Audio version: Download MP3 or use controls below:
|
Archie had heard rumors about balloon bombs. He said those rumors had been in his mind when he shouted to his wife not to touch this one. The rumors were that the Japanese had started launching balloons made of paper from Japan, with bombs dangling beneath, to ride the high-elevation air currents across the Pacific Ocean. When they arrived over the U.S., they were supposed to release their bombs and self-destruct. Several of them had been found, and several others had been spotted self-destructing. But there had been nothing but rumors, because the U.S. government was keen to keep the success of the balloon bombing operation from the Japanese. The enemy, they knew, didn’t really know if the balloons were working. So they kept all mention of the program out of the newspapers. By the time of the Bly explosion, that silence had worked. The Japanese, after months of monitoring West Coast newspapers without hearing anything, had given up the program. But that silence had been a costly one for the children of Bly. The newspapers had to report something, so they simply announced that the deaths had been due to an unknown explosion. Within a week or two the authorities knew that had been a mistake. Rumors and whispers by Southern Oregon residents quickly escalated into wild and frightful speculations. Loggers working the woods all over the state started stepping gingerly, and production plummeted, and fear levels started to ramp up — precisely the reaction the Japanese had hoped to inspire. Belatedly, authorities realized they’d need to come clean, and so Archie Mitchell — still shaken by the tragedy that had befallen his wife and the children of his friends — was authorized to tell the reporters all. Perhaps it worked. When the Japanese finally did surrender, two months later, their balloon bombs hadn’t taken any other lives — although there’s reason to suspect they did start a fairly serious forest fire, the 180,000-acre monster known as the Third Tillamook Burn, which broke out on July 9 of that year. Four years later, the U.S. Congress approved a bill that paid a total of $20,000 to Archie Mitchell and the families of the slain children. The members of the Mitchell picnic party have gone down in history as the only casualties of an enemy attack on the American mainland during the war … the only casualties so far, that is. Even today, 70 years later, it’s worth remembering that the Japanese launched 9,000 of these devices, each loaded with three bombs. Only 361 of them have been accounted for. Clearly, thousands of them fell harmlessly in the Pacific Ocean … but it’s still a possibility that one or two fell unnoticed in a deep forest somewhere, and are still up there, just waiting for some careless cross-country trekker to find one of them the hard way.
|
On our Sortable Master Directory you can search by keywords, locations, or historical timeframes. Hover your mouse over the headlines to read the first few paragraphs (or a summary of the story) in a pop-up box.
©2008-2015 by Finn J.D. John. Copyright assertion does not apply to assets that are in the public domain or are used by permission.