Showing posts tagged as: “Fake news”
Returning Serve to the Nazis: Britain’s WWII Radio Propaganda Machine
❝We want to spread disruptive and disturbing news among the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it❞ ~ Sefton Delmer
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Previous blogs on this site talked about how the Nazis used expat Britons and Americans to launch a blast of psychological warfare against the Allies with the objective of undermining their forces’ morale in WWII, the means utilised, the ‘weapon’ of powerful radio transmission (voiced by role-playing figureheads, in particular the so-called “Lord Haw-Haw” and “Axis Sally”). It wasn’t long into the World War before Britain decided it too would infiltrate the enemy airwaves in a counter-attempt to try to mess with German military minds.
𝔓𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔞 𝔴𝔞𝔯–𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔩𝔡, 𝔚𝔚ℑℑ (ℭ𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱: 𝔉𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔨𝔯)∘
Es spricht der Chef To undertake the task the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was formed with the brief of disseminating ”black propaganda”⦑a⦒ against the enemy.The idea involved setting up a number of fake German radio stations—the first called Gustav Siegfried Eins (shortened to GS1) using shortwave frequency, harder for the Nazis to jam—as the propaganda vehicle for deceiving the Fatherland. From May 1941⦑b⦒ every day at 1648 hours a broadcaster purporting to be an old school Prussian officer known as der Chef would come on the air on German radio and, predictably, denounce the enemy, the ‘Brits’, the ‘Ruskies’ and the Jews, but then launch into a full-blown rant castigating Nazi officialdom too…in “profanity-laced tirades” the Chief would lambast Nazi officials’ “buffoonery, sexual perversity and malfeasance…condemning their incompetence and their indifference to the deprivations” suffered by the German volk⦑c⦒. Because he sounded ‘legit’ the impression many listeners got from the disillusioned Chief’s on-air ‘sprays’ was that there must be a rift within the German high command (‘The Fake British Radio Show That Helped Defeat the Nazis’, Marc Wortman, Smithsonian Magazine,28-Feb-2017, www.smithsonianmag.com).
𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔞𝔪𝔞𝔷𝔬𝔫.𝔠𝔬𝔪∘
Other little parcels of poison delivered by “the Chief” via the radio waves included insinuations that the supposedly ‘Ayran’ army of the Third Reich was being contaminated by the influx of foreign troops in its ranks. He also alleged that injured German soldiers were receiving infusions of “syphilis-tainted blood” of captured Slavs. Another unsubtle avenue pursued by the Chief was to play on German officers’ fears of spouse infidelity at home.
𝔊𝔖1 ℜ𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔬 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔞𝔱 𝔐𝔦𝔩𝔱𝔬𝔫 𝔅𝔯𝔶𝔞𝔫 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔅𝔢𝔡𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔅𝔬𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 ℭ𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔩)∘
In truth, the voice they heard belonged not to a disaffected Prussian army veteran but to Peter Seckelmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany acting out the role of der Chef. The panicked Nazi commanders combed the Reich to try to locate what they thought must be a maverick German general on the loose, all the time Seckelmann was secretly housed in England, in a small radio studio tucked away in quiet Bedfordshire.
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Sefton Delmer at the helm The mastermind behind Britain’s black propaganda campaign was Denis Sefton Delmer, born in Berlin of Australian parents. Recruited by PWE in 1940 because of his fluency in German and familiarity with the Nazi leaders⦑d⦒, Delmer had a thing for colourful descriptions of what his black propaganda unit did…”psychological judo” and “propaganda by pornography”⦑e⦒. The former German-based Daily Express journalist moulded PWE “special operations” into a “veritable fake news mill”, assembling an efficient team of artists, writers and printers who worked tirelessly to create thousands of phoney German newspapers and leaflets (not to neglect the role of American bombers who dropped two million units of the bogus literature every day over enemy territory)⦑f⦒. Gathering information from various sources (British intelligence, German POW interrogations, resistance operatives, bomber debriefings), PWE deceived and bewildered the Axis enemy through a carefully measured mix of lies and fact (Wortman). The tactics of ‘black’ radio were “short-term, rumour-filled⦑g⦒ and deceptive” (Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 (2008)).
ℭ𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔄𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞 𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔪𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔱 𝔚𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔫 𝔗𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔯 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢.𝔬𝔯𝔤.𝔲𝔨)∘
The fake news network Soddatensender Calais (G9) was another, British-run, faux Nazi radio station. ‘Aspidistra’, a medium wave radio transmitter located in Crowborough, East Sussex, conveyed the Sefton Delmer blend of music, innocuous information (appealing to German servicemen) together with the manipulated, ‘black’ kind of information (‘Fake News is Nothing New: 5 ‘Black Propaganda’ Operations From the 1930s and 1940s’, Jeanette Lamb, History Collection, 24-Mar-2017, www.historycollection.com).
𝔅𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫’𝔰 𝔭𝔰𝔢𝔲𝔡𝔬–𝔊𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔫 𝔫𝔢𝔴𝔰𝔭𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔯Getting back to “the Chief”, Seckelmann under the direction of Sefton Delmer made in all 700 broadcasts to the German population. The Nazis tried to jam the broadcasts coming through the GS1 station but to no avail. Delmer, having decided to close down GS1, orchestrated a dramatic denouement for der Chef charade, having him ‘assassinated’ on-air in the final episode in 1943 (transforming “the Chief” into a kind of martyred loyalist to the Führer⦑h⦒).
Backlash to Delmer’s black propaganda approach Not everyone in Britain including those within government were on board with Delmer’s black radio activities. There were critics inside Churchill’s war cabinet, like Richard Stafford Cripps, who condemned PWE for taking the moral low ground … serving up a cocktail of outrageous lies and dirty tricks – from inventing military sex orgies to discredit the SS⦑i⦒ to fake news of American ‘miracle’ weapons like the new, non-existent ”phosphorus shells” to abrade the morale of German listeners [‘Black Propaganda in WW2’, The History Room, YouTube video, 2014). Delmer himself was a forthright, controversial and sometimes polarising figure, he had no compunction about exploiting sex in its most extreme manifestations including ”beastly pornography” and even pederasty, fabricating atrocities including the rape of German soldiers’ wives and sisters. Delmer was eyed with suspicion by both sides, some Germans thought he was a British spy and some Britons thought he was a Nazi spy (Rankin).
How effective were PWE’s black propaganda broadcasts? PWE’s sheer weight of rumours, lies, half-truths and disinformation from PWE certainly no doubt took some toll on a already sagging German morale in the latter stages of the conflict, but did Delmer’s ”psychological judo” “disrupt the enemy’s will and power to fight on”? (‘Propaganda – A Weapon of War’, NLS, www.digital.nls.uk). It is not possible to definitely answer this question in the affirmative or negative. At the end of the war PWE was disbanded and all its records and documents were shredded. The deficit of data precludes any firm idea of how big and widespread the Germany wartime audience for the phoney radio transmissions was. Praise for PWE’s work however came from on high in the enemy camp, Minister of Propaganda Goebbels no less who conceded that Britain’s black Soldatensender had accomplished a “very clever job of propaganda” (Goebbels’ 1943 diary entry).
𝖁𝖔𝖑𝖐𝖘𝖊𝖒𝖕𝖋ä𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖗 (𝖑𝖎𝖙. “𝕻𝖊𝖔𝖕𝖑𝖊’𝖘 𝕽𝖊𝖈𝖊𝖎𝖛𝖊𝖗”) (𝕾𝖔𝖚𝖗𝖈𝖊: 𝕮𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖊𝖗 𝕳𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖙 𝕮𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓)
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Footnote: ‘Black’ v ‘white’ propaganda Black propaganda is distinguished from the more common type ‘white’ propaganda. The ’White’ kind is propaganda that does not hide its origins or nature, that emanates from bodies from government international information services (eg, BBC, The Voice of America). A third variant, ‘grey’ propaganda, straddles the other two – the origin of the information and messages is concealed so it can’t be discerned, eg, during the Cold War the CIA beamed grey propaganda into the Eastern Bloc through the intermediary of radio stations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (’Grey Propaganda’, www.powerbase.info).
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⦑a⦒ a form of propaganda (used by both sides in the war) which “is presented by the propagandizer as coming from a source inside the propagandised” (Becker, H. (1949). ‘The Nature and Consequences of Black Propaganda.’ American Sociological Review, 14(2), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086855) , ie, by those it is supposed to discredit (Wikipedia)
⦑b⦒ the onset of Der Chef’s broadcasts coincided with the defection of the Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to Britain
⦑c⦒ the Chief’s main target for ”character assassination” were ”lower-level Nazi functionaries” and their presumed corruption, ‘His Majesty’s Director of Pornography’, Stephen Budiansky, HistoryNet, www.historynet.com)
⦑d⦒ Delmer met Hitler himself while inspecting the Reichstag fire in Berlin
⦑e⦒ he even referred to himself irreverently as “HMG’s Director of Pornography”
⦑f⦒ producing “agitprop masquerading as inside dirt” (‘Fighting the Nazis With Fake News’, Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com)
⦑g ⦒ one baseless rumour spread by the bogus German stations that led the Gestapo on a wild goose chase concerned a resistance group of anti-Nazis supposedly inside the Reich called “Red Circle” ‘Undermining Hitler (Part One of Three)’, Providentia, 07-Feb-2016, http://drvitelli.typepad.com)
⦑h⦒ Seckelmann‘s dissident officer in his radio diatribes had been careful to exclude Hitler himself from any blame, suggesting that it was the subordinates who had betrayed the Führer
⦑i⦒ the PWE artists’ role in the Brits’ deception was to skilfully forge documents which falsely incriminated Nazi personnel in the SS and other arms of the forces
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Declaring War on an Internal Enemy Hiding in Plain Sight: The ❛Deep State❜
In the fiercely combative arena of Washington DC politics, one term that gets bandied about a lot—before and continuing through the time of pandemic—is the notion of the existence of a “Deep State”. Whenever the expression gets publicly uttered, it’s purpose is to serve as the answer to some or other momentous development or outcome. Left there hanging in the air, vague, nebulous, mysterious and unelaborated but always unambiguously pejorative – the innuendo of conspiracy.
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Alternately called “a state within a state”, the “shadow government” or “the permanent state”, the Deep State connotes images of shadowy individuals talking in soto voco, practicing the political dark arts.
So, what actually is a deep state? In get to the essence of this concept let’s survey a cross-selection of responses to the question:
⌱ a type of governance made up of networks of power operating independently of the state’s political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals [Wikipedia]
⌱ a conspiracy theory which suggests that collusion and cronyism exists within the US political system and constitute a hidden government within the legitimately elected government [Wikipedia]
⌱ a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy [Oxford English Dictionary].
⌱ the idea that a cabal of unelected security officials across a number of government bodies maintain influence over elected politicians [Will Worley, The Independent (UK)]
⌱ (“the seed for many tantalising conspiracy theories”…the existence of a premeditated effort by certain federal government employees or other persons to secretly manipulate or control the government without regard for the policies of Congress or the President [Robert Longley]
⌱ an underworld of unaccountable authority [Peter Dale Scott]
⌱ belief in an informal or parallel government that exists to countermand legitimate, usually more democratic, institutions (whose usage includes) a catch-all term applied to any number of extraordinary, usually violent, episodes, eg, JFK assassination, 9/11, etc. [Ryan Gingeras]
⌱ a massive informal government comprising untold thousands of bureaucrats, technocrats and plutocrats committed to driving president-elect Trump from power [Breitbart]
⌱ (how it functions) when elected governments threaten the deep state’s domestic or international interests, actors aligned to this coalition (the military, the clandestine service, the mafia and far-right activists) employ any means to reverse the state’s political course…these coalitions within the government work to ‘veto’ or ‘fine tune’ policies related to national security [Ola Tunander]
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The topicality of the Deep State as a conspiracy theory and as a form of politics in practice, as I indicated at the start, resides within, indeed permeates, the present US political realm, but the political phenomena itself did not start in the US. Let’s first look at the modern origins of the deep state – in early 20th century Turkey.
Turkey: volatile zero-sum-game The notion of an unofficial para-authority, a deep state within the nation’s polity, has probably existed since the time of antiquity, but as a normative concept it can be traced back to the rise of the Young Turks movement in Turkey (revolution of 1908). In the struggle for power in the vacuum created by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks, and Kemal Ataturk who would become the ‘architect’ of the modern Turkish Republic, used criminal elements to eliminate political opponents. Ataturk’s group, through a violent, intra-government resistance to the ruling clique in Turkey, destabilised and undermined it (from within), eventually establishing control over state and society for itself. Turks called this secret network, derin devlet (literally the “deep state”). Since then, the phenomena has been replicated elsewhere, eg, Soviet Union/Russia, Egypt, Pakistan❈, with the tradition maintained in Turkey up to the (present) Erdogân era, eg, the failed military coup in 2016 seeking to overthrow the Erdogân autocracy [‘Turkey’s “Deep-State” and the Ergenekon Conundrum’, (H Akin Ünver), Middle East Institute, 01-Apr-2009, www.mei.edu].
↴ Erdogân state (Source: www.time.com)
Deep state sans conspiracy Drawing together the different threads of responses, a deep state exists when a network of different groups covertly coalesce, forming a power base independent of and parallel to the legitimate government, with the purpose of pursuing its own objectives. In practice it tends to exercise soft power (rather than the more violent type seen in Turkey) by undermining and discrediting the legitimate government, with the aim of subverting its operation and bringing it down. The collusive elements of the network or cabal is typically drawn from the state’s security services, the bureaucracy, the military, the media, the private sector, even from organised crime.
The deep state in America It was general-turned-GOP governor Dwight D Eisenhower who first alerted America to the dangers of a deep state emerging…at his farewell address in 1961 he said: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”. A couple of years later the assassination of Eisenhower’s successor John F Kennedy provided conspiracy theory obsessives with endless material for imaginative speculation. Inevitably some of that speculation has joined the dots between the never-satisfactorily explained Kennedy murder and the Deep State. A perusal of the web turns up numerous posts with titles like ‘JFK was Murdered by the Deep State’ and ‘JFK Was Assassinated by LBJ, Establishment, Deep State’…fairly self-explanatory but these generally fact-thin ‘revelations’ detail a deep state hit squad of assassins and conspirators which includes Lyndon B Johnson and a coterie of southern Democrat politicians, the American mafia, Texas oil tycoons, Fidel Castro, the CIA, the KGB and a host of other nominated suspects⊠. And of course popular movies like Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK was a further shot-in-the-arm for political conspiracy buffs and the perpetuation of the Deep State/JFK thesis (portraying “a cabal of shadowy officials as the puppet masters behind Kennedy’s assassination”)◘. As Professor Paul Musgrove remarked, “the deep state is catnip for conspiracy theorists” [‘How a Conspiracy Theory Went From Political Fringe to Mainstream’, (Tom Porter), Newsweek, 08-Feb-2017, www.newsweek.com].
Deep State rhetoric: How to vilify your opponents and turn back criticism, it’s all a conspiracy by the enemy! The term finally acquires staying power and everyday currency in the US political lexicon with Donald Trump’s transition to the presidency in 2016/2017. Trump, a self-acknowledged outlier of Washington politics, came to office promising to “drain the swamp in DC”, his avowed aim, to ditch the old, distrusted model of federal government. With Trump doing things very much his own (peculiarly idiosyncratic) way in the White House, this caused waves, there was a “natural pushback” from a bureaucracy accustomed to a very different approach under Obama. This is a normal part of the process of regime change in parliamentary democracies universally – a residual if usually temporary feature of the culture of resistance to government change. [‘President Trump’s Allies Keep Talking About the “Deep State”. What’s That?’, (Alana Abramson), Time, 08-March-2017, www.time.com].
The practice of leaking information
From within the president’s fold, warnings of “covert resistance” from within to the president, emerged. Talk of a “Deep State” was heard from the far-right✪, Trump strategist Steve Bannon among the voices. The complaint was that elements within the bureaucracy, the State Department, Pentagon, wherever, were leaking damaging information to a media hostile to Trump (eg, New York Times, Washington Post), to which Trump’s “knee-jerk” reaction was to label it as “fake news”⍤. Two points need to be made about the leaking of information from democratic governments: as Abramson has noted, this is “not a new dynamic” or unique to the US, career civil servants—who are extra-political—have always leaked information to the press. The (legitimate) government from time to time itself will leak favourably information to the media (Abramson).
Watching the president The second point is that the various federal government agencies, being non-partisan, see a component of their role to act as a check on wayward and irresponsible behaviour by an incumbent chief executive that would be harmful to the nation. Previous directors of the CIA have stated that the military would refuse to follow orders given by Trump which are unlawful [‘US Military to Disobey Trump’s ‘Illegal’ Nuclear Strike Order’, Sputnik News, 15-Nov-2017, www.sputniknews.com]. In such a scenario, the “permanent national security apparatus” has a right to act, as “a check on the civilian government” (Musgrave).
Another Deep State linkage with the coronavirus for conspiracy fans? The “Covert-19” pandemic? ↴
Using the Deep State catch-phrase to your own advantage Opposition to Trump, to his style of presidency and approach to government, in the form of hostility from almost the entirety of the mainstream US media, the leaking of information from within the ‘citadel’ such as the charge that Russian interference in the 2016 elections assisted a Trump victory, have provided the ammunition for the Trump’s enablers and supporters to construct a narrative of a deep state, a ‘conspiracy’ of anyone seeking to subvert the presidency, including foreign powers (like China) and many bureaucrats they see as loyal to the former president (Obama).
Trump has turned internal criticism of himself into an excuse to fire officials, creating scapegoats for the shortcomings of the administration he heads. Inspector General of the Intelligence Community Michael Atkinson, sacked after alerting Congress of Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine’s leader into investigating the president’s domestic political opponents, remarked pointedly that he was dismissed, not for failing to do his job but for doing it properly [‘Trump’s safari into the wilderness of the deep state’, (Jacob Heilbrunn), Spectator (America), 08-Apr-2020, http://spectator.us]. Numerous other subalterns from the White House staff, Pentagon, Homeland Security, FBI, Treasury, Attorney General, etc have suffered the same fate after earning Trump’s ire. As Professor Timur Kuran, an economist who has studied the deep state concept in both Turkey and the US, said: in many authoritarian regimes, dictators often blame their failures on a “deep state enemy” within the legitimate state [‘Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory’, (Michael Hanford), Rolling Stone, 09-Mar-2017, www.rollingstone.com].
Connecting coronavirus to the Deep State conspiracy
In the turmoil of the COVID-19 crisis in America, it didn’t take long for a number of Trump’s cronies and followers to play the pandemic conspiracy card. TV commentator Rush Limbaugh has labelled the coronavirus a deep state hoax⍝ (calling health experts fighting the virus outbreak functionaries of the deep state). The right-wing “shock jock” has said the crisis was being used by as a political weapon to destabilise and undo the Trump presidency [‘Rush Limbaugh: coronavirus a “common cold” being “weaponised’ against Trump’, (Martin Pengelly), The Guardian, 26-Feb-2020, www.theguardian.com]⦿. Other “true-believers” of the DS conspiracy myth see the coronavirus crisis as a plot to destabilise global markets and cripple the US economy, or alternately a Deep State plan to suppress dissent and impose “mandated medicine” on to the unsuspecting masses [‘Right-wing conspiracy theorists see coronavirus as a plot against Trump’, (Mikael Thalen), The Daily Dot, 26-Feb-2020, www.dailydot.com; ‘Scientist with 4 Degrees from MIT Warns ‘Deep State’ Using Coronavirus Fear-Mongering To Suppress Dissent’, (Carmine Sabina), The Western Journal, 17-Mar-2020, www.westernjournal.com].
❈ there have been numerous other Deep State scenarios internationally, a classic one in recent history was the 1973 Chilean coup where foreign elements, the American CIA and IT&T, combined with a right wing military clique in Chile to overthrow the democratically-elected Allende government
⊠ many of the conspiracy hypothesisers who accept that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, depict the gunman as having been an agent of the Deep State
◘ with hindsight we can see earlier instances of the (unnamed) deep state in American politics, beavering away to undermine a US president – in the Thirties and early Forties the Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen, exploited their key diplomatic roles in arms of the Roosevelt administration to covertly pursue their own agendas which were at variance with FDR’s policies, David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (2015)
✪ one of the wildest is the QAnon Deep State conspiracy which alleges that a “cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles” have joined up with Hollywood liberals and Democrat politicians to try to overthrow the Trump regime
⍤ sometimes hitting back with his own brand of fake news, such as his unsubstantiated tweet claim that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election
⍝ a view with popular backing among sections of the Alt-Right, patriot-militia groups in the US
⦿ Limbaugh last month, looking to cloak the ‘conspiracy’ in an even more sinister light, suggested to his viewers that there were eighteen earlier strains of the disease which he has likened to the common cold, therefore COVID-19 was nothing to be concerned about, he reasoned. Limbaugh’s woeful ignorance—the 19 in the disease’s name refers to the year it was first identified, 2019—earned him much scorn and derision from liberal America (although amazingly it didn’t deter a Trump lackey from repeating the gross misinformation in a “Fox & Friends” rant against WHO) , ‘Coronavirus skeptic Rush Limbaugh thinks COVID-19 means there were 18 other COVIDS’, (Brian Niemietz), Daily News, 12-Mar-2020, www.nydailynews.com
Project Fu-Go: Japan’s Pacific War Balloon Counter-Offensive
IN the latter stages of the Second World War, Japan, under pressure from American and Allied bombing raids on its territory, devised a novel fight-back strategy against the invaders. The strategy devised by the Japanese military high command, was certainly an unorthodox one and one signifying the increasingly desperate position of Imperial Japan in the global war.
By the second half of 1944 the Japanese military situation was unravelling fast…serious Japanese army and navy reversals in the Pacific theatre, Japan had lost its aircraft carriers, the earlier submarine raids in California and Oregon had been largely ineffective, and morale at home among the Japanese citizenry was flagging[1]. As the tide of the Pacific War was turning against Japan, the US targeted key cities of the Japanese home islands – from June 1944 to the Japanese surrender in August 1945 America unleashed a systematic, strategic bombing campaign (from bases in China and Micronesia) with long-range B-29 bombers causing extensive damage and destruction in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Kobe, as well as a host of smaller cities❈.
The Japan military command in response devised a plan, the result of Project Fu-Go – to attack North America using hydrogen gas balloons, fūsen bakudan (literally “balloon bomb”). These “fire balloons” had incendiary bomb devices attached to them, and the idea was to release them from Japan, using the jet stream to carry them the 5,000km across the Pacific Ocean and destroy towns, farmland and forests in the US and Canada[1]. The mechanism constructed was a deceptively simple but clever device to “automate the flight and release the explosives” at a given point and altitude[2].
Japanese scientists had conducted atmospheric experiments from western Japan to eastern Japan, charting the pattern of late autumn/winter jet streams. The tests revealed a particularly strong air current in the Pacific at 30,000 feet✠. The first balloon weapons were released in November 1944 (at the same time that American B-29 missions started taking a more devastating toll on the Japanese homeland). The fire balloon journey took between 30 and 60 hours to reach the west coast of North America, however it has been estimated that about only one in nine of the balloons made it to America (an estimated 1,000 out of 9,000 launched from Japan)[3]. But the number that made the journey is very imprecise…US researchers after the war discovered or accounted for at least 342. It is believed that many more landed on the American mainland but they have not been detected yet owing to being located in remote, unpopulated parts of the country[4]. This is even more likely to be the case in the much sparser populated western Canada.
The first sightings of the strange hydrogen balloons on the American west coast were puzzling to the locals. Their origin was also a puzzle for the authorities until US geologists made tests of the sand recovered from the ballast bags which traced it back to Japan and the beaches of Honshu. Many Americans were still doubtful that the balloons had floated all the way from Japan, speculating that they had been transported by Japanese submarines and secretly unleashed on the North American west coast[5].
The American response to Fu-Go The seemingly capricious nature (and innocuous appearance) of the fire balloons, to the American authorities, might not initially have seemed to pose much of a danger. Washington (DC) however did take it seriously…there was concern about the possibility of forest fires breaking out in the western regions of Canada and the US¤, and especially worrying to the US was the prospect of the Fu-Gos carrying biological weapons (which it knew the Japanese had been trying to develop)[6].
Once the source of the balloon weapons was established, the US government through its newly formed Office of Censorship put a watertight security blanket around the incidents. This starved the Japanese military of vital intelligence on the results of the balloon offensive, so Tokyo had no idea of whether the attacks were successful or not. US fighter pilots were engaged to intercept the incoming balloons but the results were at best marginal (one score only of the Fu-Gos were shot down)[7].
Klamath Falls, Fu-Go fatality site
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Heavily forested Southern Oregon countrysideThe Bly incident was the solitary lethal attack on sovereign soil of the US mainland in the course of the World War. The only other damage from the Japanese fire bombs was to property…one Fu-Go incendiary struck a nuclear weapons plant in Hanford (Washington state), temporarily blacking out the plant which was manufacturing plutonium for use in the August 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Japan which ended the war.
Cessation of the fire balloon attacks The uncertainty of not knowing how effective the balloon weapons were, did not inhibit the Japanese military from trying to exact propaganda value from the situation. News bulletins emanating from Tokyo broadcast a steady supply of “fake news” (as much for domestic consumption to boost morale)…announcements proclaimed that the floating incendiaries had claimed 10,000 US casualties, that the attacks had resulted in general alarm within the American population…they also issued a threat that Japanese troops were about to invade North America[9].
In April 1945 the Allied forces succeeded in blowing up two of Japan’s main hydrogen plants…this resulted in a scarcity in the ingredient needed for the fire balloons. This blow to the production of balloon weaponry, added to a growing realisation by the Japanese commanders that the attacks has not been a success relative to the resources expended, sealed the fate of the Fu-Go program[10].
PostScript 1: A balloon-scattered continential landscape American Air Force writer Robert Mikesh described the Japanese fire balloons campaign as the “world’s first intercontinental weapons delivery system“. In six months in 1944-45 thousands of fire balloons were dispersed across the eastern Pacific and parts of North America. For most of the projectiles their fate was a watery grave but in the 70 plus years since the end of WWII the remnants of Fu-Gos have been found, strewn across the continent – as far east as Michigan and the Great Lakes, as far south as Mexico, and as far north as Alaska and Yukon.
PostScript 2: Canada’s fire balloon fields Some of the balloon bombs were found in disparate locations like Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands, and one in British Columbia as recently as 2014. Canada in fact was as equally susceptible as the US to the latent dangers of the fire balloon attacks, much of the western coast and all of the northern part of the country comprises dry, forested land. At least 57 Fu-Gos were discovered across the Canadian west during those six months of the campaign (in Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC). From the recollections of some Canadians who experienced close encounters with unexploded balloons, it is somewhat of a miracle that there were not more fatalities of the balloon weapons that the seven in Oregon[11].
Fu-Go landing sites
(Source: National Geographic) Two of the fire balloons actually drifted back westward & landed on Honshu island!▦ See also related blog, MAY 2018 on USA/Japan conflict in World War II: Project X-Ray: Bat Raiders over Honshu, America’s Other Secret Weapon in the War against Japan
⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯ ❈ the first US air raid on Japan had been in April 1942 – known as the Doolittle Raid – an isolated strike on Tokyo (primarily) intended as retaliation for Pearl Harbour four months earlier, and to probe Japan’s vulnerability to air attack ✠ this was the discovery of one particular Japanese meteorologist in the 1920s – Wasaburo Oishi ¤ a chilling recent echo of this was al-Qaida’s 2012 online urging of jihadists to plant “ember bombs” in American forests (Carroll 2014)
[1] R Carroll, ‘How Japan’s fire balloons took the Second World War to America’s soil’, The Guardian, 31-Oct-2014, www.theguardian.com [2] S Lehman, Japan’s Secret WWII Weapon: Exploding Balloons’, Gizmodo, 13-May-2014, www.gizmodo.com.au [3] its purpose hoped to provide an inexpensive way to shift the war’s focus onto sovereign American territory, ‘Fire balloon’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org [4] J Rizzo, ‘Japan’s Secret WWII Weapon: Balloon Bombs’, National Geographic, 27-May-2013, www.nationalgeographic.com [5] RC Mikesh, ‘Japan’s World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America’, Smithsonian Annals of Flight, no 9 (1973), www.sil.si.edu; ‘Fire balloon, op.cit. [6] Rizzo, loc.cit. [7] Lehman, loc.cit. [8] ibid.; Rizzo, loc.cit. [9] ‘Six killed in Oregon by Japanese bomb’, (‘This Day in History’, 1945), www.history.com. Seven in fact died including Mrs Mitchell’s unborn child [10] Mikesh, op.cit. [11] For instance one Saskatchewan youngster in 1945 accidentally stepped on a collapsed fire balloon which failed to detonate, S Brace, ‘Japanese bombs landed in Saskatchewan 71 years ago’, (Saskat News), 11-Feb-2016, www.cba.ca