Japanese submarine shells Fort Stevens; Doney orders blackout, holds his guns
By the summer of 1942, the West Coast felt close to the war in ways the rest of the country did not. Late on the night of June 21, Commander Akiji Tagami surfaced the Imperial Japanese submarine I-25 at the mouth of the Columbia River and ordered his deck gun crew to open fire on Fort Stevens — a Civil War-era installation defending Oregon's Pacific coast. Seventeen shells fell on the fort, most landing in a baseball field or a nearby swamp. Colonel Carl S. Doney ordered a blackout, refused to return fire, and the I-25 slipped away undamaged — leaving behind cut telephone cables and the distinction of being the only Axis attack on a military installation in the contiguous United States during World War II.
Fort Stevens was the only military base in the contiguous 48 states ever shelled by an Axis power in World War II. The attack, combined with the Aleutian Islands Campaign that same month, triggered a full-scale West Coast invasion scare that reshaped coastal defense posture — barbed wire went up from the Columbia River mouth southward, and the Army's approach to protecting Pacific shorelines never quite recovered its prewar complacency.
QWhy did Colonel Doney refuse to return fire at a submarine actively shelling his fort?
A depression position finder — an instrument used to calculate the angle and distance to a target — showed Doney's crews that the I-25 was sitting beyond the effective range of Fort Stevens' guns. Firing back would have done nothing to the submarine but would have lit up every battery position on the shoreline for Tagami's crew to record. Doney ordered a blackout instead, and the Japanese shells fell blind into a baseball field and a swamp. It was a tactically sound call, though it was not universally popular with the men who had just been shelled and ordered to do nothing about it.
QWhat was the I-25 carrying besides its deck gun — and how did it use that cargo later?
The I-25 was a submarine transport fitted with a watertight hangar for a Yokosuka E14Y floatplane, a small single-engine reconnaissance aircraft. On the night of the Fort Stevens shelling, the plane went unused. But the I-25 returned to Oregon's coast later in the summer and launched the E14Y on incendiary missions over the Oregon forests — the only time in the war that an enemy aircraft dropped bombs on the continental United States. The floatplane started a small fire in the Siskiyou National Forest. The submarine that shelled Fort Stevens and the submarine that bombed Oregon's forests were the same vessel.
QHow did a wrecked 19th-century British sailing ship end up tangled in World War II coastal defenses?
The Peter Iredale was a steel-hulled British barque that ran aground on the Oregon coast in 1906. By 1942 its rusting skeleton had become something of a local landmark — visible at low tide, slowly collapsing into the sand at the mouth of the Columbia River. When Army engineers strung barbed wire southward from Point Adams after the Fort Stevens shelling, the wire ran directly through the wreck, incorporating it into the coastal defense perimeter. It stayed entangled in the wire for the duration of the war. The hulk is still there today, one of the most photographed shipwrecks on the Oregon coast.
