Information provided on the Japanese Balloon

World War II was in its third year in 1944.  The Allies were slowly gaining on the Germans and Japanese on the European and Pacific fronts. After several defeats by the Americans in the Pacific, the Japanese were slowly being forced back toward their home islands.   Now, the Americans had control of the shipping lanes and the air as numerous Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk by the allies.  Now, the Japanese had to pull back to defend their homeland.  They had to develop something new that we could not destroy.

 The Japanese assembled the ”Balloon Bombs” on the beaches of an area of Honshu Island, the main island of Japan. They were made of mulberry leaf paper for the balloon section and then filled with hydrogen for lift.  Many cloth sandbags were attached to a ring around the bottom. Also, attached to the ring were incendiary bombs, which would explode when the balloon descended and struck the ground. They had devised an intricate system whereby the pressure valves on the balloon would release hydrogen if the balloon went too high and then a valve which would release sandbags, one by one, for whatever was needed to gain altitude. They even had an 18-foot fuse that would burn for a long time.

 Starting on November 3, 1944, the Japanese sent 9,300 of these balloons into the air. The Japanese air current took them northeast up by the Aleutian Islands, across the Gulf of Alaska and then southeast toward Canada and the United States. Hundreds never made it to the land, but numerous ones did land primarily in Canada, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho while a few even reached Wyoming. 

 On Friday, December 8, 1944, at approximately 6:30 p.m., several people in Gebo noticed a balloon in the air over the northwestern part of the town. It was quite low and had a flare lighting up the area around, so people came out of their homes to view this very strange object. People who saw the balloon would call to their neighbors to tell them. So, in a short period of time, most of the town was watching this slow-moving object make its way toward Kirby.

 The balloon drifted lower and lower as it passed to the east side of Kirby and finally landed in the Big Horn River. Fortunately, a miner named Steve Czarny, who happened to be a mine explosive expert, followed the route of the aircraft from Gebo. When the balloon landed he was able to go over to examine it to see exactly what it was. He was surprised to see the bombs attached to the rim. With his experience from the mine he knew it was dangerous so he cut all of the wires so that no one would be hurt or killed by the blast. He took the bombs over to the river bank and threw them into the river to prevent any possibility of an explosion.

 Removing the weight of the incendiary bombs caused the balloon to gain flight again and eventually land on the power line that supplied electricity to Kirby. It became an interesting sight since the power poles were alongside of the highway.  In the days following the landing, numerous people stopped to view the unusual sight of a balloon hanging on the power line. 

Pete Cavalli, who was in ninth grade, lived in Gebo and was on a bus bringing students back home from Thermopolis High School around 4 o’clock in the afternoon on the following Monday.  Pete asked Carl Sharp, the driver,  to stop so that the students could see this unusual picture. The balloon was about 30 feet in diameter so part of it was lying on the ground. Pete said that many of the students jumped out of the bus to get a souvenir by taking a piece of the balloon. They thought it was unusual that it was paper as they thought all balloons were made of rubber.  When I visited Pete 71 years later, he told me that he still had a piece of the balloon.

 Sometime in the next week, the sheriff and another man came to talk to all of  our classes to warn us of the danger of a balloon bomb. If we were to see one, we should stay away from it and let the sheriff know. I am not sure if the man was from the Casper Air Base or just an investigator, but I do remember him warning us of the danger.

He reminded us not to talk about it because there might be Japanese spies listening and he did not want them to know that one of the bombs came as far as Kirby. As he finished his talk, he told us of an often-quoted phrase during the war------“Remember, loose lips sink ships.” So, being good American citizens we did not discuss the balloons.  We may have looked each way to see if anyone was listening, and then whisper to each other.

Years later, I learned that a French geologist had studied the sand in the bags hanging on to the balloon and found that this type of sand was found only on a beach area of Honshu Island, the main island of Japan. Our intelligence listened and passed it on to the U.S. Air Force. They flew a couple of reconnaissance flights to confirm their suspicions and sent a wave of B17’s to plaster the area with bombs.  That was the end of the Japanese Balloon Bomb era. It lasted less than six months and the war was over eight months later. The short life of the balloon bomb was Japan’s last chance to attack America.

Dr. Don “Duke” Bolich 

Broomfield, Colo.

Editors note: After an F-22 fighter jet from Langley Air Force Base recently fired a Sidewinder air-to-air missile, downing a suspected Chinese spy balloon, we received this info on a Japanese Balloon Bomb that came down in Hot Springs County in 1944.