Volume 17 , Issue 3

WWII (1942-1945) Balloon Bombs In America

In the waning days of the Pacific War Japan tried a last ditch ploy to hit the United States with a terror weapon. That weapon was the Balloon Bomb, or Fugo. It was supposed to set fire to the West Coast and drop anti-personel bombs randomly on the U.S. In research after the war it was found that the Japanese built 15,000 of them but only launched 9,300.

A little over 300 Balloon Bomb incidents occurred in the U.S. and Canada. The only casualties were a woman and five kids in Bly, Oregon on a church picnic, who found and moved one. It exploded killing them all.

The Japanese have been using balloons in war since the 1800s. At Port Arthur they were used for observation of troop movements. The Japanese air force came out of the balloon society.

When the US first heard about the balloon bombs they didn't believe it. After a few were found things changed. They were considered a threat and they outlined it well in an unpublished manual called BD-1.

The Japanese Navy made the Type B balloon out of rubberized silk. It carried a radio for telemetry but no weapons. The Army version (Type A) was constructed of six hundred pieces of mulberry paper and filled with hydrogen gas. It carried five incendiary bombs and one high-explosive anti-personnel bomb. It was hoped that the incendiaries would start vast fires in the great forests of the western parts of the U.S. and Canada.

However, in the winter months when the prevailing winds were best suited to carry the balloons to their destination most of the target area was damp and/or covered with snow.

Officially, no forest or grass fires were started by Fugos. There was also the real threat of chemical and biological warfare agents being released by these primitive ICBMs but none appear to have been used. Although, they were developed at the infamous Unit 731.

Some of the air balloons did contain a celluloid container holding 1120cc of a greenish-turbid liquid. A major concern by Intelligence Officers was that the containers of liquid were, in fact, biological bombs that could spread cancer and bubonic plague in humans and foot & mouth disease in animals.

The U.S. Public Health Service, Department of Agriculture and the Canadian equivalent, conducted testing on this substance by injected it into mice, guinea pigs and a calf. Charles A. Mitchell, Dominion Animal Pathologist from the Animal Research Institute in Hull, Quebec, Canada reported in a letter dated July 12, 1945, that no evidence of an infective agent was found (Report on Specimen #21 from Fort Ware, B.C.). A broth was also made out of sand bag contents and tested on animals. Again, with no infective agents were found.

If the Japanese had known of their success with the balloons it is possible that the greenish liquid found in the celluloid containers may have been replaced with disease causing bacteria.

On January 4th, 1945, the Office of Censorship censored the air balloon topic. The purpose of the censorship was to avoid panic and to assure that the Japanese had no knowledge of their success. Everything about the Japanese air balloons - the landings, or even deaths should one occur - would fail to reach the public eye.

Discouraged at not hearing any reports of destruction and death on the American continent, and with other war concerns demanding thy're dwindling resources, the campaign was abandoned in the spring of 1945 until the very last days of the war.

There may have been as many as 15,000 or more of these balloons built and up to 10,000 launchings. Including Canada and Mexico where there were over 300 incidents reported.

The only casualties I have found occurred May 5, 1945 when a woman and five children on a church picnic were killed after a balloon bomb they had drug from the woods exploded. These were the only known fatalities occurring within the U. S. during WWII as a direct result of enemy action.

None caused stoppage of war related activity, except for one case where a balloon landed on a power line at Cold Creek in Washington State. It caused the first SCRAM in history, taking down the first reactor used to make plutonium. The launch of this intercontinental threat was a carefully planned act of retaliation in response to the Doolittle raid.

The Japanese first tried attacking North American forests with incendiaries by launching two bombing attacks with submarine launched seaplanes over the state of Oregon.

The Doolittle raid, better known as "30 seconds over Tokyo", was lead by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle who led sixteen B25 bombers on a surprise attack on Tokyo, Japan on April 18, 1942. This attack was in response to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Without enough fuel to return to their launching sites, these airplanes, after dropping their bombs, flew into unoccupied China where they were able to bail out or crash-land. Doolittle was the first to fly a land-based bomber off of a carrier ship for a combat mission.

In all, the results on North America were inconsequential. Designing a way to get high explosive bombs into the heart of North America became their focus.

The result - "Pieces of Paper" (the North American code word used regarding the balloon bombs) - had the ability to succeed. By luck and timing, it didn't.
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