The "Battle of Los Angeles" (1942): 1,430 shells against an enemy that wasn't there

At a glance

• When: the night of Tuesday, February 24 to Wednesday, February 25, 1942. The guns fired between 3:12 and 4:15 a.m. Pacific time².
• Where: the sky over Los Angeles, from Santa Monica to Long Beach, California¹.
• What: targets reported as planes, balloons or an airship, at which the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade fired 1,430 shells^2,9.
• Toll: no bombs, no aircraft shot down, no military casualties. Five civilians died: three in road accidents during the blackout, two of heart attacks^2,10.
• Official explanation: most likely a weather balloon released at about 1 a.m. by an anti-aircraft regiment, then war nerves^1,4.
• In the atlas: the event predates all our sources, so it has no case page.

A coast on edge

Since the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US West Coast had been expecting to be hit. Alerts and blackouts had become routine¹. On the evening of Monday, February 23, 1942, while President Roosevelt was giving a radio fireside chat, the Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced off Ellwood, north of Santa Barbara. It fired thirteen shells at oil installations, doing little damage¹. Militarily the attack achieved nothing, but it stole the headlines from the president's speech.

On the 24th, naval intelligence warned of a possible attack within ten hours. That evening, flares and blinking lights were reported near defence plants. A first alert, called at 7:18 p.m., was lifted at 10:23 p.m.¹.

The night of February 25

In the early hours, radar picked up a target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. What followed, according to the official history of the US Army Air Forces¹:

• 2:15 a.m.: anti-aircraft batteries were alerted, then cleared to fire a few minutes later. The fighters stayed on the ground: commanders preferred to wait until they knew how big the attack was.
• 2:21 a.m.: a full blackout was ordered. Sirens woke the city at 2:25^5,6.
• The target from the sea had vanished from the screens, but the information centre was flooded with reports of "enemy planes".
• 2:43 a.m.: planes were reported near Long Beach. A coast artillery colonel saw "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over the city.
• 3:06 a.m.: a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica. Four batteries opened fire, and "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano".

"From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance," the Air Force historians write. For three hours there were reports of "swarms" of planes or balloons, from one to several hundred, at every possible altitude and speed¹. Shell bursts caught in the searchlights were themselves taken for planes¹. Rumours said four enemy aircraft had been shot down, one of them crashing in flames at a Hollywood intersection¹. The all-clear sounded at 7:19 a.m.⁶.

In the morning, residents found the damage done by shell fragments: a garage door ripped off, shattered windows, a bed torn apart minutes after the women sleeping in it had got up, an unexploded shell in a driveway⁶. A Long Beach police sergeant, E. Larson, 59, was killed in a crash on his way to his post. Henry B. Ayers, 63, a State Guardsman, died of a heart attack at the wheel of an ammunition truck⁶. The Los Angeles Times counted five dead, none of them killed by the gunfire itself¹⁰.

The front pages of February 25

The Associated Press put the story out during the day. Evening papers across the country ran it on the front page^5,6,7. The Hope Star, in Arkansas, headlined across the whole page: "Unidentified Craft Over Los Angeles, No Bombs Fall"⁵. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran "Los Angeles Anti-Aircraft Guns Open Fire; Target a Military Secret", with an Associated Press map⁶.

The wire story was cautious: "Anti-aircraft guns fired round after round of ammunition and tracer bullets at an unidentified object which moved slowly down the coast from Santa Monica and disappeared south of the rich Signal Hill oil fields." The Army declined to comment, and some suspected an enemy blimp^5,7. The Western Defense Command said only one thing: no bombs had fallen and no planes had been shot down⁶.

The Navy says "false alarm", the Army says "planes"

The two departments contradicted each other in public.

On February 25, Navy Secretary Frank Knox told a press conference it had been a false alarm^1,8,9. The same day, the Western Defense Command, which commanded the defence of the West Coast, warned Washington that "most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated". The Fourth Air Force believed no planes had flown over the city¹.

The Army did not publish these first conclusions. It questioned witnesses, and local commanders concluded that between one and five unidentified planes had been there after all¹. On February 26, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall wrote to the president²:

• unidentified airplanes, other than American Army or Navy planes, were "probably" over Los Angeles. The 37th Brigade fired on them between 3:12 and 4:15 a.m., and "these units expended 1430 rounds of ammunition";
• as many as fifteen planes may have been involved, at speeds from "very slow" to 200 miles an hour, at 9,000 to 18,000 feet;
• no bombs, no casualties among the troops, no planes shot down, no American planes in action.

Marshall thought these could be commercial aircraft flown by enemy agents, to spread alarm, locate the anti-aircraft batteries and slow production through blackouts. In his view, the varying speeds and the lack of bombs supported this².

The same day, War Secretary Henry Stimson repeated these figures word for word to the press. The papers headlined the contradiction. The Hope Star ran on its front page: "Stimson Admits Airplanes Were Over Los Angeles"^8,9. Roosevelt, for his part, wrote to Stimson asking who was responsible for air alarms, and who had the right to talk about them³:

"Who is responsible for the air alarm system in the United States? […] It seems to me that all comment in reference to air alarms should be made exclusively by the appropriate officials of the Department responsible."

The debate

A front-page editorial in the Los Angeles Times on February 26 demanded an explanation¹. Other reactions followed¹:

• in Congress, Representative Leland Ford asked whether it had been a practice raid, a raid "to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people", a mistaken identity, or a pretext to take Southern California's war industries away;
• the Washington Post called it a "recipe for jitters";
• the New York Times summed up the dilemma: "If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes […], why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them?"

The Air Force's official history would later admit that answering frankly would have revealed how weak American air defences were¹.

What the inquiry found

Colonel John G. Murphy, the Fourth Army's anti-aircraft officer, watched the night from the roof of his hotel: "A beautiful picture—a grand show! But at what were they firing? […] cold detachment disclosed no planes of any type in the sky—friendly or enemy"⁴. He then sat on the board of inquiry, which heard about sixty witnesses, civilian and military⁴. Its findings:

• The witnesses were split. "Roughly about half the witnesses were sure they saw planes in the sky," the other half saw nothing. One flier described ten planes in a V formation. On the same rangefinder, the elevation operator saw many planes and the azimuth operator none⁴.
• The order to fire was unauthorised. It was given by the young Air Force controller on duty in the operations room, who had no authority to do so. Someone had reported a "balloon". He pictured a German or Japanese zeppelin, and no one could talk him out of it⁴.
• A weather balloon started it all. An anti-aircraft regiment had sent up a meteorological balloon at about 1 a.m.: "That was the balloon that started all the shooting!" Once things had calmed down, another regiment sent up a second one to correct its fire, "and hell broke loose again". Both balloons, Murphy recalls, "floated away majestically and safely"⁴.

Murphy concludes: "Once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in"⁴.

The Air Force's official history points the same way¹. Anti-aircraft units were criticised for wasting ammunition on targets too slow to be planes. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft brigade was at first convinced he had seen fifteen planes, before realising he was seeing smoke. Two war correspondents on the scene, Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry, never made out an aircraft. Finally, after the war, the Japanese stated that they had sent no planes over the area that night. Submarine I-17 did, however, normally carry a seaplane¹.

The photo that became a "UFO"

On February 26, 1942, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page photo of searchlights converging on one point in the sky. Its caption identified the small spots of light as shell bursts lit up by the searchlights¹⁰. Decades later the photo was circulating in UFO circles as proof of a large craft that had withstood the gunfire.

In 2011, the journalist Larry Harnisch traced the history of the image in the paper's archives, held at UCLA¹¹:

• the published version had been heavily retouched, like most press photos of the time: on the copy negative, the blacked-out skyline is painted in;
• a second, unretouched negative shows only converging beams and a few scattered spots of light.

The same year, the trailer for the film Battle: Los Angeles presented fake newspaper headlines as period documents. Harnisch compared them with the real ones: the Times front page of February 26, 1942 read "Army Says Alarm Real"¹⁰.

Errors in circulation

• The deaths. The five victims did not die "during the shooting": three were killed in road accidents during the blackout and two died of heart attacks^10,6.
• The number of shells. The official figure is 1,430 according to Marshall and Stimson, and 1,440 according to the Air Force history^2,9,1. The "4,000" in one wire story printed by the Hope Star is an isolated error: the other papers that day printed 1,430^8,9.
• The date of the official history. It is not "from 1983": written in 1948, it was reissued in 1983¹.
• Murphy's date. He places the night on "February 26", when it was the night of February 24-25⁴.
• The mix-up with Washington. The Washington, D.C. case of July 1952 is a different story: radar returns over the capital and fighters sent up in vain, without a single gun fired. The anti-aircraft fire is Los Angeles, 1942.

What remains

The episode became part of the city's memory. The Fort MacArthur Museum, at the entrance to the Port of Los Angeles, commemorates it every February¹². It also inspired Steven Spielberg's comedy 1941 (1979)¹⁰.

On the substance, the documents agree. A city on edge, two days after the shelling of Ellwood. A weather balloon taken for an enemy aircraft, an order to fire given without authority. Then more than an hour of gunfire, during which shell bursts and smoke fed fresh reports. No bombs, no wreckage, no Japanese admission: nothing shows that any aircraft flew over Los Angeles that night^1,4.