Oregon Country revisited: Balloon bombs of World War II

High clouds ruffled the Southern Oregon sky on Saturday, May 5, 1945 when Rev. and Mrs. Archie Mitchell and five young members of their Christian Alliance Church left Bly for an outing in nearby woods. The pains of World War II, raging in the Pacific Theater, were closed out as the group fished in small waters along the Bly-Dairy Creek Road. While Rev. Mitchell was moving the car, the rest of the group walked along the road. One of the boys spotted a strange object, and called:

"Hey, Mr. Mitchell, what's this hanging in the bushes? Looks like a parachute or something."

Rev. Mitchell jumped out of the car and ran toward the group, now gathered around the object. Mitchell shouted:

"WAIT! Don't touch it! Get away from it."

But, Mitchell's warning was choked off by a loud explosion, the force of which knocked him and the others to the ground. Two men working on a road grader some distance away heard the blast and came running. They found Rev. Mitchell stunned, but alive. His wife was dying, and the five youths in the party had been killed instantly.

Those innocent people were the victims of an ingenious plot by the Japanese High Command.

What the church party had discovered was one of the gas-filled balloon bombs that had been released in Japan, carried across the Pacific in the upper atmosphere and lowered to this continent by a timing mechanism that released the gas.

The Japanese released thousands of the balloons from mainland Japan, the Kurile Islands and from submarines beginning in December, 1944.

Each balloon carried two incendiary bombs, one fragmentation bomb and the timing device.

The latter instrument was designed to release the gas after 50 hours, the time estimated by Japanese scientists needed to carry the bombs to northwest America.

The intent of the High Command was two-fold: create panic among the American people when the bombs began exploding; and burn the vast Western forests.

One bomb was uncovered by a Forest Service snow plow near Lake of the Woods in early 1945. Not knowing the danger of the device, workers put it in the back of a pick-up truck, then drove to Klamath Falls where they turned it over to the U.S. Army. A member of the work crew described their find:

"Well, the balloon looked to be round, maybe 30 or 40 feet in diameter. It was made of rice paper, covered with a waxy substance. The thing had a funnel-like opening at the bottom and was attached to a mechanism that was about 2-1/2 feet high. It had some sandbags and other things hanging down from it. We figured it was a weather balloon till the Army boys said those 'other things' were bombs!"

Balloon bombs were found unexploded in at least a dozen counties in Oregon, and one exploded over a high tension wire at the Hanford Atomic Works in Washington State. Another fell without damage in the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco. Bombs drifted inland as far as Detroit, MI, and Houston, TX. But, of the estimated 60,000 balloons released, only about 1,000 actually reached North America, and only a few of those exploded. One man familiar with the Japanese project commented:

"We're just fortunate that the materials the Japanese had available at that time were inferior, so that the timers and other devices were not very efficient. Those balloons could have made quite a difference if thousands had exploded in the Northwest."

The results of the effort to bring the war to North America by unguided aerial devices was one of the best kept secrets of the Pacific conflict, for virtually no information concerning their effect got back to Japan. And, after the war, a memorial was erected near Bly for Mrs. Archie Mitchell and her five youthful companions - the only persons to die in the continental United States as a direct result of World War II enemy action.

Author's note: These Oregon Country historical vignettes were first written for the radio program "Stories of Pacific Powerland." The facts upon which the tales are based are true, though some characters have been created for presentation in a narrative style.