Terror From Above

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 the U.S. planned a raid on Japan in retaliation to help boost public morale. The Doolittle mission in April 1942 was a a raid by sixteen B-26 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet about 750 miles off the coast of Japan.
The bombs dropped on the greater Tokyo area caused relatively light damage and fewer than 500 casualties, but had significant psychological impact on both Japanese and American populations.
The raid also spurred plans by the Japanese military to determine the best way to carry the war to the U.S. mainland by retaliatory bombing. After considering alternatives, the decision was to proceed with an innovative scheme to launch hydrogen filled paper balloons armed with incendiary devices designed to start large forest fires in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. mainland.
Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army launched over 9,000 balloons assembled by thousands of school girls from sites on Honshu. At least 300 reached North America and were observed in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The balloons traveled on high altitude, high speed air currents moving from west to east, known today as the jet stream. They were largely ineffective in starting fires primarily due to damp woodland conditions, but did cause at least six deaths and triggered a widespread diversion of both military and civilian resources to prevent panic.
This is the story of the ingenious Fu-Go weapon developed by Japan in the closing months of the war, a remarkable effort that became the first weapon to have intercontinental range with its flights being the longest ranged attacks in the entire history of warfare at that time.
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