Balloons of World War II

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy
Wiebelson and I'm Holly Frying. You may remember back at
the start of February there were a bunch of headlines

(00:22):
in the United States, I don't know about elsewhere, definitely
in the United States about a Chinese spy balloon traveling
over North America, which was then shot down off the
coast of South Carolina on February fourth, And then after
that the US military started adjusting its radar operations to
look for other similar floating objects, and then they shot

(00:45):
down some other stuff that may or may not have
also been balloons. As all of this was happening, a
whole lot of newspapers and other media were publishing a
lot about these balloons or post balloons, and also stories
about the balloon bombs that Japan used to target in

(01:06):
North America during World War Two, and that is something
we have gotten listener requests to talk about on the show. Before.
These were not the only balloons that were in use
during the war, though, and they weren't the first time
that balloons were used for military purposes. So today we're
going to talk about the balloons of World War Two,

(01:27):
but first we're going to give kind of an overview
of how balloons were used for military purposes historically before
that point. So the concept of filling a lightweight container
with hot air or another gas to make it float
dates back to at least third century BC in China.
That was when people started making flying lanterns. Those are

(01:49):
also called sky lanterns, and they're like tiny hot air balloons,
usually made of paper and open at the bottom, with
a candle or other flammable material suspended underneath. When the
flammable material is lit, the air inside the paper heats
up and the lantern rises into the air. Today, these
lanterns are often used in festivals and other celebrations, but

(02:10):
they were originally for military signaling. Sometimes they are called
Kongming lanterns, after military strategist Zou Guiliang, whose courtesy name
is Kungming. He was a military leader during the Three
Kingdoms period of Chinese history in the third century CE,
so these lanterns weren't his innovation. It's possible that this name, though,

(02:33):
comes from a story in which he and his troops
were surrounded and he used a sky lantern to call
for reinforcements. I'm saying story here rather than citing a
specific military event, because in addition to being a real
historical figure, he also became a popular character in Chinese
literature and plays. It's kind of tricky to tease out
which parts are the historical events in which parts are

(02:56):
the stories about him. Many of the earliest balloons that
were large enough to lift a person or made from silk,
something that was also first developed in China, but it
doesn't appear that anyone successfully did this until much later
in Europe. And we covered this part of the story
in our episode on the Mongolfier Brothers that was a
Saturday Classic this past January. They were not going to

(03:18):
go back through at all for that reason. But the
Mongolfier Brothers balloon made its first untethered flight carrying human
passengers on November twenty first, seventeen eighty three, and right
away as soon as that happened, people were talking about
military uses for this innovation. This happened while the Treaty

(03:38):
of Paris was being negotiated to formally end the Revolutionary War,
so Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay were all
in France, along with sixteen year old John Quincy Adams.
They all saw this balloon go up, and Franklin had
been observing and writing letters about the Mongolfier's experiments for months,

(03:59):
and on the day of this launch he wrote to
English naturalists Sir Joseph Banks, saying, quote, this method of
filling the balloon with hot air is cheap and expeditious,
and it is supposed maybe sufficient for certain purposes, such
as elevating an engineer to take a view of an
enemy's army works and etc. Conveying intelligence into or out

(04:22):
of a besieged town, giving signals to distant places, or
the like. Not long after, Franklin also wrote to Dutch
scientists Jan Ingenhou's about balloons, saying, quote, Convincing sovereigns of
the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect of it,
since it will be impracticable for the most potent of
them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons capable of

(04:45):
raising two men each would not cost more than five
ships of the line. And where is the prince who
can afford to cover his country with troops for its defense?
As that ten thousand men defending from the clouds might not,
in many laces, do an infinite deal of mischief before
a force could be brought together to repel them, and

(05:05):
it did not take long for balloons to be put
into actual practical military use. They were used for reconnaissance
during the French Revolution, and France established an Army Air
Corps in seventeen ninety four. By the mid eighteen hundred,
several other European nations had also established balloon units of
their own. In the US, Colonel John Sherburne lobbied for

(05:29):
a balloon reconnaissance unit during the United States War against
the Seminole Nation in eighteen forty, and then a few
years later, during the Mexican War, balloonist John Wise proposed
using balloons to bomb the city of their Accruz. Neither
of these proposals was actually put into action, though the
first attempted balloon air raid was on July twelfth, eighteen

(05:51):
forty nine. During the First Italian War of Independence, Venice
had rebelled against the Austrian Habsburg Empire and had Establis
wished its own government, and in response, Austrian forces besieged
the city. They deployed balloons carrying explosive devices on timed fuses.
Sources contradict wildly on exactly how many balloons there were,

(06:15):
somewhere between two and two hundreds. These balloons were unpiloted,
so they were totally dependent on the wind, which of
course shifted. Although one bomb did detonate in Saint Mark's Square,
most of them were blown not into Venice but onto
the besiegers. Another attempt a few weeks later was similarly unsuccessful.

(06:37):
By this point, the first airships were being developed, basically
balloons that were capable of self propulsion. The first demonstration
of one of these was by Armegefard of France in
eighteen fifty two. He called his airship a dirigible, meaning
capable of being steered. There's obviously overlap between balloons and airships,

(07:00):
but today we're mostly focused on the balloons that were
not capable of that kind of self propulsion and steering.
Airships kind of had a whole new set of abilities
that make it kind of a different thing. We do
have other episodes on airships, though, and we have one
scheduled as one of our upcoming Saturday classics. During the
US Civil War, balloonists Thaddius Lowe convinced the United States

(07:23):
to establish a balloon reconnaissance unit. Lowe first conducted a
demonstration on June seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, in which he
and a telegraph operator went aloft above the Columbia Armory
in Washington. This was clunky. There were telegraph wires dangling
from the balloon and connected to the telegraph system below
so that the operator could relay messages to the people

(07:46):
on the ground, but it worked. Lowe recruited other balloonists
to establish the Union Balloon Corps, and he became its
chief aeronaut In August of eighteen sixty one, a rebuilt
whole barge, the George Washington Park Curtis, was put into
use as a balloon launch, so sometimes that is described

(08:07):
as the United States first aircraft carrier. These balloonists were
able to gather information about Confederate movements and report back
on what they saw, but beyond that, Confederate troops wasted
time and effort trying to shoot them down when they
were out of range because the balloons were so visible.
Confederate units also kept having to change plans and strategies

(08:32):
in an attempt to evade the balloons and stay out
of sight. Yeah. I kind of imagine them getting their
plans all in order and then being like, ah, man,
there's one of those balloons. You got to make a
new plan again. At the same time, though these balloonists
were civilians, military leaders did not necessarily see them as
all that useful. Low also butted heads with officials and

(08:54):
ultimately left the Core in the spring of eighteen forty three.
Although some of the other balloons kept working after he left,
the corps really didn't last much longer. After that. The
Confederate Army tried to make use of balloons as well,
including the Gazelle, which was nicknamed the silk dress balloon
because it was made of a colorful patchwork of dress fabric,

(09:17):
not as it is often said, actual dresses that were
deconstructed and made into a balloon, just the source material.
But this balloon was captured by Federal forces on the
James River after only a couple of months in service,
and Thaddius Low cut it apart and gave away the scraps.
Back in Europe, balloons played a part in the Siege
of Paris in eighteen seventy during the Franco Prussian War,

(09:40):
as people used them to move themselves and the mail
in and out of the besieged city. This seems to
have inspired some of the other European nations that had
not yet established balloon corps to do so. Although balloons
hadn't had much success as bombers at this point, the
idea that they could be it was enough that a

(10:00):
temporary ban was proposed at the First Hague Convention in
eighteen ninety nine. This went into effect in nineteen hundred,
expired in nineteen oh five, and was renewed in nineteen
oh seven as the Declaration Prohibiting the Discharge of Projectiles
and Explosives from Balloons that was ratified by twenty eight

(10:20):
member states, including the US and the UK. That nineteen
oh seven ban was supposed to remain in effect until
the end of the Third Hague piece Conference, but that
conference never happened, so technically it still stands in spite
of that. During World War One, Professor Robert A. Milliken
of the US Army Signal Corps and the National Research

(10:42):
Council proposed the development of balloon bombers. Although these went
through development and testing, they were ultimately used only to
drop propaganda leaflets, not to drop bombs. A big reason
for this ban was that since balloons had no means
of steering, they could wind up bombing random targets indiscriminately.

(11:04):
But airship technology had come a long way between the
eighteen fifties in the start of the twentieth century, meaning
that at least in theory, the airship could be steered
to the correct target rather than just striking whatever it
happened to drift over. The first Zeppelin, named for its inventor,
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was launched in nineteen hundred and

(11:24):
Germany used Zeppelin's for bombing raids during World War One.
For a brief period, flexible and rigid airships were widely
used for both military purposes and civilian travel, but they
were soon overshadowed by airplanes. And that brings us up
to World War Two, in which obviously airplanes were used extensively,

(11:46):
but even though they might seem way less technologically advanced
than an airplane, balloons had really not gone away. And
we will get to that after a sponsor break. Now
we are going to talk about the balloon bombs that

(12:07):
Japan used to attack the United States during World War Two.
These were also known in Japanese as FuGO. Unless you
already know a lot about these devices and how they worked,
just the term balloon bomb might bring to mind somebody
just tying an explosive device to a balloon and letting
it go and hoping for the best. That is not

(12:29):
at all what was happening here. About two years of
design and planning went into a bombing campaign that lasted
for about six months. Japan's balloon bombing campaign was made
possible by earlier Japanese research into fast moving, high altitude
air currents what we know today as the jet stream.

(12:50):
Japanese meteorologist Wassuburo Oishi was one of the first people
to observe and systematically study these wind patterns, and he
did this using weather balloons to track upper level wind
patterns near Mount Fuji, making more than one thousand observations
between nineteen twenty three and nineteen twenty five. And although
he published his work, his discoveries really didn't get a

(13:13):
lot of attention. There's some speculation that this was because
he published in the constructed language Esperanto. We did an
episode on that back in twenty twenty one. In nineteen
thirty three, during a period of ongoing border disputes between
Japan and the USSR, Lieutenant General Reigishi Tata proposed using

(13:34):
balloons to bomb Soviet targets. These would have been fairly
short range balloons with bombs that were on timed fuses,
but this never really came to fruition. Then, in April
of nineteen forty two, during World War Two, the United
States carried out a surprise attack on Japan called the
Doolittle Raid that was named after Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle.

(13:57):
And we've done an episode about this on the show before,
and we're going to and that as another upcoming Saturday classic.
Japan's ninth Military Technical Research Institute was tasked with developing
ways to strike back at the United States, something that
became an even bigger priority after Japan was defeated at
the Battle of Midway just a few weeks later. Returning

(14:18):
to the idea of balloon bombs, Japanese scientists started studying
the wind currents over Japan and neighboring areas, and over
the course of nineteen forty three and nineteen forty four,
they launched approximately two hundred weather balloons. They discovered that
the jet stream over southern Japan was particularly strong at
an altitude of about thirty thousand feet or nine point

(14:41):
one kilometers, especially from November to March. The jet stream
farther out over the Pacific Ocean hadn't really been charted yet,
but researchers estimated, based on what they knew the area
around Japan, that a balloon launched from southern Japan during
those months, lying at the right altitude, could cover more

(15:03):
than six thousand miles of ocean in between fifty and
seventy hours. As this atmospheric research was going on, the
Japanese Army and Navy were each developing balloon prototypes. The
Army developed a spherical balloon thirty two feet in diameter
made of layers of tissue paper with gores held together

(15:24):
with a paste made from a root vegetable called konyaku.
The Navy design used rubberized silk, and eventually these two
projects were combined and the Navy balloon design was mostly
abandoned as impractical, that rubber was needed for other uses,
and because the rubberized balloons were less buoyant than the
paper ones. They took a lot longer to reach the

(15:45):
desired altitude, since Japan's plan was to take advantage of
that November to March jet stream. Once the balloon design
was finalized in May of nineteen forty four, there was
a huge push to make ten thousand balloons in time
to start launching them in November. Most of the balloon

(16:06):
construction happened in seven locations around Tokyo, and most of
the people building the balloons were schoolgirls. The school day
was shortened during the war in Japan so that children
could contribute to the war effort. The girls weren't told
what they were working on, and those who heard through
some kind of gossip generally did not believe it because

(16:28):
that idea just seemed so far fetched. Because Japan faced
critical food shortages during the war, and the konyaku powder
used to make the paste for the balloons was made
out of edible roots, that was not at all uncommon
for workers to take from the powder supply and eat it.

(16:48):
Because the balloons would be useless if they were punctured
or damaged. Everything in the manufacturing area was wrapped so
nothing sharp could stick out. The girls working on the
balloons were required to keep their nail short and to
wear gloves and socks, and they were told not to
wear pins in their hair. Balloon material was inspected for
holes in a dimly lit room with a frosted glass

(17:10):
floor that was lit from below. Finished balloons were test
inflated with water to check for leaks, and once they
had passed the tests, they were coated with protective lacquer.
The balloons themselves were also only one part of this device.
They were draped with fabric, with shroud lines connecting the
fabric to the gondola underneath it that would carry the

(17:32):
instruments and the payload. This included sensors to detect the
balloon's altitude, two incendiary bombs, an anti personnel bomb, and
sandbags that were used as ballast. Once the balloon was
inflated with hydrogen at the launch point, it would rise
up toward the jet stream. Its ideal elevation was between

(17:53):
thirty thousand and thirty eight thousand feet. During the day,
as the sun heated up the balloon and the gas inside,
it would rise higher at night. As things got colder,
it would start to drop. If the gas heated up
to the point that the pressure in the balloon became
too high, a pressure valve would release some of the gas,
causing it to lose some altitude and keeping it from bursting.

(18:17):
But if the altimeter detective that it had dropped below
thirty thousand feet, it would ignite release fuses, causing two
bags of ballast to be dropped, one on each side
of the balloon so that it would stay balanced. By
periodically venting gas and dropping ballast, the balloon remained at
about the right height for its trip across the Pacific,

(18:38):
and then once there was no more ballast to drop,
the bombs would be deployed and a demolition charge would
at least in theory, destroy the balloon and its remaining components.
That clearly didn't always work because people found a lot
of balloon parts. The equipment required to do this involved
several newly developed or refined devices, including release charges and

(19:02):
batteries that could withstand the extreme cold of high altitudes,
and a radio sand or a balloon telemetry instrument that
could be placed aboard some of the balloons and would
last long enough to send signals until the balloon was
out of range of Japanese receivers. Cold testing balloon components
required essentially all of the dry ice that was available

(19:23):
in Tokyo. Japan's Special Balloon Regiment was established to handle
fill and launch the balloons, and coastal launch sites were
chosen based on their landscape and how close they were
to the rail lines that would bring in the balloons
and the hydrogen needed to fill them. The first balloons
were launched on November third, nineteen forty four, which was

(19:45):
the birthday of Emperor Meiji, who had ruled Japan from
eighteen sixty seven to nineteen twelve. Although the plan was
to launch ten thousand balloons between November and March, about
four hundred of them actually went up in April. It
took between thirty minutes and an hour to fill each
balloon with hydrogen, and then the weather and atmospheric conditions

(20:06):
meant that the launch windows were really pretty narrow, like
there was a whole There were weather that it could
not be launched in. There were best conditions depending on
what kind of fronts had moved through. They just could
not deploy them as fast as was planned. The radio
songs aboard some of the balloons allowed the Japanese military
to track balloons for about thirty hours until they were

(20:29):
out of range, but learning whether any of the balloons
actually hit or damaged targets in North America after that
required Japan to monitor American media and other communications for news.
So the US Navy recovered one of these balloons off
the coast of California on November fourth, nineteen forty four.

(20:50):
That balloon had been launched on the very first day
of operation of this campaign. The balloon was clearly Japanese.
It was carrying some kind of radio transmit, but beyond that,
it wasn't immediately clear what its purpose was or exactly
where it had come from. The US Coast Guard found
part of another balloon and its rigging off of Hawaii

(21:12):
ten days later. Then, on December sixth, nineteen forty four,
an explosion was reported near Thermopolis, Wyoming. Witnesses said they
had seen something that looked kind of like a parachute
before that explosion occurred. Over the next several months, there
were almost three hundred confirmed balloon sightings or recovered parts

(21:32):
of one of these devices all around North America. They
reached from the Aleutian Archipelago in Alaska on the north
end all the way to Mexico in the south, and
as far east as Michigan. The balloons reached at least
twenty six US states, as well as Canada and Mexico.
The military, of course, tried to figure out exactly where

(21:54):
these balloons were coming from, but in the United States
knowledge of the jet stream still pretty limited. Most research
into it had started during World War Two, as these
winds affected the performance of high altitude bombers. Initially, US
military officials thought there might be some undetected Japanese naval

(22:15):
force somewhere in the Pacific which was launching balloons from platforms,
and there had been some marine platforms used for testing
while the balloons are being developed, but the ones that
reached North America during this campaign were launched from Japan.
Other efforts to find the source of these balloons and
to track that down included analyzing the sand from the ballast,

(22:38):
reinflating some of the balloons to try to test radar
configurations that might be able to spot them, and figuring
out which wavelength that radio son was transmitting on. Overwhelmingly,
unless they had personally seen one or heard about it
through gossip, the American public didn't know about the balloons
at all, and the military did try to them a secret.

(23:01):
There were big concerns about what knowledge of a Japanese
balloon attack on American soil would do to moral. This
was the first air attack on the continental US by
a foreign power since the nation's founding, and there were
also concerns about how it might raise Japanese moral to
know that the balloon bombs were reaching their targets. Although

(23:23):
some local newspapers did cover sightings of balloons or explosions
early on on January fourth, nineteen forty five, the Office
of Censorship officially asked news media not to report on it. Meanwhile,
Japanese media spread their own propaganda about successful balloon attacks.
At the same time, American officials were worried about the

(23:46):
balloon's potential to cause wildfires or to be used for
chemical or germ warfare. Several defense units came together to
establish the Firefly Project, which involved stationing people to watch
for fives and to put them out if they started.
Agricultural officers, four age clubs, and other people who had

(24:07):
some kind of agricultural role were also tasked with watching
for signs of disease and animals, but efforts to keep
people from panicking also meant that the general public was
not warned about the balloons and their dangers, and this
had a tragic outcome. On May fifth, nineteen forty five,
after Japan had finished launching the balloons, the Reverend Archie

(24:29):
Mitchell and his wife Elise were taking some children from
their church in Bligh, Oregon, on an outing to Gerhardt Mountain.
While Archie was parking the car, Elise and the children
spotted a strange device which exploded almost immediately. Elise, who
was pregnant, was killed, along with Eddie Engen, Jay Gifford,
Dick Patsky, Joan Patsky known as Siss, and Sherman Shoemaker.

(24:54):
All of those kids were between the ages of eleven
and fourteen. They were the only known dea in the
continental US that came directly from enemy action during World
War Two. Only after this happened on May twenty second
did the US government warn people about these bombs, and overall,
there was so much secrecy about the balloons in the

(25:16):
United States that surviving family members of these people who
were killed in Oregon were often just met with total
disbelief when they told other people how their loved ones
had been killed. Most of the balloons that weren't recorded
as arriving somewhere in North America probably went down somewhere
over the Pacific Ocean, but it's possible that there are

(25:37):
still undetonated paid loads out in the world somewhere. One
was found near Lumby, British Columbia in twenty fourteen, which
had to be handled by a bomb disposal team. We
will get to the Allies use of balloons after another
quick sponsor break. Japan was not the only nation using

(26:05):
balloons during World War Two. Now we're going to talk
about how the Allies were using balloons for both defensive
and offensive purposes. We're going to start with the defensive balloons,
in particular barrage balloons, which were used as protection in
multiple countries. Barrage balloons were first developed during World War
One as a way to protect cities, ports, factories, and

(26:28):
other sites from aerial attack, and nations on both sides
of the conflict put them to use. Attacking aircraft often
flew at low altitude to try to avoid anti aircraft guns,
so flying a bunch of balloons above their potential targets
forced the planes to fly higher, and this put them
in the range of anti aircraft weapons while also putting

(26:49):
them farther away from their intended targets. These balloons were
also usually anchored with cables, and the cables themselves presented
their own hazards. Planes that hit these cable could be
damaged or even crash. Balloons could also be used to
hold suspended nets with the same purpose. You may be thinking,
if these balloons were causing so much trouble, why not

(27:11):
just shoot them down? And the answer is that they
were usually filled with hydrogen, which would explode if you
did that. Yeah, so you shot them down, you were
risking yourself. The balloons used during World War Two were
similar in both design and purpose. In the UK, the
Royal Air Force Balloon Command was formed on November first,
nineteen thirty eight, and it was made up of volunteers

(27:33):
from the Auxiliary Air Force. The Women's Auxiliary Air Force
was a huge part of this. Women made the balloons
and they were trained on balloon handling and managing the
winches that were used to position and anchor them. The
balloons themselves were very large, sixty four feet or nineteen
meters long by thirty four feet or of ten point

(27:54):
four meters in diameter, and they were shaped kind of
like a blimp or a kite balloon. That's an aerodynamic
shape that was meant to make them more stable in
the air, but they did not have any kind of
self propulsion. It's estimated that during the Blitz, more than
one hundred enemy aircraft struck the cables from the barrage

(28:14):
balloons that were floating over London and either crashed or
were forced to land. The United States was using barrage
balloons as well, and more than thirty barrage balloon battalions
were trained at Camp Tyson in Tennessee, which was built
for that purpose. The balloons were used in conjunction with
the Coast Artillery Corps and the Marine Corps to protect

(28:35):
sites around the US coast, and American balloon battalions were
also deployed overseas. The US Army was racially segregated, and
four of these balloon battalions were made up entirely of
Black troops, and then one of those units, the three
hundred twentieth Barrage Balloon Battalion, was responsible for helping to

(28:56):
protect landing sites during the D Day invasion of Normandy.
This was the only all Black troop unit to storm
the beaches at Normandy. These balloons were meant to provide
cover and protection for the landing craft, and many of
them were destroyed during the initial beach landings at Normandy.
Soldiers kept having to fill and redeploy replacement balloons after

(29:20):
the initial landing was over. The three twentieth was stationed
in France for about one hundred and fifty days as
the war in Europe ended. There was a plan to
redeploy them in the Pacific, but the Pacific War ended
before that happened, and then on the offensive side. Operation
Outward was a British campaign to attack Germany using balloons,

(29:43):
and it grew out of Britain's use of barrage balloons.
On September seventeenth, nineteen forty, during the Battle of Britain,
several barrage balloons broke free of their anchors during a
severe storm. They drifted away, making their way to Sweden,
Finland and Denmark, and they were trailing their anchoring cables
behind them. These wayward balloons caused various problems, especially when

(30:08):
those cables brushed up against electrical lines, which caused short
circuits and power outages, and also knocked out antennas. Officials
in Sweden reported what had happened back to British authorities,
and Prime Minister Winston Churchill was like, so what if
we did this on purpose, or to use his actual words,

(30:29):
we may make a virtue of our misfortune. I'm just like, hey,
that's neat they do that. The Air Ministry had some
doubts that this was going to work, and there were
also people who really thought this entire idea was unsporting.
But the Admiralty started conducting studies similar to what we

(30:52):
discussed Japan doing, figuring out that at the right altitudes,
prevailing winds went from west to east, meaning that Britain
could float balloons to Germany, but Germany probably couldn't float
them back, and also the balloons weren't likely to float
back toward Britain once they'd been launched. They used eight
foot weather balloons with an internal cord which tightened as

(31:15):
the balloon inflated, so when the gas got hot and
the balloon expanded, the cord would open a valve that
would vent some of the gas. A container of mineral
oil also acted as ballast with the mineral oil, slowly
dripping out to lighten the load as the balloon gradually
lost its gas. These balloons were equipped with thin wires

(31:36):
on timed fuses, or with incendiary devices. These devices had
various nicknames, including Beer, jelly, and socks. Beer used half
pint glass bottles of incendiary materials, including white phosphorus. Jelly
contained an incendiary jelly, and socks was a canvas tube

(31:57):
soaked in paraffin and filled with incendiary material and it
looked kind of like two links of sausage. The hope
was that the shape of the sock would cause it
to snag in trees and set them on fire. Operation
Outward was approved in September of nineteen forty one, and
the first balloon launches started the following March from Felixstow

(32:17):
Ferry Golf Club. Women were once again a big part
of this operation. The Women's Royal Naval Service or wrens,
were already assisting with barrage balloons, and for Operation Outward
they filled as many as one thousand balloons a day
with hydrogen, which was inherently dangerous. They were given flashproof
gear to wear and the balloons were sprayed with water

(32:39):
during fillings, so that static electricity did not ignite the hydrogen,
but there were still some accidental ignitions and burns. Nearly
a hundred thousand balloons were deployed during Operation Outward, with
slightly more of them equipped with incendiary devices than with wires.
Over the course of this operation, Britain got reports of

(33:01):
forest fires and of German aircraft being tasked with hunting
down these balloons, so if nothing else, this was getting
the German Army to use up some of its resources.
On July twelfth, nineteen forty two, a balloon hit electrical
wires near a power station near Leipzig, and that caused
a fire and destroyed the station. That caused widespread power outages,

(33:24):
but not all of the balloons struck their intended targets.
On September nineteenth, nineteen forty four, a balloon knocked out
power in Laholm, Sweden, which led to two trains colliding
in the dark. As was the case with the tragedy
in Oregon, which took place after Japan had stopped launching balloons,
this collision happened after Operation Outward had ended. The last

(33:47):
balloon launches had taken place on September fourth, nineteen forty four,
so this was two weeks later. And of course, balloons
have continued to be used for military purposes since World
War Two, including for surveillance and to deploy weapons. This
includes everything from attempts to develop incendiary balloons during the

(34:08):
Cold War two, reports of Russia launching reflective balloons as decoys,
and really recent months to try to distract or draw
fire from Ukrainian troops. And then of course there's that
Chinese spy balloon that made so many headlines in the US.
I think we're going to have a fascinating talk on

(34:28):
Friday about these probably, so do you have listener mail
for today? Though I do. I have listener mail from Caitlyn.
It's about the velveteen Rabbit, and Caitlyn wrote, Holly and Tracy,
I'm sure I'm not going to be alone in this,
but as soon as you mentioned scarlet fever, I thought
they'd better be explaining why that poor boy's rabbit got burnt.

(34:48):
I think I'm like Holly where my parents sheltered me
from the book because I was aware of it, but
I realized i'd never actually read it until I was
reading it to my child. No. Yeah, my mother in
law gave it to my son for Easter when he
was maybe two, and went on and on about how
it's her favorite book and she bought a copy for

(35:09):
her house because she loves it so much, and I
thought it was one I had forgotten. Nope, I would
one hundred percent remember that bunny getting murdered. I remember
reading it to my son at bedtime the first time,
and as it went on, I started becoming more and
more internally distraught. Once I put him down, I went
out to my husband and said, do you know the
story in this book? Why does your mom think this

(35:30):
is sweet? He didn't remember it at all. L O L.
It's been a long time since my son, who was
now five, pulled it out. I'm hoping he doesn't rediscover
it anytime soon because he is a sensitive kid who
believes all the toys are real. Anyway, I had to
get that off my chest after hearing your rants along
the same lines. Thanks for reminding me that I shouldn't
track down our copy and hide it. Happy Friday, Caitlin.

(35:52):
I love this email. I did too, By the way, Caitlin,
all the toys are real, just definite. Yeah. I remember
if I said this already, because you were out last
week we took we had a break from recording. We
got more traffic on our Scarlet Fever post on Facebook
than anything we have done in years. And there were

(36:12):
some arguments about people's interpretations of The Velveteen Rabbit and
where whether they thought it was a sweet book or not.
There were some very vigorous Velveteen Rabbit defenders in the comments,
and then also some people who were like, I was traumatized.
This email, though, reminded me of on maybe like a

(36:33):
fourth or fifth birthday of some folks I used to know.
I bought their kid a collection of the Babar books
because I remembered loving them as a child. I did
not recognize such things as colonialism in there when I
was a child. And I also didn't remember that that

(36:57):
whole collection starts with Babar's parents being killed by hunters.
Like I had no memory of this at all. And
so you know, I've bought this child this, you know,
pretty hardcover collected volume of these stories. And she was like,
will you read it to me? And I was like, oh,
of course. And as I'm reading, like my eyes on

(37:18):
the page are seeing the words killed by hunters, and
I was like, oh, no, I don't know. I don't know,
like and if there have been any conversations about death
with this child at all, Like I have no idea.
And so I was like Babar and his parents got
separated and she went separated. I was like, yes, he

(37:40):
was lost and he could not find them. And that
was how I tried to fix in the moment my
error having bought this book without rereading it. You have
just described one of the many reasons I'm not comfortable
around kids. Yeah, because I don't know what their parents
are cool with, and there's no way to have a conversation.
Ticks through all the possible things that might come up

(38:02):
in a conversation. Sure, and then I'm like, I don't know,
do they And I'll end up, like you know, telling
them something that kids are not ready to hear. Yeah,
it's very stressful for me. I do now make it
a point to read the children's book I mean for
little kid books, not something that like a very long
chapter book, as that would be a little different, but
like when it comes to things like picture books and

(38:24):
storybooks for little kids, like I do make it a
point to read things before I give it to them,
just because I want to make sure I'm not about
to accidentally do something traumatizing. So anyway, thank you so much, Caitlin.
Thank you to everybody who was so vigorously excited in
one way or the other about the velveteen rabbit on
our Facebook page. I did have to shut down a
few threads because there were some hostilities that happened and

(38:47):
I was like, we don't need that today, but it
was great to generally see the like the more lively
but not jerkish conversation that happened. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other podcast,
great history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all
over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll

(39:08):
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(39:30):
you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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