Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

The occasional gentle thunk sound of a book landing on my doormat has of late been replaced by a near-continuous clunking sound, as my second hand book addiction has changed gears. It feels like I now know just about everything anyone sensible would eer want to know about Unit 731, Fu-go balloons, the Roswell Incident, War in the Pacific, Project Helios, Project Mogul, Piccard family minutiae, etc etc. And still books keep arriving.

Anyway, here’s a brief 16x-speed scan of what I’ve been working my way through in the last few days.

Jeannette Ridlon Piccard

I was very pleased to find a biography of Jean Felix Piccard’s wife Jeannette Ridlon Picard online. This was Sheryl K. Hill’s (2009) in-depth (and yet very readable) dissertation “ ‘Until I Have Won’ Vestiges of Coverture and the Invisibility of Women in the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Jeannette Ridlon Piccard“.

The central primary source that Hill relied upon was the The Piccard Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., that had been donated to the LOC by Jeannette Piccard, and which you may (possibly) recall being mentioned here previously.

And so it is that Hill seems to have read all the correspondence from all the boxes I was most interested in, which hopefully has saved me an awful lot of time and effort. 🙂

In the section “Stratospheric Flight Déjà vu: Helios Project” (pp. 249-252), Hill briefly tells the story of how Project Helios unwound (from Jeannette’s point of view) [p. 250]:

However, within months it was evident the Navy Department was taking over the project, now classified “confidential: project number 9-U-J,” and known as “Free Balloon Research Laboratory.” Part “B-1a” specified the contractor “shall design, construct, test and fly the stratosphere balloon specified in the contract with a crew approved by the Navy.” The December 1946 news release indicated the ONR had “entered into a contract with the General Mills Aeronautical Research Laboratory for the construction of a special cluster-type balloon and gondola to be used for scientific studies in the higher altitudes…The ascent itself [was] planned for mid-June [1947] from the Naval Air Station at Ottumwa, Iowa…” The news release indicated the “services” of Jean Piccard were “under contract,” but no mention was made of Jeannette’s role as pilot.

It didn’t take too long before the ONR pulled the money rug from under the whole project [p. 251]:

Although Jean remained optimistic that a clustered-balloon flight could be made, the
Navy pulled its financial support in June 1947, stating “operational tests of the prototype
balloons which were to be used in a cluster to form a lifting medium for project Helios
have clearly demonstrated that a piloted flight cannot be accomplished this year.” Jean
wrote his fellow scientific collaborators that he would do “all…possible…to organize a
stratosphere flight at the earliest possible date…” “I shall not leave you stranded,” he
stated, “but I shall make a serious effort to get other sponsorship.”

And that, as far as the Piccards seem to have been concerned with Project Helios, was that: despite their (literally) high hopes, they never did manage to reach the stratosphere together. For me, the #1 unanswered question was whether they secretly planned to inaugurate the 20-Mile High Club? Hill doesn’t say, so I guess we’ll never know.

Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR

So it seems that we are left with a small (but niggling) gap in the ballooning timeline between the end of Project Helios (June 1947) and the start of Project Skyhook (where the first balloon was launched on 25th September 1947). Note that there seems to be no record of “Project 9-U-J” anywhere: in NARA, just about everything with “9-U-J” turns out to be an OCR error. So for now I’m running with the idea that 9-U-J was just an internal ONR reference for Project Helios, rather than some other top secret project name.

According to Craig Ryan (The Pre-Astronauts, p.63), the ONR replaced Jeannette Piccard as pilot with “balloonist and airshipman Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR”. I’m pretty sure this is the same “Lt. Smith from Navy NYU” who arrived at Alamogordo on 28th June 1947, as noted in Albert Crary’s logbook, because this would help explain how the Project Mogul team moved from serial linkage between balloons to using a Project Helios (parallel) cluster mounting around this time:

Balloon expedition personnel arrived Saturday evening – Peoples, Trakowski, Mears, Ireland, Olsen, Moulton, Alden from AMS and Moore, Schneider, Hackman, Smith, Hazzard, 2 others and a Lt Smith from Navy NYU.

According to Fold3, Harris F. Smith had service number 4041150, and in 1942 was stationed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, NJ. And according to the blurb for J. Gordon Vaeth’s (2005) “They Sailed The Skies” (my copy will arrive from America in a few weeks’ time, *sigh*), it was Harris F. Smith and William J. Gunther at Lakehurst who revived US Navy ballooning after WWII.

Because Ancestry’s account doesn’t include access to Fold3’s “Premium Features” (or indeed to Newspapers.com’s “Premium Features”), my best current guess is that this was Harris F. Smith born 4th September 1919 in Newark, NJ, died 26th Jan 2013 in New Jersey.

The 1947 Manned Balloon Incident

Now that I have a copy of Craig Ryan’s “The Pre-Astronauts”, I’m able to see the full text (and reference) for the 1947 manned balloon incident (pp. 20-21) I mentioned before:

One of the first postwar manned balloon flights sponsored by the military was launched from the Tularosa Basin in 1947 with the intent of crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately, the entire flight’s supply of ballast was expended in the crossing of the Sacramento range to the east of Alamogordo and the balloon’s journey ended just short of Roswell. A potential embarrassment, the aborted continental crossing was kept quiet and the pilot’s name never released. “We were naive as hell,” explained one of the NYU scientists.

Craig Ryan’s notes for this chapter gives the source of this story as an interview with Duke Gildenberg, who had worked in the NYU team in 1947, and then after graduation worked at Holloman AFB (which, prior to late 1947, was Alamogordo AAFB) from 1951 to 1981. Yet there are two curious things about this story. Firstly, the first manned polyethylene balloon flight on record was Charles B. Moore in 3rd November 1949 in Minneapolis. And secondly, even though Gildenberg was interviewed many times about the events of 1947 (four years before he started at Holloman), the interview with Gildenberg in Ryan’s book is the only place I’ve seen this incident mentioned anywhere.

Hence I’m currently trying to work out who that unfortunate balloonist was. It seems entirely possible that it was Lt. Harris F. Smith, but – as Gildenberg says – the flight was “a potential embarrassment”, and “was kept quiet”. So I’m guessing it will take a fair bit of work to retrieve it from the archival maw.

Note that this 1947 incident seems entirely separate from the 1959 incident with Dan D. Fulgham and Captain Joe Kittinger (“I also recall an incident involving a manned balloon flight.” etc) that Gildenberg gave testimony about decades later.

Earliest balloon launch date

According to this site, the first plastic balloon tests were on 24th April 1947:

This report describes the first outdoor inflation and flight attempt of a full-size pliofilm balloon on April 24, 1947. Purpose of the test was to obtain data on (1) proposed method of inflation; (2) use of plastic ground cover; (3) behavior of the aerostat at low wind velocity; (4) weighing off the aerostat; (5) rate of ascent; (6) operation of appendix; (7) excess lift for safe take-off without dragging; (5) balloon suspension system; (9) behavior of suspended parachute. Several preconceived opinions on these points were found wanting. A suspension harness failure precluded an actual flight. Nevertheless, the experiment was very revealing, producing information vital to any future attempt. Prior to the first outdoor inflation, a trial inflation had also been successfully made at the balloon loft.

The project update for Helios seems to imply that by May 1947, General Mills’ balloons were going well, though Piccard’s fancy high-altitude gondola-made-for-two was still very much a work in progress:

Between June 1946 and May 1947 the contractor has designed and built the gondola and auxiliary equipment for Helios to within 75% of completion, and has tested and built seven large, and several small balloons made of various plastic films. Through trial and error it has been shown that the present design will fly if the proper plastic film is used. The ideal balloon material has not yet been found, but an adequate plastic film, polyethylene, is now in production and 500 lbs. of this film will be available for assembling in June. A balloon which loses practically no lift in twelve hours has been developed. It has a diameter of 70 feet and a volume of 165,000 cubic feet. By stressing the cellophane-taped seams, it is possible to use a film of lower tensile strength and keep the weight of each cell below 100 pounds.

Presumably the “500lbs of this film [that] was available for assembling in June [1947]” went towards Project Mogul’s relatively small needs. Might the rest have been made into a separate balloon?

Interview with Gilruth

Finally, there’s a curious almost-an-out-take in an oral history interview with Robert Gilruth given by David DeVorkin:

GILRUTH: Yes, I remember that Piccard was very, very hurt by the National Geographic that would not give them a dime, and they gave so much to these other people. There was a colonel I can’t remember his name now —

DEVORKIN: Anderson, and a Major Kettener?

GILRUTH: No. There was one that lost his life or almost lost his life. I can’t remember those things anymore.

Which colonel was Gilruth was referring to here?

In late 1944 to early 1945, America was assailed by 9000+ Japanese Fu-go constant-altitude balloon bombs flying high over the Pacific, the mulberry-papered ICBMs of the era. Though their explosions caused few deaths and little physical damage, the US Military was terrified that these balloons might instead be repurposed to carry Bacteriological Warfare payloads. Furthermore, contrary to the impression you might get from Ross Coen’s book on Fu-go balloons, a bacteriological attack is exactly what some in the Japanese military – mostly notably General Ishii Shiro, founder of the notorious Unit 731, and who seems to have had the Emperor’s ear – were pushing hard to do next.

But then WWII ended, and so the threat of trans-Pacific balloon-based anthrax attacks on North America receded too. Yet many in the US Military remained impressed with the low-cost ingenuity of the Fu-go balloons, and wondered whether balloons might be a tech trend in future warfare the US should be following.

By 1950, the US had started developing its own (anti-crop rather than incendiary) balloon bomb technology, the E77 balloon bomb. So… what exactly happened between 1945 and 1950?

The Amazing Piccards

Even before WWII, balloon technology was racing forward. In 1936, Swiss-born balloon pioneer Jean Felix Piccard flew a 25-feet (7.6m) diameter cellophane balloon built by his students in Pennsylvania: others were attempting much the same thing in Germany and Belgium. In 1937, Jean Piccard also flew the first cluster balloon (made of 98 latex balloons).

And so, after the war, it was entirely natural and obvious that Piccard, now working with Otto Winzen, would in February 1946 propose to the US Navy the best of both worlds – a cluster balloon made of plastic balloons, designed for human flight. In June 1946, this proposal was approved and became Project Helios. By 1947, this morphed into Project Skyhook, which was used both for unmanned high altitude experiments and for manned lower altitude experiments.

Yet it all parallels the work done by Jean Piccard’s twin brother Auguste Piccard, who in 1930 created a spherical pressurised aluminium gondola, and in 1931 used it to become one of the first two people to reach the stratosphere. And then, in an amazingly Jules Vernean way, Auguste then used broadly the same kind of pressurised gondola to travel deep below the ocean, with the first unmanned trips happening in 1948.

And yes, you’d be right to guess that Gene Roddenberry named the Star Trek character Jean Luc Picard after one or both of these intrepid Piccard twins, Trek canon loosely implying that he was their descendant bla bla bla. But what you probably wouldn’t also know is that Hergé modelled Professor Cuthbert Calculus on the lanky Auguste Piccard, though reduced his height “otherwise I would have had to enlarge the frames of the cartoon strip“. So today you get not only a Star Trek reference but also a Tintin reference.

1946 – Project Helios

The core idea of Project Helios was to use clusters of plastic balloons for prolonged high-altitude (stratospheric) manned ballooning. The aim was to carry out experiments at 30,000m for up to 10 hours, thanks to the huge amount of weight saved by replacing (heavy) latex balloons with (light) plastic balloons.

By way of support, Jean Piccard designed his own pressurised gondola with a 52-inch diameter octagonal floor and two escape hatches: this was later built by Winzen Research, Inc. and General Mills. Unsurprisingly, Jean Piccard was rather hoping to pilot this gondola himself. Also: rather than placing the individual balloons in serial, Piccard designed a quite different kind of clustering assembly that instead placed them in parallel.

The story goes:

On 25 September 1947, they launched the first large balloon since the end of World War II. The first in a series of four launches, the polyethylene balloon had a capacity of 100,000 cubic feet (2,832 cubic meters), but carried only 70 pounds (32 kilograms) of equipment. The next two test launches failed. On the fourth launch, the balloon refused to descend for three days, and the high-altitude controls, radio equipment, and insulated containers malfunctioned. The delay was a goldmine for cosmic ray researchers. Two Brookhaven National Laboratory physicists, J. Hornbostel and E.O. Salant, had flown a pair of cosmic ray plates on the mission, and they were delighted with the results that the three-day delay brought. The success of their experiment led the ONR to abandon the idea of human balloon flights and focus on unmanned research.

A different account mentions briefly (p.4) that:

Project Helios […] was called off because it was impossible to meet safety standards adequately. There was not enough known at the time of the capabilities of the plastic, and it was considered foolish to risk a human life in the face of many uncertainties.

The same account notes that L.Cdr. M. Lee Lewis had been working on balloons with Jean Felix Piccard since 1946, while this account mentions the ONR’s Commander George Hoover as having been involved with the project.

1947 – Project Skyhook

Presumably building on what the US Navy had learned from Project Helios, Project Skyhook was then started up with a specific initial focus on using polyethylene balloons for unmanned balloon experiments.

It is usually claimed that the first Skyhook launch, using a single balloon built by General Mills, took place on 25th September 1947 in St Cloud, Minnesota. This carried a 29 kg payload of nuclear emulsion to higher than 30,000m, before landing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Yet because this is obviously the same Project Helios balloon described above, I suspect that the boundaries between Project Helios and Project Skyhook are somewhat fluid.

Similarly, the first Skyhook cluster balloon launched (using three polyethylene balloons) in 1948.

Incidentally, when the fourth 1947 balloon flight failed to land as planned, this had unexpected social consequences:

On October 20, 1947, one balloon was not recovered and startled Minneapolis residents as it hung 100,000 feet over the city.

In a University of Minnesota News Service press release, Adeline B. Melcher, the college’s chief switchboard operator, stated that “the switchboard was jammed with calls for an hour from worried persons who wanted to know if there was a flying saucer in the sky or if it was the beginning of the end of the world.”

Finally, if you’re desperate for another cultural reference, I’d add that the 1956 film “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” mentions “Project Skyhook”. Which is nice.

1947 – Project Mogul

In parallel with the US Navy’s projects (Helios and Skyhook), the US Army was developing its own balloon-based projects. Project Mogul comprised both an unclassified (ballooning) side and a classified (nuclear test detection microphone) side, which stayed secret until 1972.

There’s a list of 1947 Project Mogul test launches in Saler, Ziegler and Moore’s (2010) debunk-fest “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth”, which gives an idea of how the Mogul team’s experiments evolved during that year:

• #1: 3 April 1412 EST, Bethlehem, Pa. 14 balloons in train, each 350 g. Radiosonde and sand ballast.
• #2: 18 April, time unknown, Bethlehem, Pa. 23 neoprene balloons in train. Sonobuoy, radar targets, radiosonde, and sand ballast
• #3: 8 May, time unknown, Bethlehem, Pa. 23 neoprene balloons in train. Same as Flight #2.
• #4: 4 June (~0300 MST), Alamogordo, N.Mex. 28 neoprene balloons in train. Same as Flight #2, plus liquid ballast dribbler but minus radiosonde
• #5: 5 June, 0516 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. 28 neoprene balloons in train. About same as Flight #2, plus liquid ballast and minus radar targets
• #6: 7 June, 0509 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. 28 neoprene balloons in train. Same as Flight #5, but dribbler lost at launch
• #7: 2 July, 0521 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. 16 neoprene balloons in Helios cluster. Microphone, radiosonde, and ballast
• #8: 3 July, 0303 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. Ten 7-ft-diameter GMI (General Mills, Inc.) [balloons]. Microphone, radiosonde, and ballast balloons in Helios cluster.
• #9: 3 July, 1930 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. 16 neoprene balloons in Helios cluster. None launched.
• #10: 5 July, 0501 MST, Alamogordo, N.Mex. 15-ft-diameter polyethylene balloon, Microphone, radiosonde, and liquid ballast.

…and so forth.

Putting aside Charles Moore’s unreliable narration regarding the 4th June 1947 #4 flight (which according to Crary’s log book, wasn’t launched at all etc), what is visible here is the Mogul project team’s move not only from Pennsylvania to New Mexico, but also from using neoprene to polyethylene, along with using Project Helios balloon clustering information (i.e. taken from the US Navy Helios project).

In 2000, Air Power History published an article by James Michael Young on “The U.S. Air Force’s Long Range Detection Program and Project Mogul“. The Mogul programme had been initiated by General Carl Spaatz, and ran test flights until Spring 1949. The NYU group’s remit (their contract was signed on 1st November 1946) was “to design, develop, and fly constant-level balloons to carry instruments to altitudes ranging from 10 to 20 kilometers, adjustable at two-kilometer intervals. The goal was to maintain an altitude within a 500 meter variance and to eventually sustain that altitude for 48 hours.” (p.27)

Note that at that time nobody in the NYU group knew anything about the classified part of the project: and it’s not at all clear to me from the article whether the Air Force’s AFOAT-1 project (started July 1948, and which ended up being the classified half of Project Mogul) was already somehow in place when Project Mogul was started in 1946.

1950 – E77 Balloon Bomb

The kick that propelled crop-based Bacteriological Warfare (BW) back on the US Military’s untasty war weapons menu was the Stevenson Committee, that in 1950 reported its findings a mere five days after the North Korean invasion. Hawkishly, the committee thought that BW should be considered not just as defensive weapons, but also for offensive weapons. (p.72)

This is the precise context when the E77 balloon bomb was commissioned: even though the technological ideas behind it were stolen from the wartime Japanese Fu-go balloon bombs, it was now intended to fight a war in Korea. Hence it now seems far from obvious to me that there was any kind of related US Military balloon bomb development going on between 1945 and 1950: or, rather, if there was any continuous development in that period, I’ve yet to see even a flicker of a sign of it.

Note: it might seem odd that even though we’ve seen US Army balloons and US Navy balloons, we have seen no US Air Force balloons. However, it’s important to point out that the US Air Force was only separated out from the US Army on 18th September 1947 (prior to that time it was the “US Army Air Force”). Which is basically why I have been jumping through hoops to say “US Military” prior to this date, *sigh*.

Holloman AFB and Balloons

There are a few more crumbs to be had in the history of Holloman AFB published in 1959. This confirms that the first successful rubber cluster balloon launch from there was on the 5th June 1947 (i.e. Flight #5, not Flight #4 as incorrectly claimed by Charles Moore). This flight lasted six hours; rose to a maximum of 58,000 feet; and was successfully recovered just east of Roswell NM.

Similarly, the first polyethylene cluster balloon launch from Holloman was on the 3rd July 1947 (i.e. Flight #8). Here, the payload was about fifty pounds; the flight lasted 195 minutes, and reached 18,500 feet; but the recovery was unsuccessful.

At Holloman AFB, the Balloon Branch (the part of the air force at the base who travelled out to collect landed balloons) was formed in 1949, though it informally existed beforehand as the “Balloon Unit”. There are pictures of the Balloon Branch’s vehicles parked up near junctions, waiting to zip off and recover landed balloon payloads.

What’s Missing From This Picture, Nick?

The point of trying to put together this kind of technology timeline is almost always to see how things link together, and where any documentary gaps are. For me, the biggest gap here relates to the US Navy’s Project Helios. There was obviously interaction between the Navy’s Project Helios team and the Army’s Project Mogul team, because the latter switched from using serial linkage (“in train”) to Jean Felix Piccard’s Project Helios parallel cluster linkage on their flight #7 in July 1947.

I can’t easily believe that the Project Mogul people would have switched to using Project Helios parallel cluster linkage if it hadn’t already been properly tested. Yet we have not a single record of a Project Helios test flight.

Really, I can’t help but wonder if the difference between Project Helios and Project Skyhook is that (a) Project Helios ended up being a codeword for all the early experiments that went disastrously wrong, and which had to be quietly buried; and (b) Project Skyhook was code for all the good bits of Project Helios that were then carried forward and used for many years (with more than 1000 balloon flights, in fact).

Hence I’m more than a bit suspicious that Project Helios did in fact have some kind of (possibly fatal) accident in 1947 that had to be covered up – which might explain the somewhat awkward talk of meeting “safety standards adequately” noted above.

Hence I’m now left wondering where to look for Project Helios documentation. I tried the Jean Felix Piccard special collection at University of Minnesota, but almost all the interesting material there seems to stop around 1942. And I had a poke around in NARA, but I found nothing there remotely interesting from that time period (I emailed the archivists to ask if there was something I missed). So… where next for Project Helios archives?

As part of the process of trying to identify / eliminate small Pacific islands taken by the Americans in early 1945, I’ve been reading loads of books and articles, while grinding through all manner of documentary evidence.

So far, the single thought that strikes me most is that anyone ill or wounded encountered by US Military forces in the Pacific would be processed and treated by its military hospital infrastructure. And so I quickly pivoted to trying to understand how US Military field hospitals worked in 1945…

The 1945 bed problem

In early 1945, the immense logistical challenge that US military planners faced in the Pacific was how to put enough beds in place to support not only an assault force, but also an occupation force. Japan was going to need a lot of field hospital beds, and the practicalities of war often meant that these had to be in place elsewhere in the Pacific before any large actions were set in motion. This is a side of war at scale that few people ever properly consider or think about.

Hospital ships were a huge help close to the front lines, but these were relatively few, and had only limited capacity. What people needed on the ground (and not too far back from the front line) were actual field hospitals.

You can therefore track the situation in the Pacific theatre of war by seeing where the 24th Field Hospital was located:

New Caledonia	Jul 6, 1943	Jul 21, 1943
Guadalcanal	Jul 31, 1943	Sept 6, 1943
New Georgia	Sept 7, 1943	Feb 7, 1944
Guadalcanal	Feb 8, 1944	Mar 20, 1944
Emirau	Apr 1, 1944	Jun 15, 1944
Luzon	Jan 11, 1945	Sept 6, 1945
Honshu	Sept 17, 1945	Dec 14, 1945

From this table, and given that we’re specifically interested in the early 1945 time-frame, I’m going to drill down into what happened when the 24th Field Hospital moved to Luzon in the Philippines.

Luzon

The American fight to reclaim the Philippines (having had Japan steal the islands from the US at the end of 1941) started with a gargantuan sea battle in Leyte Gulf in October 1944 (arguably the largest naval battle ever fought). This was paralleled by a land attack on the island of Leyte in the Central Philippines that continued through to the end of 1944. As the Japanese war planners had already worked out, however, the US’ real target there was actually Luzon.

We can see how this played out in the timeline for the 24th Field Hospital in Luzon:

January 9, 1945 – the 24th Field Hospital lands at Lingayen Gulf, Luzon, Philippine Islands.

January 11, 1945 – the organization sets up for operation and receives its first patients.

January 16, 1945 – Paragraph 12, General Order # 9, Headquarters Sixth United States Army, APO 442, dated January 27, 1945, confirms transfer of the 24th Field Hospital from XIV Army Corps to Sixth Army.

January 20, 1945 – the Hospital closes for receipt of patients and transfers all remaining sick and wounded to the 7th Evacuation Hospital.

January 30, 1945 – the 24th Field Hospital closes its present site for operations and transfers all its patients to the 21st Evacuation Hospital.

May 28, 1945 – following receipt of new movement orders, the organization sets up at a new site further inland.

July 1, 1945 – General Orders issued by Headquarters, Sixth United States Army, announce that the 24th Field Hospital will end its stay in Luzon, Philippine Islands, by July 4, 1945.

Specifically, the 24th Field set up under canvas on 11 Jan 1945 in Binmaley, “to accommodate about 400 patients”. This was:

“[…] mainly to care for Filipino civilians who had been injured from the initial air and naval bombardment, prior to the landings. During the immediate phase of operations, evacuees were taken to the 7th Evacuation Hospital, located at the Lingayen airstrip. Unfortunately, evacuation by air could not be effected immediately since the strip was not in a condition to be used, and therefore those patients were evacuated from the beach to ship.”

What had happened was that “several hundred Filipinos” had been wounded by the initial three-day bombardment of the area surrounded the landing area, that “resulted in the destruction of hospital buildings, churches, and what few medical supplies were in the hands of civilians. Hundreds of civilians were killed, injured, separated from their families, and dispersed throughout the objective area.”

We can then see these civilians being moved out of the 24th Field Hospital:

On the afternoon of 10 Jan 1945, civilian casualties were evacuated from division clearing stations to companies A and C, 264th Medical Battalion, in order to free them for possible movement inland.

During 11 and 12 January, civilian casualties were trans­ferred to the 24th Field Hospital from Company A, 264th Medical Battal­ion, and to the 894th Clearing Company by Company C, 264th Medical Bat­talion. The 24th Field Hospital thereafter received civilian casual­ties in the 37th Division sector, and the 894th Clearing Company re­ceived those in the 40th Division sector, until such time as improvised civilian hospitals under PCAU control were able to assist such hospitalization responsibilities.

It was also mentioned that “Civilian physicians and nurses were hired through PCAU to assist Army personnel in the care of civilian casualties.”

We similarly learn:

The 894th Medical Clearing Company opened at Lingayen on 11 January and was not utilized as a chain in the medical service for Army personnel. It served entirely as a hospital for the care of sick and injured civilians in the 40th Division sector.

We further learn that at this time:

Evacuation by water took the seriously ill and wounded to Leyte, and when hospitals became crowded, to Biak. Hospital LSTs, medically-equipped APAs and Hospital Ships carried the wounded on slow journeys to other destinations.

What I’m trying to highlight, however imperfectly, is the network of station hospitals, field hospitals, and evacuation hospitals that criss-crossed the Pacific. Even in just this one tiny slice of war, we can see casualties from the front:

• Being evacuated by ambulance (e.g. by the 410th Medical Collecting Company)
• Being triaged and processed by Companies A and C, 264th Medical Battalion
• Being taken to 894th Medical Clearing Company at Lingayen or the 24th Field Hospital in Binmaley.
• The seriously ill and wounded were then taken by water to (already crowded hospitals) in Leyte
• When Leyte ran out of space, casualties were shipped to Biak in Western New Guinea (in modern-day Indonesia)
• Casualties were also taken onwards to further destinations by hospital ships / transports etc.

Camp Del Pilar

The 24th Field Hospital’s next phase began on 30th January 1945:

The 24th transferred all remaining patients to the 21st Evacuation Hospital and then moved on to Dau. The new hospital site was located on National Highway No. 3, approximately 2 miles north of Angeles, 7 miles south of Mabalacat, and near to Airstrip # 2, Clark Field. The site itself was a former Filipino garrison hospital named Camp del Pilar. It consisted of permanent buildings which the Japanese had taken over and utilized. Consequently they needed much repair and cleaning prior to any possible use. The main building was allocated to the Surgery Section while additional small rooms were utilized for Clinics and Administration. The theater auditorium and stage conveniently housed approximately 174 acute surgical patients. As the place was really large, three 2-story barracks were used to accommodate 250 more patients, and two thatch-roofed other buildings were converted into wards with a capacity for approximately 1500 beds, two Operating Rooms, one Mess Hall, and some Offices.

Here we can see Japanese hospital buildings (i.e. the Camp del Pilar garrison hospital) being appropriated and used by the 24th Field Hospital.

So it would seem that many of the historical components we were looking for were indeed in place in the Pacific in January 1945, though that hardly amounts to proof that everything claimed to have happened did in fact happen. But even so, it’s arguably a tolerably OK starting point. 😉

Associated Archives

Incidentally, NARA has a sizeable (1665 boxes’ worth) collection of material related to this period called “The Philippine Archives Collection”, though the matching digitization project seems to be taking a fair old while. I found one 270-page pdf describing Phase II box contents, but given that I don’t yet know what I would like to find out from these, it’s perhaps a bit early for a deep dive into these waters.

Even at the best of times, cipher mysteries are unruly little buggers to work with: never mind being surrounded by a Churchillian “bodyguard of lies”, some seem to have whole brigades of apologists, treasure hunters, theorists, cultural appropriators, postmodernists, alt-historians, Redditors, YouTube opinionators, and the rest. It can often feel as though the bare truth of these artifacts are lost below swirls of (essentially useless) commentary.

Yet more recently, I have been getting the feeling that whole swathes of longstanding cipher mysteries are close to toppling. While nobody should need reminding of the recent marvellous crack of the Zodiac Killer cipher, the forensic analysis of the Somerton Man’s remains that began earlier this year (2021) must surely be getting close to producing real results – and there’s similarly no good reason why DNA shouldn’t also soon solve the mystery of Henri Debosnys’ concealed identity. Behind the scenes, various other famous cipher mysteries also now seem to be moving forward towards their long, slow conclusions (but more on those as they happen).

And so for much of this year, the combination of these two factors – the deafening online commentariat & the impending closure of famous cipher mysteries – has given the whole area a fin-de-siecle vibe. Might, putting the splendidly enraging Voynich Manuscript to one side, my Cipher Mysteries research programme now be close to over?

A New Japanese Cipher Mystery

However, the big news of the week is that I now have two gigantic new cipher mysteries to work on.

The first of these is (to probably nobody’s surprise) the 1947 Roswell Incident, despite the likelihood that many CM readers still have their doubts that this will turn out to have been the kind of cipher mystery I suspect.

Of course, Francis Bacon wrote (and this was a favourite of Tim Rayhel, as I recall):

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

In short, the presence of doubt (and please be clear that I have plenty of doubts myself) shouldn’t mean investigative paralysis: even if we have unclear / unsure evidence and unreliable / compromised witnesses, we must continue to make the best judgment calls we can, while still ploughing on forward relentlessly. And it seems that there’s still plenty of ploughing to be done here.

My second new cipher mystery relates to a large and complicated set of documents that was first openly disclosed in Japan only in 2019, and remains very poorly understood. Future blog posts here should make it clear what is going on, but I want to make sure I post good quality images, as well as place those images within their proper historical context.

It’s likely that getting hold of scans (and then annotating them and making them properly available for everyone to see) will take a little bit of time, so I’m very open to collaborating with any Japanese-speaking historians with an interest in code-breaking (even though I studied Japanese at night school many years ago, this is out of my range).

Please email me (nickpelling at nickpelling dot com etc) if you’re interested in contributing, thanks!

As far as the Truk Incident war crimes (as outlined in the previous post) go, I now have a clear focus on what I’d like to find out – which is whether the Imperial Japanese Navy’s war crimes against American prisoners of war in Truk were accompanied (as Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” source seems to imply) by more systematic crimes against humanity.

But where should I go looking for evidence to test this research question?

WCDI / NARA / IWG

The WCDI (War Crimes Documentation Initiative) has a nice page on War Crimes archival sources on trial records, which quickly led me to the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (better known as the “IWG”)’s NARA page on research resources on Japanese War Crimes.

I highly recommend reading the 200+ page-long Introductory Essays document linked at the top there: this contains well-written essays not only on Japanese War Crimes themselves, but also on the complicated and tangled politics surrounding them. The essay writers highlight many issues that historians have yet to make a substantial impact on, such as Japanese crimes against native Pacific populations (which even today remain significantly under-reported).

Here’s what p.81 has to say about RG 125:

The main body of records [released in 1997] produced by Navy JAG [Judge Advocate General] during its war crimes investigations is in the Records of the Navy War Crimes Branch collection, which has numerous entries with information on war crimes committed against Americans held captive by the Japanese. For example, Case Files of Pacific Area War Crimes Trials, 1944–49 has many documents pertaining to the U.S. Navy trials of 123 Japanese military personnel tried on Guam and Kwajalein between 1945 and 1949, primarily for alleged mistreatment of POWs and the unlawful executions of captured Navy airmen.

It didn’t take long to find “Case Files of Pacific Area War Crimes Trials, 1944–49” on the NARA site…

Hiroshi Iwanami’s Case File

Handily, the case file for Hiroshi Iwanami and his men (National Archives Identifier: 6997364  HMS Entry Number(s): A1 2, UD-16W 1 Creator: Department of the Navy. Office of the Judge Advocate General. Navy Division. War Crimes Office. 1/13/1945-9/18/1949) is available online. At first sight, this seems to be quite large: but then you discover that nearly all of it is a 1600-signature petition asking the court for clemency. The actual court record starts at page 192 (of 197), with three charges of murder and six charges of violations of the laws and customs of war. Here’s the first specimen murder charge:

30 Jan 1944, IWANAMI, while Commanding Officer of Fourth Naval Hospital, Dublon Island, Truk, with others, murdered six (6) American POWs, by experimenting upon them with virulent bacterial and by exposing them to shock, this in violation of the law and custom of war.

Iwanami pleaded not guilty to all charges, but was found guilty of all (bar the second murder charge, which was proved to have been Lieutenant Shinji Sakagami’s fault.) The main procedural interest in the case arose because Shigeyoshi Nakamura committed suicide after giving evidence but before being cross-examined: Iwanami’s defence asked for Nakamura’s testimony to be withdrawn (because it had not been tested in court), but it was allowed to be used as evidence.

Other NARA Files

For Japanese war crime archives, the main finding aid is surely Greg Bradsher’s 1700-page “Japanese War Crimes and Related Records: A guide to Records in the National Archives“. However, the NARA website allows you to drill down into RG (“Resource Group”) 125, to find other archival documents

The specific sections of RG 125 that seem likely to be relevant are:

• Records Regarding Pacific Area War Crimes Cases, 1945 – 1949
• Correspondence from Records Originated by the Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 1945 – 1949
• Secret Correspondence of the Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 1945 – 1949
• Card Name Index to Correspondence from Records Originated by the Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 1945 – 1949
• Confidential Correspondence Originated by the Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 1945 – 1948
• Restricted Correspondence Originated by the Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 1945 – 1949
• Memorandums, Dispatches, and Related Records Originated by Director of War Crimes, Pacific Fleet, 4/1945 – 10/1949
• War Crimes Investigations and Trials from Records Originated by Liaison Officer for War Crimes, Naval Forces Marianas, 1945 – 1949
• Records Regarding Interrogations of Japanese Witnesses and Defendants in War Crimes Cases, 1945 – 1949
• Exhibits to Investigations, 1943 – 1949

The NARA records include a number of short films, including “AERIALS OVER TRUK“, which contains a shot of a hospital complex (which I believe is on Truk rather than on Dublon Island, though I could be wrong):

The archives include a fair number of good quality photos (many taken from bombers as they were dropping bombs), including this one showing a spotter’s guide to Dublon Island, where you can see the Naval hospital at the top right:

Finally, It’s Wrapping Up Time

The bad news is that even though just about access to everything in RG 125 is marked as being unrestricted, hardly any of the files in RG 125 that I would consider interesting have yet been digitised. More broadly, the Navy hospital atrocities on Dublon Island seem to have received very little mainstream attention over the last 70+ years: it is as though interest waned to zero once the war crime trials had concluded.

Even so, there are a fair few books and articles that I can get to read that cover Dublon Island. For example, the (2010) book “Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics” looks like it could be a good reference work (but at ~£40 is a bit pricey). Similarly, “The Surrender of the Fortress of Truk” (Charles Blackton, 1946) is on JSTOR, and looks like it might cover some of what I’m interested in.

All the same, other books on Dublon Island have a quite different focus. Charles Hill’s (2000) “Fix on the Rising Sun” (mentioned online here) discusses a connection with the Hawaii Clipper mystery (Joe Gervais was told that the missing plane was concreted over to form the base slab of the hospital in 1938, along with its missing airmen). But make of all that what you will.

There’s also some helpful description of the hospital on the Pacific Wrecks site here. One commenter (Dick Williams) mentioned the following there (I have no idea what book “Ghost Ships” is, if anyone knows please tell me):

“Hospital where an American aviator POW met his end. He was kept in the room at the far right. Read his account in “Ghost Ships” Silander Manuel, a Mortlockese who taught me Trukese told me about him that they also slit his eyelids so that his eyes could never close again. This just before they killed him. That’s what Richard, the orderly who went to Saipan to testify against the Japanese, told me they did with them.

Finally: care with names has to be exercised: originally Dublon Island, it was renamed Natsushima (Summer) Island by the Japanese, its codeword to the Americans in WWII was ADHERENT, but is now called Tono[w]as Island in Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia.

Postscript: The Trial Transcript

Having posted all the above, I finally stumbled upon the trial transcript online here, which I’ll be going through next…

Following on from my last post, this post started out with me wondering what I could find out about Japanese hospitals in Saipan and Tianan, before submerging in rather deeper waters at Truk Island.

Saipan Hospital

The English Wikipedia entry on the Saipan Byoin (Japanese Hospital in Saipan) may be short and suitably enigmatic, but it at least has a nice picture:

The Japanese Hospital or Saipan Byoin is a historic World War II-era hospital complex on Route 3 in Garapan, a village on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. The three concrete buildings are the largest Japanese-built structures to survive the war. The main hospital building is an L-shaped structure with a domed entrance at the crook of the L. A second, smaller building housed the pharmacy, while the third is an underground circular chamber of unknown purpose.

The Japanese Wikipedia page (translated) has a little more detail:

Saipan Hospital was established by the South Seas Mandate in 1922. There are seven hospitals in the South Sea Islands, including Saipan Hospital, Palau Hospital, Angaur Hospital, Yap Hospital, Truk Hospital, Ponape Hospital, and Yaluto Hospital. It was a modern hospital with the most advanced medical facilities in Micronesia at that time, and helped improve the local sanitary environment.

In short, when the South Sea Islands were gifted to Japan as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the Japanese established the South Seas Bureau / Mandate (Nanyocho). However, following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1933, its claim to the islands became shaky. Then, when the war situation deteriorated in 1943, the Mandate’s six administrative offices across the South Seas were reduced to just three: Truk, Palau, and Saipan.

This Japanese page continues:

As of 1939, there were 5 Saipan Clinic, 6 Palau Clinic, 2 Yap Clinic, 3 Truck Clinic, 3 Ponape Clinic, 3 Jaluit Clinic, and 2 Angaur Clinic.

In addition, epidemiological surveys and research on local diseases in the South Sea Islands, which had languished in the German colonial basement far from the home country, were also actively conducted. The “South Sea Islands Regional Disease Research Medical Papers” (No. 1-5 (Collection)) was published independently by the Police Department of the South Sea Agency in 1933-1939, and was published by Noboru Okaya, Kyozo Nagasaki, Yasushi Fujii and each island. Muneo Samejima, a doctor of medicine who worked at the clinic, reports on the results of medical, epidemiological, and anthropological surveys of natives of each island area, particularly Micronesians but also Marshall islanders. In addition, it has nothing to do with the Truk incident ( Navy biopsy incident ) (Truk Island Navy 4th Hospital) that occurred at Truk Hospital on Truk Island.

Clearly the Japanese Wikipedia editors want us to grasp that what Japan’s kindly Mandate administrators put in place throughout the South Sea Islands in the 1920s and 1930s were nice modern hospitals doing sympathetic modern medicine things, and doing nothing whatsoever like the abhorrent stuff that the Imperial Japanese Navy did on Truk.

So: what was the “Truk incident“? Finally, we get to a good question…

What Was the Truk Incident?

The full extent of the Bacteriological Warfare research on live human subjects carried out under General Ishii Shiro for the Japanese Imperial Army may never be known. Anyone who wants to see a properly solid technical account should read Sheldon Harris’ Chapter 16 (p. 463 ff.) of Military Medical Ethics Vol. 2 (2003): this makes it abundantly clear that Ishii’s deadly empire included units all the way from Inner Mongolia through Manchukuo to Singapore.

So: the events that happened on (the then Japanese-occupied) Truk Island started with the capture of an US submarine by the Japanese Imperial Navy in late 1943, leaving the Navy with about 50 prisoners of war. When some of General Ishii’s results (gained from live human experimentation) became more widely known in early 1944, some in the Japanese Navy wanted to use human subjects to gain the same kind of knowledge. And so the decision was made to perform various vivisection experiments on the Truk prisoners of war.

Because Stephen Mercado makes plain the long-running antipathy (and complete lack of cooperation) between the Japanese Army and the Japanese Navy, it should be no surprise that the Japanese Navy wanted to “keep up with the Ishii’s”, so to speak.

These ghastly Navy ‘experiments’ in Truk were carried out in January, March, June and July of 1944 (please excuse me if I don’t go into the gruesome details): the POWs’ bodies were initially buried, and then later dug up and disposed of again to try to hide the evidence.

Though the Japanese perpetrators initially denied all knowledge post-war, Korean war personnel on the island were able to tell the American investigators what had happened: and this ultimately led to two war-crime trials on Guam, the first in Jun-Sep 1947, and the second in Sep-Oct 1947. Many of the perpetrators committed suicide rather than testify against their commander: having been found guilty, Hiroshi Iwanami tried to kill himself with a pencil in the courtroom, but failed and was subsequently hanged.

What is Missing From This History?

Sheldon Harris’ chapter 16 in Military Medical Ethics makes for harrowing reading: but I think it’s important to point out that the Truk Incident Navy doctors went on trial for war crimes (i.e. against enemy prisoners of war), not crimes against humanity. Specifically, they were charged with “Neglect of Duty in Violation of the Laws and Customs of War”.

Given that Army General Ishii Shiro’s Unit 731 (and all the other numbered Units) carried out appallingly inhumane experiments against all manner of people (and only rarely on prisoners of war), it really does require no huge stretch of the historical imagination to wonder whether the Japanese Imperial Navy carried out Ishii-style experiments not just on prisoners of war, but also on all manner of other non-volunteer test subjects. If it was good enough for the Army, it was good enough for the Navy, right?

As a reminder, the story told by Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” claimed that disabled and handicapped people were taken by the US Military from a hospital on a small Pacific island that had been taken in 1944, where they had been used for inhumane experimentation. From the horrific details of the Truk Incident, there certainly seem to have been no ethical barriers preventing this: but whereas there was an appetite to prosecute war crimes against prisoners of war, there seems to have been no similar push to prosecute the same people for anything else they may have done to anyone else.

There are numerous stories about Japanese outrages (rapes, murders, etc) against Chamorros in Guam and Saipan from late on in WWII: so it is hard to see them having much respect for the people of these South Sea Islands.

Hence it would seem likely to me that even though Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” said that the three Roswell Incident dead she saw looked like “humans – handicapped humans – and from Japan or China, I would say to you” (Body Snatchers, p.6), it’s again no huge stretch of the imagination to wonder whether they were Chamorros. There seems to have been no obvious ethical barriers in place there either.

And so I’m left here wondering about what happened in the Japanese Imperial Navy’s hospital on Truk in 1944, and where I should be looking to try to reconstruct the full picture, in all its atrocious horror. What books or archival sources document what happened on Truk then? When the investigators themselves wore such tightly-focused evidential blinkers, who since has gone looking for the whole story?

It’s often said that history is a conceit constructed by the victors: but, as the conclusion to Sheldon Harris’ MME Chapter 16 pointed out, in the case of post-WWII Japan it seems that both winners and losers were complicit in concealing much of what went on. History is as much about the stories that get hidden as the ones that get told.

Following my recent posts about how the 1947 Roswell Incident strongly fits the template for a cipher mystery, I’ve moved on to wondering how arch-Ufologist Nick Redfern’s profoundly non-Ufological theory (where, according to his “Black Widow” witness, the debris found in Roswell was actually caused by the crash of some kind of high-altitude balloon experiment using disabled Japanese people as live test subjects) fits into this. The challenge is how to temper Redfern’s effusive research enthusiasm with actual historical insight: can we build up a reliable picture of the things that might have contributed to his story?

I’ve therefore been reading books that try to build up solid factual accounts of the historical contexts into which Redfern would like his narrative inserted. Which is important because there remain many aspects of his books I’m still extraordinarily uncomfortable with.

Ross Coen’s “Fu–go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America”

Though written in a comfortably US-archive-centric popular history vein, Coen’s book is actually a nice, easy read that covers a lot of ground (all the way from Mexico to Alaska, in fact) in understanding how Japan’s war-time balloon bomb blitz was responded to in America.

Perhaps unwittingly, Coen works hard to pop a lot of the balloon-based conspiracy bubbles that Redfern notes floating around the edges of the discourse. For example, he says that:

• the Japanese top brass halted the balloon programme simply because – thanks to the US news blackout on balloon bomb explosions – the people running the programme couldn’t supply them with any solid proof that the 9,000 Fu-go balloons they had launched had militarily achieved anything;
• there was no plan for bigger, bolder, better balloon bombs – claims to that effect were in fact just part of internally-focused Japanese propaganda aimed at its own people
• despite American fears that the balloon bombs might be a precursor to a far more deadly Bacteriological Warfare attack from the skies, this simply wasn’t part of what was planned at all.
• it wasn’t direct & deliberate American attacks on Japanese hydrogen plants that made things logistically difficult for the Japanese balloon bomb makers, but instead ruptures to their train lines and widespread supply shortages

For me, the biggest takeaway from Coen’s book was simply how well the Americans came to understand (and indeed appreciate) the inner workings of the Japanese balloon bombs: their fuses, their internal wiring, their ‘wheel’, their battery, their antifreeze, etc. The Fu-go balloon bomb was in many ways a masterpiece of low-cost engineering and pragmatic ingenuity, coupled with solid meteorological understanding and actually quite daring thought.

Yet given that the US Military went on to build its own balloon bombs (though with a bacteriological warfare payload) from 1950 onwards, one of the broader questions I had before reading Coen’s book was to do with whether the Americans would have needed help from Japanese engineers to get them to 1950. But, perhaps surprisingly, the answer to that seems to be a resounding no: by the end of the War, the US Military had been able to reverse-engineer everything they needed to know about the Fu-go balloons.

Moreover, you finish Coen’s book somewhat reassured as to the idea that these balloons could have been used for waging Bacteriological Warfare: in his account, this seems to have been primarily a US Military defensive fear, that by 1950 was then redirected into an offensive (in both senses of the word) opportunity.

Amanda Kay McVety’s “The Rinderpest Campaigns”

Unfortunately for Coen, McVety’s book reports (p.73, footnote 86) the 1990 testimony of Noboru Kuba, who started work at the Noborito Research Institute in 1943 to create an “acute contagious disease” to infect cattle, and to use that toxin to bring America to its knees. Kuba reported carrying out tests on a group of cows in Busan (in Korea), all ten of which died ten days later, thus proving that it did what they hoped it would.

In Kuba’s recounting, the development of the toxin happened in parallel with the Fu-go balloon bombs, but it was clear to many in the Imperial Japanese Army that the two technologies were a good match for each other. And so the proposal was made in September 1944 to use 20 tons of rinderpest toxin as the payload for Fu-go balloon bombs. However, this was rejected by Hideki Tojo, a former prime minister (and by then general), on the grounds that the Americans would likely retaliate against Japan’s rice crop in the harvest season, causing enormous problems.

What this throws up is that Coen’s book relies heavily on the post-war Compton Report, which (as Mercado makes clear in “The Shadow Warriors of Nakano”, a fascinating read too) was weakened to the point of uselessness not only by the immediate burning of just about all the documentary evidence that could be burned, but also by the deception and lack of cooperation of the (now-suddenly-former) Noborito Research Institute members.

And yet at the same time, the US Military seems not to have known about any of this at the time. All the interesting Big Conspiracy Theories about this period tend to focus on the miserable Mengele-like atrocities inflicted by The Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 upon the people of the Japanese puppet state on mainland China, which perhaps suggest why Nick Redfern got so caught up with that side of the history.

It’s certainly true that a number of Unit 731 personnel were given something not entirely unlike an amnesty, and that it is likely that a good few were swooshed – Operation Paperclip-style – into America not long after the war. So it’s certainly possible that some of these awful, immoral, dehumanised Japanese ‘scientists’ from Unit 731 contributed to the US Military’s research in the post-war years. Having said that, perhaps more relevant to American Bacteriological Warfare research would have been the activities of Unit 100 (elsewhere on mainland China), which focused on anthrax, glanders, and red rust.

But all the same, I think the picture that emerges here about what was happening is quite unlike the one presented by Redfern in yet different ways from the one presented by Coen.

Tularosa Balloons

Speculative stuff aside, the account given by Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” witness (who claims to have worked at Oak Ridge) is actually rather specific. The core of her story is a series of unethical high-altitude balloon tests carried out at night in May, June, and July 1947 at Tularosa on fifteen live (but anaesthetised) subjects, with horrific and fatal results.

It’s no secret that the Tularosa Basin was indeed used for American high-altitude balloon experiments from 1945 onwards, such as Project MANHIGH III. In his book “The Pre-Astronauts” (which I haven’t yet read, though I’ve ordered a copy), Craig Ryan notes (quoted here):

“One of the first postwar manned balloon flights sponsored by the military was launched from the Tularosa Basin in 1947 with the intent of crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately, the entire flight’s supply of ballast was expended in the crossing of the Sacramento range to the east of Alamogordo and the balloon’s journey ended just short of Roswell.”

So it seems eminently clear that US Military balloon experiments – that is, ones specifically involving people, so not weather balloons or Project MOGUL – were not only launched from Tularosa in 1947, but were also in range of Roswell. Even if how these things mesh together isn’t yet clear, Tularosa is certainly not an entirely unreasonable launchpad.

“A Small Island in the Pacific”

Separately, Redfern’s Black Widow claims that these test subjects were “acquired […] in early 1945 after a battle between American and Japanese troops on a small island in the Pacific”, where the Americans discovered “a small medical laboratory where Japanese doctors and scientists were conducting all manner of atrocities on both physically and mentally handicapped people”.

Where could this have been? If we roll the clock back to 1944 (note the sentence says “in early 1945 after a battle”, so the battle itself could easily have been in 1944), the battles that fit the timeline are:

• Feb 1944: Battles of Kwajalein and Eniwetok
• Summer 1944: Marianas Islands – Guam, Saipan, Tinian
• Feb-Mar 1945: Iwo Jima
• Apr-Jun 1945: Okinawa

The timeline and size seems to rule out Okinawa, the volcanic Iwo Jima seems a highly unlikely location, and Kwajalein and Eniwetok seem to have been too small and too early. So it seems that we are being pointed towards the Marianas Islands: and because Guam had been taken from America by the Japanese in 1941, that too seems unlikely, while the third major Marianas island (Rota) remained under Japanese control.

All of which seems to leave us two specific islands to look at: Saipan and Tinian – you may recognise Tinian as being the island whose airstrip the B-29 Enola Gay famously took off from in August 1945. And so I’ve also ordered myself a copy of Gordon Rottman’s “Saipan & Tinian 1944: Piercing the Japanese Empire”, which should be an interesting read.

Pinning the Tail on the Axis Donkey?

I think it’s important to say that if there were unethical high-altitude balloon experiments going on in 1947, the issue of whether they involved “Japanese doctors and Nazi doctors” is entirely secondary. Unlike Unit 731’s shocking experiments on non-volunteered Chinese subjects carried out on the Chinese mainland, or Unit 100’s experiments on cattle on the Chinese mainland, or Noboru Kuba’s experiments on cattle in Korea, these would have been American tests on American soil, commissioned and carried out by the US military, making it impossible to ‘export’ any ethical failings of those tests. Furthermore, you don’t have to look much further forward along the military timeline to see the 1960s controversy over the US testing of Agent Orange in Okinawa, where all these themes would recur.

In short, if there was any unethical science going on in Tularosa in 1947, it would first and foremost have been American unethical science. So all in all, doesn’t it sound somewhat as if someone somewhere is trying to unpin the blame from themselves, and instead pin it on questionable Axis scientists (who may or may not exist)? Or if not on them, then on extra-terrestrials, hmmm?

I always find it fascinating when someone approaches a topic that I thought was a carcass stripped of every scrap of flesh, and yet from it manages to conjure up an entirely fresh-looking meat feast. Even though there is – of course – a danger that they simply dreamed it all up, there’s also the chance that they might have glimpsed (however imperfectly) something really big. So you always ask: is it smoke and mirrors, or behind the smoke is there some kind of fire?

In his (2005) “Body Snatchers in the Desert” and its (2017) sequel “The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing a Shocking and Sinister Secret”, long-time researcher/writer Nick Redfern took a hugely sideways look at the 1947 Roswell Incident (along with the often lurid crash site stories of oddly-deformed bodies) and found an entirely new story to tell.

Given that Redfern is an avowed Ufologist, what’s immediately unexpected about these two books is that they set out to tell a story about the 1947 Roswell Incident that was anything but extraterrestrial. Unsurprisingly, many (if not most) of his Ufological buddies and correspondents believe that he has drunk too deeply from the PsyOps poisoned well of UFO nonsense, and become befuddled by the many layers of cover stories laid down over the years.

All the same, the big question is: how on Earth (if you’ll excuse the phrase) did a Ufologist end up writing arguably the most anti-Ufological book ever? And might even a small bit of what he found hidden under that rock actually be true?

“Who Cares Where They Come Down?”

Historically, Redfern’s story pivots on the US Military’s actions in the years just after WWII, across a period bounded on the one hand by Operation Paperclip (and its Japanese analogue), and on the other hand by the Nuremberg Trials.

As is well-documented (even in Wikipedia), Operation Paperclip was a secret operation whereby “more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians” got spirited away from the bombed desolation of post-war Germany to start fresh new lives in the US. This programme was authorised by President Truman on 3rd September 1946, and led to an influx to the States of such famous rocketeers as Wernher von Braun. As Tom Lehrer memorably wrote (to a tune which I now inevitably can’t get out of my head):

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,”
Says Wernher von Braun.

Note that Redfern also stresses the other side of the political equation: that it was not just that the US was anxious to gain the services of these brilliant (if perhaps morally damaged) individuals, it was also that the US wanted to avoid the scenario where those same people were swooshed up by the Russians. (Did they ever have an Operation Paperclipski?)

So: the picture that Redfern paints is that from the start of 1946, technologists from the defeated Axis countries along with their technology (and documentation) resurfaced in America, influencing not only the type of science that was being done there, but also the way it was being done. They were, after all, domain experts, so why not bring ’em in?

The Nuremberg Trials

The reason that the Nuremberg Trials form a terminus ante quem for Redfern is – though I don’t think he says it explicitly – what happened in the IG Farben trial, which ran from 27th August 1947 through to 30th July 1948.

The directors of German chemical conglomerate IG Farben were in court not only because they had manufactured Zyklon B (the poison gas used in the Nazi extermination camps), but also because they had used slave labour. Though the single thing that seems to have tipped the balance for the judges was the fact that IG Farben had built a Zyklon B manufacturing plant right next door to Auschwitz, with the clear intention of using slave labour to manufacture the same poison that was then used to kill the same slaves.

(Personally, I find this extraordinary and awful, as though the only way someone could be convicted of murder is if they had shot someone with a gun they had previously forced the dead person to build for them.)

Five months later, one of the judges (Judge Hebert) filed a witheringly dissenting opinion, where he wrote (though possibly more for the benefit of his conscience than for its usefulness to later historians):

“Willing cooperation with the slave labor utilization of the Third Reich was a matter of corporate policy that permeated the whole Farben organization […] For this reason, criminal responsibility goes beyond the actual immediate participants at Auschwitz. It includes other Farben Vorstand plant-managers and embraces all who knowingly participated in the shaping of the corporate policy”

For Redfern’s narrative, this specific part of the Nuremberg trials is centrally important because the third group of crimes that the IG Farben directors were indicted was (again, as per Wikipedia):

“3. War crimes and crimes against humanity through participation in the enslavement and deportation to slave labor on a gigantic scale of concentration camp inmates and civilians in occupied countries, and of prisoners of war, and the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons.”

That is to say, the world now had the concept of war crimes, for which culpable individuals could be held accountable.

A Narrow Ethical Window

From this, you could say that Nick Redfern’s narrative (reconstructed from different witness accounts) falls within a narrow ‘ethical window’. This time period commenced with Operation Paperclip’s influx of scientists who brought with them a radically different experimental ethics – what we would now disparagingly call “Nazi science” – but then finished with the Nuremberg Trial judges’ clear signal to the world that the cruelty, terror and indeed murder carried out in the name of that so-called “science” was a war crime – what we would now call “crimes against humanity”.

For Redfern, key American military scientists seem to have been utterly seduced by the whole idea of carrying out inhumane experiments against “volunteer” (but utterly misinformed) prisoners, the mentally or physically handicapped, or even infant corpses in the pursuit of ‘scientific knowledge’. By way of support, he offers a large number of grotesquely shameful instances in post-war America (and indeed Britain) where exactly this kind of thing happened.

Even today, Josef Mengele’s chillingly inhumane experiments at Auschwitz (where he performed grotesque ‘operations’ on inmates, while also cheerfully selecting those to die of Zyklon B) remain utterly shocking. But the atrocities carried out during WWII by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army in their development of bacteriological warfare seem every bit as morally repugnant. As Wikipedia notes:

The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip. Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda.

It should be noted that Unit 731 was located on mainland China (where Japan had occupied a sizeable region before WWII), and so the majority of its ‘test subjects” were Chinese. These “included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, the homeless and mentally handicapped, and also people rounded up by the Kempeitai military police for alleged ‘suspicious activities’.“

So when thousands of these morally-compromised Axis scientists (as Tom Lehrer jeered, were they “apolitical” or just plain “hypocritical”?) were absorbed into the post-WWII American military R&D complex, what was the cultural effect? Did everything run the same as before, or did their horribly dehumanised attitudes towards test subjects – people in Unit 731 referred to them as “logs”, or “long-tailed Manchurian monkeys” – also get integrated along with their science?

Fu-Go Balloon Bombs

Nick Redfern’s story hinges on a relatively little-known side of WWII: Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs. Over 9,000 of these mulberry-paper balloon bombs were launched from Japan, flying at a relatively constant altitude (thanks to an ingenious bit of engineering trickery) all the way to America’s West Coast. These were launched from late 1944 until April 1945, because they were carried by a seasonal higher altitude wind that consistently blows across the Pacific during those months (though less than 10% of them actually reached their destination).

Though these balloon bombs caused hardly any casualties (a single family was blown up when they went to investigate a downed balloon up close), this wasn’t the whole story. According to Redfern, the Japanese actually had a much bigger Fu-Go attack planned for 22nd September 1945, with the intention of dropping toxins on San Diego. However, that particular attack never happened, thanks to Japan’s surrender a month earlier, following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Redfern also has a story about a manned Japanese balloon attack on California, observed late in the war by three witnesses. He also talks about further plans for a larger balloon being sent across from Japan carrying a bomb-filled glider beneath it, for a Kamikaze pilot to steer to its final (high-value) target.

A quick Wikipedia search reveals that these balloons were designed and built by the Imperial Japanese Army’s Number Nine Research Laboratory (Noborito Laboratory) under Major General Kusaba. According to a 2007 review of a 2001 posthumous memoir by former insider Ban Shigeo (“Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu [The Truth About the Army Noborito Research Institute]“): “the US Army” – to nobody’s great surprise – “quietly enlisted certain members of Noborito in its efforts against the communist camp in the early years of the Cold War.” I for one would gladly pay to read an English translation of Ban Shigeo’s book, wouldn’t you?

Actually, it should be noted that there’s also a long discussion of this in Amanda Kay McVety’s (2018) “The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century”. McVety notes that the rinderpest toxin was developed not by Unit 731, but by the Noborito Lab itself: and that their big plan was to use a wave of balloon bombs to drop 20 tons of the stuff over the US to kill American cattle en masse. According to McVety, the plan was nixed not by the end of the war, but by a senior General fearing American reprisals against Japan’s rice harvest.

Yet even though the US Military developed its own range of – it has to be said extremely similar – balloon bombs (e.g. its E77 was developed in 1950) not that long after, I was unable to find any official military history charting how these Noborito balloon bomb researchers affected American thinking and balloon development. This sounds like a fascinating slice of secret history that military historians seem to have largely overlooked to date. Let’s hope that particular lacuna gets filled before very long.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

And so, from the normal historical fog, we can start to see the broad shape of Redfern’s account of the 1947 Roswell Incident starting to emerge. He presents the Roswell Incident as the crash not of an extraterrestrial spaceship, but instead of an unfamiliar balloon technology brought in via the Japanese equivalent of Operation Paperclip. And the oddly deformed bodies? For him, these were not X-Files “grays”, but instead handicapped Japanese test subjects, similar to the ones upon whom Unit 731 performed ghastly experiments. And the whole UFO story? According to Redfern, this was to cover up the “Nazi science”-style atrocities being carried out to gain high-altitude physiological (or possibly radioactive) scientific knowledge.

Admittedly, Redfern’s conspiratorial excitement then somewhat gets the better of him, to the point that he confuses Unit 731 with Noborito Laboratory, and then somewhat oddly throws a whole load of Nazi flying machine tech into the mix. I’m also far from convinced by his attempts to stitch the glider-beneath-the-balloon account into his own narrative. Even so, I thought he was doing perfectly well with just the actual history, so it’s not all bad, not at all. :-/

Finally, the “Bamboo” Bit Teased in the Title…

All in all, does Nick Redfern’s account really explain everything about the Roswell Incident? I think it’s fair to say that in its current form, probably not quite. But all the same, the idea that the incident revolved around a balloon built according to unfamiliar principles ‘acquired’ (Operation Paperclip-style) by the US Military from Japanese balloon bomb builders does strike me as entirely plausible (in a good way).

And moreover, his suggestion that the people involved were actually ‘involuntary volunteer’ test subjects whose deaths in that balloon crash subsequently got hushed up is also far from unreasonable. There was definitely an experimental moral laxity in that period, though the notion that the victims’ various deformities were due to specific genetically-linked conditions may well be a bit too… intense for some. Still, full marks for trying to cover all the bases, regardless.

For me, though, I can’t help but wonder whether the whole Roswell Incident was nothing more complex than a crashed balloon that used unfamiliar techniques and materials brought to America by the Noborito ‘acquirees’. Even though the US Military knew a fair bit about balloons, it may well not have developed suitable gondolas: so might the gondola in the Roswell crash (for if there were people on the balloon, it surely had a gondola, right?) have actually been a Noborito Lab-developed gondola quietly swooshed out of post-war Japan’s backdoor by the Americans?

As an aside: one of the unexplained things about the initial Roswell Incident crash site was the inwardly curved I-beams that so bemused Jesse Marcel, and which had some kind of strange writing imprinted on them (the ones that various witnesses remarked upon). This is, after all, why I’ve been treating the Roswell Incident as primarily a cipher mystery.

So here’s Nick’s thought for the day: might these inwardly-curved “I-beams” have actually been bamboo from the crashed gondola frame? And might the writing on those “I-beams” actually have been Japanese (e.g. assembly instructions)? In which case, might the real reason that no images of this writing have ever been made public is that it would be obviously Japanese, thereby opening up a whole world of awkward (and clearly non-extraterrestrial) questions about the roles Noborito Lab researchers were playing in post-war US Military R&D?

Jesse Marcel was certain that what he was looking at wasn’t any kind of American balloon he’d seen before: and, not knowing America’s (presumably still highly Top Secret) connection to Japanese bomb-balloon-makers, he (wrongly, I think) concluded that he could only be looking at debris from a crashed flying saucer. And so it could well be that Marcel’s quick rationalisation was inadvertently the well-spring from which all modern UFOlogy eventually flowed.

Regardless, if your job was to cover up a Top Secret US Military collaboration with Japanese balloon-bomb builders in 1947, how would you try to explain it away? It would be a bit of a tricky challenge, that’s for sure. Hmmm…

Anyway, paraphrasing Tom Lehrer slightly:

“Once the balloons are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department”

Given that many different witness accounts mentioned that the ‘beams’ found initially at the Roswell debris site had unreadable writing on them, this would surely seem to be a sensible starting-point for further cipher mystery research.

We then, as I posted before, have three separate reports suggesting that the US Military took control of the beams (and hence the writing with it).

So what happened to those beams? I decided to have a look at a few (of the many tens of thousands of) UFO books out there. And it didn’t take me long to find Philip Corso…

Corso & Birnes (1998) – “The Day After Roswell”

This is presented as a tell-all book, written by a key military insider (Philip Corso) on the Foreign Technology Desk, who sat between the US military, the Pentagon, and US government. Written at the peak of X-Files mania (before it all got a bit silly with Series 6), it tells you pretty much everything you ever hoped or feared to hear about aliens. Basically, its central claim is that American technological ascendancy came from reverse-engineering alien space tech taken from a crashed flying saucer, all thanks to the personal brilliance of – you guessed it – Philip Corso. Unsurprisingly, the book was a huge bestseller (though it was later claimed that Corso, who died not long after, got bilked out of his royalties).

In many ways, I suspect that this is THE central book of modern Ufology, in that your attitude to it squarely defines what you think about the US and UFOs. It’s extraordinarily hard to read it in a “halfway-house” evidence-cherry-picking kind of way: you pretty much have to either accept it all or reject it all.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that Corso did genuinely hold the positions he claims to have held (or at least very close to them). And there’s no shortage of people who want to defend his account against the numerous UFO researchers who don’t believe a word of it – perhaps one of the best-presented defences is Michael Salla’s two-part article (here and here, or perhaps here and here).

Note that Salla flags that the FBI thought poorly of Corso (“shifty-eyed”, “rat”, “a parasite”), but that this was because Corso had been told by someone in the CIA that Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant, but wouldn’t tell the FBI who had told him. Also, I’m a bit dubious about Salla’s claim about General Trudeau: the book I have on Dulles (“The Devil’s Chessboard”, p.278) says that Trudeau was ejected for trampling on political toes by meeting with Konrad Adenauer in 1954 to talk about paranoid German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen.

On the other hand, Brad Sparks’ debunking is typical of the criticism the book received from the UFO research community (if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you). In 2001, The Guardian newspaper famously included “The Day After Roswell” in its Top Ten list of literary hoaxes, right up there with the Donation of Constantine, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Hitler Diaries. (Personally, I’d have included the Priory of Sion and the Rosicrucian Manifestos, but each to their own, eh?)

For me, I can’t help but notice that Corso talks explicitly (and at length) about Majestic 12 (MJ-12), which became known through thin bundles of extraordinarily fake-looking photocopied documents (with badly-copied fake signatures) that first started surfacing in 1984. If you think MJ-12 is an outright fake (as I do), then I really think you can only sensibly conclude that Corso’s account in “The Day After Roswell” is no less fake.

Conversely, if you think MJ-12 is real, why not believe Corso’s account too? Go ahead, knock yourself out.

The Fork in the Road

In the historiography of Ufology, then, “The Day After Roswell” marks a sharp fork in the road. Here, one path leads to an “X-Files” vision where just about everything short of The Cigarette-Smoking Man’s Ultimate Conspiracy is confirmed as True-As-Hell; while the other path leads you to a world where you have almost nothing direct to work with.

Hence UFO researchers seem utterly trapped between this Scylla (of believing everything) and Charybdis (of believing nothing). Even an assiduous writer like Timothy Good (who works hard to collect and collate information) is only able to do what he does by suspending disbelief on an almost industrial scale.

More broadly, the ‘normal’ approach to writing UFO books seems to be completely believe some ‘new’ witness source you have uncovered, while supporting that source by selectively quoting pieces from wherever suits your new source best. But the reality seems to be that Corso either gives you everything at once (i.e. the whole Big Kahuna Conspiracy) or takes everything away from you.

From my perspective, the key thing that differentiates these books from proper historical research seems to be that belief and disbelief are the starting points for inquiry rather then the endpoints – inputs rather than outputs. Moreover, if you don’t like Testimony X, it’s easy as pie to weave a story about how it was obviously misinformation to cover up Secret Project Y. And so the merry-go-round continues to spin.

So: Back To Roswell, Then?

In my opinion, this probably explains why there is now more interest in the original Roswell “debris field” incident than in Corso’s claims, or the stories of saucer crashes / alien bodies in Corona or the Plains of St Augustine or wherever. This is simply because you don’t have to drink Corso’s Kool-Aid or believe every line of “The Roswell Incident” to believe that something probably did crash at the ranch outside Roswell in 1947.

In the end, whether that was a Project Mogul balloon or an alien whatnot is perhaps less important than the fact it marks a place we can all agree to start from.

Is it any wonder I want to see what the symbols on the beams looked like?