Japanese Balloon Bomb - circa 1945.
I just found out about these things. The Japanese launched thousands of these balloons from Honshu against the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada in the final months of fighting during World War II. The idea was to use the existing air streams to carry them across the Pacific and have them trigger forest fires in the Northwest. They didn't really work, apparently they only killed six people in a single incident (a woman and five children in Oregon came across one while picnicking and accidentally set it off) and none triggered any forest fires. The Japanese abandoned the program in April 1945, 4 months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Anyways, I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating - we tend to focus on the grand narratives of history, which is fine, but in doing so things like these slip through the cracks and be forgotten, which is a shame.
Really? I thought it was common knowledge. I remember first hearing about it in 20th World History class in Highschool.
ReplyDeleteSome others I like:
1) The sinking of the Lusitania is not the real catalyst for the US entry into WWI, there's a much better story involving British chicanery and the threat of a Mexican invasion.
2) How Canada tricked the US into not invading the Soviet Union, but how the US used that to trick everyone into remilitarizing and avoided the Soviet veto in the UN over the Korean Invasion and how Mao was left on the sidelines until General MaCarthur finally showed what a fuck-up he was.
You couldn't write this stuff