The Fire Balloon Attacks
By 1944, WW2 had had gone disastrously wrong for Japan. It was being slowly starved by an ever tightening American blockade, and its cities were being gradually demolished by steadily intensifying American bomber raids. Japanese authorities were under intense pressure to strike back, but they had no bases or platforms from which to launch retaliatory bomber raids against the US. Then somebody in Japan came up with the idea of using a low tech weapon, such as a balloon, to hit back.
The result was the Fu-Go (“Code Fu”) weapon, a hydrogen balloon capable of carrying a 70 pound load of explosive or incendiary bombs. Planners calculated that when released in Japan, the jet stream would carry them over the Pacific Ocean until they reached North America, where their bombs would drop on American and Canadian cities, forest, and farms. The Japanese were particularly hopeful that the incendiary bombs, coming down in the heavily forested Pacific Northwest, would ignite devastating wildfires, wreak havoc, and cause widespread panic.
The technology was brilliant in its utilization of cheap materials to launch a simple device capable of reaching an enemy’s homeland, thousands of miles away. The Fu-Go fire balloons were technically the first weapons ever with an intercontinental range. In that respect, they preceded both the American B-36 Peacemaker bomber and the Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile.
The first fire balloon was launched on November 3rd, 1944, and in the following months, over 9300 more were built and launched. Japanese planners calculated that about 10% of them would make it across the Pacific to North America. Within days, the first balloon was found floating near Los Angeles, and by the end of November, others had been found as far away as Wyoming and Montana. To avoid a panic, authorities in the US and Canada imposed a news blackout on the fire balloons. It kept civilians from panicking, and also kept the Japanese in the dark about the impact of their campaign.
The greatest hoped-for effect, the sparking of massive wildfires in the forested Pacific Northwest, never materialized because unusually heavy rains kept the forest too damp to ignite. Between that and the news blackout, the Japanese eventually concluded that the Fu-Gu campaign had been a complete flop, so they gave up and abandoned it in April of 1945.
On May 5th, 1945, a minister, his wife, and five children from their parish were on an outing in the woods near the small town of Lakeview, Oregon, when his wife and the children came across one of the Fu-Go devices. Curious, they handled it to see what it was, causing it to go off and kill the woman and the five children. They were the only fatalities of the thousands of bombs launched in the fire balloon campaign.
Fu-Go devices were discovered all along the western parts of North America, from the arctic circle in northern Alaska and Canada, all the way down to Mexico. The majority of the Japanese fire balloons that reached North America were never discovered. So it is a statistical certainty that at least some of these devices are still scattered all over the western parts of the continent. Most of them have probably deteriorated and gone inert by now, but odds are that some are still dangerous if disturbed.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Sources & Further Reading
American Oil and Gas Historical Society – Japanese Sub Attacks Oilfield
Center For Greater Southwestern Studies, University of Texas, Arlington – Thornton Affair
Daily Dose, The – August 27, 1918: The Battle of Ambos Nogales Brings the Fence to the Border
Huachuca Illustrated, Volume 2, 1996 – Buffalo Soldiers at Huachuca: The Battle of Ambos Nogales
National Geographic, May 27th, 2013 – Japan’s Secret WWII Weapon: Balloon Bombs
Now I Know – Lookout Air Raids
Task and Purpose – Balloon Bombs: How Japan Killed Americans at Home In WWII
True West Magazine, October 7th, 2016 – The Bombing of Naco
University of Texas – Pancho Villa: The Attack on Columbus, New Mexico