do exist, and no author on this subject can have failed to consult Carl Boyd and Akira Yoshida’s The Japanese Submarine Force in World War II or Paul Dull’s A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy. For more technical information the encyclopaedic volumes Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Jentschura, Jung and Michel, and Polmar and Carpenter’s Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1904–1945 provide a mass of data invaluable to researchers.
The war on America’s and Australia’s doorstep has been largely forgotten over the past six decades, and even at the time it was an occasional story of local interest, but rarely a real source for concern at the highest levels of government. The fears generated by these hit-and-run tactics against inshore merchant shipping and military targets on land were unjustified with hindsight, but rumours continue to abound even to this day of dark Japanese wartime designs concerned with invading Australia or unleashing biological warfare upon the western United States. If the intention of the Japanese Navy was to unsettle the American and Australian populations who perhaps felt relatively secure far from the sounds of gunfire and bombs it succeeded. It bought for the Japanese a few alarming newspaper headlines, and the attacks by submarines and aircraft made both America and Australia strengthen their inshore defences, but the attacks did very little to assist the overall Japanese war effort.
The attacks, especially those of such daring and dash, such as the midget submarine attacks on Pearl Harbor and Sydney, Fujita’s lone bombing missions over the forests of Oregon, and the five occasions when Japanese naval shells exploded on the shores of America and in the streets of Australian cities, are interesting for the simple fact of their incongruousness. That Japan should reach out so far came as a surprise to the United States and Australia at the time. To us, they are anomalies in the history of the Second World War, examples of forgotten corners of the history of that conflict, but corners still worth shining a little light into in attempts to complete the story of the war in the Pacific.
This book could not have been written without the kind assistance of the following individuals and institutions, and I would like to extend my deep thanks to you all: Brigadier Henry Wilson and the staff at Pen & Sword Books for their continued support; I would also like to thank my editor, Susan Econicoff, for her hard work. Many thanks to Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp for permitting me to reproduce data from their excellent website on Japanese submarines to be found at http://www.combined-fleet.com/sensuikan.htm. A great many thanks to the forum at www.uboat.net for enabling contact between myself and many submarine researchers, and for the continued excellent feedback from many contributors concerning all matters submarine. A great debt of thanks also to Rick Francona and the Port Orford Lifeboat Station, Oregon, for allowing me to reproduce details of the Fujita missions over Oregon and for their assistance in answering my questions and providing me with contacts. Many thanks to Don Kehn, Jr. for providing me with the declassified action reports of the USS Edsall from the National Archives (NARA) in Washington D.C. The following institutions are owed many thanks for their assistance; The Australian War Memorial; National Archives of Australia; The British Library; The National Archives (Public Record Office), Kew; The Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex; Colchester Central Library. Finally, a great many thanks to my wife Fang Fang for her undiminished support and encouragement throughout the gestation of this book, and I remain always indebted for her love and steady advice.
Shanghai
February 2006
Chapter 1
The Best Laid Plans
How courteous is the Japanese;
He always says, ‘Excuse it, please.’
He climbs into his neighbor’s garden,
And smiles, and says, ‘I beg your pardon’;
He bows and grins a friendly grin,
And calls his hungry family in;
He grins and bows a friendly bow;
‘So sorry, this is my garden now.’
Ogden Nash
Thirty-one year old naval aviator Nobuo Fujita arrived at Imperial Japanese Navy Headquarters in Tokyo on 27 July 1942, fresh from flying duties aboard the submarine 1–25. A small, compact man with cropped black hair and a determined expression set permanently upon his face as befitted his rank of chief warrant officer, the senior non-commissioned grade available to an enlisted man, he was directed immediately by an aide into a room inside the Japanese Admiralty’s First Bureau (Operations) department. There he discovered several staff officers standing stiffly around a table on which was spread a large map of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. All acknowledged the arrival of the only non-com to be invited to the meeting with curt nods of their heads and returned Fujita’s formal salute before returning to their discussion over the map table. The most important officer present was of a relatively junior rank, but his position was of the highest standing and everyone naturally and obsequiously deferred to him. Commander Prince Takamatsu was the younger brother of the ‘Sacred Crane’, Emperor Hirohito, and although he was a senior member of the Imperial family he was also a serving naval officer. The young prince had taken a strong interest in an ingenious plan Fujita had dreamed up when whiling away the long periods of inactivity on active duty at sea; a plan that would come to be named the ‘Fujita Plan’ after its designer. The officers gathered in the room represented all the sections of the Imperial Navy who were interested in making Fujita’s idea a reality.
Present at the table was a staff officer from the submarine service, and another who had once been a Japanese vice-consul in the American city of Seattle. Following formal introductions, the staff officer from submarines announced in a matter of fact tone, ‘Fujita, we are going to have you bomb the American mainland.’ As a stunned Fujita began to take on board the realization that his dream had finally become a reality, the staff officer who had lived and worked in the American northwest, the former vice-consul, fleshed out the headquarters staff’s amendments to Fujita’s original plan. ‘You will bomb forests for us, right about here,’ he said, stabbing his index finger at a position which Fujita could see lay approximately seventy-five miles north of the California state line. At this point Fujita began to realize that the high command had a different plan in mind entirely from his own brilliant idea. Fujita had carefully outlined a scheme in writing to headquarters for using the small reconnaissance floatplanes carried aboard submarines such as his own I-25 to bomb important military targets and cities along the United States west coast, and to attack the Panama Canal, the vital artery that linked American naval forces in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and an important international trade route. He could see that the area indicated on the map that lay before him was devoid of any large towns or cities harbouring industrial or military targets. Perhaps noting the look of disappointment and confusion that crossed the young Fujita’s face, the staff officer explained further: ‘The north-western United States is full of forests. Once a blaze gets started in the deep woods, it is difficult to stop. Sometimes whole towns are destroyed.’ The delivery of a small amount of incendiary bombs, it was explained, and the floatplane type fitted to many Japanese submarines, the Yokosuka E14Y1, was only capable of lifting a tiny munitions load, could potentially cause a huge conflagration. The staff officer went further, detailing the important point of such a mission to Fujita: ‘If we were to bomb these forests, it would put the enemy to much trouble. It might even cause large-scale panic, once residents knew Japan could reach out and bomb their families and homes from 5,000 miles away.’ Fujita was also informed that a further outcome of such an attack could be th
e US Navy redeploying their Pacific Fleet to defend the American mainland, taking pressure off the Japanese elsewhere in the Pacific theatre.
Such was the final ‘Fujita Plan’; a plan originally conceived to be a series of nuisance and morale-busting air raids conducted against the United States Pacific coast. Its evolution as a result of the 27 July meeting in Tokyo made the plan a far more dangerous proposition, a series of attacks, which, if successful, had the potential to devastate large swathes of the Pacific Northwest, causing immense physical and economic damage and the deployment of considerable civil defence and military forces into the area to both defend from further attacks and clear up the damage caused. The Japanese Navy proposed a firestorm campaign in which Imperial forces reached out across the wide Pacific and brought the war directly to America’s doorstep. The United States had not been attacked on its home turf since a final entanglement with the British during the Napoleonic conflict termed the War of 1812.1 So marked the most ambitious plan yet devised by the Japanese Empire to sow death and destruction upon the American public, safe in the knowledge that no country had managed to strike at their doorstep since the Republic’s infancy.
The ‘Fujita Plan’ marks a strange and largely forgotten episode in the Pacific War, and was accompanied by much Japanese activity along the United States west coast, led by the Imperial Navy. Japanese submarines launched a campaign of attacks on coastal merchant shipping within sight of shore, submarines bombarded coastal installations with their deck-guns, and Japanese aircraft dropped bombs over American forests. At the same time, Australia was also targeted, and a further innovation, the midget submarine, was employed to penetrate Sydney Harbour and wreak havoc. But, as we shall see, the attention of the Japanese was always on the battles raging across the Pacific island chains and in south-east Asia, and the ‘Fujita Plan’ and its ilk amounted to nothing more than flea bites on an elephant as Japan’s resources were thrown into defending their massive Empire. What is certain, however, is that although the submarine attacks on the United States and Australia did cause panic and confusion throughout the civilian populace, they have also left a legacy far greater than their military and economic impacts at the time, a legacy rife with stories of invasion and fifth columnist activity in both the United States and Australia that have endured up to the present day. The Japanese submarine campaigns against both countries are noteworthy as historical ‘what could have been’ scenarios, had the Japanese been more committed in taking the Pacific war to the American and Australian home fronts as they rode high following their conquests of 1941–42.