Japan’s Fu-Go program — a secret wartime weapon kept from the public by wartime censorship — sent more than 9,000 paper-and-balsa balloon bombs across the Pacific to North America. Carried by the high-altitude jet stream, hundreds reached Canada and the continental United States, carrying incendiary and anti-personnel payloads. In one tragic incident in Oregon in May 1945, a balloon bomb killed six civilians — the only enemy-action deaths on the U.S. mainland during World War II. The March 1946 All Hands Bulletin article “Balloon Bombs” provided the first public account of the program following the end of wartime censorship.
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