It’s a bit of forgotten history...the week that World War II came to Ventura County, when the county was attacked from the air.
"Most do not know that this event happened," said historian Richard Senate.
By late 1944, the war was going badly for Japan. The United States and its allies had regained most of the territory they had lost earlier in the war, and bombing raids were causing massive damage to the Japanese homeland.
Japanese leaders decided to pursue a project aimed at taking the war to America’s West Coast.
"Towards the last part of the war, the Japanese had learned of the jet stream, which goes in an arc from Japan across the Pacific," explained Senate. "They had schoolchildren build paper balloons, and filled them with hydrogen, and suspended below them were bombs."
More than 9,000 of the bomb carrying paper balloons were made, with the focus on causing massive forest fires in the western U.S. The 30-foot-wide balloons had an ingenious system that measured the altitude and dropped onboard ballast if necessary to keep them in the jet stream.
"These would be released in Japan, and they would take the jet stream across the Pacific, and come down in North America," said Senate. "They hoped the bombs would set off massive forest fires."
According to Senate, since the war was going badly for Japan, and the Japanese mainland was being decimated by airborne attacks, the balloon bombs were a desperate effort to strike back at America.
"Japan was being attacked by air then. Many Japanese saw this as a way to strike back, and were pleased to see the balloons take off on their trip to America."
An estimated 300 of the balloons reached the U.S. and Canada, including at least two in Ventura County.
"One of them flew over Ventura County, over Saticoy, and released its bomb," said Senate. "It was in the middle of the night. People woke up to an explosion. They had no idea of what it was. They checked around and saw it blew up a field. It didn't harm people or property. Then, released from the weight of the bomb, the balloon flew all the way to Moorpark, where it crashed into a mountain."
In February of 1945, the remnants of another balloon bomb were found in an Oxnard agricultural field.
However, the balloons failed to achieve their objective of causing massive wildfires. Most arrived during the winter, when conditions weren't ripe for fires.
And, according to Senate, the American government didn’t want Japan to know that some of the bomb-carrying balloons had made it to the West Coast, so they asked media outlets not to report the attacks.
"They refused to let any news media cover the balloon bombs. The public did not know there was a danger."
In May of 1945, one of the balloons caused a deadly incident. A woman and five children at a church picnic east of Klamath Falls, Oregon, spotted one of the balloons on the ground. As they approached it to investigate, it exploded, and all six died.
They were the only known casualties on the U.S. mainland during World War II.
Senate said it was only after the war that news of the balloon was widely reported by the media.
While there are no well-documented cases of the balloons landing in Santa Barbara County, it had a different kind of attack.
In February of 1942, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Ellwood, just west of Goleta. It lobbed several shells at an oil processing facility. No one was hurt, and the damage was minor.
It was the first attack on the U.S. mainland during World War II.
