Axis Pilot Became Only Man to Bomb Contiguous US, Years Later the Town He Targeted Finally Found Him

The date was Sept. 9, 1942.

Less than a year earlier, imperial 🇯🇵Japan launched a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a major American naval base. Instead of crippling the United States, this attack only awakened the giant. The war was now in full swing, and with U.S. bombers touching the Japanese home isles under Col. James Doolittle’s raids, the reality was setting in for the Pacific empire.

Amid this chaos, a Japanese submarine quietly surfaced off the 🌲Oregon coast.

Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese naval pilot, waited as a seaplane was pieced together by the empire’s sailors and loaded onto a deck-mounted catapult.

Finally, it was ready to launch. Fujita climbed aboard and was thrown into the air. Armed with two thermite firebombs, he set a course for the wilderness near the sleepy town of Brookings.

The seaplane wasn’t quick or powerful enough to take on a major target, so the Japanese military command instead aimed to spark wildfires in rural areas. The hope was that these blazes would destroy material, siphon war resources and generally damage American morale.

Fujita made it to his target and dropped the firebombs. The Japanese didn’t expect what happened next.

“It was too wet and it just stopped raining,” retired Brookings librarian Brenda Jacques told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “He dropped these thermite bombs and they just fizzled. They created enough smoke so the forest service saw them.”