Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some time early last month a balloon floated silently in across Cape Flattery on Washington's rainswept northern coast. The balloon, made of shellacked, parchment-like paper and bearing the rising sun of Japan, was a sizable object (33½ ft. in diameter) but nobody saw it, apparently. Eventually a 70-ft. fuse, connected to a small incendiary bomb on the inflammable paper bag, sputtered-and went out. The balloon drifted on across the Northwest...
Quaint as it appeared, the balloon was a practical and efficient affair. Inflated with hydrogen, it was capable of lifting 800 lbs. The FBI discovered that the Japanese had obligingly printed a good deal of information on the bag. It had been completed only a few weeks before, on Oct. 31, at a Japanese factory. Japanese characters also revealed the number of hours spent in its manufacture, data regarding work shifts...
Like the small seaplane which dropped an incendiary bomb and started a forest fire in Oregon during 1942, the balloon had presumably been launched from an offshore submarine. But why? If it had carried men, where had they parachuted to earth? Since the balloon was designed to destroy itself in the air, had other earlier balloons sailed in across the Northwest undetected...
Under the new regime some first rate drilling is being done over in the cage. This structure feels as though it would swell up balloon fashion any minute in these Charles River breezes. Battalion Commander Dave Schieder assured us privately that the structure is insured--as for us, well, we've stood through those industrial management classes...
...since the blitz had London taken so savage a beating. At dawn, at dusk, in fog, sunlight and darkness the robombs roared across the Channel, streaked through ack-ack and balloon cable defenses, pounded more of the city into debris...