A menacing balloon from Asia floated in the skies over Montana. The year was 1944.
The balloon, with a small incendiary bomb attached, drifted down to a forested area near Kalispell, Mont., crumpling into a heap. Two loggers found it there in December 1944. The FBI and Army Air Force arrived to study the strange contraption, 33 1/2 feet wide, made of laminated paper. Writing on the balloon told them it was Japanese and had been completed a few weeks earlier at a Japanese factory.
Around the same time, a bomb crater was discovered near Thermopolis, Wyo. And then another balloon was found near Estacada, Ore.
Farmers, ranchers and others began reporting balloon incidents. They heard explosions or found small holes in the ground with metal fragments nearby, or partially inflated balloons in the scrub brush.
What they were seeing was Japan’s effort to bring the war to the U.S. mainland by launching bomb-bearing balloons onto the Pacific jet stream. Japan launched nearly 10,000 such balloons from Nov. 3, 1944, to April 1945. Around 300 of them landed in the United States. Each carried two incendiaries and a 33-pound antipersonnel bomb.
“It’s the only thing that they had that was capable of reaching the United States — and even that was a long shot,” Robert Mikesh, who wrote a monograph about Japan’s balloon bomb program for the Smithsonian Annals of Flight Series, said in a 2020 interview.
The only casualties from those attacks came from the tragic discovery on May 5, 1945, of an unexploded balloon bomb by small group on a church outing in the Gearhart Mountain area of Southern Oregon. The Rev. Archie Mitchell and his wife, Elyse Mitchell, of Bly, Ore., took five children with them. While the reverend parked the car, Elyse and the children called to him that they had found a strange object in the woods. He shouted a warning, but it was too late. The explosion killed his wife and the five children, ages 11 to 14.
The U.S. Office of Censorship had asked journalists not to report on the balloon bomb incidents so that the Japanese would not know they had successfully reached the U.S. mainland, and the request was honored. But after the deaths in Oregon, the War Department issued a statement describing the balloon bombs so that people finding debris would know not to touch it.