Today’s post is by Cody White, Archivist at the National Archives at Denver
Let’s take a trip back…80 years ago…to 1945. It is 8:00 PM in the late spring evening, so the endless Montana sky still lies atop the Crow Reservation in front of you while driving back home after checking some fencelines along Pryor Creek. Suddenly, you spot it. Unmistakable; huge, white, menacing. You remember the training down in Billings, the briefing. Bringing your well used ‘38 Chevy truck to a stop, no new vehicles in years due to the war, you turn around back into the setting sun and race through the three speeds, pushing the inline six as hard as you can over the rough rural roads on your way to the nearest telephone down in Pryor, gravel and dirt kicking up behind as you race with your warning. You arrive at the BIA subagency office, no one around so you roust a clerk to get the phone – reports were absolutely forbidden to be made over open radio circuits. Given it is outside working hours you call the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Regional Forester Thomas Carter at his home, said number being provided to all staff already; Billings 2457. The report had to be made to him alone; if his wife answers, you demand Carter because sharing a report with an employee’s family was strictly forbidden. The report doesn’t take long, “Paper report. Class A. Item one 8:17, item two 14 miles north of Pryor, item three northeast.” And that reported “paper” thus ruins the regional forester’s night, as he himself then now has to make several phone calls to the United States Army.
The U.S. Army was called because in the spring of 1945 “paper” was a codeword for a Japanese balloon bomb. While the above story is a dramatization of what might have happened based on the instructions for staff found in our holdings here at the National Archives at Denver, hundreds of the intercontinental weapons landed in the United States that winter and spring. On May 5, 1945, one even killed an adult and five children in Oregon. During the early months of 1945 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), National Park Service (NPS), and U.S. Forest Service staffers across the west were learning how to report the threats and this is that story, as seen in our Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
Starting in November 1944, reports of balloons and fragments had been rolling into the U.S. Army from across the west. As the clues were assembled, what emerged was a program the Japanese had been working on for years. Japanese scientists had built massive balloons out of paper and utilizing the jet stream, set them off from Japan with a series of weights. As the balloon began to fall a fuse would set off, releasing a weight bag and allowing the balloon to rise and continue on its intercontinental journey. This would continue until there were no more weights and just the explosive remained, ready to go off once it finally crashed onto the American mainland.
By mid-spring U.S. defense officials had identified the threat and began work on contingency plans. Our records here at the National Archives at Denver start with a letter to the Crow Indian Agency on April 5, 1945, informing the superintendent that Captain John Tipper, Chief of the U.S. Army’s bomb disposal unit based out of the Presidio of San Francisco, would be in Billings on May 12 to conduct training on how to identify and handle the aerial bombs. A few weeks after that letter the U.S. Army hosted several BIA reservation superintendents, the superintendents of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, U.S. Forest Service staffers, and state foresters in San Francisco to discuss the threat, especially in regard to range and forest fire. These plans included planes sent out to patrol the higher fire risk areas and 300 African American paratroopers with the 9th Service Command out of Fort Douglas rushed into smokejumper training. Another 750 ground troops – largely veterans back from the front and transitioning out of the service – were to be staged across the west in case they too were needed.
While our records detail both meetings and decisions about how to tackle the threat of the bombs, they also document the reporting procedures and include the reporting forms. One last point was driven home – care was needed not only to stay safe around the bombs, but also to prevent any landings “from getting into the newspapers.”
So, do the records detail any actual balloon landings? In 1973 Robert Mikesh of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum wrote a detailed report that noted several balloon bombs landing near various BIA agency headquarters. However, no mentions of them have yet been found in our BIA holdings, save one, the landing at the Cheyenne River Reservation. Today the administrative decimal files from the agency held by the National Archives at Kansas City not only contain several photographs taken, but even pieces of the actual balloon; “5 pieces of paper from envelope of Japanese Balloon found 4/1/1945 south of Swift Bird Creek about 5 miles northwest of Cheyenne River Agency, showing seam construction, each approximately 8″ x 10″ in size. 1 piece of cord from a balloon, approximately 55″ long.”
Several photographs taken by the Cheyenne River Agency staff of the balloon that landed on the reservation, these from a photograph series that corresponds with files “036 – Japanese War Balloon Reports” and “036 – Japanese War Balloon Items” in the agency’s decimal correspondence files.
Two of the balloon fragments from the file “036 – Japanese War Balloon Items,” found in the Cheyenne River Agency records at the National Archives at Kansas City.
So perhaps, somewhere in the thousands of cubic feet of BIA records at National Archives facility nationwide, there are more pieces of this obscure bit of WWII history just waiting to be found.
All documents not otherwise noted come from the file “680.7 Re: Japanese balloon menace and protection,” today found in the records of the Crow Indian Agency at the National Archives at Denver. Background and context information on the balloon bombs is courtesy of the Smithsonian Magazine.