#fu-go

[nelc]

Japanese WWII Fu-Go incendiary balloon

[bstoday]

Fu-Go balloon bomb - Wikipedia

[74656xdavid]

I didn't know they actually killed 7 people in Oregon. And didn't know the FU-GOs made it so far inland. Thought it worth sharing.

[indypendenthistory]

A fire balloon, or Fu-Go, was a weapon launched by Japan during World War II. A hydrogen balloon with a load varying from a 12-kilogram (26 lb) incendiary to one 15 kg (33 lb) antipersonnel bomb and four 5 kg (11 lb) incendiary devices attached, they were designed as a cheap weapon intended to make use of the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean and wreak havoc on Canadian and American cities, forests, and farmland. This photo is one that was shot down and re-inflated.

[alechsml-blog]

Map was sourced from: Mikesh, Bob C, Japan’s World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America Smithsonian Annals of Flight #9. Smithsonian Institution Press, City of Washington, 1973. Page 67,68.

[alechsml-blog]

Schematics for the Fu-go Bomb (Fusen Bakudan) designed by the Japanese as a propaganda tool to incite panic in America. As a response to the first bombing of Tokyo in April 1942, these bombs were set a drift in November 1944 along the Pacific jet stream set to start forest fires on the US west coast.

Between November of 1944 and April of 1945, the Japanese launched about 9300 balloon bombs against the US. Out of that number, only about 1,000 actually made it to the US and Canada, and of those there was one case of six people being killed by the bomb carried by the balloon. Little of no other damage was reported during the balloon attack.

Some bombs made it quite far—Michigan, Texas, Canada and Mexico—but were luckily largely ineffective. I think the most interesting part of this story is that this was an expensive Japanese war effort that was conducted largely in secret. School days were shorten so that girls could help build the balloons. The balloons themselves were pretty elegantly designed things despite their lack of functionality.

The balloons were made from mulberry paper, glued together with potato flour and filled with 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. The balloon envelope was encircled by a scalloped cloth band to which numerous shroud lines were attached, and these were tied together below in two large knots. From these knots, the bombs and ingenious ballast release mechanism were suspended. They were 33 feet in diameter and could lift approximately 1,000 pounds, but the deadly portion of their cargo was a 33-lb anti-personnel fragmentation bomb, attached to a 64–foot long fuse that was intended to burn for 82 minutes before detonating.

The design to keep the balloon afloat is pretty interesting.

Read here.

P.S. I first learned of this in a comic. Yeah.