Japanese sub blasted its way into Oregon history

By Finn J.D. John
January 21, 2024

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a rewritten and re-researched version of a much shorter article published Jan. 30, 2011, which you can find here.

IN LATE AUGUST 1943, the crew of the destroyer U.S.S. Patterson scrambled to battle stations off the coast of what is now Vanatu, near Australia. The sonar operator had picked up the signature of a big Japanese submarine submerging close by.

The Patterson steamed into battle, depth charges rolling off the deck and lighting up the sea below. Then, on the final depth-charge barrage, a deep undersea explosion could be heard, bigger than any depth charge. Oil and air bubbles boiled to the surface.

The Patterson had found its mark.

After that day, the most important submarine in the history of the state of Oregon — the Imperial Japanese Navy’s I-25 — was never heard from again.

(Actually, you could argue that the U.S.S. Blueback is historically more important, because of the generations of youngsters who have toured it as part of OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) in Portland. But, you get the idea.)

I-25 WAS ONE of the large fleet subs the Japanese navy put out to sea during the war, a Type B Cruiser sub. Imperial Japanese Type Bs were big, among the very largest in regular service throughout the war: 357 feet long and displacing just over 3,700 tons of seawater.  For weaponry, they packed 17 of Japan’s legendary Long Lance torpedoes, a 140-mm (5.5-inch) deck gun, a pair of 25-mm antiaircraft guns, and a small scouting seaplane kept disassembled in a waterproof hangar on the deck.

The reason I-25 is so important to Oregon stems from two visits it paid to the Beaver State in the year before it sank. In the course of those visits, the I-25 sank two merchant ships, shelled a coastal battery, and sent its airplane ashore to try and start a forest fire. It left Oregon not that much worse for wear, but the psychological effect was considerable as Oregonians wondered if this were just the beginning — and realized that if it was, they'd be right on the front lines.

It wasn’t, of course, the beginning of anything. It was just a single submarine. A single very busy submarine.

THE I-25 LEFT Yokosuka, Japan, in spring of 1942 and headed east across the Pacific Ocean, headed for Alaska and points south. This was the big submarine’s third combat patrol, and would be its second visit to the American West Coast. On the first visit, just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, the plan had been to heave to off the mouth of the Columbia River on Dec. 25, unlimber the deck gun, and give the Americans as many 140-mm Christmas presents as possible.

This plan was scotched at the last minute, much to the crew’s disappointment. The reason given was that there were so many combat patrols being flown in the area that it just wasn’t worth the risk of losing the Imperial Navy’s only scouting presence off the Northwest coast for what would likely be nothing more than a symbolic gesture.

That decision may have something to do with an interesting coincidence in the record. On Dec. 24, 1941, Everett “Brick” Holstrum was flying his B-25 Mitchell bomber low over the mouth of the Columbia when he unexpectedly saw, loafing there in the sea below, a surfaced Japanese submarine.

Brick Holstrum, as you may remember if you’re a World War II buff, was one of the Doolittle Raiders who bombed Tokyo in April 1942; in late December 1941, he was based out of Pendleton and was training with his team for that raid.

You may also recognize his name if you’re a Beaver — he’s possibly the most decorated Oregon State University alumnus in college history: Silver Star, Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air Medals, and two Commendation Medals. He retired from the Air Force in 1969 at the rank of Brigadier General. So, his word can probably be trusted on this.

Ordering his bombardier to get the payload ready, Holstrum lined up and let the sub have it, laying down a string of three bombs as he roared by overhead.

The resulting explosions nearly knocked the B-25 out of the sky, and Holstrom believed he’d hit his mark. His crew backed him up, and the Army Air Corps gave him one of his Air Medals for this action.

The Imperial Japanese Navy did not lose any submarines off the Columbia in late 1941. But it most definitely did have a submarine stationed there … a submarine that was scheduled to shell the Cape Disappointment Light the following day, but which unexpectedly decided that it had better not.

Was it the I-25 that Holstrom saw? Did his bombs maybe bracket the big sub, and by the time he got turned around to see what had happened it had submerged and he thought he’d sunk it? It seems very logical. If so, it would be more than a bit ironic, because Holstrom and his fellow Doolittle Raiders would go on four months later to do something (more about that something, the Pendleton-based Doolittle raid, here) that would inspire submariner-pilot Nobuo Fujita to hatch his plan to bomb America with his submarine-launched fold-up float plane later in 1942 (more about Fujita's raid here).

But Fujita’s raid wouldn’t take place until the I-25’s fourth cruise, and that (along with Fujita’s bombing raid) is a story for another time. For now, we’re mostly interested in the third cruise, which sallied forth from Yokosuka, where it had put into dry dock for a refit, in April just after the Doolittle raid. In fact, while the sub was in Yokosuka, Doolittle’s raiders had another crack at it. Their bombs damaged the submarine in the dry-dock slip next to it.

The I-25 set out from Yokosuka shortly after the raid, headed for Alaska and points south. Two months and one heavily damaged Canadian freighter later, on the night of June 21, 1942, the sub was headed for the mouth of the Columbia River. The plan was to finally get those long-delayed Christmas presents delivered.

The sub’s captain, Mieji Tagami, waited until early evening when a large flotilla of fishing boats was on its way in to shore; he brought the submarine, presumably running at periscope depth, right into the middle of the group. Tagami knew they would show him the way through any minefields that might have been laid there, and any airplanes would be far less likely to spot the big sub in the middle of a group of obviously harmless targets.

When the sub got within range, Tagami brought the sub to the surface with its deck pointed seaward so that it could scamper away to safety if things got sticky. Sailors scrambled out and got ready for action. The deck gun was deployed and limbered up and prepared for action. Then — wasting no time, because a submarine on the surface is the most sinkable ship on the sea — they cut loose. And for the first time ever, the state of Oregon was under direct attack by a wartime enemy.

“We got off 17 rapid rounds of 5.5-inch shells from our deck gun, then raced out of there as fast as we could, leaving a wake of frantic fisherman,” recalled Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita, the sub’s seaplane pilot, in an interview with the U.S. Navy’s Joseph D. Darrington in 1961.

(I’m pretty sure he was joking about the frantic fishermen. The shooting started around midnight, by which time the fisherman would certainly have long since crossed the bar and headed for their home ports.)

ON THE SHORE, “frantic” was also a pretty good word to describe the effects of the cannon fire. Frantic, that is, to get to the gun emplacements and return fire before the shooting stopped. Soldiers and officers leaped out of bed and started running around trying to get ready and go help return fire — in the dark, of course. People tripped over stoves and crashed into trucks and cursed at one another as they scrambled to their battle stations in their underwear.

“We looked like hell,” Capt. Jack R. Wood, commander of the battery, told historian Bert Webber later. “But we were ready to shoot back in a couple of minutes.”

They were ready, and itching to scratch their trigger fingers lighting up the sea around the enemy sub; but the orders were to hold their fire.

This was for several reasons. First, struggling to use his rangefinder on a handful of muzzle flashes across the dark ocean, Capt. Wood concluded that the sub was out of their range. The big 10-inch guns, designed to stop ships from coming into the Columbia, would not tilt up high enough to lob shells to the attacking submarine. These guns dated from the “Endicott era” — roughly 1885 to 1905 — and had been designed to fire black-powder rounds. They were simply obsolete.

The 12-inch mortars couldn’t reach it either, or so they believed.

Nonetheless Wood requested permission to open fire. Major Robert Huston denied permission. Years later, he explained why in a letter to historian Webber:

“I refused permission on this basis,” Huston wrote. “One: The submarine was not in range and was very likely firing a reconnaissance mission to spot location of our batteries. Two: The submarine outranged us by about 4,000 yards, being a modern 5-inch (approximately) gun on a barbette carriage. … Three: We had no radar at that time and we had to depend on visual observation of the flashes, or use searchlights, which certainly wasn’t advisable when you are outranged and the target is out of range.”

As it happened, the target was not out of range … although it wouldn’t have taken the I-25 long to scoot back far enough to be safe. Playing a “what-if” game, though, if Fort Stevens had opened up with everything they had, all at once, aiming for the muzzle flashes, they would have had a pretty decent chance of blowing the sub out of the sea with the first or second salvo. For one thing, it would have been a huge surprise to the submariners to see the south bank of the river lighting up with cannon fire. Working with an old 1920s-vintage chart, Capt. Tagami believed the defensive works along the river were on the north side, well out of range of his boat. He also believed he was shelling a submarine base, not a full-on shore battery. When historian Webber actually met him in person, more than 30 years later, and showed him charts and pictures of the installation he’d been shelling that night, Tagami told him, “I feel more than lucky to be here tonight. I had NO IDEA there were such big cannon right in front of me.”

But hindsight, of course, is always very clear. And the idea of a submarine cutting loose with a single relatively puny 5.5-inch gun in the dark of night made very little tactical sense ... unless ... unless it was a recon mission.

Shooting back might have made the crews feel better, but unless they got lucky with the first or second salvo, it would have revealed the guns’ position, relative size and range to a submarine that they were pretty sure was on a mission to acquire exactly that information. If so, the minute all the guns opened up, the sub would race away out of range, then go home and report that a nice big fleet of surface warships sitting 10 miles out to sea could pound Fort Stevens with impunity and then sail right up the Columbia River if it wanted to.

Obviously, that couldn’t be allowed to happen.

So Fort Stevens sat there, simmering with collective frustration, and took it — all 17 shells — without so much as a pistol shot in reply. And eventually, the I-25’s crew got tired of shelling the dark and unresponsive mainland, put the gun away, and left.

Behind, they left the smoking wreckage of a baseball-diamond backstop, some slightly damaged power lines, and a handful of holes in the ground. The total dollar amount of damage done was probably well under $20.

ON ITS NEXT visit to Oregon, the I-25 did better — if “better” is the right word. It started out on Sept. 9 by launching its on-board seaplane with a couple incendiary bombs and orders to use them to start a forest fire near Brookings. It was the only wartime airstrike ever delivered on the American mainland, before or since. But, that’s a story for another time.

(Sources: Silent Siege, a book by Bert Webber published in 1984 by Ye Galleon Press; Bombs Over Brookings, a book by William McCash published in 2005 by Maverick Press; “I Bombed the U.S.A.,” an article by Nobuo Fujita and Joseph D. Harrington published in the June 1961 issue of U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings)

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