Battle of Los Angeles

February 1942. Eleven weeks after Pearl Harbor. On 23 February the Japanese submarine I-17 shelled the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara. The coast was on edge. The next evening Los Angeles went on alert at 7:18 p.m. The alert was lifted at 10:23 p.m.

Around 2 a.m. on 25 February, radar picked up an unidentified target about 120 miles west of Los Angeles. "Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast." A blackout was ordered at 2:21. Sirens sounded across the county at 2:25.

At 3:06 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica. Four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire. In the words of the official Army Air Forces history, "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano." People climbed out of bed and watched from their windows in nightgowns and pajamas.

What they saw depended on where they stood. Katie, an air-raid warden, looked out of her window. "It was huge! It was just enormous! And it was practically right over my house." It was pale orange, and it hovered. "They were shooting at it, but it didn't seem to matter!" In Hermosa Beach, young C. Scott Littleton saw an oval, "like a lozenge," with shells exploding "all around it!" Reporter Peter Jenkins described a V formation of about 25 silvery planes flying slowly toward Long Beach. A coast artillery colonel reported "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet."

The firing ended around 4:14. The gunners had fired 1,440 rounds. No bombs had fallen. No plane had been shot down. Shell fragments damaged homes, buildings and cars. One shell struck a Long Beach golf course. By one count, five civilians died, three in blackout traffic accidents and two of heart attacks. The all-clear came at 7:21.

That day, Navy Secretary Frank Knox called it "a false alarm" caused by "war nerves." "There were no planes over Los Angeles last night, at least that's our understanding." Secretary of War Henry Stimson said there had been 15 unidentified aircraft. On 26 February, Gen. George C. Marshall wrote to President Roosevelt that "Unidentified airplanes, other than American Army or Navy planes, were probably over Los Angeles." Rep. Leland M. Ford called it "complete mystification." After the war, Japan said it had flown no planes over Los Angeles.

In 1949 the US Coast Artillery Association concluded that a meteorological balloon "started all the shooting," and that "once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in." The official history agreed that "anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes." The acting brigade commander was at first convinced he saw fifteen planes. He soon decided he was seeing smoke.

The famous photograph drew its own scrutiny. In 2011 Larry Harnisch found that "much of what you see in this photo is painted," which was routine newspaper retouching at the time. Historian Brett Holman studied a less retouched print. He argued that the bright spot was a cloud lit by the converging beams. Littleton never accepted the balloon explanation. Tethered balloons, he noted, were kept only at El Segundo.

In 1968 Paul T. Collins wrote of "bright red spots of light" moving in "a pattern which could not possibly have been made by any man-made object." After that, the night slowly entered the UFO canon. It inspired Spielberg's 1941 and the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles. Every February, the Fort MacArthur Museum in San Pedro stages a re-enactment.