Japanese balloon bomb
A pregnant woman and five children: caught up in a war that was raging thousands of kilometers away. All because of a bomb that fell “by chance” in Oregon.
On May 5, 1945, three and a half years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, a French-designed balloon bomb hit Oregon.
It was the only one of the hundreds of Japanese attempts that was capable of harming people. The Japanese had been trying for some time to kill American civilians with these war devices, but fortunately for the USA the vast majority of these balloons did not reach their targets, and very few were even able to reach the North American coast, I remembered a few years ago.
On this day, however, one of these bombs, about 10 meters in diameter and made of silk or rubberized paper, was the killer of the only six fatalities on North American soil during the Second World War.
Reverend Archie Mitchell was taking his wife, Elyse, and his Sunday school class on a rural outing. Suddenly The woman, who was pregnant, felt bad and moved a little away from the corso to rest. Some children outside with her.
Suddenly an explosion: Elyse and five children had been caught by the killer balloons. “There was a terrible explosion,” said a worker at the site who witnessed the explosion, Richard Barnhouse. “Twigs flew through the air, pine needles began to fall, dead branches and dust, and dead trunks flew.”
They were the only deaths on American soil in World War II. But on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific, there were thousands: 400,000.
Carolina Bastos Pereira, ZAP //
