A trip to the library started a 41/2-year quest for Bill McCash, who turned his interest in an obscure bit of World War II history into “Bombs over Brookings,” an account of the Japanese attack on the southern Oregon Coast.

The book chronicles the September 1942 bombing raids by a submarine-launched plane – and the one-man mission of peace and reconciliation pursued by the plane’s Japanese pilot in the years after the war.

McCash was vacationing in Curry County and decided to visit the remote site of the bombing. Finding the road blocked by a downed tree, he instead headed to the Brookings city library to research the story. That visit sent the history enthusiast from Corvallis on a mission digging through newspaper articles, government records and eyewitness accounts.

“I kept finding brand-new information that no one else knew about,” he said.

On Sept. 9, 1942, a small “Geta” seaplane launched from the long-range submarine I-25 – the same vessel that fired on Fort Stevens in Clatsop County three months earlier. The pilot, Nobuo Fujita, and his navigator flew toward Brookings with the mission of dropping incendiary bombs in the dense coastal forests to the east – the plan being to ignite massive wildfires that would burn cities and cause widespread panic on the West Coast.

The attack, and a second one Sept. 29 near Port Orford, failed, as the resulting fires were easily extinguished by local firefighting crews or burned out on their own.

McCash fleshed out the story with records from the Army, U.S. Forest Service, Civil Defense Board and other agencies. Along with the documents, many from the National Archives, he interviewed dozens of people who actually saw or heard the aircraft 63 years ago. Piecing together the various witness accounts, he plotted the plane’s likely routes for both attacks on a map.

“No one’s ever put it together like this – taken all the sightings, plotted them and tried to make sense of it,” he said.

While his original focus was on the attack itself, McCash also became intrigued by the friendship that grew between the pilot, Fujita, and the citizens of Brookings. He details that connection in the book.

Fujita first visited the city in 1962 on the 20th anniversary of the attack, invited by the local Junior Chamber of Commerce as a way to bring publicity to Brookings and the local Azalea Festival.

Word of the invitation generated heated opposition and even some threats against the organizers, and Fujita himself became worried that he might be attacked. But the visit went off without incident, as Fujita and his wife and son were feted by the Jaycees, to whom he presented his Samurai sword.

In the following 33 years, Fujita returned to Brookings several times, using his connection to the community as a platform to call for promoting world peace. He was named an honorary citizen of the town, and after his death in 1997, his daughter scattered some of his ashes at the remote bomb site.

“His visits after the war were absolutely wonderful,” McCash said. “The fact that Fujita was trying to change that hate to more positive feelings is just an honorable thing to do.”

“Bombs over Brookings” is on sale at Godfather’s Books in Astoria. It can be ordered directly by sending $14.95 plus $3 for shipping to William McCash, P.O. Box 1053, Corvallis, OR 97339-1053.