There isn't much footage available to show the bomb-carrying balloons in flight, crossing the Pacific, and none showing the bombs being dropped. They didn't do much damage either. I suppose that's why we hear so little about them and why this program takes more than fifteen minutes to cover the Pacific War up until the autumn of 1944.
But these balloons were the damndest things. They weren't just "balloons" sent up in the hope that somehow, someday, they might reach the enemy. Their design was infinitely intricate.
The balloons themselves were made of paper and glue. They were designed to be carried along to the west at 30,000 feet in the jet stream, a tunnel of high-speed wind that our own meteorologists had only just discovered. Each carried about half a dozen incendiary and one anti-personnel bomb.
The were weighted with sandbags. If they dropped below their designated altitude, a barometer released on of the sandbags. Their cargo was a bomb pointed downward. But a complicated mechanism not only released the bomb but detonated an explosive charge when all the sandbags had been released -- meaning when it had lost sufficient altitude. The balloons also carried miniature transmitters so the Japanese on the homeland could keep track of them.
There was little danger from the anti-personnel bomb. However, the incendiaries posed a real problem because the northwest coast of North America was heavily forested. Moreover, the Japanese had been carrying out experiments with human guinea pigs that were aimed at a cargo, not of bombs, but of plague-carrying fleas, typhoid bacteria, and other diseases. We captured the commander in charge of the program and put him to work on our own germ warfare program in Maryland.
This episode also covers other desperate weapons, such as the kamikaze but these are widely known.
It's a nicely made, reasonably thorough documentary.
But these balloons were the damndest things. They weren't just "balloons" sent up in the hope that somehow, someday, they might reach the enemy. Their design was infinitely intricate.
The balloons themselves were made of paper and glue. They were designed to be carried along to the west at 30,000 feet in the jet stream, a tunnel of high-speed wind that our own meteorologists had only just discovered. Each carried about half a dozen incendiary and one anti-personnel bomb.
The were weighted with sandbags. If they dropped below their designated altitude, a barometer released on of the sandbags. Their cargo was a bomb pointed downward. But a complicated mechanism not only released the bomb but detonated an explosive charge when all the sandbags had been released -- meaning when it had lost sufficient altitude. The balloons also carried miniature transmitters so the Japanese on the homeland could keep track of them.
There was little danger from the anti-personnel bomb. However, the incendiaries posed a real problem because the northwest coast of North America was heavily forested. Moreover, the Japanese had been carrying out experiments with human guinea pigs that were aimed at a cargo, not of bombs, but of plague-carrying fleas, typhoid bacteria, and other diseases. We captured the commander in charge of the program and put him to work on our own germ warfare program in Maryland.
This episode also covers other desperate weapons, such as the kamikaze but these are widely known.
It's a nicely made, reasonably thorough documentary.
