[DBrow]

I was in a US history museum and asked about Japanese fire balloons- and got a flat denial, it never happened!

Then l I went to another history museum, this one in Halifax NS CA, and they had one there (the frame was original and the fuse/payload was “re-created) and there was the whole story about fire balloons on the West Coast.

I do not understand the caginess, this long after the events.

[DB]

Thank you for the details.

I knew there were attacks and that Japanese subs were off the west coast. Never knew any of the details or particularly about the fire bomb plan.

[magslinger]

SONOBUOY PING!

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[InABunkerUnderSF]

If a bomb falls in the forest...

never mind

[PROCON]

Mr. POE,
You are a wealth of information..did not know that!

[wideminded]

Yet Fujita’s mission stands unique in the annals of warfare.

The thing that seems impressive about this to me is that they had a plane that could:

1. Be stored in a submarine.
2. Take off from a submarine.
3. Find its way back to the submarine.
4. Be safely retrieved along with the pilot.

[hanamizu]

My first legal drink at age 21 was at a bar in Goleta called the Timbers that was supposed to have been built from the timbers of the dock that was destroyed by the Japanese sub. The attack was well known in the Santa Barbara area in the ‘60s.

[Sherman Logan]

Alaska’s soft underbelly was the Aleutians ... Yamamoto could island-hop his way to the Alaskan mainland.

This is a truly hilarious statement, given the weather, just about the worst on earth. Both the American and Japanese forces in the area spent most of their time just trying to survive.

The Aleutians aren't a "soft" anything. The Japanese footholds there were only useful for propaganda purposes and the American attacks to remove them were undertaken for the same reason. No military value at all.

[gaijin]

The balloon bombs did in fact claim some US casualties; in Oregon or Washington State a family happened across one of the now-rusty bombs in 1960 or so. It killed several of them, including one or two kids, I believe. They were picnicers.

Hiroshima school kids folded paper-cranes for the American victims.

Almost unknown - The Manhatten Project was delayed by a day or so by the effects of one Japanese ballon bomb --for decades this was classified. The explosion caused a power-outage of a facility (very far from New Mexico) that powered a critical part of the "device" research facility.

The (history) scholarly journal that detailed the event was fascinating --truly gripping.

The balloon bombs were assembled near one of the places I lived in in Japan.

[Nailbiter]

ping

[kabar]

Militarily ineffective, it nonetheless captures our imagination, embodying all that we hated and admired in our Japanese adversaries: their bluster, their arrogance, their disquieting tenacity, their selfless valor.

Oh come now. If you want daring and selfless valor, look no further than Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942.