This winter’s Chinese balloon scare was not the first time such unmanned aerial vehicles have violated North American airspace.
The most famous example is Japan’s use of balloons against North America during the Second World War.
The big difference between then and now, however, is that while the most recent balloon caused a sensation and minute-by-minute media coverage, no one talked publicly about the Japanese balloons until later.
Project Fu-Go was the Japanese response to an air raid on Tokyo by American bombers in 1942. Incendiary devices and high-explosive bombs were packed into lightweight balloons and launched into the jet stream with the hopes that they would make their way to North America and cause a distraction by starting wildfires.
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Most of the 9,000 balloons launched in 1944 and 1945 didn’t survive the journey, but more than 300 did, floating across the western United States and Canada.
However, the American and Canadian governments kept the balloons secret because they didn’t want the Japanese to know their plan had sort-of worked.
Reporters tried to do their jobs, but censorship pressure during wartime was too strong.
Author Mark Bourrie writes that the Regina Leader-Post had a story about one such balloon landing near the U.S. border south of Regina, complete with eyewitness accounts. Government censors refused to allow it to run, but did offer an exclusive once the publication ban had lifted.
Bourrie says stories about 190 balloon sightings were languishing in Toronto newspapers’ “unpublished” trays by the late spring of 1945.
In April of that year, the publisher of the Vancouver Sun was badgering the government to let him start running stories about the Japanese balloons. Everyone in British Columbia knew about them by then anyway, he argued.
The censorship apparently worked because the Japanese were never sure if their balloons had actually made it to North America.
The balloons never caused much damage, but the decision to keep the public in the dark did have tragic consequences when a pregnant woman and five children were killed in Washington while investigating one during a picnic.
Fortunately, this winter’s balloon stakes weren’t quite that serious.
