Terror in the skies! This isn’t the first time North America has been threatened by balloons
blown from North American skies in recent days seem like a new threat, but this isn’t the first time North Americans we have worried about strange balloons floating toward us from across the Pacific. Nearly 80 years ago, people in western Canada watched for bomb-laden balloons drifting on the jet stream.balloon bombs were perhaps the strangest weapon launched against the Allies in the Second World War.
A Canadian military intelligence officer called the bombs “fiendishly clever but a military failure.” The devices were relatively harmless, partly because so many of their bombs were duds. This was a secret that the U.S. and Canadian military intelligence establishments wanted to keep from the Japanese.
The Japanese were to be kept in the dark about the number of balloons that made it to North America. The fewer the reports, the thinking went, the more likely the Japanese would believe the bombs weren’t able to get across the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese didn’t know that one balloon drifted over downtown Moose Jaw, terrifying people there, or that aCensors killed a Vancouver Province story that said only about one out of every 40 balloons launched from Japan reached the coast of North America.
By late spring, newspapers in Toronto had stories on 190 balloon sightings but couldn’t publish them until the war was almost over. If the newspapers printed stories about the balloon bombs any Japanese agent in North America would get “the very information he was seeking,” censors claimed. Censors in Washington and Ottawa managed to have the rest of the comic series killed, but journalists in Canada and the U.S. argued that the story was now out there. They should be allowed to run the stories and pictures that had been suppressed.A few days after the comic strip fiasco, the Japanese got another chance to learn about the success of their campaign.
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