Two FBI reports, one of them newly declassified, suggest the use of biological agents, in particular bubonic plague and anthrax, as part of a large-scale balloon barrage – code name “Fu-Go” – carried out by Japan over the United States and Canada in late 1944 and the first four months of 1945.
One report, dated two months after the end of World War II, stated that anthrax was discovered in Japanese balloons that came down in the U.S. Midwest. The other report was dated five years after the war. Written by J. Edgar Hoover, or sourced to his office, it discussed outbreaks of bubonic plague that experts felt were linked to the Japanese balloon attacks.
During World War 2, Japan launched some 9,300 high-altitude balloons against the U.S. and Canada. Approximately 300 balloons, many carrying antipersonnel and incendiary bombs, were known to have touched land in North America.
According to Japanese testimony, all records inside Japan relating to their secret balloon program were destroyed at the end of World War II, along with the biological warfare research undertaken by Japan’s infamous Unit 731.
The new evidence presented in this article significantly changes our understanding of this important episode in World War II, and points to an intelligence cover-up more than seven decades old.
Balloons Downed in Midwest Carried Anthrax
Last year, stimulated by the controversy over the discovery of a Chinese balloon drifting over the United States, a number of news articles recalled the WW2 Japanese balloon episode. In a May 5, 2023 Time Magazine interview with historian Ross Coen, who has written a book on the Fu-Go attacks, Coen noted, “From the perspective of the War Department and Army intelligence, the thing that they feared most was biological warfare…. Ultimately there never was any biological component to the balloons.”
But a July 6, 1945 FBI memorandum addressed to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, Daniel M. Ladd, stated, “recently several Japanese balloons were found in [North and South Dakota, and Nebraska] which were determined to have been carrying bacteria.”
The bacteria were identified as anthrax. The pathogen was discovered in the hydrogen gas that inflated the massive paper-laminated balloons. The FBI report was written by the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Norfolk Field Division.
Hellbound and Down 