Secret Weapons (24 page)

Matters came to a head when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1933. He was a good friend of Britain, and his family had successfully traded with the Chinese for decades, so he looked with increasing distaste at the growing threat of the Nazis, and with even more disapproval at the Japanese invasions of Chinese territories.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Roosevelt’s inclinations were to join with Britain and France to defeat Germany – but the people of the United States were opposed to becoming involved in another European war, and the 1940 Presidential elections were looming. The America First movement was growing in strength, spear-headed by such personalities as Charles Lindbergh and supported by anti-Semitic leaders including Henry Ford. But in direct defiance of this movement Roosevelt donated 50 American destroyers to fight for the Allies. This began in September 1940 when the United States government covertly offered Britain 43 destroyers for the Royal Navy; then seven more were given to the Royal Canadian Navy. This was nominally in exchange for 99-year leases for United States bases in places like Newfoundland, Jamaica and British Guiana. American ships were thus fighting for Britain almost from the start. In 1941 President Roosevelt followed this with the innocently named Lend-Lease Bill which led to the steady supply of materiel – weapons, explosives, etc – from 1941 to 1945. At the same time, the United States offered the secret use of her ports to Allied shipping. Captain Richard Moss of Cambridge, England, recently told me of the Royal Navy’s use of the port of Boston, Massachusetts, for military purposes prior to 1941. The notion that America stayed out of the war is untrue; secretly, she was in from the start.

Germany was also using the help of covertly friendly nations that (like the United States) were ostensibly neutral. Although Sweden made a great show of remaining outside the conflict and loudly proclaimed her neutrality, she supplied much of Germany’s iron ore for weapons production through the Norwegian port of Narvik. Without Swedish assistance, Germany could never have produced planes, ships and weapons as she did.

Japan – always needing supplies of energy and raw materials – had signed a commercial treaty with the United States in 1911, and in the years before World War II Japan had adopted an outwardly friendly attitude towards the United States; but the United States unilaterally terminated the treaty in 1939 and then initiated a policy of economic sanction against Japan, designed to curtail aggressive Japanese expansionism into South-East Asia. The Export Controls Act of 1940 restricted the supply to Japan of oil for use as a fuel and lubricant, and was followed by a ban on all exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan. The Japanese protested, but in vain; and in July 1941, President Roosevelt went on to freeze all Japanese assets in the United States. Britain and the Netherlands did the same. This unilateral action meant that Japan was suddenly unable to purchase oil and the Western action brought further protests, the Japanese emphasizing that they would be obliged to take action against these sanctions.

Japan set out to draw up a plan of war, and proposed to invade Malaya, Burma and the Philippines. These plans were intercepted by Allied intelligence, and the United States knew that her great fleet, based in Hawaii, would be on standby to go to war with Japan once these invasion plans were put into operation. Intelligence agents of the United States continued to monitor messages as Japan planned to take military action.

Japan now stood bereft of essential supplies. They were not so much short of military equipment as of the essentials needed for day-to-day life, including fuel oil. General Tojo Hideki became the Japanese Premier in October 1941, and realized at once that the position of his nation was desperate. He set 29 November as the date on which Japan would take military action against the United States, if no agreement was forthcoming. The United States, meanwhile, was hoping to inveigle Japan into entering the war and knew that the mighty American fleet moored in Pearl Harbor would be more than a match for any attempted invasion of territory by Japan. The intelligence service had heard that one of the targets would be Pearl Harbor; crucially, these revelations were never passed to the military commanders in Hawaii, so no preventive action could be taken. Moreover, Britain had recently perfected a transponder radar system called IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) which they offered to the United States Army Signal Corps, but they turned it down. According to their leaders, they did not need anything from the British: American systems were best.

The attack, when it came, was unexpectedly from the air and launched with overwhelming force. Military strategists had expected Japan to invade countries to obtain her vital supplies, and the warships in Hawaii were ready to sail out to repel them when they did; nobody had imagined that Japan would instead annihilate the American fleet.

On the morning of 7 December 1941, a radar operator at the Fort Shafter radar station on the island of Oahu saw a large signal appearing on his screen. He asked a private stationed with him to look, and both agreed that there were a large number of aircraft about 130 miles (210km) away and approaching fast. Their superior officer was 1st Lieutenant Kermit A. Tyler, who listened carefully to their reported sighting. And then he reached his fateful decision. A flight of American B-17 bombers was due in that day, and he guessed this must be them. He was wrong: over 180 Japanese fighters, torpedo planes and bombers were heading to Hawaii at top speed. The opportunity to prepare or take cover was lost.

Six Japanese aircraft carriers were within range, and seemingly endless waves of planes had taken off to join forces against Hawaii. Two massive attacks then followed; 3,500 United States personnel were killed or severely wounded and 18 ships of the Pacific Fleet were sunk or badly damaged. More than 350 aircraft were destroyed. Further damage was done by scores of top-secret Japanese midget submarines that penetrated deep inside the port. Every one of the eight United States battleships was sunk; some 1,200 sailors were killed when just the USS
Arizona
was attacked. The United States lost her battleship fleet in the space of 2 hours. The Japanese attack was a complete success and a triumph of top-secret planning.

Much of the technology used in this audacious raid would have a far-reaching influence throughout the course of the war and beyond. Midget submarines were a particularly successful secret weapon. Pearl Harbor saw their first use in World War II but they were also used to great effect by the British and Italians.

The technology developed during World War II for small submarines is still in use to this day, often in unexpected applications. Tourist submarines some 32ft (10m) long are in use around the world, carrying people to see the wonders of life beneath the waves. Recently, secretly constructed submarines (some up to 98ft, 30m, long) have been discovered in Central American waters, where they are used for present-day drug smuggling.

Contrary to what we are so often told, the Pearl Harbor attack was no surprise to the United States government – it was launched after much provocation, and after copious warnings; it had even been detected by radar. Whatever else one might argue, it was not an unprovoked attack from an unexpected quarter, though the operation was a triumph of top-secret military planning.

The United States had their best code-breakers assigned to the difficult task of following the Japanese plans. They were systematically decoding their top-secret messages, and they soon learnt of a plan to lure the remaining American ships into a trap at Midway Island. In June 1942 in the battle of Midway the United States successfully turned the tables by sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser in exchange for the loss of one aircraft carrier and a destroyer. This was the turning-point in the Pacific, and from that time onwards the Japanese headed steadily to defeat.

The secret weapons that were developed by the United States against Japan, and vice versa, included some of the most fanciful ever seen in war. The Japanese resolved to launch incendiary attacks against the United States, and manufactured some 9,000 hydrogen balloons to which they fitted small incendiary weapons that could burn for over an hour and 33lb (15kg) of high explosive anti-personnel bombs. The plan was to launch them into the high-altitude jet-stream – which the Japanese had just discovered – so that the weapons were carried across the Pacific to North America. The balloons were made of paper and were assembled by young women, mostly acting students from nearby schools. The
washi
paper for the balloons was made from large sheets stuck together with ‘devil’s tongue’ gel made by boiling the roots of arum lilies. Virtually the entire stocks of the arum root gel disappeared from the stores, partly to feed the balloon industry, but also because it had a pleasant taste and was being consumed by the students in copious quantities. Starting in November 1944, the Special Balloon Regiment established under the Imperial Japanese Army released a continuous stream of these balloons from Ibaraki Prefecture, on the western side of Honshu.

Unlikely as it seems, the ruse worked; most of the balloons burst or deflated, landing in the sea, but over 1,000 of these secret weapons reached North America and a quarter of them caused damage, mostly small forest fires. The first reports of the fireballs descending from the skies were dismissed as farmhand gossip, but towards the end of 1944 the authorities realized what was happening. Some of the balloons landed intact and were examined by the military. The payload contained magnesium as an incendiary device, partly to set fire to the balloons on landing, but also to ensure that the device was consumed in the blaze, so that the Americans would not discover the true nature of these strange balloons.

However, the balloons produced minimal interference with the conduct of the war, and once the nature of the weapons had been discovered, many were shot down by warplanes in mid-flight. A secret agreement was made with newspaper editors, so that reports of successful attacks were never published, and the Japanese could not find out how successful their balloons had been. After five months had passed without any news of damage appearing in the American news media, the Japanese became discouraged and discontinued their attacks. In reality, 285 balloon bomb incidents had been reported and some of the balloons reached as far as Michigan. One was found by a group of holidaymakers in the Oregon woods, all of whom were killed when they tried to move it and the anti-personnel mine exploded.

The United States were working on their retaliation with equally bizarre plans. A dentist (and inventor in his spare time) named Lytle S. Adams proposed to send a squadron of B-24 bombers to destroy Osaka, Japan. Each plane would carry 100 incendiary shells – and Adams had a unique twist to the proposal for a raid: the weapons would contain not bombs but bats. He argued that the bats would home in on the wood and paper buildings that were a feature of that ancient Japanese city. Each bat would carry a small incendiary charge, strapped securely in position. Once they had settled under the eaves or tucked themselves away in the roof spaces of buildings in Osaka, the fuses would light the devices – and the city would be destroyed in a massive conflagration.

The National Defense Research laboratories experimented with lightweight incendiary bombs, and produced a design weighing less than 1oz (28g), including the weight of the small timed fuse that would ignite the package. Adams and his team were meanwhile reported to have visited literally thousands of caves to collect guano bats, which were large enough to carry the little bombs. Some trial flights were made at Muroc Lake in California but they were farcical – the bats were disorientated and flew straight into the ground. A batch of the bats, experimentally fitted with their bombs, later escaped from their shed at an army base in New Mexico and set fire to an aircraft hangar and the military vehicle inside. The United States government response was to take the project away from Adams and his friends, and hand it to the authority of the Marine Corps. They code named it Project
X-ray
, and abandoned the idea soon afterwards.

Conventional incendiary attacks against Japan were soon intensified. The Germans had introduced the concept of fire-bombing civilians with the destruction of Warsaw in 1939. They next burned Rotterdam, even though that city had already capitulated. German forces carried out firebombing raids on an even larger scale with the night-time attacks of London in 1940–41. This led to what is now called ‘shock and awe’ – the widely televised raids on Baghdad during the Iraq War of 2003–10 are a more recent example of the same tactic. This indiscriminate bombing of heavily populated civilian areas early in World War II seems terrifying to us now, but it was soon to be adopted by the Allies. Hamburg was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943, and the huge conflagration that the bombs caused led to the death of about 50,000 people, most of them civilians. The destruction of Dresden in 1945 was a later example, by the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force. Some 1,300 heavy bombers delivered a massive onslaught of almost 4,000 tons of bombs which destroyed 15 square miles (about 40km
²
) of that historic city. Though there have been many claims that the bridges and industrial complexes were important targets, there is no evidence that these were bombed specifically. Estimates of the number of deaths at the time were as high as 250,000, though it has since been thought that this could be as much as ten times higher than the real figure.

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, squadrons of B-29 Superfortress bombers were sent to fire-bomb Japanese cities with devastating consequences. In Operation
Meetinghouse
, 100,000 civilians in Tokyo were burned and blasted to their deaths. Altogether, 500,000 Japanese were killed during World War II and 5,000,000 were left homeless. And so – even though the bat bombs of Project
X-ray
were a failure – the Japanese cities were burned after all.