Weeks after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine shelled the West Coast — legend says it wasn't strategy, but one captain's grudge against the oil field workers.
On the evening of February 23, 1942 — just 79 days after Pearl Harbor — the Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced off the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara. Tokyo had timed the strike to land the same day as a scheduled radio address by President Roosevelt, and Commander Kozo Nishino ordered his crew to ready the sub's 14-cm deck gun.
Around 7:00 PM, the gun crew opened fire on a Richfield aviation fuel tank just past the beach. A skeleton crew of oil workers first mistook the impacts for an internal explosion, until one man spotted the submarine sitting offshore and the workers scrambled to call the police as shells kept falling around them.
For about 20 minutes, the I-17 fired somewhere between 12 and 25 rounds, buffeted by waves that threw off its aim. A derrick and a pump house were destroyed and the pier suffered minor damage, but the total toll came to roughly $500 and not a single casualty — then the submarine ceased fire and slipped away into the dark.
Militarily the raid was almost nothing, but it was still the first naval bombardment of the U.S. mainland since the British shelled Baltimore in 1814, and the furthest inland strike Japan would land anywhere during the war. Nishino hadn't come for the fuel tanks — he'd come to plant fear up and down the coast, and it worked.
For decades afterward, locals told a juicier version of the story: that Nishino had once captained a Japanese oil tanker through the Santa Barbara Channel before the war, stopped at Ellwood, and stumbled into a patch of prickly-pear cactus in front of a crew of oil workers who never let him live it down. The shelling, the legend goes, was personal payback.
It's a great story — and almost certainly false. Naval records show Nishino graduated Japan's naval academy in 1920 and spent his entire career as a submarine officer, never commanding a merchant ship, and a 1963 account from a fellow I-17 officer states plainly that he'd never even seen the California coast before that night. The tale traces back to a 1956 speech by an oil company president, who may have grafted a real cactus mishap involving some other, unnamed tanker pilot onto Nishino's name.
The real fallout from Ellwood had nothing to do with cacti. Panicked reports of mysterious 'signal lights' onshore triggered a coastal blackout and were later cited to help justify the internment of Japanese Americans just a week later — and the raw nerves it left behind primed Los Angeles for a very different kind of panic the very next night, when the city's own anti-aircraft guns opened fire on what turned out to be nothing at all.