Скачать или смотреть America's Secret WWII Front: Japan's Balloon Bombs and the Hanford Close Call

Riding an invisible highway of winter winds, Japan launched a long‑range attack few Americans ever saw coming. In 1944–45, the Fu-Go balloon bomb campaign sent thousands of hydrogen balloons across the Pacific, aiming to spark wildfires, sow panic, and prove that distance did not guarantee safety. Most fell into the ocean; a few hundred drifted over North America, appearing without warning from Alaska to Mexico and deep into the interior.

These paper-and-hydrogen weapons were clever machines—barometric switches, sandbag ballast rings, and incendiary and antipersonnel loads calibrated to ride the jet stream for days. U.S. forces scrambled interceptors and patrols, but near-silent targets at 30,000 feet were hard to find. As incidents accumulated, a grave question loomed: if a balloon could carry a small bomb, what else could it carry?

To deny Tokyo feedback, the Office of Censorship quietly asked the press to stay silent. The public heard little, even after a balloon shorted power to the top-secret Hanford Engineer Works on March 10, 1945, briefly scramming a reactor feeding the Manhattan Project. Then came May near Bly, Oregon, when a minister’s wife and five children found a downed rig. It detonated, killing all six—the only known civilian fatalities on the U.S. mainland from enemy action during World War II.

This film retraces the science, the fear, and the secrecy that surrounded America’s forgotten front, where physics became a weapon and chance dictated impact. Remembering these episodes matters—not for shock value, but to understand how ingenuity, miscalculation, and silence can shape a war far from the front lines. If this history moved you, subscribe for more War Chronicles USA and share the story so it isn’t lost again.

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