“I could see six planes, and shells were bursting all around them. “I could barely see the planes, but they were up there all right,” a coastal artilleryman named Charles Patrick later wrote in a letter. There was even a claim of a Japanese plane crash landing in the streets of Hollywood. Reports poured in from across the city describing Japanese aircraft flying in formation, bombs falling and enemy “But cold detachment disclosed no planes of any type in the sky-friendly or enemy.”įor others, however, the threat appeared to be very real. “Imagination could have easily disclosed many shapes in the sky in the midst of that weird symphony of noise and color,” Coastal Artillery Corps Colonel John G. It appeared that Los Angeles was under attack, yet many of those who looked skyward saw nothing but smoke and the glare of ack-ack fire. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)Ĭhaos reigned over the next several minutes. Soldiers manning anti-aircraft guns in New York City. “Powerful searchlights from countless stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers,” the Los Angeles Times wrote, “while anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.”
Before long, many of the city’s other coastal defense weapons had joined in. Following reports of an unidentified object in the skies, troops in Santa Monica unleashed a barrage of anti-aircraft and. Within minutes, troops had manned anti-aircraft guns and begun sweeping the skies with searchlights. Air raid sirens sounded and a citywide blackout was put into effect. on February 25, military radar picked up what appeared to be an enemy contact some 120 miles west of Los Angeles. It began on the evening of February 24, 1942, when naval intelligence instructed units on the California coast to steel themselves for a potential Japanese attack.Īll remained calm for the next few hours, but shortly after 2 a.m. The day after the oil field raid, paranoia and itchy trigger fingers combined to produce one of the most unusual home front incidents of the war.
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