WORLD WAR II’S PAPER BOMB ATTACK

It’s one of World War II’s odd­est, and least-​​known sto­ries: In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese sent a fleet of hydrogen-​​filled, paper bal­loons across the jet stream to strike North America. And it worked.
Out of the 9,000 hand­made incen­di­aries sent, 1,000 even­tu­ally landed here. And not just along the West Coast , but as far east as sub­ur­ban Detroit.
Slate (via /​.) reviews the tale, gives a warn­ing or two about cen­sor­ship, and pro­vides a few links.
THERE’S MORE: “In my research for Terrors And Marvels: How Science
And Technology Changed The Character And Outcome Of World War II, I came across an orig­i­nal photo, in the FDR Library at Hyde Park, of one of the paper bal­loon bombs, teth­ered on a base in Montana,” Defense Tech dad Tom Shachtman writes.

The photo was there because it had crossed the president’s desk, and it had clearly alarmed him and his aides. (It is repro­duced in the book.) In gen­eral the bal­loons did very lit­tle harm, though, no more than iso­lated light­ning strikes might have done, and their land­ing sites were less pre­dictable than light­ning strikes.
The Canadian gov­ern­ment did ready a plane full of peat moss that they could impreg­nate with bubonic plague, for retal­i­a­tion on Japan in case one of the paper bal­loon bombs did con­tain bio­log­i­cal, disease-​​causing agents. In with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion on the bal­loons from the pub­lic until American and Canadian sci­en­tists could deter­mine the make-​​up of the pay­loads, the cen­sor­ship served its basic pur­poses: to pre­vent panic in the gen­eral pub­lic, and also to pre­vent trigger-​​happy peo­ple in the mil­i­tary from send­ing peat-​​bombs in return.

June 17th, 2004 | Retro-Futuro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.