The balloon victims at Bly

On Saturday 5 May 1945, in the forest on the slopes of Gearhart Mountain, some fifteen kilometres east of the small town of Bly in Oregon, an explosion killed six people: Elsie Mitchell, the pregnant wife of the local pastor, and five children aged 11 to 14. They had come across a Japanese balloon with a bomb lying in the woods. They were the only people killed by enemy action on the continental territory of the United States during the Second World War. Three days later Germany’s surrender took effect in Europe, and Americans still knew nothing of the tragedy, because wartime censorship had for months kept the very existence of the balloons quiet.

Balloons over America

The Japanese balloon offensive lasted from November 1944 to April 1945. Some 9,000 hydrogen-filled balloons made of washi paper were released from the coast of Honshū. Carried by the jet stream at an altitude of about 10 kilometres, they crossed the Pacific in roughly three days. Each usually carried four incendiary bombs and one anti-personnel fragmentation bomb weighing about 15 kilograms. The Japanese command was counting on forest fires in the American West and on panic among the population.

According to American estimates, as many as a thousand balloons may have reached North America, but fewer than three hundred finds or sightings were confirmed – from Alaska and Canada to Mexico, with isolated balloons getting as far as Michigan. The damage was negligible. In winter and early spring the forests were damp or covered in snow, and many bombs failed to explode. In March one balloon brought down a high-voltage line in Washington State and briefly shut down the reactors at Hanford, where plutonium for the atomic bomb was being produced – but the Japanese never learned of it.

They never learned of it because the American authorities made sure of silence. On 4 January 1945 the federal Office of Censorship sent newspaper editors and radio stations a confidential request not to publish any information about the balloons. The overwhelming majority of the press complied. Japan, receiving no reports of any effect, eventually concluded that the offensive had failed and in April 1945 stopped releasing balloons. The price of silence, however, proved high: people in the western states did not know that unexploded bombs might be lying in the woods.

It was not the first Japanese attack on Oregon’s forests. In September 1942 a floatplane from the submarine I-25 twice dropped incendiary bombs on the state’s wooded coast. Those raids, too, caused no casualties.

An outing to Leonard Creek

Archie Mitchell, then 27 and pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Bly, had come to the town with his wife only a few months earlier. Elsie Mitchell (née Winters) was 26 and five months pregnant. On Saturday 5 May the couple took five children from their Sunday school for a picnic and some fishing in the mountains, in the Fremont National Forest in Lake County. They were Joan Patzke (13) and her brother Dick Patzke (14), Edward Engen (13), Jay Gifford (13) and Sherman Shoemaker (11).

The forest road turned out to be blocked, so the group stopped by Leonard Creek. While the pastor parked the car and unloaded the food, his wife and the children went ahead through the woods. A moment later he heard that they had found something that looked like a balloon. “I had heard of Japanese balloons, so I shouted to them not to touch it. But just then there was a big explosion,” he recalled later. The four boys were killed outright. Elsie Mitchell and Joan Patzke died a few minutes later; the pastor burned his hands putting out the flames on his wife’s dress.

A military investigation established that the balloon had probably been lying untouched in the forest for about a month, and that the bomb went off when someone kicked or dropped it. It was not an incendiary but a fragmentation bomb – designed precisely to kill people.

The end of the silence

Soldiers and forest rangers came to the scene, and the remains of the balloon were taken away for analysis. The deaths of six people forced the authorities to change their policy. Censorship could no longer protect the secret at the cost of human lives: if people did not know of the danger, other outings might end the same way. On 22 May 1945 the publication ban was lifted. The War and Navy Departments issued a joint statement on the Japanese balloons, and newspapers, radio and schools began warning people not to touch unfamiliar objects found in the woods but to report them to the authorities.

By then the Japanese were no longer releasing balloons. The announcement thus came at a moment when it could no longer help them assess the results of their offensive – while it might save the lives of people who came across unexploded bombs still lying in the forests. Balloon remains, sometimes with bombs, were still being found in Canada and the United States decades after the war.

Monument and memory

In 1950 the Weyerhaeuser timber company, which owned the land, erected a monument of local stone at the site of the explosion, with a bronze plaque bearing the names and ages of the victims. It states that this is the only place on the American continent where anyone died as a result of enemy action during the Second World War. The unveiling on 20 August 1950 drew some 500 people; the Governor of Oregon, Douglas McKay, spoke. The company later transferred the site to the Fremont National Forest, and in 2003 the Mitchell Monument was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Beside it grows a ponderosa pine whose trunk still bears the scars of the shrapnel.

The memory of Bly also became a gesture of reconciliation. In 1976 Sakyo Adachi, a Japanese scientist who had taken part in preparing the balloon offensive, visited the monument, laid a wreath and wrote a letter of apology to the Patzke family, who had lost two children. In 1987 Japanese women who as schoolgirls had glued together the balloon envelopes sent the victims’ families a thousand paper cranes – a symbol of peace and reconciliation. For the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, in 1995, six Japanese cherry trees were planted beside the monument.

Archie Mitchell did not abandon his mission. In 1947 he married Betty Patzke, the elder sister of the two children killed near Bly, and went with her as a missionary to French Indochina. He worked at a leprosarium near Buôn Ma Thuột in South Vietnam, where on 30 May 1962 he was abducted by Viet Cong guerrillas together with two other missionaries. None of them was ever seen again.

Place in the war

Militarily, the Japanese balloon offensive was fruitless. Several thousand balloons caused a few small fires, a brief interruption at the Hanford reactors and one tragedy near Bly. Its significance lay elsewhere: it showed that in 1945 the war could reach even a remote, peaceful corner of America, and that its victims – as throughout this war – were above all civilians. The balloon affair also became one of the most effective examples of wartime censorship: the silence of the press deprived Japan of any knowledge of the attack’s results and helped bring it to an end, but it also meant that the victims at Bly did not know what to beware of.

In May 1945, as the war in Europe was ending, the United States was preparing for the final reckoning with Japan. The six victims at Bly remained the only Americans killed by enemy action on the continental territory of the United States – in a war that elsewhere claimed tens of millions of lives.