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1942: A Japanese long-range submarine surfaces off the California coast and uses its 5.5-inch deck gun to shell an oil refinery near Santa Barbara.
The attack, which lasted about 20 minutes, caused little damage to the Ellwood refinery. But it helped to stoke fears, which had existed since the raid on Pearl Harbor 10 weeks earlier, that the Japanese might be preparing a full-scale invasion of the West Coast.
In Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel, The Man in the High Castle, the Japanese not only plan a U.S. invasion, they carry it off. In reality, though the Imperial High Command envisioned nothing of the sort, lacking both the military capacity and a strategic reason for invasion.
Cmdr. Nishino Kozo, skipper of the I-17, was familiar with the Ellwood refinery, having docked there as the captain of an oil tanker before the war. A Parade magazine article in 1982 suggested that Kozo staged the raid on his own initiative, in retaliation for a slight he suffered during a prewar visit to Ellwood.
Whether Kozo took the opportunity to settle an old score is unknown. He never said. (The I-17 was on combat patrol along the Pacific Coast. Five days after shelling the refinery Kozo torpedoed an American tanker off Cape Mendocino.)
Kozo's gunnery display scared the bejesus out of the already skittish Americans. On the night following I-17's shelling of the refinery, trigger-happy anti-aircraft gunners in Los Angeles lit up the night sky with tracer ammunition for a couple of hours after spotting some UFOs. The refinery shelling, in any event, showed the extent to which submarine technology had advanced since World War I.
The B1-class submarine I-17, at 350 feet long and 2,200 tons surface displacement, was by far the largest combat submarine to see service during World War II. By comparison, Germany's largest long-range combat U-boat, the IXD, was 70 feet shorter and displaced barely 1,600 tons when surfaced.
A generation earlier, World War I subs were smaller, carried fewer torpedoes and had a much more limited range.
Kozo was able to take advantage of the fact that in early 1942, American coastal defenses were poorly organized. On the East Coast, German U-boat commanders were discovering the same thing, and with devastating effect on Allied shipping.
Source: Various
