War Balloons over the Prairie: The Japanese Invasion of South Dakota
Lawrence H. Larsen
South Dakota History, volume 9 number 2 (1979)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
On Friday, 20 March 1945, at 6:50 p.m., mountain war time, a large balloon descended toward the Cheyenne Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The bag was about thirty-two feet in diameter and made of smooth pliable paper. A metal gas relief valve covered a hole at the bottom from which nineteen forty-foot shrouds connected the envelope with a mass of ballast gear. The silvery sphere, blown gently by a slight northeasterly breeze, landed in tall grass and bounced along until the equipment caught in a washout. Several persons from a nearby ranch walked to the scene. What they found puzzled them. They had never seen anything quite like it before. After considerable discussion, they decided it was a weather balloon of no great importance. Determining that the balloon could still float, they grabbed the shrouds and led the entire contraption back to the ranch. There, firmly tied to a fence post, the bag swayed gently through the night hours.
The following morning, a report of the incident resulted in a flurry of long-distance telephone calls and other activity at the office of the Cheyenne River Agency. Range Supervisor John P. Drissen drove to the ranch, arriving early in the afternoon. By then, numerous people had come to see the balloon. This upset the range supervisor, so he assumed jurisdiction and warned those present that spreading information about the unusual occurrence could lead to prosecution for espionage. He then examined the landing site and took nine photographs of the balloon. When a rising wind tore the envelope of the balloon, he collected some of the escaping gas in two borrowed fruit jars. Soon, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several army security men appeared. They took custody of the film and fruit jars, made arrangements to keep the story out of the local papers, loaded the deflated bag and the gear onto a truck, and left for their respective headquarters. The range supervisor went back to the agency, and life on the ranch returned to normal.
This was only one of several balloon incidents that occurred in South Dakota during the first half of 1945. Ranchers found fragments of envelopes near Buffalo, Kadoka, Marcus, and Wolsey. Authorities recovered a balloon in the Red Elm vicinity, and a farm hand found a bomb that probably came from a balloon near Madison. Another balloon exploded in the middle of March in broad daylight in the sky north of Custer. Many persons reported the incident, just as others did another balloon sighting a few days later.
Appearing over Belle Fourche in the early afternoon, a balloon drifted southward at an estimated altitude of three thousand to four thousand feet. A civilian pilot who pursued the object reported: "Catching the late afternoon rays of the sun, the balloon appeared in the sky as a perfect silvery sphere which could be seen only if the observer was in line with the reflection. At times it disappeared in the blue haze and near Piedmont, a squadron of flying fortresses from the local air base passed within a quarter of a mile of it without noticing. The following day, farmers discovered the balloon dangling from a barbed wire fence not far from Chadron, Nebraska.
Balloons continued to drift over South Dakota on into the summer, and at least one landed and exploded in the state. While the balloons appeared harmless —one South Dakotan unknowingly carried a balloon bomb many miles over bumpy back roads in the trunk of his car, and another allowed his children to use a balloon bag for a doll house —they could be very deadly. The charge from one, exploded with a dynamite cap by an army intelligence officer at Rapid City, tore a hole in the ground three feet deep and five feet in diameter. Of course, this was what the balloons were designed to do: blow up on American soil. They were actually military weapons.
The instruments were part of a rather feeble Nipponese retaliatory program born out of frustration and an inability to mount any other kind of long campaign against the continental United States. In 1933, Japanese planners started military balloon feasibility studies. The project had a low priority, and no one in high places displayed serious interest until American planes staged a nuisance raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities in April of 1942. As one means of retaliation, the Japanese High Command authorized a balloon offensive under the code name Project FUGO. The planners hoped to launch the weapons from submarines lurking off the American West Coast, but the Imperial Navy's refusal to cooperate forced a shifting of emphasis to automated transoceanic warfare. By mid-1944, experts had overcome technological problems and perfected two suitable bags, roughly similar in size. Type B was made of silk and rubber; Type A was made of paper. Although serious rubber shortages necessitated almost exclusive use of the paper model, both carried one thirty-three-pound high-explosive bomb, four elevenpound incendiaries, and two self-destruct charges. The balloons were relatively inexpensive, which advocates emphasized when confronted with embarrassing questions about certain obvious shortcomings.
There was no way to select precise targets. The launch crews could only send the balloons off into the jet stream and hope for the best. The prevailing winds of winter could assure the Japanese that the balloons would probably land in America and not in Russia or back in Japan, but winter only provided fifty days of ideal winds and weather. Still, the more enthusiastic balloon adherents hoped the winter-launched devices would avenge American air raids, raise morale in the home islands, burn down forests, terrorize civilians, and force the implementation of costly countermeasures. Theoretically, the strange weapons, traveling at heights of up to thirty thousand feet and at speeds of sixty miles an hour, could reach North America from Japan in four or five days. Proponents glossed over the problem of how balloons landing in snow-covered woods would panic the general population. After the war, Project FUGO's leaders denied ever considering biological warfare. War crime investigators accepted the explanation, given Japan's own vulnerability and the nature of the weapon. A wind shift might bring a balloon back to the Japanese mainland or carry it to neutral territory. Even so, the high command had considered the risks acceptable when it authorized the offensive. Between November of 1944 and August of 1945, a force that at its height numbered twenty-eight hundred men launched six thousand armed balloons from stations on Honshu.
By early 1945, puzzled American intelligence officials had received thirty reports of balloons reaching North America and its western approaches. The first came on 4 November 1945 when a United States Naval vessel retrieved a balloon sixty-six miles southwest of San Pedro, California, While most of the balloons landed in costal regions, some drifted far into the interior. Because authorities decided not to release information about the balloons, some people who saw them had no idea they were military weapons. In December of 1944, Wyoming newspapers reported four mysterious explosions of what appeared to be flares from a parachute in the night sky, attributing them to a "phantom plane." A Colorado ranehwoman told an air force intelligence officer. "The thing just suddenly appeared up there in the sky. It came out of nowhere —just blazed out there in one place, stood for a moment without moving, then vanished. I can't describe it as anything but a big brilliant ball of fire, about the size of the moon. I hope you won't use my name. When I tell my friends about it. they think I'm having hallucinations." On 23 February 1945 near Bigelow. Kansas, a farmer discovered a balloon snagged in a tree. He hitched a team of horses to it and hauled it to town, where "the thing," including its live explosive devices, was stored for several days in the Bigelow Post Office until the county sheriff arrived and took it away. "I was lucky I didn't get blown up." the farmer recalled, "because when I found the thing, I jerked the bucket out of the tree and it landed right beside me. I supposed it was some sort of weather balloon."
At first, intelligence officials were confused about the purpose of the balloons. They originally assumed that the balloons, launched from submarines, carried suicidal secret agents. However, new meteorological data that confirmed the existence of the jet stream and a paucity of submarine sightings gave rise to the assumption that the launching sites were in Japan. A Canadian Geological Survey investigation that indicated that Japan was the source of the sand used for ballast in the balloons buttressed this assumption. The possibility of a man surviving a flight across the Pacific Ocean at high altitudes seemed remote, and, consequently, attention shifted away from espionage possibilities. Some experts raised the spectre of biological warfare, aimed at either civilians or agriculture. They were in a distinct minority because many felt there were easier ways of transporting germs to targets. Other evaluators correctly perceived Japanese motives. Unfortunately, there was no way to be entirely certain, and by spring, a favored theory held that the balloons were "ranging shots" in preparation for future operations, possibly involving one-way assaults by Kamikaze pilots." The whole business was very weird, having overtones of science fiction. In fact, it was not until 30 April 1945, close to six months after the first balloons reached American shores, that the FBI in Sioux Falls confidentially informed law enforcement officers in South Dakota that the balloons were part of a "purely military operation" and that all jurisdiction had been transferred to the War Department." Several balloons had reached South Dakota, forcing inclusion of the state into defense plans designed to keep incidents secret, alert civilians to the threat, and protect forests.
Back in January 1945» South Dakota newspaper editors, at the request of the army and navy, attended a confidential conference in Denver. There, Brigadier General P. X. English and Colonel Robert W. Reed, either wittingly or unwittingly, lied to the press in order to justify censorship. At a time when there had been relatively few landings or sightings, the officers stated that "vast numbers" of balloons had reached the western portions of the United States. Far from admitting that the purpose of the balloons remained unknown, they boldly declared that they were "known to be scientific experiments for something infinitely bigger." Against that background, the army men claimed that published reports of specific incidents would "get back to Japan by secret radio within a couple of hours." At the conclusion of the briefing, the journalists readily accepted self-imposed censorship, accepting the premise that balloon stories in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, the Mitchell Daily Republic, and the Rapid City Daily Journal would pose a threat to national security. They agreed to print no information about the balloons and to attribute any fires or deaths caused by them to an "explosion of undetermined origin."'
However, the wide dissemination of information by other means gradually undermined the censorship arrangements. In May, after a pastor's wife and five children attending a church picnic were killed in an Oregon forest when a balloon bomb they found exploded, the government made the decision to inform the general population in affected areas about the danger. Governor M. Q. Sharpe of South Dakota issued Order No. 19 to all state employees, asking them to publicize the contents of a classified federal document, "Japanese Balloon Information Bulletin No. 1," which described the balloons, speculated about their purpose, and told how to report incidents to local authorities. The governor suggested that state workers contact and request the help of sheriffs, state's attorneys, county agents, social security employees, American Legionnaires, Veterans of Foreign Wars, patriotic organizations, boy and girl scout troops, and 4-H clubs.
However, the wide dissemination of information by other means gradually undermined the censorship arrangements. In May, after a pastor's wife and five children attending a church picnic were killed in an Oregon forest when a balloon bomb they found exploded, the government made the decision to inform the general population in affected areas about the danger. Governor M. Q. Sharpe of South Dakota issued Order No. 19 to all state employees, asking them to publicize the contents of a classified federal document, "Japanese Balloon Information Bulletin No. 1," which described the balloons, speculated about their purpose, and told how to report incidents to local authorities. The governor suggested that state workers contact and request the help of sheriffs, state's attorneys, county agents, social security employees, American Legionnaires, Veterans of Foreign Wars, patriotic organizations, boy and girl scout troops, and 4-H clubs. However, he warned that anyone who told the news media would be in violation of the Espionage Act. "The press and radio have all been contacted and will cooperate in the matter, but it is required that before reading this or the attached bulletin to any meeting, you must request the local press not to mention it and caution the people as above set forth," he asserted. "What we wish to do is to spread this information by a word of mouth campaign among our people as rapidly as possible and have them cooperate in keeping any of the information from reaching the enemy."
Under the circumstances, press censorship appeared increasingly unnecessary. Presumably, spies, unlike journalists, could hear the contents of the classified balloon bulletin. Major Charles D. Frierson, Jr., the intelligence officer responsible for balloon cases in South Dakota, commented in a May 1945 telephone conversation, "Some of the newspapermen are getting a little more resentful now, and I don't blame them." He supported continued censorship of balloon landings and sightings, contending, "It is highly desirable for nothing to get in the papers about them otherwise it could be known. False rumors and strange things go on." However, higher authorities believed the time had come to modify the policy. On 22 May, the War Department issued a general press release about the balloon threat, accompanied by a confidential covering memo requesting that the press and radio refrain from reporting specific incidents. Many editors declined to publish the general account, even though Japanese propaganda broadcasts reported the contents. In South Dakota, nothing about the balloons appeared in the newspapers until after the war.
The censorship was in part imposed in order to defend North American forests. In the spring of 1945, representatives of the army and Forest Service held meetings to plan cooperative action.^^ Out of these evolved Operation Fire Fly, which the Forest Service incorporated into official 1945 fire control plans. Three hundred black paratroopers would receive training as smoke jumpers. This was a dangerous and highly skilled occupation, and Forest Service officials expected only two hundred "effective jumpers" to complete the course. During the summer, these survivors would literally leap into fires and try to stem the flames until the arrival of white support troops. In addition, the Western Defense Command started the Sunset Project, designed to use radar to find the balloons and direct intercepter aircraft to them. The planes were to avoid the use of tracers and to observe "no shoot" zones over designated forested areas." These precautions proved unnecessary; radar operators never spotted a balloon.
Forest Service officials responsible for stopping fires in South Dakota attempted to augment Fire Fly and Sunset through arrangements with regional military authorities. Rapid City Army Air Force Base representatives refused to sign a contract to furnish men and materials to fight fires in the Black Hills and Harney National Forests, but the Forest Service went ahead with plans, assuming that the base would help if a fire occurred. A meeting held at Fort Warren, Wyoming, on 13 June 1945 had somewhat more productive results after a bad start. The officers present claimed that training and rotation requirements prevented the commitment of vast numbers of soldiers to combat any blazes, let alone those caused by armed balloons. Indeed, they expressed concern about sending troops into wooded areas to possibly perish in booby traps dropped from balloons. Following a lengthy discussion, the base commander finally agreed verbally to allow the Forest Service to train no more than twenty-five officers and men in fire suppression and to field up to five hundred "limited service" personnel on fifteen minutes' notice to counter those emergencies within 210 miles of Fort Warren. These troops would return to the post at night as a precaution against their destroying and looting civilian property. The number of men agreed upon was far short of the thousands needed to battle a major fire. Fortunately, in 1945 no serious conflagrations swept South Dakota woodlands.
The Japanese High Command abruptly terminated the balloon offensive in May, shifting most of the personnel to other duties. Few balloons were launched during the rest of the war. The men in charge of Project FUGO were unable to justify continuance of the attacks. Their sole proof of success was the general press release issued by the U.S. War Department. In the final accounting, the campaign was a fiasco. Authorities in North America verified only three hundred balloon landings, which killed six people and started no fires. While the project caused the American expenditure of considerable time and money on defense measures, it failed to achieve any other objectives and had no effect on the outcome of the war. Any positive impact on Japanese morale was more than nullified by military reversals and fire raids. Still, the balloons represented the only prolonged threat mounted against the continental United States in World War II. About the best that can be said is that some balloons got to the center of the continent. At least nine dropped on South Dakota, and individuals claimed to have seen nine others floating aloft. The balloons were a footnote to the state's participation in the war effort. From the governor on down, citizens cooperated with the federal government in deterring what ultimately proved to be an insignificant threat.
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
