Balloons in WWII: Japan's (not so) cunning plan
Where is the prince who can afford to so cover his country with troops for its defence as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?
-Benjamin Franklin, upon witnessing the first manned balloon flight.
In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers, Etienne and Joseph, flew the first balloon. They had been fascinated with flight; some months earlier Joseph had dropped a sheep equipped with a parachute from the roof of his father's barn.[1] The brothers filled a large balloon with smoke from a hot-burning straw fire, watched it float up a bit, drift a mile or so, and sink back down. Etienne and Joseph were an immediate sensation. Shortly thereafter they sent up a rooster, a sheep, and a duck, and, other than a nasty wound incurred by the rooster when the sheep trod on it, the passengers landed unscathed.[2]
About the same time, Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles filled a rubberized balloon with hydrogen with the same purpose in mind. To generate the amount he needed, he had to dissolve 1,000 pounds of iron with
500 pounds of sulphuric acid over three days.[3] In Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of the Airship, Lee Payne describes the scene:
Finally, on August 27, 1783, in the Champ de Mars before a crowd of fifty thousand cheering Parisians that filled the streets and rooftops, Charles's balloon rose to a height of three thousand feet and drifted out of sight. It came to earth fifteen miles away near the village of Gonesse, where the peasants, recognizing a work of the devil, tore it to shreds with pitchforks.
These advances were quickly put to more utilitarian ends. In 1848, the citizens of Venice tossed out the occupying Austrians, and proclaimed a Venetian Republic. Predictably, this didn't sit well with the Austrians, and they returned in force to make mischief but encountered difficulty. In particular, Austrian Lieutenant Uchtaius looked about Venice and saw that, for the purposes of laying siege to the city, the topography was wanting: he had trouble placing big guns in a position to properly shell the Italians. Instead, the Lieutenant imagined that lightweight hot air balloons constructed of paper could loft a payload of ordnance into the city. Such balloons were crafted and carried 33 pounds of explosives, set with a half-hour time fuse, and troops scurried around with them to launch them into the proper wind currents. In Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America, Robert C. Mikesh details the project's efficacy:
No great material damage was done to the enemy, though one of the charges burst in St. Mark's Square. An unexpected shift of the wind drove some of the balloons back to the besiegers and their use was abandoned.
Such was the early military career of the balloon.[4] Most scientists went about designing zeppelins soon afterward and occupied themselves with the task of powering the craft in a chosen direction. Before settling on propellers, they mucked about with oars, trained birds, and cannons shot backward. Meanwhile, the lowly, unpowered balloon was not thought to be effective for military use. However, in 1933, undeterred by the lessons of history, the Japanese Military Scientific Laboratory began to experiment with balloons. This was done alongside such projects as a remote-controlled, unmanned tank and a lethal variant of today's high-voltage stun guns. Payloads from bombs or propaganda leaflets to actual troops were considered for balloons, but the project was shelved, along with other, kookier ones, until about ten years later. While the designs gathered dust, World War II began, and Japan mounted a very effective sneak attack on the United States by bombing Pearl Harbor in Hawaii one early morning.
Still Smarting, United States Stages Counterattack
Under cover of night, the United States Navy held a little bomb run of its own over mainland Japan on April 18, 1942, a few short months after the Pearl Harbor attack. An aircraft carrier headed towards Japan, where it intended to deploy the bombers from roughly 500 miles offshore. The run, commandeered by one Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, consisted of only sixteen planes, but this was the first attack on mainland Japan by the U.S. and was meant as revenge for Pearl Harbor. Some 800 miles out, the carrier was sighted by a Japanese patrol boat, and, after sinking the boat, the bombers took off early. This risked running out of fuel following the raid, but premature takeoff was deemed necessary in order to cut down the response to the warning likely radioed by the patrol boat. Payloads delivered but gas tanks empty, the airmen wound up bailing out, mostly over Japanese-controlled areas of China. The Chinese, no great lovers of the Japanese at this point in time, hid the Americans and smuggled most of them to safety. Doolittle himself, humiliated at the loss of all of his planes, expected a court martial, but given the national morale boost his raid spurred (it was the first United States military success against the Japanese), was instead awarded the Medal of Honor.
While material destruction sustained by Tokyo in the Doolittle raid was limited, the psychological damage sustained by the Japanese people was immeasurable. It suggested their mainland was vulnerable to attack, and, piddly vacation islands in the Pacific notwithstanding, their enemies to the east were untouchable. No practical airfields existed for the Japanese to retaliate from, and despite some tries at launching bombers from submarines or flying one-way aircraft, attacks on the U.S. mainland remained impossible.
Kooky Idea Given Reconsideration
About this time, Japanese meteorologists had been studying "rivers of fast moving air" in the upper atmosphere, today better known as jet streams. At around 30,000 feet, a healthy one shoots over Japan, across the Pacific, and bumps into North America.
In the winter of 1943-44, when the Japanese released some 200 balloons equipped with measurement devices and radio transmitters into the jet stream to better characterize it, they figured it might actually be possible to fly balloons from the Japanese mainland all the way to the west coast of the United States.
Hydrogen-filled balloons[5] like theirs, however, would run into problems: to float a balloon from Japan to the U.S. takes about 60 hours, and during that time either the sun will heat the hydrogen enough to pop the balloon, or the cool night will sink it. To get around this problem, they built a little valve on the balloon to vent gas when it got too high, and they put several sandbags on the basket that got dropped when the balloon got too low. Over 60 hours, the balloon vented during the day and dropped sandbags at night to maintain that important 30,000 foot altitude (if it got lower, the winds slowed down and it would likely be stranded over the ocean). Said balloons also carried a nasty bomb and a couple of incendiary charges, the better to start forest fires in the Pacific Northwest with.
The balloons themselves were made out of a kind of paper derived from the kozo bush (washi paper) that was produced in little squares and pasted together by schoolchildren. The children were collected in vast concert halls and sumo wrestling amphitheatres,[6] stripped of their potentially damaging hairpins and long fingernails, and instructed to glue together the washi squares with konnyaku-nori, paste made from a Japanese potato commonly known as "Devil's Tongue". Wartime being what it was, workers were frequently scolded for eating the paste.[7] The balloons were assembled (about 10 m in diameter), and, from November 1944 through March 1945 (when Japanese scientists determined the jet stream was most amenable to transcontinental travel) some 10,000 of them were set aloft from Japan's eastern shores.
Believe It
They worked. Not that well, but they did. Fragments of 285 balloons have since been found all over North America; the majority turned up in Washington and Oregon but some made it as far south as Mexico, as far north as Alaska, and as far east as Michigan.[8] People saw them silently sliding by, or were startled to hear loud explosions and fire issuing from nowhere. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the jet stream was most cooperative during the wet season [ of the Pacific Northwest, so the balloons weren't very effective in the forest fire department. The U.S. stationed firefighters just in case, and requested those in agricultural circles to be on the lookout for strange diseases in livestock (at this point, it was anticipated that the Japanese might use the balloons for the dispersal of germ warfare materials). In early January, 1945, Newsweek and the New York Times ran articles on these mystery balloons before the nation's press received a curt note from the Office of Censorship requesting a moratorium on such stories.
After some months of media silence while balloons continued to rain (okay, piddle) on the continental United States, one Reverend Archie Mitchell, his wife Elsie, and five children were picnicking in the woods outside of Bly, Oregon when the woman and children happened upon a downed balloon. One of the group tugged on it, and the bomb detonated, killing all of them. The Office of Censorship quickly yanked its decree, and everyone else got warned not to touch strange objects in the woods.
Meantime, the United States military forces were all running willy-nilly trying to figure out what was happening. Planes were dispatched to shoot down incoming balloons, but they proved difficult to find, and less than twenty were destroyed this way. To test whether the balloons could be detected by radar, they reinflated some downed ones. Mikesh details one such episode:
Moored to a winch
attached to a truck, the balloon ascended to approximately 1,000 feet and after
about an hour fell limp to the ground because of helium loss through the now
weathered and porous paper... [some attempts later] the balloon rose to
approximately 4,500 feet and remained airborne for about thirty minutes before
it finally settled into some trees about five and one-half miles away, damaged
beyond repair. [10]
U.S. Asks, How'd They Get Here?
After finding some radio transmitters in a minority of balloons, the U.S. went about looking for transmissions from ones still aloft, and, lo and behold, determined the balloons were actually coming from the direction of Japan proper. Transcontinental delivery of balloons was thought impossible; everyone believed that the balloons were either being released by submarines, by Japanese frogmen on shore, or perhaps German POW camps inside U.S. borders, yet the transmissions issued from out in the Pacific. While the radio signals were being investigated, a few of the sandbag ballasts from the balloons were sent to the U.S. Geological Survey's Military Geology Unit, which was supposed to be in the know about sand.
Footnotes
1. Sadly, the sheep's fate is unknown.
2. Contemporary scientists had speculated that the atmosphere might not be breathable above a few hundred feet.
3. Dissolving certain metals with sulfuric acid liberates hydrogen gas.
4. The Austrians retook Venice in 1849, largely by starving them out.
5. Hot air doesn't have nearly the lift hydrogen does. The Japanese balloons were designed to carry about 1,000 pounds. A comparable hot air balloon would be absurdly large. Additionally, the fuel regulation required to keep the air hot would prove technically difficult.
6. Nichigeki Music Hall and Kokugi-Kan Wrestling Hall in Tokyo were used, for example
7. Some of the schoolchildren have since grown and provided accounts of balloon construction, not the least of which, one by United States Air Force club manager Yoshiji "Eddie" Ohsawa, appears in the USAF publication Airman. The article, subtitled, During WWII he fought us; now he feeds us details his childhood. We sniggered at the subtitle.
8. The 285 discovered have been in mostly populous areas: it is quite conceivable that there are additional balloons in rural areas that still await discovery.
9. For the areas most hit, precipitation hovers somewhere between 8 and 12 inches a month, and measurable (>.01 inch) rain on about half the days. Better luck next time.
10. Mikesh
Bibliography
1. John McPhee. Irons in the Fire. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.
2. National Park Foundation. The Complete Guide to America's National Parks, 1990-1991 Edition. Simon & Schuster, 1990. [Out of Print]
3. Lee Payne. Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of the Airship A.S. Barnes and Co., 1977.
4. Robert C. Mikesh. "Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America". Smithsonian Annals of Flight, 9. 1973.
5. John McPhee. "The Gravel Page". The New Yorker, 1. January 29, 1996
|
Balloons: The Winds Of Fortune |
Japan's failed WW2 balloon attack on the US
The USGS: FDR's Whipping Boy
Heretofore, the U.S. Geological Survey had been little more than a Federal burp. In particular, the dinky agency led a rocky existence in the 1930s, due in no small part to a disagreement it had with President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR happened to hold great stock in the restorative properties of the water of Warm Springs, Georgia, after a visit there ameliorated his polio in the early 1920s, and, when in a position of authority, made it his business to figure out how that water worked. He asked the Survey what the story was, and it calmly replied that the water at Warm Springs, Georgia was no different than ordinary tap water.
This lack of faith annoyed FDR to no end. He felt a miracle had occurred on the occasion of his visit, and was unwilling to chalk it up to the placebo effect. Once President, Roosevelt sent a full team of geologists there. Upon arrival, the Survey team encountered another team headed by German Doktor Paul Härtle. Doktor Härtle was a bubbly miracle water expert hailing from Bad Kissingen, Germany who was there to check on them at the President's behest; Roosevelt apparently didn't trust his own geologists. The U.S. Geological Survey team, headed by Foster Hewett, had a chat with Härtle. In his account, "The Gravel Page", John McPhee details the conversation:
At one point, Doktor Härtle asked Hewett, "Are you studying the gas that comes from the water?"
Hewett answered, "We are."
Härtle said, "Have you examined the shape of the bubbles?"
Hewett's pupils doubled in size. He said, "No, we haven't."
Härtle said, "Oh, you must examine the bubbles. Some bubbles are round, but others are square."
Hewett (all this would appear in U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1589) said, "Do I understand that you know places in Germany where the bubbles issuing from water are square?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Hewett," Härtle said. "The bubbles of gas at Bad Kissingen are square. You see, Mr. Hewett, when you put your arm in water that contains gas, bubbles appear on the flesh. Now if these bubbles are round they produce no effect, but if they are square they have the effect of stimulating nerves on the skin. It is extremely important that you determine whether these bubbles are round or square."
Hewett spent two and a half years studying Warm Springs, and concluded that the magic fluids were "ordinary rain water without exceptional physical or chemical properties." After this information was printed in his report, a bound copy was sent to the White House. It was not acknowledged. [1]
A contemporary geologist with the Survey later commented,
There was a period of about six years in the thirties when no one was hired by the Survey. Roosevelt wanted to believe the German, who said the bubbles came up in the water and the corners scratched your skin. That was just bullshit.[2]
But Then Uncle Sam Came Crawling Back
Despite this low social standing, during World War II, the Survey found itself once again needed. The War Department wanted to know soil conditions for landings. Were they marshy? How about quicksand? Where do we deploy our troops? These questions needed answering, geologists were ably suited to answer them, and the Survey's budget and roster swelled. Before tracking balloon radio signals, the War Department handed the Survey a pinch of the sand it had found from balloon wreckage, and asked the geologists to determine its origin. The War Department fully anticipated the Survey to find that the sand had origins in California somewhere; the military figured the balloons had been launched surreptitiously by invading agents stationed on the continent.
Wrong, said the Survey. In the sand they found certain skeletons of tiny critters -- diatoms -- of a type only found near Asia.[3] Put that together with an absence of coral, the presence of certain volcanic products, and the Survey guessed two possible locations: one was the very site of deployment, and the other a little off, perhaps one hundred miles from two other sites. These locations were swiftly bombed, and two of the three hydrogen plants supplying the balloon effort were destroyed.
Destroyed, Yes, But Pretty Much Finished Anyway
By then, the balloon operation itself had been largely halted. The Japanese military, faced with the news blackout, had no reason to suspect that the balloons were doing any damage. While the local propagandists told of a United States engulfed in flames, the higher-ups remained sceptical. The media ban by the United States Office of Censorship was far and away the best defence against the bombs. The balloon project was expensive and had been considered a great waste of money and effort by the Japanese military despite being the world's first successful transcontinental attack and the most effective of any of Japan's war efforts against the mainland U.S. As McPhee tells us, the damage sustained by other attacks was even more modest:
In February of 1942, Japanese Submarine I-17 shelled an oil field up the beach from Santa Barbara, and damaged a pump house. In June, Submarine I-25 shelled a coastal fort in Oregon, damaging a baseball backstop.[4]
Compared to these, the balloon effort was a rousing success. It was also a metaphorical one:
On March 10, 1945, a paper balloon that had crossed the Pacific Ocean, the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Range descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production site at Hanford, Washington. The balloon landed on an electric line that fed power to the building containing the reactor that was producing the Nagasaki plutonium, and shut the reactor down.[5]
Footnotes
1. McPhee
2. McPhee
3. Diatoms themselves are everywhere, but frequently have distinctive shapes, making types and origin discernible.
4. McPhee
5. McPhee
Bibliography
1. John McPhee. Irons in the Fire. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.
2. National Park Foundation. The Complete Guide to America's National Parks, 1990-1991 Edition. Simon & Schuster, 1990. [Out of Print]
3. Lee Payne. Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of the Airship. A.S. Barnes and Co., 1977.
4.
Robert C. Mikesh. "Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America". Smithsonian Annals of Flight, 9. 1973.
5.
John McPhee. "The Gravel Page". The New Yorker, 1. January 29, 1996. p.52-60
Japanese Balloon Bomb
attack on the US
This section is divided into the following parts:
1. General information
2.The structure of the balloon
3.Specific places where the balloon bombs dropped their cargo
4.The program was basically a flop.
5.Damage caused to Japan.
6.Japan claimed to plan manned bomb missions
7.Secrecy about the attacks.
8.How a botanist helped the US war effort.
9.The inventor of the balloons dies.
10.Japanese apology for deaths in Oregon incident.
11.Books about the subject.
1.
GENERAL INFORMATION
The Japanese launched some 9000 balloon bombs against the US during the war.
The bombs were meant to start forest fires and cause explosions, hopefully
causing chaos and confusion in the US west. They were a reprisal for the
Doolittle raid on Tokyo, sort of an “if you bomb our country we'll bomb yours”
type of thing.
Out of some 9000 launched only about 1,000 actually made it to the US and
Canada, and of those there was one case of six people being killed by the bomb
carried by the balloon. For a weapon, that's a pathetic rate of success. The
forest fires they hoped to start never appeared, largely because the bombs were
being designed or in hiatus during the dry season in the US. If lots of fires
had started then lots of people would have been needed to fight them, perhaps
reducing the war effort, or at least that's what the Japanese hoped.
The propaganda value was nil since the US media pretty much covered up the
story of the bombs till very late in the war, which served as a major
discouragement to the Japanese who were launching them.
They were pretty much another sign that Japan really didn't understand what
they were getting themselves into in World War II when they attacked Pearl
Harbor.
They didn't have any immediate plans to land soldiers in Hawaii and try and
take that over which really would have been a good thing to do (for them) right
after the Pearl Harbor attack, but they ended up wasting that advantage. (Hawaii
would have been an excellent base for them and made it much harder for the US to
carry out its Pacific war.)
Japan had no planes that could reach the US and bomb the mainland (the
Germans had an experimental plane that once came within 12 miles of New York,
but that's as far as that program got.) Thus, Japan was totally unable to stop
the military production capability of the US, something which Yamamoto knew
would happen, although no one among the Japanese leaders listened to him.
Thus, the US could continue to produce weapons while, eventually, the
Japanese were unable to as the US advanced in the Pacific. The balloon bombs
were basically the Japanese version of the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rockets, but much
less technologically advanced and very much less effective.
Yet the entire balloon bombing program is something that most Americans today
are not familiar with (along with the Japanese submarine shellings of Fort
Stevens and Santa Barbara, and the plane bombings of Oregon.) It's all a really
fascinating historical area of World War II.
The book noted below talks about what could have been, though:
”The concept of balloon bombs might have changed the course of the war in
favor of the Japanese had it been pursued with more vigor and tenacity. ... Had
this balloon weapon been further exploited by using germ or gas bombs, the
results could have been disastrous to the American people.”
The program could have caused major forest fires if they had been launched
during the west's dry season. Any biological weapon descending over a city could
have caused mass panic and damaged US morale. Those are could-have-beens, of
course. Alternative history type of thinking.
2.
STRUCTURE OF THE BALLOON BOMBS
”The Japanese idea of a balloon bomb
originated in 1933 when Lieutenant General Reikichi Tada, of the Japanese
Military Scientific Laboratory, was assigned to the head of the 'Proposed
Airborne Carrier Research and Development Program' which was to investigate
and develop new war weapons.”
There was also one project which was to have launched balloons
from submarines which would have been closer to the US and would have cut down
the flight time of the balloon to about ten hours. The program never got
underway, though.
”...a ten-meter-diameter (32.8 foot)
balloon was determined s optimum for this requirement....The balloons, usually
made of three and four layers of tissue paper cemented together to be a
gas-proof sphere, were inflated with hydrogen to a capacity near 19,000 cubic
feet....The balloon envelope was encircled by a scalloped cloth band to which
numerous shroud lines were attached, and these were tied together below in two
large knots. From these knots, the bombs and ingenious ballast release mechanism
were suspended.”
”The altitude-control mechanism was developed under the
supervision of Technical Major Otsuld of the Noborito research Institute. This
device consisted of a cast-aluminum wheel from which bags of sand were hung. By
means of aneroids and a small battery, a release fuse attached to two sandbags
was ignited whenever the balloon reached a preset minimum altitude. The balloon
then would rise again to approximately 38,000 feet, and be carried along by the
higher winds. It would sink to the minimum desired altitude-around 30,000
feet-as the gas slowly escaped or was cooled. Two more sandbags were then
dropped, as the process was repeated. When all thirty-two sandbags were
expended, the balloon would discharge its load of bombs and destroy itself by a
small demolition charge. The number of cycles required was calculated based upon
forecasted wind speeds, and appropriate settings were made to position the
balloon over the American continent for bomb release.”
That was the Japanese army balloon. The Japanese navy developed
one with a “skin of rubberized silk,” although it carried a smaller payload.
The balloons were made often by schoolchildren.
”In numbers, school children were the greatest labor
force on this project. During wartime, school hours were short in order that the
remainder of their day could be devoted to the war effort. Thousands of Japanese
had a part in making these balloons, but officially they were never told of
their purpose. Even when word about their intended use would filter down, no one
believed it.
”Two years of experimentation and some 9,000,000 yen (more than
2,000,000 prewar dollars) were spent on the manufacture of balloons.” Cost
per balloon was about $2,300 at the start of the project but went down as
production increased.
These are three descriptions from newspapers.
It wasn't just an easy matter of inflating and letting the
balloon go. The weather had to be just right, the wind currents just right, and
even then the wind at the surface could catch the partially-inflated balloon and
cause problems for its handlers.
 |
| Number of
balloons launched: November 1944: 700
December 1944: 1,200
January 1945: 2,000
February 1945: 2,500
March 1945: 2,500
April 1945: 400
Total: 9,300
|
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|
A launch site |
A balloon in flight |
3.
SPECIFIC PLACES WHERE THE BOMBS DROPPED
The first of the balloon bombs was launched on November 3, 1944.
The first balloon was found on November 4 about 66 miles southwest of San Pedro,
California, in the sea, the balloon having crashed into the water. (The
international dateline thing makes it one day after launch rather than 2 days,
technically). Two weeks later another fragment of a balloon that had crashed
into the ocean was found. The decision to keep things as secret as they could
was made, although forest rangers were told to keep an eye out for any balloons
in the forests.
 |
|
One map of the places the bombs hit |
This is one map of where at least some of the bombs hit.
It's fascinating to go through papers of the time and find where
they listed places where the bombs had been found. Just a very few of these
include:
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California |
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Alaska |
British Colombia |
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|
Michigan |
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|
Michigan |
Oregon |
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|
Montana |
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|
Oregon deaths |
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Oregon deaths remembered |
Oregon deaths |
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Washington |
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|
Out west somewheres |
 |
 |
| Washington: Walla-Walla Union
bulletin, Oct. 16, 1946. An unexploded balloon bomb is found. |
Out west somewheres |
Sources:
Alaska: Statesville Record and Landmark (NC), January 1, 1955.
Notice that this is ten years after the end of the war and the balloons were
still being found.
California: San Mateo Times and Daily News Leader, March 12,
1946. This one refers to the remains of a balloon being found; apparently it had
exploded but did no damage.
Lytton, Canada: The Times Recorder (OH), Oct. 4, 1948. Another
balloon found years after the end of the war.
Michigan: The Lowell Sun (Mass) June 6, 1945. This report
refuses to say where the balloon bomb was actually found in the state.
Michigan, second article. The Lima News (Oh), August 16, 1945.
This one refers to multiple balloons. One bomb was found ten miles from Detroit,
another near Grand Rapids, and another near Sault. Ste. Marie.
Montana: The Independent Record, Aug. 19, 1945. This article,
like the one above, refers to multiple balloon bombs. It also discusses the
secrecy factor.
Oregon: The Bismarch Tribune (ND), June 11, 1943. This article
refers to bombs used to start forest fires. It also says that an army Colonel
expects “airplane bombing, submarine shelling and sabotage.”
Oregon deaths: Nevada State Journal, June 1, 1945. An article
about the death of six people due to a balloon bomb they found in Oregon. This
was the incident that caused the authorities to stop trying to keep the balloon
bombs a secret, instead warning people to avoid any suspicious balloons or
balloon fragments.
Oregon deaths, second article. The Bradford Era, June 4, 1945.
Oregon deaths remembered. The Lima News, Sept. 30, 1976. 31
years after the Oregon bomb deaths a ceremony is held in Nagasaki, and a
meteorologist who had been involved in the project lays a wreath at a monument
as a gesture of atonement.
|
A listing of many of the incidents. |
 |
The US was not without its own countermeasures, however. Project
Firefly was one system set up with airplanes and 2,700 troops, 200 of them
paratroopers, who were stationed at spots which were considered hazardous areas
for use in fire-fighting missions should those become unnecessary. Lightning
Project was a system set in place where vets, 4-H clubs, agricultural colleges,
etc, were told to be on the lookout for “the first sign of any strange disease
in livestock or crops.” Only a couple of balloons were shot down over the
mainland, one over California and one over Oregon. There was more success over
the Aleutian Islands where, on April 13, 1944 some nine balloons were shot down.
Still, there wasn't much success in intercepting the balloons. This was caused
by poor weather, the high altitude balloons were at, and inaccurate sighting
reports.
One major disadvantage for the US and something that might have
also contributed to the low interception rate was the fact that the west coast
defenses had been deactivated since the war was obviously going in favor of the
US and any actual invasion by Japan was out of the question. Radar stations were
not properly manned and no combat planes were kept on ground alert.
Anti-aircraft defenses were limited so there wasn't a whole lot that could be
done to stop the balloons.
4. THE
PROGRAM WAS BASICALLY A FLOP
There are going to be different views about the success of
something by two different sides in a war. For the Japanese, at least during the
war, the balloons were considered a success with claims of 10,000 casualties had
been caused by the bombs and numerous fires had been started. They claimed that
“something big” was up, and that “large-scale attacks with death-defying
Japanese manning the balloons” would be launched. It was implied that bombers
flying one-way suicide missions would be launched against the mainland (it could
have been done if the planes were stripped down and had really favorable winds).
Yet this was all propaganda for those in Japan. The truth was
that the Japanese did not really know if the balloons were effective or not. The
1000 balloons that got to the mainland managed to kill six people, start two
small brush fires and cause a momentary loss of power at the Hanford,
Washington, atomic-energy plant.
 |
| Statesville
Daily Record, May 23, 1945 |
This is one the articles from when the war was still going on
but in its closing stages. Note that neither the army nor the navy were “worried
about” the balloon bombs. A practical reason for the secrecy is also given; if
the Japanese knew where the balloons were landing, they could have improved them
to take care of any problems and make them more accurate.
 |
|
Walla Walla Union-bulletin (WA), Aug. 25, 1945 |
This, I believe, was meant as an editorial. It talks about the
“squawks” from the Japanese about the inhumanity of the atomic bomb and then
says that the balloon bombs were more “barbaric.” The writer charges that the
Japanese knew the victims would be innocent people. (This totally ignores the
fire bombing of Japanese cities which was done on purpose targeting the civilian
population). The article also states that the Japanese violated the rules of war
by using the bombs, but that part I don't understand. Why did it violate the
rules of war? If it did, then so did the V-1 and V-2 which were much more
effective than the balloons ever were.
 |
|
The Post Standard, June 8, 1947 |
This article is two years after the war so it's going to have
more complete information. It notes only 1,000 of the 9,000 bombs ever arrived,
giving it almost a 90% failure rate even before the question of any damage comes
up. It also notes the abandonment of the project.
5.
DAMAGE CAUSED TO JAPAN
 |
|
The Lethbridge Herald (Canada), Oct. 3, 1945 |
.
The article notes that two balloons returned to Japan when the
winds shifted. Both returns happened on March 13, 1945, about a day after
launching. The balloons fell in snow and did no damage.
6.
JAPAN CLAIMED TO PLAN MANNED BALLOONS
 |
|
Salamaca Republican-Press (NY) June 4, 1945 |
As the article points out, the Japanese were promising to send
manned balloons, “with death defying airmen” in the next wave of balloon
attacks. They also claimed that the attacks were “creating great havoc in the
enemy country.”
Great havoc was something they were not creating, not by any
means. Claims like this were meant to bolster morale at home rather than to tell
things like they really were.
The idea of sending manned balloons doesn't make a whole lot of
sense. For one thing, you'll have to have a way to make sure the pilot can
breathe at the altitude the balloon hits. That takes weight, along with any
water for the pilot to drink and any weapons the pilot carries. More weight
equals less bomb potential.
Let's assume they could find a way for the pilot to survive the
trip. What you would end up having is individual pilots landing rather than any
organized form of of landing. Granted, individuals can still cause damage, but
consider this; almost 90% if the balloons launched ever managed to get to the
U.S. That means probably around 90% of any manned balloons would also fail; in
effect giving you a 90% casualty rate even before you ever set foot on enemy
territory.
In all likelihood the statement was just another form of of
propaganda, an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of Americans.
7.
SECRECY ABOUT THE ATTACK
The two articles below, quite similar in nature, tell about how
the media kept most of the balloon-bomb information secret during the war except
for the incident in Oregon that killed six people. This resulted in the Japanese
not having any idea whether or not their balloon bombs were being effective or
not. They released some 9,000 of the things and only knew for sure that one was
effective; that made a .0001 percent effectiveness ratio which isn't really very
good, to say the least.
 |
| The Daily
Courier (Pennsylvania) April 16, 1946 |
 |
 |
| Syracuse Herald Journal ,
April 15, 1946 |
The Daily Courier
(Pennsylvania) April 16, 1946 |
Although the articles make much of the secrecy factor, even if
the Japanese had know it wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference since the
bombs were basically a complete failure. One of the major problems was that this
was a weapon that you let loose and had no idea when it would fall.
That's not very good. The V-2 rocket, for example, could be
launched with a relatively reasonable certainty that it would hit its target;
London, for example. It wasn't very accurate, but it could at least hit a city.
The balloon bombs couldn't really be aimed except for letting them go and
figuring the ballast/timing mechanism would get them to drop somewhere over the
U.S.
