The Fujita Plan: Japanese Attacks on the United States and Australia During the Second World War

by Mark Felton

  One of the principal Japanese naval bases in the Western Pacific, located at Rabaul in New Britain, now found itself menaced by an American naval task force that was discovered to be steaming towards the base as weather reports ceased, and the mission began to look in doubt. The task force, built around the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, appeared a juicy target to the Imperial Fleet’s local headquarters at Truk, and all available submarines and surface warships headed out and searched for the force. The two days spent on attempting to locate and attack the American task force, which aborted a projected attack on Rabaul, meant that the Pearl Harbor raid itself was delayed until 3 March. In the early evening the two big flying boats touched down safely in the lagoon at French Frigate Shoals, and the crews of the I-15 and I-19 set to work refuelling the huge beasts. At 9.38 p.m., both aircraft had lifted off and turned towards Pearl Harbor, the crews readying themselves for the daring strike against a location still clearing up the detritus and wreckage from the first Japanese raid, and a place maintaining a much better surveillance of the skies and seas around Hawaii, determined not to be caught out again by a sudden ‘surprise’ attack.

  US Navy intelligence officers had spent the remainder of 3 March pondering the significance of Japanese submarine activity at French Frigate Shoals that had arrived on their desks from the decrypts of Imperial Navy radio communications. The officers remained unsure as to what it signified, and more importantly, whether such activity posed a threat to local American forces. The massive raid of 7 December 1941 against Pearl Harbor had been launched from Japanese aircraft carriers, and none were believed to be near to Hawaii in March 1942. No land-based Japanese aircraft had the range to reach Hawaii from the furthest regions of the Japanese Empire, and although the officers were aware that some of the larger Japanese submarines certainly mounted a small plane onboard, they also knew that the aircraft was essentially a harmless reconnaissance model that they had codenamed ‘Glen’. For the moment, the reports of enemy submarine activity remained routine, and no alarms were raised or the alert status at Pearl Harbor brought up a notch.

  The pair of Kawanishi flying boats continued to devour the miles between the Shoals and a blacked-out Oahu, oblivious to the radar beams that constantly scanned the skies around the Hawaiian Islands. A US Army radar station at Kauai was the first section of the airborne early warning system to record a possible problem. At 12.14 a.m. on 4 March the radar ‘painted’ a single target moving towards Oahu at a range of 240 miles. The soldiers immediately informed the Air Raid Defense Center, who in turn telephoned the local Army Air Corps and US Navy air stations throughout the islands requesting that any friendly aircraft airborne be reported to the centre, and so could be eliminated from the air defence equation. Both the army and the navy replied that they had no aircraft then airborne, so the unidentified radar target was deemed most likely hostile.

  Unlike on the morning of 7 December 1941, this time the Americans responded quickly and efficiently to the threat they now perceived to be fast approaching. At 12.43 a.m. the air defence commander ordered general quarters, bringing all military and civil defence personnel to full readiness of an impending air raid on Oahu. At 1.15 a.m. a trio of US Navy PBY Catalina flying boats took off with orders to seek out any Japanese aircraft carriers lurking close to the islands that would explain the presence of enemy aircraft bearing down on Pearl Harbor. Four Curtiss P-40 Warhawks formed local air defence, and these fighters were scrambled at 1.36 a.m. to form a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) over Pearl Harbor with orders to intercept and shoot down any hostile aircraft encountered. This was easier said than done, as the Americans lacked any dedicated night fighters, and as the P-40s were bereft of radar the pilots would have to hunt by following ground directions and using their eyes. Although originally the night had been clear, with a full, bright moon, the weather had rapidly deteriorated, and rain and clouds were now building up over the intended Japanese target. The rain that would prevent the P-40s from discovering the Japanese flying boats that night also prevented the two amphibious bombers from satisfactorily locating their targets.

  The two pilots, Hashizume and Tomaro, planned to deposit their bombs over the central Ten-Ten Dock at Pearl Harbor, but as the two Japanese planes made landfall at the extreme western tip of Oahu and headed inland across the Koolau Mountains at 15,000 feet, both pilots noticed the clouds and rain squalls building up ahead of their machines. The Japanese planes stuck to an easterly course that would take them to the north of Pearl Harbor. Once close to the harbour the amphibians would make a sharp turn to port and head south to begin their bombing runs over the base. Lieutenant Hashizume’s aircraft followed the set course and arrived over the harbour as planned, but the target was badly obscured by cloud cover. Some members of his crew yelled over the intercom that they had seen Ford Island in the centre of the Pearl Harbor naval base through breaks in the cloud, but Hashizume decided to fly on, make a turn, and come back for a second look before releasing his bombs. The pilot banked the huge aircraft round to port and started back for his bomb run, dropping his payload at 12.10 a.m. through the clouds. These bombs rained down on some trees carpeting the slopes of Mount Tantalus behind Honolulu, six miles from Pearl Harbor. Four booming explosions echoed off the hills to mark the arrival of the Japanese, though hardly a soul registered the detonations as having a Japanese origin.

  The second aircraft, with Ensign Tomaro at the controls, did no better than Hashizume. When Hashizume had made his sharp turn to port designed to bring him back over the target, Tomaro had misunderstood Hashizume’s order and had carried on following the southern route. Realizing his mistake with the disappearance of his wingman, Tomaro hauled the big flying boat around and retraced his path back north. At 12.30 a.m., unsure of his exact position but believing himself to be over Pearl Harbor, Tomaro released his bombs, which fell harmlessly into the sea. Both Kawanishi’s now formed up and headed away from the islands with all possible haste, leaving the P-40s and Catalinas to search fruitlessly for them.

  Hashizume’s aircraft had completed the mission with a punctured hull, and this aircraft headed straight for Jaluit for repairs. Tomaro took his plane to Wotje Atoll, arriving at 2.45 p.m. Both pilots wrote detailed reports of their sorties over Oahu, and both men concluded correctly that the level of damage they had inflicted on the naval base was difficult to determine, owing to the weather conditions they had encountered over the target. Back at Pearl Harbor, to begin with the four explosions that had been heard on Mount Tantalus were investigated. The Americans initially thought that one of their own aircraft from either the army or the navy had dumped its bomb load in the countryside before landing, but closer examination of bomb fragments recovered from the scene revealed them to be of Japanese manufacture. An even more extraordinary answer to the riddle of how the Japanese had carried out the daring long distance attack slowly revealed itself, an interesting case of life imitating art.

  American intelligence had suppressed a short story written by a serving naval officer in 1940 entitled Rendezvous.10 The story, by W.J. Holmes, then a lieutenant, told of a fictional American raid on a Japanese base. In the story, the Americans plan to bomb Japanese preparations for an amphibious operation by using flying boats. Because the flying boats lack the range to reach Japan from Hawaii, three submarines are used to refuel the aircraft at the fictional ‘Moab Atoll’ located 1,000 miles from Japan. The American submarines carried not only aviation fuel for the thirsty flying boats, but the bombs that they would drop on the mythical port of ‘Bosoko’ in the raid. The Office of Naval Intelligence had suppressed the story in November 1940, but after Holmes defended his right to publish using examples of similar British and Italian seaplane operations, the navy relented and Rendezvous appeared in the August 1941 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Following the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in March 1942, Rear-Admiral Edwin Layton, chief intelligence officer to the commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, disclosed that the Japanes
e had most probably copied the idea for the raid from Holmes’s short story, supplanting ‘Moab Atoll’ for the very real French Frigate Shoals as a refuelling waypoint. In the story Rendezvous the Americans manage to wreck the Japanese ships assembling in ‘Bosoko’ harbour for an amphibious attack. In the real mission, the Japanese failed to cause any damage, apart from digging up some trees.

  The Americans looked carefully at Holmes’s story, and decided in light of the recent attack to dispatch the destroyer USS Ballard to the French Frigate Shoals to take a careful look, and leave behind some mines should any Japanese submarines have returned. They never did, and the evident failure of so complex an operation, including the use of three fleet submarines that would have been better employed elsewhere, meant that the Japanese would not attempt another operation of this sort again.

  The Junsen Type-B submarine I-26 had an interesting claim to fame. On 7 December 1941, as Imperial Navy aircraft and midget submarines struck the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor the I-26 was hunting a thousand miles north-east of Honolulu. It was here that Lieutenant-Commander Minoru Yokota found and sank the Cynthia Olson, an American merchant ship on her way from Tacoma, Washington to Honolulu. In Hawaii a shore station registered a distress signal from the vessel, reporting that a submarine was attacking her. Of the thirty-five crewmen aboard the vessel, none survived. The Cynthia Olson was the first American merchant ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Second World War. On 11 December, also in the waters around Hawaii, the I-9 under Lieutenant-Commander Fujii discovered the American freighter Lahaina. The vessel was sunk 800 miles off Honolulu, and four men died either during the sinking or from exposure during ten days spent at sea in lifeboats before the crewmen were washed ashore at Kahtilui on the island of Maui.

  The I-26 had spent the remainder of 1941 and early 1942 patrolling off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a major arterial waterway serving the port of Seattle. By June 1942 the I-26 was still lurking off the entrance to the Strait, thirty-five miles southwest of Cape Flattery. On Sunday 7 June the 3,286-ton American freighter Coast Trader was sailing from Port Angeles bound for San Francisco, the crew unaware that a large Japanese submarine had been trailing them in their wake since they had turned south on leaving the Strait. The Japanese were observing every movement of the freighter and preparing to mount an attack.

  The ironically named Submarine Boat Company of Edison, New Jersey had constructed the Coast Trader in 1920. Originally the vessel was named the Point Reyes, and after fitting out, the 324-foot long freighter had gone to work for the US Shipping Board. In 1936 the Coastwise Line Steamship Company had purchased the Point Reyes from the government, renamed her the Coast Trader, and had made Portland, Oregon her new homeport. When America had entered the Second World War the Coast Trader had been placed under indefinite charter to the US Army. To this end she carried aboard her nineteen American soldiers forming an ‘Armed Guard’ unit tasked with defending the ship from enemy attack.11

  On 7 June the Coast Trader was steaming south down the coast loaded with 1,250-tons of newsprint, arranged in bundles of paper each weighing 2,000 pounds. Captain Lyle G. Havens was fully aware that since December 1941 Japanese submarines had been preying on unescorted American merchant ships plying the west coast inshore trade routes. Havens had posted lookouts fore and aft with orders to keep a sharp watch on the sea for signs of submarines. What these lookouts failed to detect was the periscope of the I-26 cutting through the water aft of the Coast Trader, a baleful glass eye sizing up its victim. The I-26, at 356.5 feet in length, was also much larger than the Coast Trader.

  Commander Yokota had decided to launch a submerged torpedo attack, abandoning earlier tactics that had involved Japanese submarines in deck-gun bombardments of merchant ships, and occasional surfaced torpedo attacks. The Coast Trader was unaware of the presence of the I-26 until a Long Lance torpedo ploughed through the stern hull plates on the starboard side and detonated within the ship. The hatch covers over the holds were blown open and several tons of burning baled newsprint sailed into the sky to scatter in the sea around the stricken ship. The Coast Trader’s engines had been stopped by the impact of the torpedo. In the radio shack the operator desperately attempted to call for assistance, but both the main mast and the radio antenna had been felled by the torpedo’s explosion, and this rendered communication with the shore impossible. After quickly assessing the situation and receiving damage reports Captain Havens concluded that his ship was done for and gave the order to abandon her. Launching the ship’s two lifeboats proved to be difficult. The torpedo had cracked the Coast Trader’s refrigeration system releasing poisonous ammonia fumes that caused the crew some problems. Men were forced to lie down on the deck to recover. The starboard lifeboat had also been damaged, and it was decided that it would have to be abandoned. This meant that only the port side lifeboat and two large cork rafts were available to take off the fifty-six members of the crew. In an orderly fashion the crew abandoned the Coast Trader, launching their craft onto a calm sea. Some of the crew observed the partly submerged conning tower of the I-26 hovering like a shark’s dorsal fin on the water’s surface barely 200 yards from the foundering ship. Commander Yokota had decided to remain submerged, monitoring the death of the Coast Trader through his periscope. He did not have long to wait. At 2.50 p.m. the Coast Trader sank by the stern and the I-26 quietly departed from the scene, commander and crew eminently satisfied with their day’s work.

  For the crew of the Coast Trader their problems were only just beginning. As the I-26 motored away rain began to fall. Captain Havens realized that they must remain together and he had the lifeboat and the two rafts secured to each other with lengths of rope. Several crewmen had been injured during the Japanese attack, and Havens now had all the injured transferred to the more seaworthy lifeboat. The skipper now decided that because of the damage inflicted on the communications equipment aboard the Coast Trader he could assume that no distress signal had been received onshore. Therefore, it would be up to the crew themselves to save themselves. Havens and the survivors observed the deteriorating sea conditions, as a great howling wind came up and the waves grew steeper. The skipper ordered the lifeboat crew to begin rowing towards the shore, towing the two attached cork rafts loaded with the remainder of the crew. Towards midnight the lines securing the rafts to the lifeboat parted company, and the lifeboat was unable to force its way back through the high seas to replace the umbilical. Captain Havens ordered his men to resume pulling for the shore. As the dawn came the heavy seas and high wind began to abate, and this enabled a small sail to be rigged on the lifeboat. All morning and through most of the afternoon of the 8 June the survivors rowed and sailed their flimsy craft towards land, always aware that over half of the crew of the Coast Trader remained trapped on rafts adrift at the mercy of the sea. At approximately 4 p.m. the exhausted survivors spotted another vessel on the horizon and began pulling towards it with their last ounces of energy. The ship was the Virginia I, a fishing boat based in San Francisco out trawling for halibut. The survivors from the lifeboat were immediately taken to a US Navy post at Neah Bay. The navy launched a coordinated effort to find and rescue the men left on the two cork rafts. These men had to spend another night at sea, as US Coast Guard aircraft began a search and rescue operation. The men on the two rafts sighted one of the searching planes slightly before dawn on Tuesday 9 June, an officer from the Coast Trader firing an orange signal flare into the sky to alert the pilot. The Coast Guard aircraft immediately radioed the position of the life rafts in to the US Navy, who passed on this information to the nearest Allied ship in the vicinity – the Royal Canadian Navy corvette HMCS Edmunston. The Canadian warship raced to the scene, and after enduring forty hours on open rafts, battered by cold seas, high winds and rain the exhausted survivors were hauled aboard. The Edmunston immediately made for Port Angeles to offload the remaining crew of the Coast Trader.12

  Many of the crew of the Coast Trader required hospitalization for the inju
ries they had sustained as a result of the Japanese attack, or because they were suffering from exposure, or both. One man, a ship’s cook, had died in the lifeboat, but all remaining fifty-five soldiers and sailors survived their ordeal. In the meantime, Commander Yokota had taken the I-26 north along the coast to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and further action. The American press was not told the truth about the sinking of the Coast Trader, nor of any of the other American vessels attacked or sunk by Japanese submarines along the west coast. It was considered not to be in the interests of public morale at the time to admit that the US Navy was virtually powerless to prevent Japanese submarines from coming so close to the coast of the United States. Already, the bombardment of the Ellwood oil refinery in California by Lieutenant-Commander Kozo Nishino and the I-17 in February had sparked rumours of an imminent Japanese invasion. Officially, the destruction of the Coast Trader was the result of an ‘internal explosion’ aboard the ship, and not the impact of a Japanese Long Lance torpedo. Incredibly, this position remains on file in Washington DC today as the ‘official’ cause of the loss of the vessel, even though Commander Yokota himself reported torpedoing and sinking an enemy vessel on a date and at a location exactly matching that of the Coast Trader when the I-26 returned to Yokosuka, Japan on 7 July 1942.