Balloons II: The Winds of Fortune

In Brief

Having done little more than spread litter over half of the United States, Japan's interest in balloon warfare quickly dwindled towards the end of World War Two. Yet the US War Department was still in the dark as to the origin of the nasty paper floaters, and drafted the United States Geological Survey to investigate. Join us as two superpowers bring their most secret weapons to battle in this week's story.

Party On

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Last time we revealed that, during World War II Japan bombed the mainland of the United States. The Japanese launched thousands of balloons from their shores equipped with bombs intended to kill American citizens, and start forest fires in the Pacific Northwest besides. Befuddled by the attacks, and as of yet ignorant of the existence of a trans-Pacific jet stream, the United States Department of War figured the bombs were launched off the shores of California or elsewhere nearby. When balloon fragments were found, some of them contained sandbags used for ballast. We pick up the story with The War Deparment having forwarded a bit of sand to the United States Geological Survey for analysis, in hopes that light might be shed on this new, airborne weapon.

The USGS: FDR's Whipping Boy

Heretofore, the U.S. Geological Survey had been little more than a Federal burp. In particular, the dinky agency led a rocky existence in the 1930s, due in no small part to a disagreement it had with President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR happened to hold great stock in the restorative properties of the water of Warm Springs, Georgia, after a visit there ameliorated his polio in the early 1920s, and, when in a position of authority, made it his business to figure out how that water worked. He asked the Survey what the story was, and it calmly replied that the water at Warm Springs, Georgia was no different than ordinary tap water. This lack of faith annoyed FDR to no end. He felt a miracle had occurred on the occasion of his visit, and was unwilling to chalk it up to the placebo effect. Once President, Roosevelt sent a full team of geologists there. Upon arrival, the Survey team encountered another team headed by German Doktor Paul Haertle. Doktor Haertle was a bubbly miracle water expert hailing from Bad Kissingen, Germany who was there to check on them at the President's behest; Roosevelt apparently didn't trust his own geologists. The U.S. Geological Survey team, headed by Foster Hewett, had a chat with Heartle. In his account, "The Gravel Page", John McPhee details the conversation:

At one point, Doktor Heartl asked Hewett, "Are you studying the gas that comes from the water?"
Hewett answered, "We are."
Haertl said, "Have you examined the shape of the bubbles?"
Hewett's pupils doubled in size. He said, "No, we haven't."
Haertl said, "Oh, you must examine the bubbles. Some bubbles are round, but others are square."
Hewett (all this would appear in U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1589) said, "Do I understand that you know places in Germany where the bubbles issuing from water are square?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Hewett," Haertl said. "The bubbles of gas at Bad Kissingen are square. You see, Mr. Hewett, when you put your arm in water that contains gas, bubbles appear on the flesh. Now if these bubbles are round they produce no effect, but if they are square they have the effect of stimulating nerves on the skin. It is extremely important that you determine whether these bubbles are round or square."
Hewett spent two and a half years studying Warm Springs, and concluded that the magic fluids were "ordinary rain water without exceptional physical or chemical properties." After this information was printed in his report, a bound copy was sent to the White House. It was not acknowledged.[1]

A contemporary geologist with the Survey later commented,

There was a period of about six years in the thirties when no one was hired by the Survey. Roosevelt wanted to believe the German, who said the bubbles came up in the water and the corners scratched your skin. That was just bullshit.[2]

But Then Uncle Sam Came Crawling Back

Despite this low social standing, during World War II, the Survey found itself once again needed. The War Department wanted to know soil conditions for landings. Were they marshy? How about quicksand? Where do we deploy our troops? These questions needed answering, geologists were ably suited to answer them, and the Survey's budget and roster swelled. Before tracking balloon radio signals, the War Department handed the Survey a pinch of the sand it had found from balloon wreckage, and asked the geologists to determine its origin. The War Department fully anticipated the Survey to find that the sand had origins in California somewhere; the military figured the balloons had been launched surreptitiously by invading agents stationed on the continent.

Wrong, said the Survey. In the sand they found certain skeletons of tiny critters -- diatoms -- of a type only found near Asia.[3] Put that together with an absence of coral, the presence of certain volcanic products, and the Survey guessed two possible locations: one was the very site of deployment, and the other a little off, perhaps one hundred miles from two other sites. These locations were swiftly bombed, and two of the three hydrogen plants supplying the balloon effort were destroyed.

Destroyed, Yes, But Pretty Much Finished Anyway

By then, the balloon operation itself had been largely halted. The Japanese military, faced with the news blackout, had no reason to suspect that the balloons were doing any damage. While the local propagandists told of a United States engulfed in flames, the higher-ups remained skeptical. The media ban by the United States Office of Censorship was far and away the best defense against the bombs. The balloon project was expensive and had been considered a great waste of money and effort by the Japanese military despite being the world's first successful transcontinental attack and the most effective of any of Japan's war efforts against the mainland U.S. As McPhee tells us, the damage sustained by other attacks was even more modest:

In February of 1942, Japanese Submarine I-17 shelled an oil field up the beach from Santa Barbara, and damaged a pump house. In June, Submarine I-25 shelled a coastal fort in Oregon, damaging a baseball backstop.[4]

Compared to these, the balloon effort was a rousing success. It was also a metaphorical one:

On March 10, 1945, a paper balloon that had crossed the Pacific Ocean, the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Range descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production site at Hanford, Washington. The balloon landed on an electric line that fed power to the building containing the reactor that was producing the Nagasaki plutonium, and shut the reactor down.[5]

Footnotes

1. McPhee, p.55
2. McPhee, p.55
3. Diatoms themselves are everywhere, but frequently have distinctive shapes, making types and origin discernible.
4. McPhee, p.58
5. McPhee, p.60

Bibliography

1. John McPhee. Irons in the Fire. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.
2. National Park Foundation. The Complete Guide to America's National Parks, 1990-1991 Edition. Simon & Schuster, 1990. [Out of Print]
3. Lee Payne. Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of the Airship. A.S. Barnes and Co., 1977.
4. Robert C. Mikesh. "Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America". Smithsonian Annals of Flight, 9. 1973.
5. John McPhee. "The Gravel Page". The New Yorker, 1. January 29, 1996. p.52-60

 
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