A Brief History
On September 9, 1942, the mainland of the United States was bombed by a Japanese military aircraft when a float plane dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon near Brookings.
Digging Deeper
While the US avoided the devastating bombing attacks suffered by many other countries during World War II, US territory was indeed attacked, shelled and bombed outside of the continental or “contiguous” states, including the islands of Alaska. As for the mainland of America, the Oregon bombing incident, known as “The Lookout Air Raids,” conducted by a Yokosuka E14Y launched from a submarine caused minimal damage and the intended forest fires were not induced.
Another Japanese attempt to bomb mainland America was the “Fu-Go” balloon bombing campaign in which giant balloons were launched in Japan in order to drop incendiary and small high explosive bombs on the US, but this effort met with little results.
Germany had also greatly desired to bomb the US but failed in their attempt to ever devise the necessary technology or strategy to make that plan a reality. Thus, Americans remained largely secure in their homeland during World War II.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Horn, Steven. The Second Attack on Pearl Harbor: Operation K And Other Japanese Attempts to Bomb America in World War II. Naval Institute Press, 2005.
O’Neill, Bill and Dwayne Walker. The World War 2 Trivia Book: Interesting Stories and Random Facts from the Second World War. Kindle, 2017.
The featured image in this article, a schema by Tangopaso of the Lookout air raids on a map of the south of Oregon, has been released into the public domain worldwide by the copyright holder of this work.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
