From
the Los Angeles Times January 16, 1994
Balloons
That Bombed
49
Years Ago, Japanese Explosives Drifted Into Footnotes of Ventura County History
It wasn't exactly a day of infamy in Ventura County [just north of Los Angeles]
-- hardly anyone knew what happened.
But
49 years ago yesterday -- Jan. 15, 1945, toward the end of World War II -- the
winds of war brought the first of three spectacularly unsuccessful and almost
unnoticed Japanese assaults on the coast.
The
attacks were not carried out by enemy submarines, or even by long-distance bombers.
These bombs came by balloon -- paper
balloons -- sent all the way from Japan.
The
first Fugo balloon bomb created a crater in the dry bed of the Santa Clara River
near Saticoy. Two days later, on Jan. 17, an entire balloon was found in Moorpark,
containing unexploded incendiary bombs but missing the 33-pound anti-personnel
bomb carried by the balloons. Remnants of a third balloon bomb were found Feb.
21 in Oxnard.
"It's probably
the only time anyone could actually say that the war came to Ventura County,"
said Richard Senate, a Thousand Oaks-based historian. "These balloons were
very ingeniously designed devices on the drawing board. Luckily for us, they didn't
perform well in real life."
The
Japanese attack on the county was not revealed at the time, Senate and others
said. Local news media agreed with government officials to squelch stories about
the incidents to prevent the Japanese from knowing whether their unassuming weapons
made it to American shores.
"It wasn't until after the war that we saw
any kind of news reports about the balloons," Senate said. "By then,
people were getting on with their lives and didn't really seem to care too much
about the incident."
No other
landings in Southern California were recorded, although remnants of a balloon
were found floating about 60 miles west of San Pedro [the port of Los Angeles].
The balloons, about 70 feet high and
30 feet in diameter, were [first] launched from Japan in November, 1944. The idea,
according to Tom Crouch, chairman of the Smithsonian Institution's Department
of Aeronautics in Washington, was to start hundreds of forest fires in California
and throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Designed
to ride the swift west-to-east high-altitude jet stream, an estimated 10,000 balloons
were launched by the Japanese army and they malfunctioned by the hundreds. Crouch
said it is possible that only 10% of the devices made it across the Pacific to
places as far-flung as Alaska and Mexico. An estimated 355 of the airborne bombs
were credited with reaching U.S. territory, some getting as far as Michigan and
Texas.
"They wanted to set
the Northwest on fire," Crouch said. "It was a desperation move. They
wanted to strike back at us for our aerial bombing raids."
Bert
Webber, an Oregon-based historian, said the bombs are known to have caused six
fatalities among U.S. civilians. On May 5, 1945, an Oregon woman and five children
at a church picnic became the only known victims when they approached a downed
balloon and its 33-pound bomb exploded.
The
balloons were made of paper and glued with potato paste. The air envelope was
filled with hydrogen and an elaborate system of ballast weights linked to a barometer
managed the device in flight.
When
the balloon would lose altitude, Webber said, a small explosive device -- about
the size of a shotgun shell -- would fire and a ballast weight would be released,
allowing the balloon to resume its normal operating altitude -- about 38,000 feet.
A typical crossing took two to three days, he said.
Webber
said the balloon bomb attacks would have been stepped up by the Japanese if the
U.S. forces had not started even more intensive aerial bombing over Japan with
B-29 Superfortress bombers.
"There's
evidence indicating that they were ready to launch even larger balloons with larger
bomb loads," Webber said. "What stopped them was our B-29 raids over
Japan. It literally crushed their ability to make the things."
For
Senate, the balloon bombs showed the resourcefulness of the Japanese military.
"They used Japanese schoolgirls to construct these things using non-strategic
materials such as paper and potato paste." Senate said. "For very little
money they were essentially making unguided missiles."
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