Japanese Balloons

I know this has been dealt with before, but this piece in today's paper caught my attention.

Columnist Jerry Jonas looks back at a terrorist threat America faced during World War II that lingers today.

While the threat of terrorist attacks within the United States today, such as the mass shootings and recent use of vehicles to run down innocent civilians, poses a relatively new yet constant threat to our population, there are, unbelievably, other terror threats that, while having been around much longer and being extremely rare, do exist.

One of these still-existing threats is the direct result of desperate actions taken by the Japanese military as far back as the closing days of World War II.

On May 5, 1945, just a few months before the Japanese surrendered to bring an end to World War II, a small group of U.S. civilians — a minister’s pregnant wife and a group of five children on a church picnic on Gearhart Mountain near Klamath Falls, Oregon — were killed by a Japanese aerial bomb. They had discovered the bomb in a nearby woods, and were apparently dragging it into a clearing when it exploded, killing all of them.

While these were the only known deaths of civilians occurring in the continental United States during that war, and certainly a tragedy, the situation could have been much worse.

The bomb was only one of about 10,000 launched toward the U.S. from Japan over a five- month period during the final year of World War II. It was one of the last desperate acts of a country that was on the verge of collapse.

In late 1944, with U.S. Air Force bombers raining death and destruction on almost every major city in Japan, and civilian deaths in the hundreds of thousands, the Japanese military sought a way to retaliate.

They would attempt to hit the U.S. mainland with a new secret weapon: thousands of large balloons, each carrying hundreds of pounds of anti-personnel or incendiary bombs, and some possibly carrying chemical or biological weapons.

The 33-foot-wide, bomb-carrying balloons, made of rubberized silk and a special paper, would be launched from Japan and carried by high-altitude winds more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific to North America. There, they would fall indiscriminately on cities and towns, in forests, in the mountains and on open land — wherever the winds carried them.

The prime purpose of the balloon assault was to demoralize and instill terror in America’s civilian population, cause destruction and possibly ignite forest fires in heavily wooded areas.

In many ways the balloon bomb campaign against the U.S. would be analogous to Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch rocket bomb offensive against Great Britain, yet it would be far less sophisticated and thankfully, less destructive.

It’s estimated that between early November 1944 and April 1945, some 10,000 balloons were launched. Carried across the Pacific by the jet stream at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour, about a thousand of them reached North America, with about 300 of them actually falling on U.S. soil.

The first balloon to be discovered was spotted floating off the California coast near Los Angeles by the crew of a U.S. Navy patrol plane. Most of them landed in the Northwestern states, with at least 50 seen over Washington in one day.

Some of them traveled as far east as Davenport, Iowa, and at least one reached the suburbs of Detroit. Dozens were reported in Alaska and about 100 in Canada. Others were sighted as far south as Mexico, and as far west as Hawaii.

On April 11, 1945, in a period of only two hours, nine balloon bombs were shot down by U.S. Air Force fighters near Attu in the Aleutian Islands.

To reduce the chance of panic among U.S. residents, and to deny the Japanese any information on the success of the launches, the U.S. government, with the cooperation of the news media, quickly put in place a strict policy of silence. But following the civilian deaths in Oregon, the government was forced to publicize the balloon bombs, warning people not to tamper with them.

The balloon attack had begun after U.S. air defense facilities had been deactivated. To counter this threat, Army, Air Force and Navy fighters flew intercept missions to shoot down balloons when sighted, and Army personnel were stationed at critical points to combat any forest fires that might occur.


Decontamination chemicals and sprays to counter any possible use of germ warfare were quietly distributed in the western states. Yet before detailed Air Force defensive plans had been put into effect, the attacks ceased.

Based on available evidence, except for the six civilian deaths in Oregon, the balloon bomb offensive was a total failure. There were no major forest fires and no unusual outbreaks of diseases.

For a variety of reasons, much of the evidence of the balloon attacks was long-concealed by the U.S. government, and it is still considered one of the best-kept secrets of World War II. Most primary source material on the assault remained security-classified until the early 1980s.

Sadly, the unfortunate woman and the five children killed by one of these bombs were the only known fatalities occurring within the continental U.S. during WWII as a direct result of enemy action.

Yet a real threat from these weapons still exists. As recently as November 2014, forestry workers in Lumby, British Columbia, happened upon one of the balloon bombs. Considered too dangerous to move, the bomb was detonated using C-4 explosives.

In 1984, Bert Webber, an author and researcher, claimed to have located 45 balloon bombs in Oregon, 37 in Alaska, 28 in Washington and 25 in California.

While it’s been more than 70 years since the balloons were launched, it’s a reasonable assumption that hundreds of them continue to lie undetected across the U.S. and Canada, and all these decades later, they still pose a serious threat to anyone who encounters them.

Jonas: These World War II balloon terror bombs still threaten America