The recent threat of balloons over America was not the first time America has been threatened by balloons. But in 1945, we didn’t have 24 hours news stations.
In 1944, Major General Kusaba of the 9th Army Technical Research Laboratory developed a secret weapon that he thought would create panic in America. The” Fu-go balloon bomb” was a hot air balloon that carried four incendiary bombs and one 33-pound anti-personnel bomb. The balloons were constructed by schoolgirls. The idea was to set the balloons adrift on the jet stream and they would land in forests in America and start forest fires. The trip took three to five days. From October, 1944 to April, 1945, 9,300 balloons were launched. It is estimated that about 500 made it to America. Some got as far as Michigan. A few caused minor fires, but most did not explode. The U.S. government ordered strict censorship of the weapon to demoralize the Japanese in charge of the project. This succeeded as the project was abandoned for lack of success. Unfortunately, the censorship meant the Reverend Archie Mitchell was not aware of the dangers of the bombs. On May 5, 1945, Reverend Mitchell and his pregnant wife Elyse went on a picnic in a forest in Oregon. They brought five kids from his Sunday school class. While he parked the car, his wife and the five kids went exploring and encountered a balloon. When they tampered with it, it exploded killing all of them. The six were the only Americans killed by Axis actions in America during WWII. Be careful when you go into a forest on the west coast. In 2014, some Canadian forestry workers found one and it had to be defused by a bomb disposal unit.
– Plunges Again pp. 200-201
– https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon-bomb-killed-six-americansfive-them-children-oregon-180972259/
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