Commander Akiji Tagami had orders to sink Allied shipping and harass the American mainland. His submarine, the I-25, carried a crew of 94 and a Yokosuka E14Y floatplane - a tiny reconnaissance aircraft stowed in a watertight hangar on deck. On June 21, the I-25 slipped into U.S. coastal waters by following fishing boats through the minefields, a trick that worked because the mines were set to ignore small-vessel signatures. Late that night, Tagami ordered his crew to surface near the Columbia River bar. His target was Fort Stevens, a coastal defense installation that dated back to the Civil War and was armed with obsolete Endicott-era artillery: 12-inch mortars, 10-inch and 6-inch disappearing guns designed for a previous century's threats.

When shells began falling, Colonel Carl S. Doney made two decisions that likely saved lives - including Japanese ones. He ordered an immediate blackout, plunging the fort into darkness. Then he refused to let his gunners return fire. The reasoning was tactical rather than timid: a depression position finder had placed the submarine beyond the range of the fort's guns. Shooting back would only reveal their positions to the enemy without any chance of hitting it. The result was a strange, one-sided engagement. Seventeen explosive shells arced through the darkness and landed mostly in empty ground. One struck near Battery Russell. Another hit a concrete pillbox. The most consequential round severed several telephone cables - the only real damage of the entire attack. No one at Fort Stevens was injured.

The I-25 did not escape unnoticed. Army Air Forces planes on a training mission spotted the submarine and radioed its position. An A-29 Hudson bomber scrambled to the scene, found its target, and dropped its payload. But Tagami was already diving. The bombs fell into empty ocean as the I-25 slipped beneath the surface, undamaged. The submarine would go on to make history again that September, launching its floatplane to drop incendiary bombs on the forests near Brookings, Oregon - the only aerial bombing of the contiguous United States by a foreign power. The I-25's career ended in September 1943, when it was sunk near the New Hebrides with all hands.

The physical damage was negligible, but the psychological impact reshaped the Oregon coast. Combined with Japan's simultaneous Aleutian Islands Campaign, the Fort Stevens shelling fed a genuine invasion scare along the entire West Coast. Military authorities strung rolls of barbed wire from Point Adams southward along the beaches. The rusting wreck of the British barque Peter Iredale, which had run aground in 1906 and become a local landmark, was entangled in the wire and would remain caught in it until the war ended. Communities practiced blackout drills. Coastal watchers scanned the horizon. The shelling had done what seventeen shells landing in a baseball field could never accomplish through physical destruction - it had made the war feel close.

Fort Stevens is a state park now. Battery Russell's concrete emplacements still stand, weathered by Pacific storms and softened by coastal vegetation. Interpretive signs mark where the shells fell. The Peter Iredale's iron skeleton still rises from the sand at the river's mouth, stripped of its barbed wire but not its strangeness - a shipwreck on a beach where a submarine once opened fire. The fort holds the distinction of being the only military installation in the contiguous United States shelled by the Axis powers during World War II, and the second mainland base attacked after the bombing of Dutch Harbor in Alaska two weeks earlier. It is a place where the war touched American soil, however lightly, and where a colonel's restraint under fire proved wiser than returning it.