While you're all drinking margaritas (virgin margaritas for you young'uns out there) today in celebration of Cinco de Mayo remember that today also marks an auspicious day in Japan-U.S. history: sixty-five years ago today forces of the Japanese Empire launched their only fatal attack on the lower forty-eight states, claiming six lives in rural southern Oregon. Why attack the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest you ask? Well, the simple answer is that the winds carried the war there, because the attack didn't come from any soldier, but rather from a paper balloon bomb.   Much in the same way that Germany experimented with various long-range terror weapons during WWII, such as the V-series rockets, the Japanese also had their own programs. But whereas the coastlines of Germany and the United Kingdom lie only as much as hundreds of miles away from each other Japan and America had thousands of miles of ocean between them. The balloons, called fuusen bakudan in Japanese, were the brainchild of Teiji Takada, a major in the Ninth Army Technical Research Laboratory who realized that the only way to launch an attack from such a distance given the technology of the 1940s was to utilize the jet stream, a current of swiftly flowing tropospheric air that runs east over Japan to North America. While the Japanese didn't discover the jet stream (that happened during the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883) they were the first to understand its effects thanks to experiments during the 1920s, and with the balloons they were the first to purposefully utilize its effects.  Though it may be crass to say of a device that killed six people, the balloons' design was ingenious. At first made of silk, the hydrogen used to inflate the balloons was found to be leaking through seams so the engineers switched to canopies made entirely of washi, a rough, traditional paper made from mulberry bushes. The paper squares were pasted together using a glue made from konnyaku (a starchy vegetable that you may have eaten if you've ever had lychee jelly cups from an Asian grocery). Altitude was controlled via an electric altimeter that jettisoned sandbags when the balloon dipped below 9,000 meters and vented hydrogen when it climbed above 11,000. After three days the balloon finished its 5,000 mile trip across the Pacific, a timer tripped, and the deadly payload would be released onto...whatever might lie below.  With around 9,000 balloons launched, hundreds shot down over North American airspace and millions of square miles of uninhabited continental land how in the heck did one of these even kill a person? On that fateful day in May one Reverend Archie Mitchell took his wife and five children from his Sunday school class on a picnic to Leonard Creek just outside the town of Bly, Oregon. Shortly after arriving the group found one of the balloon bombs hanging from a nearby tree and, not knowing of its danger due to the press cover-up of the devices, went to investigate, only to have the payload explode and kill the Reverend's wife and all five students. A terrible tragedy caused by one of WWII's strangest weapons programs.
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