I-25 was no ordinary submarine. Under Lieutenant Commander Meiji Tagami, the Japanese vessel had spent 1942 waging a one-boat campaign of terror along the Pacific Northwest coast that remains unique in the annals of American military history. On June 21, 1942, I-25 surfaced off the mouth of the Columbia River and shelled Fort Stevens with its 14-centimeter deck gun -- the first enemy bombardment of a military installation on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812. The 17 rounds fired caused little damage, landing mostly in sand and scrub and destroying a baseball diamond backstop. But the psychological impact was enormous. Then, in September, I-25 launched something even more audacious: a small E14Y floatplane piloted by Warrant Flying Officer Nobuo Fujita, who dropped incendiary bombs on the forests near Brookings, Oregon -- the only aerial bombing of the continental United States by a foreign power during the war. The damp forest refused to burn. The Camden was I-25's next target.

When the torpedo detonated against the Camden's bow, the explosion ignited gasoline in the forward tanks. Flames engulfed the bow section and spread across the water's surface as fuel leaked from ruptured plating. The crew had no way to fight a fire fueled by tens of thousands of barrels of gasoline on a ship with no engine power. They launched lifeboats into the predawn darkness off the Oregon coast and pulled away from the burning tanker. The Swedish merchant ship MV Kookaburra answered the distress call and picked up the survivors. One crew member -- whose name the records do not preserve with the clarity he deserved -- went down with the ship. The Camden, still burning, refused to sink. She remained afloat, a pillar of smoke and flame visible for miles, drifting on the current while the Navy and Coast Guard figured out what to do with a floating bomb.

The tugboat Kenai took the Camden under tow, initially heading for Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. But the tanker's draft had increased as she took on water, and the Columbia River bar -- already one of the most treacherous passages on the Pacific coast -- was too shallow to risk crossing with a sinking, burning ship loaded with gasoline. The plan changed. The Kenai turned north, hauling the Camden up the Washington coast toward Seattle and the deeper waters of Puget Sound, where repair facilities might save her. For six days, the tug pulled the smoldering hulk northward along a coastline where just months earlier I-25 had shelled a fort and bombed a forest. On October 10, somewhere off the coast of Washington state, the Camden finally gave out. Fire -- whether residual or newly ignited -- consumed what remained of the ship, and she sank at coordinates 46.7772N, 124.5208W. She rests today at a depth of 312 feet.

The sinking of the Camden belongs to a chapter of World War II that most Americans have forgotten, if they ever knew it. The war in the Pacific is remembered for Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima -- distant island battles fought thousands of miles from home. But in 1942, the enemy was off the Oregon coast, within sight of the shore. I-25 shelled American soil, bombed American forests, and sank American ships in waters where fishing boats worked and merchant vessels carried the fuel that powered the war effort. The Camden was one of several merchant ships attacked along the West Coast that year, casualties of a submarine campaign that stretched from the Aleutian Islands to California. The wreck lies in waters now considered for protection under the National Marine Sanctuaries program, a recognition that this patch of seafloor holds more than rusted steel. It holds evidence that the home front was, for a few terrifying months, a front line.