Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Fu-Go Balloon Bombs of WWII ft. Dr. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

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Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode, as well as years of other bonus content, at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. Submarines and their men, you know, that staff them, were expensive, and much better put to use attacking shipping lanes countering the growing threat of the American sea power or Transporting men and supplies to various remote island holdings, which of course would eventually be island hopped by piles of Marines So they would need to come up with something to attack the American homeland, but you know Not spend a bunch of money on it. They're just doing on the cheap. It's like look guys We don't know if this is gonna work. So you've got to keep the budget down. What my dad used to call Christmas.

Listen, daddy's got to go fight on the Western Front. You don't get Lego this year. Yeah, you're not getting any of those sweet, succulent catalytic converters I've stolen over the weekend. Stacking them on top of each other like Duplo? Enter the Norobito Research Institute. They were a secret military laboratory charged with developing experimental weapons and tools used in Japanese operations throughout the Second Sino-Japanese war and then World War II dating back to the 30s and when you hear me say secret Japanese military

lab of the 30s you kind of already know what's going on here crimes against humanity oh yeah just just so many they had their hands in developing like the not biological weapons that was 731 and other groups but they came up with the ways to deliver them onto civilian populations in China which worked they also tried to build things like remote-controlled tanks and the electrical death ray which did not work would have been cool if it had though yeah way cooler if the second thing succeeded than the first yeah I like I was like yet another terrible thing

to happen to the civilian population in China during World War Two. Like it's like I cannot overstate that no matter how bad you think what happened to China during World War Two was, it was infinitely worse. Yeah. Yeah. Your worst possible conception of what happened to China during World War II is still orders of magnitude less than the reality of it. Like I read a I read a recent book about it and I was like, I think it's called Forgotten Ally. Good book recommend. But yeah, you're just like, oh, that's the every single page. There's just new atrocities

and horrible things. And even if you're desensitized after having read a lot about the Eastern Front, it's still pretty shockingly bad. Yeah, we did a series on Nanking a few years back and people like, wow, it couldn't possibly get worse than this. It's like turn to the next page. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing that could have made it worse is give them Gauss cannons.

Yeah. Yeah. But the only thing that could have made it worse is give them Gauss cannons. Yeah, yeah. Coming up with a weapon to hit the US fell to a man named General Rikichi Tada, who already had a bit of a history working on balloon based weapons dating back to 1933. When he tried to develop one for tactical usage on the battlefield before it got shelved for being kind of dumb. Okay, I had to look up what exactly this plan was. Oh yeah, I'm rubbin' my hands together now.

What if you deployed paratroopers from a balloon? Oh hell yeah. Now, I know what you're probably thinking, that seems like a really good way to kill a lot of paratroopers, and I say, that's just called being a paratrooper? Like, you're, like, I say this is someone who originally enlisted as a tank crewman look we enlisted in jobs or we die there's no don't don't don't try to lower your your casualty count you're getting rid of the spree decor of your

job. Yeah you just in both roles where you just get anything below your knees just atomized in a second's notice. Yeah, that's the fastest way you like someone looked at infantry and decided, how can we kill them faster? And like, what if we threw them out of a plane? Yeah, that is one of those things where you look back at it. I think this is true for anybody who does any anytime you're talking about the first time somebody does something that we take for granted, but that is objectively insane. Like the first guy to get on a horse like that guy's buddies were like, what is your had to be drunk as shit?

Yeah. What is your like, what is your fucking plan here, man? Like what is the best case scenario for you jumping on the back of this animal? The same thing with the first guy to jump out of an airplane voluntarily. Like that's a perfectly good airplane. Airplane's not on fire. fire you're not getting shot down you're not even getting shot at you're just gonna jump out of the airplane are you fucking high yeah but Patrick you know full well he was busting the whole way down oh yeah yeah yeah yeah shoot ropes like spider-man as he flew through the air and who can blame it but for sure

I went to airborne school it's awesome he was just doing sounding with the ripcord. He's Like a party pop roll the comb just shoots out It's kind of like the guy who tried to jump from the the Eiffel Tower just word like a really big jacket Yeah What amounted to be a really big jacket like it looks like something that like the crow would wear and he fucking died on video. But it I bet it felt fucking amazing while he was on the way down. Yeah. For like a split second and right before he hit the ground he was worth it.

Smack. You know, not that I not that I've thought about various ways to go all that much, but there are worse. There are worse ways to do it than that. Like, yeah, I mean, he had a sick jacket. That's more than I can say right now. Look at me. Jacketless. He had a he had a sick jacket and and he died just like hard enough to cut diamonds.

And that's he made like history's first snuff film because it's on video. Yeah, everybody will remember you killing yourself like an idiot. It's just like they they clean up the fucking like mess left by you so hard coming down that there's actually like a cylindrical indentation in the concrete. Respect. Yeah. I do. OK. Look, that's what could be more French than leaving behind an imprint of an erection we should do if he hit his mistress on the way down. That's true. That would be more French. That's a French version of, you know, like the the stars on in Hollywood where

the hand prints is like you have to jump off the Eiffel Tower and leave your dick cylinder in the concrete. Yeah, that's oh man. That's that is, that's how you memorialize yourself as a true French lover. Yeah. Oh God. Now, as far as balloons went, you can imagine how they kind of went on the back shelf as a weapon. Even as a spying or a scouting tool,

fixed-wing aircraft became favored over balloons. Of course, ironically, the US military re-employed balloons during the global war on terror. I saw them. It was very funny. But when given the task of developing a weapon that could sow terror and maybe even cause real damage on the American west, it was decided that balloons might be the way to go. They were very cheap, very easily made, and required really no skill for the balloon part

of it. Of course, there's going to be controls and ballast and whatnot that will require skill, but the balloons themselves, simple. Nobody has to be inside the balloon. Nobody's gonna kamikaze this shit, which would be funny. So, you know, it seems like a win-win. It's cheap, you're not sacrificing anybody. No one's really at risk.

Japanese scientists working in the lab also had this small thing called the jet stream to work with, which was a very recent discovery back then. It discovered in 1924 by a Japanese meteorologist named Wasaburo Oishi. He saw that weather balloons, once they reach a certain altitude, would be swept west over the Pacific towards North America. He wrote an entire paper on it, publishing it in Japanese and so more people could understand it and that famously widely spoken language Esperanto. Yes, yes, yes! Because for people who are unaware, kind of like me, I had to look this up, Esperanto was invented to be a global second language that never took off

Yeah, so he wrote it in a language that of course back then not many people are learning Exotic languages badly through Duolingo or whatever So he published it in a language that only Japanese scientists are going to read and then a language that nobody is going to read I like so it's in like fucking Phoenician or Thracian or something like that. More people more people would have been able to read it if it had been in Phoenician. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent guarantee that because at least. Publish this on a stone tablet in UART. This is this is how I know I've been playing tabletop role playing games

for for a long time is that in one that I used to play Esperanto was like a listed skill that you could take. That's how fucking long I've been doing that. It's the only language skill that kills you immediately. Yeah. It was in a game called ninjas and super spies, which actually it actually was pretty fucking cool. I mean, like to be fair, there was a very, and this is very much in my wheelhouse now, there was a distinct sect of Czech Marxists in the like 1970s who like part of their whole, their brand of like Maoism was, we are going

to make Esperanto the universal language. And they like refused to speak Czech. I have so many questions, but I can't ask any of them. I'll just say the thing that we're all thinking, you know, it's smoke crazy in there. So he published it in two languages that nobody outside his immediate scientific circle would read or understand, which meant he discovered the jet stream and then effectively accidentally kept it a secret

from the world. So the Japanese were the only ones that kind of had a firm grip on what it could do. And most importantly, guess who read it? The Japanese military. So with the jet stream as a delivery method, they still had to come up with a balloon that could make the trip over, which was not easy. The balloon would have to carry an explosive, sure, but it would have to be self-correcting for altitude and wind at least to some degree So it might be able to ride the jet stream to the US or somewhere in that general direction Even the construction of the balloon itself would need to be decided upon because war was going on everything is being rationed

So much so that the Japanese government were like every time they put forward an idea of how to build a balloon They're like nope. they put forward an idea of how to build a balloon. They're like, nope. Nope Can't use that we're rationing that because remember also the whole point of this bloot is like you have to build it out of shit Nobody else wants You're looking around here. Like you we have like we have to build warships We have to make all these shorter swords so our soldiers can cut their guts out if they get caught Do you think we have balloon money here? We spent all of our tactical balloon money on a group of clowns,

and they all died on Iwo Jima. Like, if we build these balloons, we have to take so much money from the national sex doll manufacturing sector. Like, do you think we're gonna do that? This is Japan. The Strategic Body Pillow Reserve? sector, like, do you think we're going to do that? This is Japan. The strategic body pillow reserve. You're just, oh my God, you're in the Pacific Northwest and you just see this balloon on

fire coming down and it just has Asuka on the side of it. Look man, that's so fucked up. That wouldn't be the weirdest thing you see in the Pacific Northwest. That would not even close. I've seen far stranger things like recently in recent months, not even in the midst of a girl of a global conflict. Yeah. Yeah. See in the next global world war three or whatever, instead of like, well, the Evangelion

like thermal balloon is probably going to be likely as well, but it's also just going to be like a member of BTS before it explodes on you and kills you. The idea that the US government has not yet built an Evangelion is still astounding to me because the military has a surplus of depressed teenagers and with the like massive budget that the DOD has, we should have at least invented a really shitty Ava, maybe one that has like three legs, walks all fucked up. Like, I don't know. Something like the disabled cousin of the Boston Dynamics robot, but bigger.

I think that's just the Boston Dynamics robot. Yeah, that's true. I heard it as soon as I said it. It's just the Boston Dynamics robot is just like, what if a dog was really fucked up? Let's see. This is the thing is that I built you up a particularly fucked up robot. America does not have distinct international cultural exports enough that are ubiquitous enough to put on a thermal balloon. Japan has anime. Korea has BTS.

What does America have? A 350 pound dude from Iowa who dips everything in ranch. That's what we have. That's America. I know which one of those is going to win too.