The first news of the attack led to the dispatch of pursuit planes to the area, and subsequently three bombers joined the attempt to destroy the raider, but without success. The shells did minor damage to piers and oil wells, but missed the gasoline plant, which appears to have been the aiming point the military effects of the raid were therefore nil. For about twenty minutes the submarine kept a position 2,500 yards offshore to deliver the shots from its 5½-inch guns. The raider surfaced at 1905 (Pacific time), just five minutes after the President started his speech. The shots seemed designed to punctuate the President's statement that 'the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies.' Yet the attack which was supposed to carry the enemy's defiance, and which did succeed in stealing headlines from the President's address, was a feeble gesture rather than a damaging blow. Office of Air Force History concluded that an analysis of the evidence points to meteorological balloons as the cause of the initial alarm: âĭuring the course of a fireside report to the nation delivered by President Roosevelt on 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine rose out of the sea off Ellwood, a hamlet on the California coast north of Santa Barbara, and pumped thirteen shells into tidewater refinery installations. Rumors were bad enough that 500 United States Army troops moved into the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California to defend the famed Hollywood facility and nearby factories against enemy sabotage or air attacks. In Seattle, the city also imposed a blackout of all buildings and vehicles, and the owners who left the lights on in their buildings had their businesses smashed by a mob of 2,000 residents. Rumors spread of a Japanese aircraft carrier cruising off the coast of the San Francisco Bay Area, resulting in the city of Oakland to close their schools and to issue a blackout civil defense sirens provided from Oakland Police Department (OPD) cars blared through the area, and radio silence was ordered. In Juneau, residents were told to cover their windows for the nightly blackout after rumors of Japanese submarines lurking by the southeast Alaskan coast. Anger and paranoia over the Imperial Japanese Navy's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Decemand the United States entry into World War II the next day intensified across the West Coast of the United States over the next few months.
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