Eight years ago I put up a post about Japan’s World War II rather random weapon, the incendiary balloon. I just came across a more thorough account in Nicholas Basbanes’ history of paper. The balloons were made of paper, so …
[This] ambitious [balloon] offensive was deemed feasible on the strength of meteorological research conducted in the 1930s that had discovered ‘rivers of fast moving air’ flowing in the upper atmosphere toward North America, wind patterns that we know today as jet streams. …
Seven manufacturing centers were set up around Tokyo to assemble what was code-named the Fu-Go Weapon (the first character of the word for balloon is fu), with handmade paper selected for the skin of the thirty-two-foot-diameter balloons, six hundred individual sheets required for each one, all glued together in a lamination that made no allowance for gas leakage. …
It is believed that nine thousand balloon bombs were launched from three coastal locations in Japan between November 3, 1944, and April 5, 1945, each inflated with nineteen thousand cubic feet of hydrogen. About a thousand are thought to have reached North America … Sightings were confirmed in locations that ranged from Alaska, British Columbia, and Manitoba … to Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska … One traveled as far east as Grand Rapids, Michigan … Wreckage … turns up from time to time in densely wooded areas, one as recently as 1992. …
Unwilling to give the Japanese any information to fine-tune their assaults, American censors placed a strict embargo on all details of the raids. … The … assault was not without its victims, however. On May 5, 1945, a woman and five children on an outing near the Gearhart Mountains, northwest of Klamath Falls, Oregon, came across a strange object lying on the ground; all six were killed when one of them apparently tugged on a dangling line, triggering a bomb. A memorial plaque erected after the war identifies the location as the ‘only place on the American continent where death resulted from enemy action during World War II.’
The people killed in the ballon bombing campaign were almost all children. Children killed by balloons. Children love balloons!
source:
On Paper: the everything of its two-thousand year history
by Nicholas A. Basbanes
2013. Alfred A. Knopf, New York
