By 1944, Japan had already sent several weather balloons towards North America. These initial balloons contained radio transmitters and weather equipment designed to record and send back real time weather information to Japan. Although the Americans did not know it at the time, these balloons had traveled more than 2,000 miles before they quit transmitting and then miraculously continued the next four thousand miles to the North American mainland.
Since weather gathering equipment was well known by military intelligence during WWII, the Japanese balloons were looked at more as a curiosity than as any important military event. However, that began to change after November 4,1944 when a rubberized silk balloon reached Fourth Air Force. Located just north of San Francisco, California, the Fourth Air Force was in charge of the defense of the West Coast. Even though the balloon was thought to have been Japanese, military intelligence probably rightly assumed it was just another weather balloon released by a Japanese submarine somewhere in the Pacific, but near the West Coast. However, in December, Fourth Air Force began taking the balloons more of a threat as reports started coming in from the Western Defense Command.
On December 6, 1944, reports from ranchers in and around Wyoming of unexplained explosions forced Fourth Air to look for explanations and for some kind of proof that what the farmers and rancher heard, was real. The proof came on December 19,1944 with the discovery of a bomb crater near Thermopiles, Wyoming. The investigation was turned over to Army and Navy military intelligence who found the first evidence of Japanese paper balloons causing the explosions on December 31,1944 when another balloon was discovered, this one in the state of Oregon.
The balloon in Oregon had also detonated, but instead of disintegrating and destroying all evidence, as in Wyoming, this Oregon crater contained pieces of both the balloon and parts of the Japanese high-explosives. Within the next two weeks, four more balloon bombs were discovered and analyzed. Military Intelligence concluded the balloons were the first wave of a new Japanese offensive weapon. The Fourth Air Force then notified the War Department of the new Japanese attacks. Within hours, on January 4,1945, George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff made the Western Defense Command coordinator for all balloon intelligence activities.
Twenty-five officers of the U.S. Army and Navy began investigating every reported unexplained explosion in North America, including those in Canada and in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. While gathering information about the balloons proved difficult, early reports indicated the balloons were dropping either incendiary or antipersonnel bombs, or both. Even so, other more hideous reports indicated the Japanese were in the process of developing bacteriological and chemical warfare bombs, and some reports indicate the War Department felt it likely that as the Japanese lost islands in the Pacific, the Japanese would likely use the balloons to carry biologic and chemicals into North America. Obviously, the War Department concluded, something needed to be done about free floating Japanese paper balloons that had the potential of setting huge expanses of Western timberland on fire. Therefore, the Western Defense Command created two military projects, Firefly and Lightning, to defend against the invisible balloon threat.
Project Firefly used aircraft and almost three thousand troops stationed at critical junctions throughout Western America to fight potential forest fires that might otherwise affect America’s ability to continue fighting the war. While Firefly addressed known hazards, the Lightning Project quietly advised agricultural officers, veterinarians, and farmers to be on the lookout for unexplained or strange diseases in livestock and crops, and to report them immediately. Furthermore, the Army then sent decontamination chemicals and sprays to strategic points in the Western States. Along with the reactive projects, the Army and Navy also attempted to intercept the balloons before they reached North America.
Throughout much of 1945, the Army and Navy dispatched more than 500 aircraft to search for reported balloons. Although defense of North America was paramount, collecting and analyzing the balloons was also important. Therefore, a new kind of ammunition, called “headlight tracer” aloud the balloons to be shot down without destroying them. However, only two balloons were ever shot down, one with conventional ammunition destroyed a ballon in Nevada while the other was safely brought down in California. Other balloons were found in the Aleutians and in Canada. In one case, a slow moving unarmed USN aircraft brought down a balloon using nothing more than its prop wash as it repeatedly flew by the balloon.
By April, Navy Aircraft spotted a large number of balloons and on April 13, shot down nine balloons flying between 30,000 and 37,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. Although that one day was an exceptional day, it also demonstrates how difficult it was to find balloons on any other day. Weather, inaccurate spotters, and high altitudes made intercepting balloons very difficult even for the best pilots. Furthermore, even the best new RADAR techniques proved ineffective at locating the balloons at virtually any altitude. About the only thing that seemed to be certain was where the balloons came from.
After several balloons surfaced without blowing up, the Army successfully disarmed the balloons and began an in-depth analysis. While the balloons were obviously Japanese in origin, the question became, where were they constructed and launched? Early thoughts were that they were possibly being launched from Japanese midget submarines, however, that theory was discarded after America began reading the new Japanese naval codes. The next theory was that the Japanese were using ships or possibly an island near America to launch the balloons, but that too proved wrong. Eventually, ballast sand was sent to a geologist in Canada who analyzed microscopic features of the sand. He determined the sand came from a specific beach in Japan. On May 25, 1945, aerial photographs taken along the beach near Sendai, Japan, showed what looked like partially inflated balloons, railways, taxiways, and what looked like heavily defended positions that otherwise had no other reasonable explanation. Although the launching pads had been found, there was no immediate plan to destroy them. However, although no one in the US or Canada knew it at the time, it really did not matter that the location was known because by late April, 1945, the Japanese paper-balloon offensive was over; the highest level Japanese military officials ended the project without converting the balloons to either biological or chemical weapons.
Part three of this series will discuss the successes and failures of the Japanese attacks from both the Japanese and the US and Canada points of view. Although we touched upon the worst case scenarios in this chapter, part four will revisit the worst case scenarios to set the stage for part five of this series, examining what might happen if similar balloon attacks would take place today.
