Te Portland Army Air Base was


only a two-hour drive inland, situated at what is today the Portland Interna- tional Airport. Tis base was a straight shot east, up the Columbia River from where the I-25 surfaced and fired. However, the responsibilities of the 44th Army Air Forces Base unit sta- tioned in Portland was to protect the millions of tons of wartime shipping that went in and out of the Port of Portland via the Columbia and Wil- lamette Rivers. Te Corvallis Army Air Field,


likewise, was about a two-hour drive south from Astoria and the site of the Japanese attack. Like so many 2nd Air Force fields out west, Corvallis AAF was primarily a training base for B-17 and B-24 replacement crews. Yes, B-24 Liberators had been useful and quite skilled in sinking enemy submarines at sea. Te Liberators alone get war- time credits for 93 U-boat kills in the Atlantic. However, it is quite doubtful that replacement crews being trained in Oregon were getting much of their training time dedicated to sinking Japanese subs in the nearby waters of the Pacific. Several hours eastward, near the


Idaho border, the 17th Bomb Group with their B-25 Mitchell bombers was stationed at Pendleton Field, Oregon. Te Mitchell was quick and light compared to the B-24, but Astoria was many hours west of where they were stationed. Not to mention that AAF protocol during the war had spent very little time training Mitchells for anti- submarine campaigns. Tus the 17th BG bombers would not have been a reasonable choice had the idea of chas- ing the I-25 been given any credence. Even if the attack on Fort Stevens


had happened in the late afternoon— say 5 p.m., by the time B-24s or B-25s would have been scrambled and sent west from Corvallis or Pendleton Army Air Fields, it would have put them over the Pacific Ocean near sunset; 7:54 p.m. on the night of the attack. Where the I-25 would


Monument to the June 21, 1942 Japanese attack. This granite marker sits on DeLaura Beach Road in Astoria, Oregon. It marks the shell impact that nearly killed the Hitchman children. (Miskimins photo collection)


have been by then would have been anyone’s guess. Just several miles down the coast,


near the town of Ilwaco, Oregon, sat the Cape Disappointment lighthouse. Its lights could illuminate the nearby waters for up to 19 miles—which is why on the night that the Japanese started firing, the lighthouse got the phone-call/order to “Shut off the damn lights!” Te lighthouse most likely would have been more helpful to the Japanese sub looking for inland targets than to the AAF bombers looking for the submarine on the surface around dusk. Te ability of a submarine to sub- merge and hide was what made them so often safe from aerial attack dur- ing WWII. It is doubtful any damage could have been inflicted upon Tagami and his crew by U.S. planes even if the attack had come during daytime. Although, one must ask if Fort Stevens would have been hit and damaged by those 17 shells if the Japanese had had the benefit of sunlight to aid their aim. No doubt, a daytime attack would also have made Fort Stevens’ commander rethink his “don’t fire” policy.


In the end, the attack on Fort


Stevens is an interesting footnote to the vast history of WWII. While it gave Fort Stevens and the town of Astoria, Oregon, a strong “trivial” con- nection to the war, the fate of the I-25 was much different—the sub was sunk in the South Pacific by an Allied attack in late 1943. Tagami and much of the crew from the Astoria attack had been transferred to another sub command and thus survived the sink- ing. Several dozen would survive the war—including Tagami, who lived all the way to 1981.


NOTE: In a bit of WWII/college football oddball history, several months after the Fort Stevens attack, on January 1, 1943, the 2nd Air Force’s football team defeated the team from Hardin- Simmons University 13-7 in the 1943 Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas. The war affected many bowl games in terms of both participants as well as locations.


Sources consulted:


Bert Webber, Panic at Fort Stevens, Webb Research Group Publishing, Medford, Oregon, 1998.


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