June 21, 2007
Japanese Attacks on the U.S. Mainland Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 AM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on the website today, “Forgotten but True: Japan Attacks the American Mainland,” details the handful of attempts by Japan to strike at the continental United States during the Second World War. Today is the anniversary of the most dramatic, when a Japanese submarine, the I-25, fired 17 shells at Fort Stevens, at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Oregon coast. The I-25 managed to damage a baseball backstop; as a reply to the shock of the Doolittle Raids, the I-25’s first foray was a damp squib, as was a follow-on raid with a sub-launched seaplane a couple of months later. Late in the war, incendiaries launched by balloon from across the Pacific did manage to kill three Americans, a mother and two children who found a balloon bomb and picked it up; this was a couple of months before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events have had a long afterlife as Second World War trivia questions and bar bets, and I think they usually divert American audiences made privy to them because of the fantastic disproportion between the horrific effectiveness of American attacks on the Japanese Home Islands and the contrastingly comical ineffectiveness of the Japanese attacks on the lower 48. I do not have the impression that people feel sympathy for the Japanese on the strength of the contrast. People who take an interest in Second World War trivia usually know that scores of millions of civilians died as a direct or indirect result of Japanese actions during the Pacific War. The comic effect seems to be a very old and perhaps morally coarse one: We laugh at the impotence of our enemies. To my ear, our laughter is morally palliated by a parallel knowledge of how much harm our enemies could do on other occasions (the Rape of Nanking, or the Bataan Death March, or the mass murders in Manila, for example). The laughter is in any case a rare and unrepresentative portion of our response to the adversaries we fought during the Second World War, even more than 60 years on. Most wartime attempts to ridicule the Axis, the sort that got into Hollywood shorts and second features, look bizarre nowadays, and not too much anti-Axis humor has matured with the passage of time. All wars are ironic, a famous critic once asserted. Not that one—not yet, or at least not too often.
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