On This Day: Japanese WWII “Balloon Bomb” Kills 6 in Oregon

The Rev. Archie Mitchell was on an outing with his pregnant wife, Elsie, and five local youngsters when they found the odd-looking balloon. He “watched in horror” when it exploded as Elsie and the children dragged it out of the woods.

In a little-known 1944 Fu-Go campaign, Japan released 9,000 bomb-laden balloons that floated across the Pacific and were intended to explode in America, causing forest fires and panic.

Each balloon was armed with “one 15 kilogram antipersonnel bomb and two incendiary devices,” and they “looked like giant jellyfish,” according to the U.S. Air Force.

Japan said it was retaliation for the 1942 U.S. “Doolittle raid,” in which American pilots bombed key targets in Tokyo, under cover of darkness, from aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Seen as American revenge for Pearl Harbor, the raid was “a tremendous boost to American morale.”

As the balloons landed, the U.S. government tried to hide the information from the American public, hoping the Japanese would abandon the campaign as ineffective. The press largely cooperated with the government’s secrecy efforts.

In April 1945, U.S. B-29 bombers destroyed the plants that produced the balloons, though the Japanese had halted the project around the same time because they thought the bombs were not reaching America, according to the Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Following the deaths of Elsie Mitchell and her children—the “only known fatalities on the U.S mainland from enemy attack during World War II,” according to B-17 navigator Marshall Stelzriede’s Web site—the U.S. government decided to inform the public about the balloon bombs.

Though the balloon bombs caused minimal damage in the U.S., there was potential for the Fu-Go campaign to be far more destructive, according to the book “Japan’s World War II Bomb Attacks on North America.”

“The concept of balloon bombs might have changed the course of the war in favor of the Japanese had it been pursued with more vigor and tenacity,” it writes. “Had this balloon weapon been further exploited by using germ or gas bombs, the results could have been disastrous to the American people.”

Even today, the balloon bombs pose a threat. Balloon bombs were found in 17 states, with the most recent one discovered in 1955 in Alaska with “its payload still lethal after at least 10 years of erosion.” An Air Force Web site says “dangers of the balloon bomb still may exist” because “hundreds were never found.”

The balloon bombs aren't the only World War II occurrence largely unknown by Americans today. In 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast, which “went into the history books as the only hostile shelling of a military base on the U.S. mainland during World War II and the first since the War of 1812.” Then, a few months later, Japanese planes dropped bombs on Oregon, causing forest fires on two separate occasions.

A 2006 article in America in WWII magazine describes the highly effective German U-boat presence on America’s Atlantic coast during World War II. “Ship by sinking ship, the Nazis achieved a victory over the United States comparable to and even more devastating than the one the Japanese had enjoyed at Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier. … Meanwhile, the American people were not being told how close they were to disaster.”