User:Feoffer/sandbox Fu-Go balloon bomb

Censorship campaign
Historian Ross Coen reports "the War Department had enacted a strict information blackout based on the not altogether misguided belief that keeping word of the balloons out of the newspapers would deny the Japanese the very intelligence they needed to know whether the campaign was successful. The censorship policy worked precisely as designed".

The Office of Censorship had been established on December 19, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8985, which established the Office of Censorship and conferred on its director the power to censor international communications in "his absolute discretion."

On December 14, the Western News, a weekly newspaper from Libby, Montana, broke the story of a recovered Japanese balloon. The January 1, 1945 editions of Newsweek and Time both featured stories about the Kalispell balloon. One Colonel within military intelligence privatly decried the coverage as "like giving Tokyo a Christmas present". On January 2, the Portland Oregonian featured a front page story on the balloon; This story prompted the Western Defense Command to directly reach out to news agencies to squash the balloon story.

The Office of Censorship subsequently released a statement to select media outlets: "Any balloons approaching the United States from outside its borders can be enemy attacks against the nation. Such attacks involve military security. Information that the balloons have reached this country and particularly what section they have reached is information of value to the enemy. The War Department is appropriate authority for such information. Please do not aid the enemy by publishing or broadcasting such information without appropriate authority."

A potential security breach occurred in February 1945 when Congressman Arthur Lewis Miller included mention of the balloons in his weekly column submitted to all 91 newspapers in his district. The Gordon Journal published Miller's statement, including the claim that"As a final act of desperation, it is believed that the Japs may release fi re balloons aimed at our great forests in the northwest." In response, intelligence officers of the Seventh Service Command in Omaha called editors at all 91 papers, requested censorship of the column. The effort was successful -- only two papers actually printed the column.

On April 22, intelligence agents were forced to investigate the Sunday "funny papers" when the nationally-syndicated adventure comic strip Tim Tyler's Luck featured a Japanese balloon recovered by the crew of an American submarine. In subsequent weeks, the storyline saw the protagonists fighting monstrous vines created by an evil Japanese horticulturalist bent on spreading the seeds via balloon. Another source of concern was the aviation serial The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, which featured a Japanese balloon that explodes upon reaching the ground. In both cases, the Office of Censorship did not feel the need to censor the serials.

In late March, the United Press released a story to its distributors on the Japanese balloon bombs, prompting military officerss to contact Army Intelligence, warning the article had a "great deal of detail, a lot of mechanical detail on the thing, in addition to being a hell of a scare story". Censors contacted United Press who reported that, fortuntaely, the story had not been teletyped yet, thus only five copies of the story existed; Censors were able to retrieve and destroy the copies. Investigators determined the origin of the story was a discussion held in an open session of the Colorado State Legislature.

Price sent a private letter to media outlets, congratulating for complying with the censorship campaign, writing "There is no question that your refusal to publish or broadcast information about these balloons has baffled the Japs, annoyed and hindered them, and has been an important contribution to security".