It doesn't seem right; sending young girls off to war. Most civilizations just wouldn't do that, but the Japanese did. How and why the Japanese nation took this unusual step is the reason for this story: the story of Tanaka Tetsuko and the others of Yamaguchi Girl's High School.

"It was my sixteenth birthday, we marched off in formation, one hundred and fifty of us. Only those who were physically too weak were left behind. We were in high spirits. But we were still children, and some thought this was like a school trip. We all wore headbands with the characters "Student Special Attack Force" on them. I thought I might not be coming back, so before I left I wrapped a lock of my hair and clippings from my nails in paper and, together with my last will and testament, left them pressed in a book at home."

The girls shown at right are what the girls in this story may have looked like had they been born so many years earlier. They were the same age as the girls in this story.

Tanaka's story begins in 1944 when an army officer from the military arsenal at Kokura came to the Yamaguchi Girl's High school as well as the Nakamura Girl's School and told the students that they could participate in the making of a "secret weapon" and that this weapon would have a great impact on the war. The officer did not say just what the girls would be doing but that somehow what they made would be able to fly to America. This gave the girls a great sense of mission.

As the young girls marched off, some girls of the troop may have thought their time in service would be like going on a picnic, this was not to be the case. For Tanaka, her dream of becoming a ballerina would have to wait as would the dreams of all of the girls of Yamaguchi High. The principal of the school had resisted the army's order to move the girls to the military arsenal since it would be a likely target for Allied air attacks. But the girls petitioned the principal to "Please let us go and serve the nation." The girls finally got their wish.

"That night we moved into our dormitory. There was no heat. To keep us warm, we had only the blanket we had been told to bring. The arsenal provided nothing but blue cotton sleeping mats. The first morning we awoke to the strains of the "Cuckoo Waltz." At four thirty! We ate breakfast and left for work at five. From the dorm to the factory took fifty minutes on foot. We formed four lines and marched there wearing our headbands and singing military songs..... Each of us had one of those cloth air raid helmets, and an emergency bag strapped across our chest like so many warriors. We didn't wear anything white, because that could have made us targets.

When we arrived in front of the factory we had morning assembly. A young military officer, a graduate of the military academy, maybe a captain, gave a speech of admonishment, something like, 'You will be defeating America with these arms. Work to your utmost. Achieve your quota!' Then we all recited aloud the Imperial Precepts for Soldiers and Sailors. All I can remember now is 'soldiers and sailors should consider loyalty their essential duty,' but I used to know them all."

The girls had originally started their assignment at their high school utilizing the schools two basketball courts. The girls placed pieces of cloth like paper onto large flat boards and then brushed on many coats of a rubberized paste and the left these to dry. Then these now airtight pieces were glued together to form huge pieces of material strong enough to be used to assemble a large balloon. To meet the objective of launching some 9300 of these balloons, larger facilities were needed. For this reason the girls were sent to the military arsenal.

Here they would be making and assembling the balloons that were designed to carry bombs across the Pacific to drop them on America. The balloons carried one antipersonnel and two incendiary bombs suspended underneath. Also suspended was an assembly that measured the altitude of the balloon so that the hydrogen gas that lifted the balloon could be vented if the balloon rose too high or sand could be released if the balloon dropped to low. The decision to make these balloons was conceived and developed after the first American air raid on Japanese cities led by Jimmy Doolittle in April of 1942.

When we arrived I was shocked at the size of the factory. Everywhere, metal drying boards were revolving on steam-blasting machines that dried them. The noise was deafening. We were taken to the place where the balloons were actually assembled and tested. There stood an enormous balloon, perhaps ten meters in diameter. When we saw this we were thrilled. This is what we had been making! It fired our determination.

At six o'clock, we relieved the shift that had been on duty through the night. These were the girls from the Nakamura School. The floor was muddy with the extra paste that always streamed off the drying boards. From above, steam, condensed into water droplets, fell on us. Each person was in charge of two drying boards. The paper dried very quickly, so you shuttled back and forth between them like a crab. If it got too dry then it would crack and fail the quality test. That was unforgivable, so we ran barefoot across the pasty floor. When we couldn't complete our quota we had to stay longer. I don't recall how many we had to do, but I do remember running and running and then just meeting my target. Gradually, the weaker girls fell behind.

I can't recall ever eating lunch. One very meticulous person kept a diary. According to her diary, we were so hungry that we ate our lunch at the same time we ate breakfast, since that was so spare. We worked twelve hours straight -- no breaks except to go to the toilet, which was outside the factory building. It was filthy. There was no electricity, even at night, and no lights because of the blackout. Most of us tried not to go there if possible.

When we returned to our dorm we gulped down our food, little as it was, and then rushed to take our bath, because it was bitter cold. The steam warmed the factory, but outside it was freezing. Besides, you marched back to the dorm in damp clothes, gusts of wind tearing at you.... There were ten people in my group. I don't even remember who they were. I can only remember the girl next to me. That's how exhausted we were. We had sweet potatoes that were sometimes old and had turned black and smelled strange mixed with rice. You got one rice bowl full of that and one cup of miso soup, nothing added. No vegetables, nothing. It wasn't enough food to sustain us at the work we had to do.

We changed shifts on Sunday. All day on Sunday we slept like corpses. It was washday, too. Our monpe (clothes) were rigid with paste. The laundry had a roof but no walls. It was completely exposed, bitter cold, and the water was cold, too. Sometimes our families came to visit, but left having seen only our sleeping faces. We did our best. Our spirit was in it, but whenever we got messages or packages from home, we always broke down. In the beginning, we shared things which came from the families, but gradually, even when you thought you ought to share, you just couldn't.

When the war ended, we felt that what we had done, all that effort, everything we had suffered, had been in vain. I was overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness. I didn't really want to think about the days we spent there. There wasn't anything good to remember. We only learned some forty years later that the balloon bombs we made had actually reached America. They started a few forest fires and inflicted some casualties, among them children. Five children and a woman killed on a picnic in Oregon in May,1945 when a bomb dropped earlier exploded. When I heard that, I was stunned. I made those weapons. Until then, I had felt only that our youth had been stolen from us, and that I'd missed my chance to study. I thought we were victims of the war.

The ordeal these girls faced on a daily basis at the military arsenal was as severe as that which many servicemen faced during the war. Fortunately for girls, the Allies did not locate the military arsenal so there were no bombings and therefore no casualties. Had they been bombed, all indications are that the girls of Yamaguchi High would have endured and would have measured up to the kind of service that men gave the world over.

Japanese bomb-carrying balloons were 32 feet in diameter and when fully inflated, held about 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. Launch sites were located on the east coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu. From the late fall of 1944 through the early spring of 1945, the Japanese launched more than 9,000 of these "fusen bakudan", or fire balloons, of which 300 were found or observed in the US. Some guesswork gives the total number that made the trip at about 1,000. Despite the high hopes of their designers, the balloons were totally ineffective as weapons, and survive in memory only as an ingenious and malevolent curiosity.

Japan released the first of more than 9,000 bomb-bearing balloons Nov. 3, 1944. It's estimated that nearly 1,000 reached North America. They were found in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Michigan and Iowa, as well as Mexico and Canada. The last one was launched in April 1945. The last one found in North American was in Alaska in 1955 - its payload still lethal after 10 years of erosion.

The bombs actually caused little damage, but their potential for destruction and fires was awesome, not to mention their psychological effect on the American people. U.S. strategy was to not let Japan know of the balloon bombs' effectiveness. Cooperating for national security reasons, the press showed great restraint in not publishing balloon bomb incidents. As a result, the Japanese only learned of one bomb reaching Wyoming, landing and failing to explode, so they stopped the launches after less than six months.

Article text is from Wikipedia and licensed under terms of GFDL. The original article can be found here.