Posted on 01/20/2015 2:27:36 PM PST by Theoria
Seven decades after thousands of “balloon bombs” were let loose by the Imperial Japanese Army to wreak havoc on their enemies across the Pacific, two forestry workers found one half-buried in the mountains of eastern British Columbia.
A navy bomb disposal team was called and arrived at the site Friday in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, B.C.
“They confirmed without a doubt that it is a Japanese balloon bomb,” said RCMP Cpl. Henry Proce.
“This thing has been in the dirt for 70 years .... There was still some metal debris in the area (but) nothing left of the balloon itself.”
The forestry workers found the device Wednesday and reported it to RCMP on Thursday.
Proce, a bit of a history buff himself, accompanied the men to the remote area and agreed that the piece appeared to be a military relic.
The area was cordoned off and police contacted the bomb disposal unit at Maritime Forces Pacific.
It was a big bomb, Proce said. A half-metre of metal casing was under the dirt in addition to approximately 15 to 20 centimetres sticking out of the ground.
“It would have been far too dangerous to move it,” Proce said. “They put some C4 on either side of this thing and they blew it to smithereens.”
Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army released more than 9,000 bomb-bearing balloons.
Assembled from bark and rice paper, in some cases by school children, the balloons were loaded with hydrogen and attached to a chandelier-type structure loaded with sandbags and incendiary bombs, said Andrew Burtch, director of research at the Canadian War Museum.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Interesting name Bly ... we have a Blyn near where I live.
Did one of those back in 88.....same render safe procedure....BIP it .....blow in place. 1.25lb M112 block of C4 dual primed. 10 minute stroll back to cover and then oooooh beer thirty back home.
Thank you for the ping.
Moore can kiss ole spot on his brown nose...
The map on a previous post is wrong in that it confuses Lakeview OR with Lakewood WA. Of course Lakeview is in the central part of Oregon near the southern border.
I really don’t know how accurate that map is either ...just saw it and the story and I remembered something about my history class regarding those balloons ....
Thanks for the ping. C4 was the right way to dispose of it.
Bombs are dug up around Tokyo all the time. A few years back a big 500lb bomb was dug up just next to the train tracks near my house. There is always so much construction in Japan that they are found with some frequency, but we only hear about the really interesting ones.
probably not as much lately with their economy
Japanese wartime explosives commonly used an explosive filler called picric acid. It doesn’t age well to begin with, but when it ages in contact with iron (like a bomb casing) it forms amalgams that are extremely unstable and dangerous.
Looking out my office window I see a forest of tower cranes putting up new 30-story building from one side of the city to the other. The economy may not be great, but its generally not too bad for those that have the cash to invest in new real estate. Its always artificially stable here anyway.
I wonder if the Canadians bothered to contact the Japanese to see if they had any desire to repatriate their wandering warrior.
So. Did it, or did it not, produce excess yield beyond what could be explained by the known amount of C4? Was it the real deal? Or was it not?
Unless they have an answer to that, those Canuck cops are just flat-footed, negative archaeologists. Inquiring minds want to know.
One of them landed in Omaha, NE. There is a plaque on the wall of a building there commemorating it. It is in the Dundee area of town.
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