Balloon Bombs, Plus Other Nastiness
Attack from the air is unnerving as well as potentially deadly. People, particularly civilians, do not cotton to the idea of harmful things dropping onto them from the sky. That’s one psychological advantage held by purveyors of airborne warfare, and what drove the Japanese to pursue a strategically worthless but tactically clever air campaign against the United States in the final eighteen months of the war. Following study of Pacific air currents, a Japanese naval meteorologist named Sakyo Adachi confirmed that airborne incendiary-and- antipersonnel devices launched from Japan to float above the ocean—for days or weeks—would pass north of Hawaii and eventually reach America’s west coast.
Pacific trade winds blow from east to west, but above those winds is a west-to- east flow, the Japan Current. High explosives lifted above the trade winds would float eastward. In a test, Adachi attached an incendiary-filled canister to a simple paper balloon. The balloon was inflated with gas and released into the sky. A Zero fighter sent to track the flight confirmed the hoped-for ascension of the balloon into the Japan Current. The device was on its way east to, Adachi hoped, the United States.
The balloon bombs would ordinarily fall into a subsection of the UFO category, but because the balloons were so slow and small, they became UFOs of another sort: unseen flying objects. The scheme was clever, but Japanese naval aspirations for it were plainly incredible. The tacticians’ dream was that a flurry of bombs wafting into the great pine forests that covered California, Oregon, and Washington would set off tremendous forest fires. America’s timber industry would suffer, and, more crucially, civilians would be stunned into panic. Some Japanese meteorological projections anticipated explosive balloons floating as far east as Salt Lake City and even Chicago. The Japanese reasoned that if American timber, housing stock, and other civilian areas suffered regular damage, the USA might agree to a negotiated settlement to the war. That was a pipe dream, of course, especially given presidents Roosevelt and Truman’s clarity on the issue of Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Regardless, over a period of months some six thousand balloon bombs— known colloquially to their creators as Fugo—were lifted aloft into the Japan Current. They traveled east, but most were lost over the great expanse of the Pacific. Of the Fugo balloons that reached America’s West Coast, one or two sparked small timber fires in Oregon and possibly Washington. Most of the devices lucky enough to make landfall dropped unnoticed onto desert areas of California and Nevada. The balloon-bomb program could never have forced a change to America’s determination to end the war on its own terms, but would have created a stir if it could have duplicated its greatest—and most miserable— achievement: on May 5, 1945, a Fugo fell and exploded near Sunday School picnickers on Gearhart Mountain, near Bly, Oregon, killing a pregnant woman and five children.
An American attempt to send unseen flying objects to Japan was even more incredible than the Fugo scheme: President Roosevelt authorized Project X-Ray, which called for Japanese cities to be terrorized by millions of bats carrying tiny incendiaries. The small mammals were to be released from American planes.
Trial runs in Texas, New Mexico, and California during 1942–43 showed an unpredictable kind of efficacy—a cadre of test bats accidentally incinerated a new U.S. airfield—but the bat-bomb campaign was terminated when American scientists made significant progress toward an atomic bomb.
The Fugo incendiaries and bat bombs are linked to (admittedly simple) technology, but most strongly to twisted notions of race. From the beginning of America’s struggle with Japan, American propaganda, particularly illustrations, magazine cartoons, and animated cartoons, depicted Japanese as squalid, yellow, bandy-legged little creatures with fangs or, if the depiction was intended to be more “humorous,” horsey buck teeth. Thick, round spectacles brought attention to squinted, “slanted” eyes above features twisted into perpetual grimaces.
Sometimes, these cartoon Japanese had tails, like monkeys. (Arthur Szyk, a brilliantly talented Polish-American designer and caricaturist featured regularly in Time, Collier’s, and other major magazines, was particularly skilled at creating these sorts of alien-seeming Japanese hobgoblins.) Much as the Nazi anti-Semitic cartoonist “Fips” (Philippe Rupprecht) depicted European and American Jews as subhuman in hundreds of drawings published in Jules Streicher’s abhorrent rag Der Stürmer, Szyk and other American cartoonists established that Japanese were closer to vermin than human. We were encouraged to believe that against such creatures, the atomic bomb wasn’t just justified but obligatory.
The Japanese exploited race hatred via cartoons of giant-sized, cucumber- nosed Americans, with red hair and an imperative to murder children and steal the virtue of Japan’s women.
It is in such repugnant stuff that the war’s belligerents developed a template reflected just half a decade later in such pop culture inventions as Hollywood’s The Thing from Another World, a generation of horrific science-fiction comic books and aggressive SF toys, and, later still, accounts given by shaken victims of abductions engineered by brutal extraterrestrials. Like the Germans, these ETs have superweapons and other advanced technology; and like the imagined Japanese and the Americans, they are ugly, duplicitous, and vicious.