Yeah, the large Japanese submarine fleet was badly misused. In their defense a sustained assault on the US West Coast would have been difficult considering the distance from Kwajalein (the nearest I-Boat base) to the West Coast. However, they did something no other nation in WW2 did. They bombed the continental United States . On September 9 1942, Warrant officer Nobuo Fujita flew his float plane from the I-25, and conducted the only wartime aircraft-dropped bombing on the United States. Using incendiary bombs, his mission was to start massive forest fires in the Pacific Northwest outside the town of Brookings, Oregon, with the ultimate objective of tying up U.S. military resources to the defense of the mainland, away from the Pacific Theater. It was also meant to be payback for Doolittle's Raid. The bombs did no serious damage tho. The forest was too wet.
When passing through the town last summer I took pictures of his 400-year samurai sword now on display at the Brookings library. It was presented to the town in a gesture of peace in the 1960s.
Here's the road up the mountain to the bomb site.
