Real Time History
Published 10 Mar 2023
It’s common wisdom that the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese surrender at the end of the 2nd World War. However, there has been a fierce historical debate if this narrative omits the role of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 — or if this invasion was actually the main cause for the surrender.
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March 11, 2023
Why Japan Surrendered in WW2: Stalin or the Bomb?
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March 10, 2023
The evolution of a slur
Scott Alexander traces the reasons that we can comfortably call British people “Brits” but avoid using the similar contraction “Japs” for Japanese people:
Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern — World War II — is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
He also explains how and when (and how quickly) the use of the word “Negro” became extremely politically incorrect:
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said — in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him — that “Negro” was a slur — and because people believed him it became true.
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March 8, 2023
Perhaps the Prime Minister ran out of glitterbomb distractions?
In The Line, Matt Gurney speculates on why the federal government needed to be “punched in the face” for literally weeks before finally taking (some) action:
Let’s acknowledge something right at the top: no one really knows what the hell the prime minister proposed yesterday. Not in any specific policy sense, at any rate. But boy, did we ever learn something about how the Liberals are viewing this politically.
After weeks of bobbing and weaving and throwing out fistfuls of increasingly ridiculous chaff, Justin Trudeau has belatedly agreed to a series of actions to probe Chinese electoral interference in Canada. And maybe other interference? We don’t know. We do know it’ll involve NSICOP, which is an acronym in desperate need of an agreed-upon pronunciation, if Monday’s press conference was any guide. NSICOP is a joint House-Senate committee that reviews various matters relating to Canada’s national security and intelligence (read this on its website and you’ll know more than 99.9 per cent of Canadians do about NSICOP). There’s also going to be a splash of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), plus a special rapporteur. The special rapporteur will apparently be given broad powers and, should they recommend a full public inquiry, the PM will accept that.
Hell of an endorsement for someone who hasn’t been selected yet. It’s almost like the PM decided he had to make an announcement before he was ready to actually share many details about that announcement, for some reason. Like the announcement itself was the point. Weird, eh? Wonder what that was about. In any case, all we know is it’ll be an eminent Canadian.
Shoutout to all you eminent Canadians out there, I guess. Brush up those cover letters.
Winston Churchill frequently has this attributed to him: “You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.” Our Canadian version might be that you can depend on Prime Minister Trudeau to do something, but only after he’s exhausted all of his glitterbombs on distracting public attention.
The way that the Liberals responded wasn’t shocking. They only have a few plays left in their playbook, and we’ve seen something just like this only a few weeks ago. (Which is why I’m wondering if they actually only have the single play left, come to think of it.) The Liberals have responded to the barrage of news stories over Chinese interference exactly the way they did over their controversial gun-control amendments from the fall. First, deny there’s a problem. Then accuse anyone saying there’s a problem of being Donald Trump 2.0 or somesuch. Then just cut right to the chase and call them racist. When that doesn’t work, wait a few days to see if the problem goes away. When it doesn’t — indeed, when it gets worse — that’s when you finally admit that you can’t just yell “DISINFORMING MAGA BIGOTS!” at people and watch as your problem magically evaporates.
With guns, after everything else failed, they withdrew the amendments (though I imagine they’ll try again, though probably with no better luck). With China interference, it was agreeing to some kind of process. All the unfilled blanks notwithstanding, even the fact that something is being agreed to shows a dawning of political reality in the PMO: ignoring this and hoping the leaks stop if you called enough people racist Trumpers wasn’t going to work. Clearly, sometime in the last few days, the PM and his staff reached the acceptance stage, and concluded that either they had to admit that there was enough here to warrant some kind of serious process, or they could just start randomly talking about abortion in the hopes that people fell for that.
No, no, wait. They tried that anyway.
It would be fascinating to know what specifically led to the mental breakthrough that enabled Monday’s announcement. Weeks of denials, evasions and counterattacks, a day of performatively fretting about abortion, and then, zap!, we’re getting an rapporteur — an eminent one! — and a process. Maybe they looked at some internal polling. Maybe they’re worried about a big scoop that’s yet to land. Or maybe they’re just tired of being on the defensive and figured that the proposals would stand a decent chance of smothering the issue to death with pillows stuffed with bureaucracy and abbreviations.
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March 7, 2023
The lab leak in Wuhan was bad, but the cover-up after the fact is much worse
Jon Miltimore outlines some of the recent confirmations of so many conspiracy theorists’ speculations about the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
More than three years after the Covid-19 outbreak, the world is still reeling from the virus and the global response to it.
Some 6.8 million people have already died from the virus, according to official statistics, including an estimated 1.1 million Americans. Each day the toll climbs higher; globally, more than 10,000 people die each week.
A bevy of government assessments now indicate that the likely source of the virus was not a wet market, but the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which for years has dabbled in the creation of chimeric coronaviruses.
Last Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy had concluded the Wuhan lab was likely the origin of the pandemic. Days later the FBI chimed in, declaring that “the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China”.
If true, it’s not hyperbole to say this would be the greatest scandal of the century.
As the Washington Post reported nearly two years ago, State Department cables had previously warned of safety issues at the WIV, where researchers were studying bat coronaviruses. The cables were sent after science diplomats made a January 2018 visit to the Wuhan lab on behalf of the US embassy in Beijing. What the officials found at the lab, which in 2015 had become China’s first facility to achieve the maximum level of international bioresearch safety, shocked them.
Bad, even shocking, to those who refused to listen to the whistleblowers early in the pandemic. Worse, however, is the complicity of western government and media in the cover-up:
While the US government’s involvement in the Wuhan lab leak scandal may have been inadvertent, its attempt to avoid potential responsibility and conceal the truth is now apparent.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci — the same Dr. Fauci whose agency awarded a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab — became the leading voice denying the possibility that Covid-19 could have emerged from the WIV.
It was “molecularly impossible” for viruses at Wuhan to have mutated into the current viral strain, he claimed in October 2021. In April the previous year he called the lab-leak-theory “a shiny object that will go away soon”, later noting that the virus’ “mutations” were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human”. In May 2020, he told National Geographic that “everything … strongly indicates” that the virus “evolved in nature”, calling the lab-leak theory a “circular argument”.
Scientists are of course entitled to their opinions, but there are two big problems that accompany Fauci’s public statements.
The first problem is that while these statements were being issued publicly, a different conversation was taking place privately, The New York Times noted Tuesday.
“… in 2020, many of those scientists who would become the most stalwart critics of the lab-leak theory privately acknowledged that the origins of the pandemic were very much up for debate”, writes David Wallace-Wells, “and that a laboratory leak was a perfectly plausible — perhaps even the most likely — explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan a few months earlier.”
We know this because a series of emails obtained by BuzzFeed through FOIA requests show that some of the world’s top virologists initially believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was at least as plausible as natural evolution theory. Specifically, the virologist and natural biologist Kristian Andersen described the new virus as “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. In another email, Jeremy Farrar, the incoming head scientist of the World Health Organization, summarized the perspectives of scientists who concluded the “accidental release theory” was the likeliest scenario — “70:30” or “60:40” in favor. (Farrar put the odds at 50-50.)
These views were not made public, however. And following a Feb. 1 conference call arranged by Fauci, scientists published a paper in Nature expressing their belief that the most likely scenario was that the virus naturally evolved on its own.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”, the scientists, including the initially skeptical Andersen, emphatically noted.
So just a few months into the pandemic, scientific researchers were raising concerns in private, but governments pushed legacy media and social media platforms to police public discourse and to actively suppress public doubts of exactly the same sort that the experts were discussing among themselves.
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and the Greek Myths
toldinstone
Published 20 Aug 2021Did dinosaur fossils inspire the mythical griffin? Did mammoth bones shape the story of the Gigantomachy? Were the cyclopes modeled on the skulls of dwarf elephants? This video investigates some of the fascinating intersections between fossils and the Greek myths.
This video is part of a collaboration with @NORTH 02 Check out their video “Scimitar Cats, Cave Bears, and Behemoths” for more on the fossils that so fascinated the ancient Greeks and Romans: https://youtu.be/lpU-F3EQ4v4
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March 4, 2023
Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
In The Critic, Robert Lyman reviews a recent book offering a rather more nuanced view of the British empire:
The book is a careful analysis of empire from an ethical perspective, examining a set of moral questions. This includes whether the British Empire was driven by lust or greed; whether it was racist and condoned, supported or encouraged slavery; whether it was based on the conquest of land; whether it entailed genocide and or economic exploitation; whether its lack of democracy made it illegitimate; and whether it was intrinsically or systemically violent.
Biggar’s proposition is simple: that we look at Britain’s history without assuming the zero-sum position that imperialism and colonialism were inherently bad, that motives and agency need to be considered and that good did flow from bad, as well as bad from good.
Whether he succeeds depends on the reader’s willingness to appreciate these moral or ethical propositions, and to re-evaluate accordingly. In my view, he has mounted a coolly dispassionate defence of his proposition, challenging the hysteria of those who suggest that the British Empire was the apotheosis of evil. Biggar’s calm dissection of these inflated claims allows us to see that they say much more about the motivations, assumptions and political ideologies of those who hold these views than they do about what history presents to us as the realities of a morally imperfect past.
He reminds us that British imperialism had no single wellspring. Most of us can easily dismiss the notion that it was a product of an aggressive, buccaneering state keen to enrich itself at the expense of peoples less able to defend themselves. Equally, it is untrue that economic motives drove all imperialist or colonial endeavour, or that economics (business, trade and commerce) was the primary force sustaining the colonial regimes that followed.
As Biggar asserts, both imperialism and colonialism were driven from different motivations at different times. Each ran different journeys, with different outcomes depending on circumstances. The assertion that there is a single defining imperative for each instance of imperial initiative or colonial endeavour simply does not accord with the facts.
Whilst other issues played a part, it was social, religious and political motives which drove the colonial endeavour in the New World from the 1620s: security and religion drove the subjugation of Catholic (and therefore Royalist) Ireland in the 1650s; social and administrative factors led to the settlement in Australia from 1788; and social and religious imperatives drove the colonisation of New Zealand in the 1840s.
In circumstances where trade and the security of trade was the primary motive for imperialism — think of Clive in the 1750s, for example — a wide variety of outcomes ensued. Some occurred as a natural consequence of imperialism. In India, Clive’s defeat of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah in 1757 was in support of a palace coup that put Siraj’s uncle Mir Jafar on the throne of Bengal, thus allowing the East India Company the favoured trading status that Siraj had previously rejected.
This led in time to the Company taking over the administrative functions of the Bengal state (zamindars collected both rents for themselves and taxes for the government). Seeking to protect its new prerogatives, it provided security from both internal (civil disorder and lawlessness) and external threats (the Mahratta raiders, for example). The incremental, almost accidental, accrual of power that began in the early 1600s stepped into colonial administration 150 years later, leading to the transfer of power across a swathe of the sub-continent to the British Crown in 1858.
Biggar’s argument is that, running in parallel with this expansion came a host of other consequences, not all of which can be judged “bad”. We may not like what prompted the colonial enterprise at the outset (not all of which was morally contentious, such as the need to trade), but we cannot deny that good things, as well as bad, followed thereafter.
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February 27, 2023
Luftwaffe Defeated in One Week?! – War Against Humanity 099
World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2023Allied and German Air Forces fight fierce battles over Europe with civilians caught in the crossfire, while Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria deport two entire ethnicities of half a million in just one week.
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February 26, 2023
Tojo Takes Control – Week 235 – February 25, 1944
World War Two
Published 25 Feb 2023Now that the Americans have seized the Marshall Islands, they can bypass the Japanese base at Truk. This impels Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to shake up both army and navy command, and he even takes personal control over the Japanese Army. On the Anzio Front, Lucian Truscott replaces John Lucas as Allied Commander. In the field, the Allies win a big victory in Burma, and in Ukraine, the Soviets are still on the move.
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February 24, 2023
QotD: Relearning lessons as old as warfare
DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese.
The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.
During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.
News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.
The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.
But they were also outfought.
In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?
In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.
Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand — at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.
Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963
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February 23, 2023
Type 99 Arisaka Sniper Rifles
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Nov 2016The Japanese Army made significant use of snipers (or in today’s terminology, designated marksmen) as part of its infantry combined arms doctrine, and produced about 22,000 Type 97 sniper rifles for use in WWII and the Sino-Japanese War. In 1941, shortly after the adoption of the new 7.7mm rifle cartridge, it was decided that a sniper rifle variant of the Type 99 should be made in addition to the Type 97 (which was basically a scoped Type 38).
Testing through 1941 determined that there was almost no practical difference in accuracy between scoped examples of the Type 99 long and short rifles, and so the short rifle was chosen to be the basis for the Type 99 sniper (the Type 99 long rifles would drop from production altogether pretty quickly anyway). About 1,000 of the scoped 99s were manufactured by the Kokura Arsenal using the same 2.5x scope as on the Type 97 sniper, while the Nagoya Arsenal instead used a 4x scope, offering more magnification at the expense of a narrower field of view. Nagoya would produce approximately 10,000 of these rifles, with 4x scopes except for a period between serial numbers 5,000 and 7,000 with 2.5x scopes (most likely the remainder stored at Kokura when that plant ceased production). The rifles made into snipers were given no special selection criteria; simply taken at random from normal production. The utility of the weapon in Japanese practice came not from it being mechanically more accurate than any other issue rifle, but rather from the optical sight allowing better exploitation of that standard rifle’s inherent accuracy.
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February 19, 2023
The Destruction of Monte Cassino – Week 234 – February 18, 1944
World War Two
Published 18 Feb 2023The Allies bomb the monastery atop Monte Cassino in Italy, but just to the Northwest it’s the Germans attacking them at Anzio this week. In the Soviet Union, the Axis break out of the Korsun Pocket, but at great cost, and in the Pacific comes a major Allied raid on the Japanese base at Truk and landings on Eniwetok Atoll.
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February 18, 2023
Nikki Haley’s presidential bid is clearly doomed because … she uses her middle name? Let me read that again.
Jim Treacher (whose name I should now probably put in scare quotes because it’s a nom-de-plume) explains why Nikki Haley is a no-hoper in the next Republican presidential primaries:
As I revealed over a decade ago, “Jim Treacher” isn’t my real name. This is just a message-board pseudonym that got way out of hand, and now I guess I’m stuck with it. My government name is Robert Sean Medlock, but my parents have always called me Sean. I don’t know why they didn’t just name me Sean Robert Medlock, but I was in no position to argue my case at the time because I couldn’t talk yet.
So now, every time I need to fill out paperwork somewhere, I have to explain that I go by my middle name. Doctors, dentists, car repairs, insurance, what have you. The routine is kind of annoying, but at this point I’m used to it.
I’m not deceiving anybody by using my middle name. It’s just my name, man. Lots of people go by their middle name.
In other news: This week Nikki Haley announced she’s running for president. I don’t know if she has a shot, but the libs sure seem to think so. They’re already attacking her for … going by her middle name.
Check out this idiot:
She didn’t. Her birth name was Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Not “Nimrata”, as it’s commonly misspelled by supposedly sophisticated libs:
My goodness. Guess it runs in the family, huh?
The Randhawa family referred to their daughter as Nikki, which is Punjabi for “little one”. And she changed her last name to Haley when she married a man named Michael Haley.
Y’know, like Hillary Rodham did when she married Bill Clinton.
Here’s another dummy, who of course works for CNN:
Yeah. Wait. What?
And if that scandal wasn’t enough to sink Nikki Haley’s chances utterly, CNN’s Don Lemon helpfully points out that she’s way, way, way past her peak:
Now, you know I’m not one to cry sexism often. Frankly, when I found out a hot college professor of mine had been fired for doing a #MeToo, I was offended for not being involved. I’d gone to office hours, for godsakes. But there is sexism this week we have to call out. Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. She’s a reasonable Republican candidate who is, of course, a long shot against Trump. There are plenty of ways to criticize her politics, but for some reason a bunch of people we are meant to respect tried to say that the real problem is that she’s a woman, that she’s not young, and that she’s Indian.
You may think I’m exaggerating.
Here is Don Lemon on CNN: “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry”, he says, looking to camera, a little smile on his face. “When a woman is considered to be in her prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s …” His co-hosts, both women, balk. (“Prime for what?”) But Lemon keeps going. Watch the extremely stressful video here, where he goes on … and on … about how Nikki Haley, who is 51, cannot criticize Biden’s age. Because women peak in their 20s, and she’s long past that.
Or here’s progressive hero Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, who disavowed him and became a star of the intelligentsia. She decided that the best way to insult Nikki Haley this week was by highlighting that she’s Indian, because Nikki is her middle name. Again, this is a real statement Mary Trump released on Twitter: “First of all, fuck you Nimrata Haley.” Sorry, I’m slow: If you’re a white person trying to insult someone who’s not white and you do it by highlighting their race, what’s that called again? I’m sure there’s a Robin DiAngelo chapter on this somewhere.
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February 17, 2023
Spy ballooning has a remarkably long history (that’s clearly still ongoing)
In The Line, Scott Van Wynsberghe outlines the history of balloons in wartime and (as many are now aware from recent events) in peacetime:
China’s balloon spying is shocking on so many levels that you can take your pick. There is the ultra-flagrant violation of foreign sovereignty, the stunningly surreal air of denial exhibited by Beijing, and the fearful sense that something in the world order just lurched. There is also puzzlement: what, balloon spying is still a thing? Indeed it is, and its centuries-long history is instructive as to what China is now doing. It also makes clear that the U.S. is no innocent victim here but rather a past offender with a cleaned-up act.
Among the first major studies of aerial reconnaissance was a book brought out by military author Glenn B. Infield way back in 1970. In a way, Infield was charting unknown territory. When he addressed balloons in particular, he traced their use in spying to the many wars associated with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In 1794, he related, the French military officer Jean-Marie-Joseph Countelle made an ascent at the city of Maubeuge in order to monitor enemy forces in the area. In the process, Countelle became the first balloon spy.
As technology improved, other firsts followed. By the 1850s, cameras were mounted on French military balloons. In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, Union forces battling the Confederacy used balloons trailing telegraphic wires, which transmitted immediate updates from the balloonists. Yet technology cut both ways. By the early 1900s, balloons had a nemesis in sight, in the form of winged and powered aircraft.
The inevitable showdown occurred in the First World War, and it was ugly. Large numbers of observation balloons were used by all sides in the conflict, and WWI historian Denis Winter claims the Germans alone deployed 170 of them in France by 1917. Typically, such balloons were tethered in place near the frontline, floating at several thousand feet, with telephone wires dangling to the ground. Although they seemed vulnerable, they were actually protected from below by anti-aircraft units, which blasted at any enemy plane that got too close. However, the reverse was also true, with balloons themselves being fired at from the ground. By 1915, says aviation writer Ralph Barker, the British were losing at least a dozen balloons a month from all forms of enemy action. Those balloonists who were not shot to pieces often had to bail out, putting their faith in parachutes that did not always work. (Horrified onlookers called them “balloonatics.”) The fighter pilots responsible for much of this mayhem — which they called “balloon-busting” — may not have had an easy time, but some of them scored heavily, with one Frenchman named Coiffard tallying 28 balloons. Although observation balloons managed to make it to the end of the war, it was a near-run thing. According to author Linda Hervieux, nobody after the war was talking about repeating that experience in any future fighting.
[…]
Once the Second World War was underway, some propaganda leafleting did occur, but secret balloon activity seemed to be at a low level. That was very misleading, because one of the tensest moments in ballooning history was playing out in the background, but it occurred amid so much security that the entire tale took years to emerge. In 1944, Japan launched the first of over 9,000 bomb-rigged balloons across the Pacific. Robert C. Mikesh, in a comprehensive 1973 monograph issued by the Smithsonian Institution, noted that almost a thousand of the balloons may have reached North America, but the true number is unknowable, because so many came down in remote wilderness. (One was found by forestry workers in British Columbia as late as 2014.) Mikesh tabulated 285 known incidents, ranging from Alaska all the way south to Baja California and as far inland as Manitoba. Both the U.S. and Canada clamped down hard on any news about the balloons, for fear of providing Tokyo valuable feedback about the results of the campaign. (In other words, balloon counterintelligence became a priority.) In general, the balloons did not cause a lot of harm, but one of them slaughtered six people in Oregon in 1945. By a strange fluke, one of the few groups in the U.S. that knew the full story of the balloons was an element of the Black community. The all-Black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion was sent to the U.S. West to handle emergencies caused by the balloons.
The remains of a Japanese balloon bomb found in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, BC in 2014. It was detonated on-site by the bomb disposal unit of Maritime Forces Pacific of the Royal Canadian Navy.
There is a strong temptation to blame the Japanese balloon bombs for what happened next, because the U.S. unaccountably entered the Cold War as the most pugnacious exponent of clandestine ballooning up to that time. Whatever the explanation, the epic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics plunged U.S. ballooning into a tangle of psychological warfare, shadowy science, under-the-table finances, and clandestine belligerence indistinguishable from military attacks. Plus, UFOs and breakfast foods were involved (seriously).
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America’s War on Japanese Shipping – WW2 Special Documentary
World War Two
Published 15 Feb 2023We’ve covered in great depth the Battle of the Atlantic and the war by and against German U-Boats, but what about the other side of the world? Why has the war on Japanese shipping been so much quieter? There are several very specific reasons for that, which we look at today.
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