As per various recent posts here, I’ve been trying to find out about a 1947 US experimental military balloon accident, as recounted by Duke Gildenberg in Craig Ryan’s “The Pre-Astronauts” (pp. 20-21). Back then, it seems to me that the only manned experimental balloon was the one being built for the Office of Naval Research’s Project Helios using a cluster of polyethylene balloons, as designed by Jean Felix Piccard. If I’m right, this would date the accident to between June 1947 (which is when General Mills had 500lb of polyethylene film ready to make into balloons) and mid-September 1947 (when Project Helios was finally shut down).

However…

• Craig Ryan had nothing extra to add when I asked him about this incident
• When I asked NARA, it holds archives on Project Helios’ successors (1948+), but nothing on Helios
• Commander George W. Hoover never published his tell-all memoirs on the early years of the ONR
  • I haven’t yet had a reply from his son George W. Hoover II, though still remain hopeful

I also contacted Sheryl K. Hill (whose excellent dissertation on Jeannette Ridlon Piccard I mentioned previously) about the Piccard Family Papers at the LoC (to which she referred extensively). The Piccard letters she quoted show that the Navy replaced Jeannette Piccard with highly experienced balloonist Lt Harris F. Smith USNR as pilot for Project Helios. However, I haven’t yet had a reply from Hill.

J. Gordon Vaeth’s “They Sailed The Skies” further added that Lt. Harris F. Smith was then, amidst yet more US Navy mid-1947 political chicanery, replaced by a different (and far less distinguished, balloon-wise) US Navy Commander, though this commander’s name was not recorded. Given that this commander might well have been the balloon pilot who had the accident, I put some effort into trying to work out who he was…

Navy Balloonists

At this point, Mark Lutz at the Lighter Than Air Society kindly came to my (partial) rescue here, with a list the LTAS maintains of Navy LTA aviators up to 1945. But cross-checking its list against the US Navy lists in Ancestry highlighted two problems with my search. Firstly, Navy ranks can be hard to pin down – specifically, there was a difference between permanent rank and acting rank, where many acting ranks seem to have been inflated in late 1945. (I suspect this was to do with military pensions.) And secondly, even though I was able to find the US Navy Officers List for 1st July 1947, I haven’t yet found the equivalent list for the Naval Reserve. So, for example, I was unable to find Lt. Harris F. Smith (because he was USNR).

All the same, by looking for Captains and Commanders who had the LTA Aviator qualification (‘3’) in the July 1947 US Navy Officers List, I managed to compile two decent-sized lists of names (23 and 33 entries respectively) and dates of birth. Looking these up in familysearch.org yielded dates of decease for all but George William Campbell (b. 15th Jul 1902).

Of all the rest, the most interesting by far was Captain Charles Hansford Kendall (b. 17th July 1904, d. 27th Aug 1949). He was a pre-WWII US Navy balloonist (who competed in Gordon Bennett races): his name pops up in J. Gordon Vaeth’s “They Sailed The Skies” (pp. 102-104). His ballooninghistory.com entry reads (‘B’ means ‘Balloon’):

• b: 17 Jul.1904 Baltimore, MD.
• e: U.S.Naval Academy, 1928.
• s: Officer in the U.S.Navy; Balloon & Airship Instructor; Lt.Commander, Commander of Airship Squadron ZP12 in 1941; Executive Officer of USS-Shaw, 1943;
• f: Received B-Training at Lakehurst Naval Air Station; FAI-ACA B-License #1083 issued 27 Jul.1934; More than 1525 LTA hours by 1933; Last LTA duty 1944.
• l: 1933, Aide (to T.SETTLE) in G-Bennett B-Race; 1934, Winner of U.S.National B-Races; 1934, Placed 12th in G-Bennett B-Race.
• r: Who’s Who in Aviation 1942-43; The Airship 29 Dec.1943 p3.

“The Carters of Blenheim” (1955) offers a little more information about him:

During World War II as a Lt. Commander [he] commanded a destroyer in the Pacific Area and after the war was returned to Lakehurst, New Jersey, and attained the grade of Captain in the U.S. Navy. He died August 26, 1949. On July 16, 1938, he married Boudinot Atterbury Oberge.

It goes on to say that Kendall had two sons: Charles Hansford Kendall (b. 13 Jun 1939) and John Kendall (b. 29 Jan 1943).

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I can’t help but think that Kendall seems to fit the description I’m looking for – a high-ranking Navy commander with extraordinarily deep ballooning and LTA piloting experience, but yet who never really got the ballooning ‘brand recognition’ (say) Tex Settle did.

Is Kendall the US Navy Balloonist I’m Looking For?

TL;DR – maybe he is, maybe he ain’t.

Regardless, I’d be very interested to see his obituary, and there also seems to be a six page US Navy biography of him (I’ve asked the Navy Archives if I can see the portion covering 1946-1949), which may well cast some light on this.

The best possible historical source would seem to be Commander George W. Hoover’s (unpublished) memoirs, but… hoping for that seems to be hoping for too much. Oh well!

To my great surprise, the copy of J. Gordon Vaeth’s (2005) “They Sailed The Skies” that I ordered from the US (and hence wasn’t expecting for a few weeks) arrived today. It’s a colourful, fascinating, and very well-illustrated book (and I thoroughly recommend it). Yet I was most interested in his final “Epilogue” chapter that deals (along with various other post-WWII ballooning stories) with Project Helios.

“Project Durante”

Having first established Lieutenant Harris F. Smith’s absolute suitability for piloting Project Helios’ balloon cluster (“unflappable… a Princeton graduate, accomplished in diplomacy and personal relationships”), Vaeth then opens up a completely new angle on what happened to Helios that I haven’t seen anywhere else (p. 138):

A flight to the top of the atmosphere and a world’s altitude record was a glittering attraction. It brought engineers, physicist, biologists, medical doctors, and others out of the woodwork, all wanting a piece of the action. Lt. Cdr. George Hoover, the project’s sponsor at the Special Devices Center, took to calling it Project Durante, recalling that comedian’s line that “everybody wants to get inta da act”.

Those who became involved included Navy “brass” who allowed Smith to be elbowed out and replaced by a Navy commander with no record of significant ballooning achievements.

So it seems that I now have an entirely new missing Navy pilot to find, one distinguished mainly by his, errm, indistinctitude.

Continuing, Vaeth repeats the now-standard explanations for Project Helios’s failure, i.e. the polyethylene film was unreliable, and launching a cluster of hundred balloons all at the same time was just too difficult. All the same, I have to point out that Charlie Moore and the other Project Mogul guys were launching clusters of General Mills polyethylene balloons in early July 1947 using a Project Helios frame (and apparently with Lt. Harris F. Smith’s help), so it clearly wasn’t that unreliable or that difficult. Hey ho.

Note that Princeton’s archives has a file linked to Harris F. Smith, though because it is dated 1941, it almost certainly relates to his undergraduate activities there rather than to his time in the US Navy or later.

George Hoover’s (Missing) Autobiography

Craig Ryan’s (1995) “The Pre-Astronauts” briefly mentions (p. 277) that the ONR’s (by then retired) Commander George Hoover was busy working “on his autobiography at his home in Pacific Palisades, California. His book will tell the whole story behind the events at the ONR in the 1940s“. Ryan continues (echoing Vaeth’s summary above):

According to Hoover, other organizations within the Navy, civilian contractors, and – later – the Air Force all attempted to gain control of and take credit for the ideas and technology in Project Helios. “I had to work on these things secretly, give them code names, and bury them inside all the other projects I had going on. Let me tell you, it was a real cut-throat operation.”

However, I’ve found no indication that Hoover ever finished writing up his life story: he died in March 1998. There’s a nice summary of his life here, and a tribute to him given the following month in the House of Representatives. Perhaps his family might one day donate his papers to the Library of Congress.

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?