Bombardment of Fort Stevens

The Bombardment of Fort Stevens occurred in June 1942, in the American Theater and the Pacific Theater of World War II. The Imperial Japanese submarine I-25 fired on Fort Stevens, which defended the Oregon side of the Columbia River's Pacific entrance.

Bombardment
The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine JAPANESE SUBMARINE I-25, commanded by Akiji Tagami, had been assigned to sink enemy shipping and attack the enemy on land with its 14 cm deck gun. Transporting a Yokosuka E14Y seaplane, the submarine was manned by a crew of 97. On 21 June 1942, I-25 had entered U.S. coastal waters, following fishing boats to avoid the mine fields in the area.

Late that night, Commander Tagami ordered his crew to surface his submarine at the mouth of the Columbia River. His target was Fort Stevens, which dated to the American Civil War and was armed with more or less obsolete Endicott era artillery, including 12 inch mortars and several 10 inch and 6 inch disappearing guns.

Tagami ordered the deck gun crew to open fire on Fort Stevens' Battery Russell. Surprisingly, his shots were harmless, in part because the fort's commander ordered an immediate blackout. The commander also refused to permit his men to return fire, which would have revealed their position. Spotting the enemy gun flashes with a depression position finder indicated the submarine was out of range.

Most Japanese rounds landed in a nearby baseball field or a swamp, although one landed close to Battery Russell and another next to a concrete pillbox. One round damaged several large telephone cables, the only real damage that Tagami caused. A total of seventeen explosive shells were fired at the fort.

United States Army Air Forces planes on a training mission spotted the I-25 and called in her location for an A-29 Hudson bomber to attack. The bomber found the target, but the I-25 successfully dodged the falling bombs and submerged undamaged.

Aftermath
Even though there were no injuries and very little damage, the Japanese attack on Fort Stevens along with the Aleutian Islands Campaign the same month helped create the 1942 full-scale West Coast invasion scare. Thereafter, rolls of barbed wire would be strung from Point Adams, near the mouth of the Columbia River, southward in case of an invasion. The wrecked British barque Peter Iredale was entangled in the wire and would remain so until the war's end.

The Fort Stevens shelling marked the only time that a military base in the contiguous United States was attacked by the Axis Powers during World War II, and was the second time a continental U.S. military base was attacked by an enemy since the bombing of Dutch Harbor two weeks earlier.