There were more than 400,000 American casualties during World War II, and believe it or not, six of them actually occurred on continental U.S. soil.
During the war, the Japanese developed a rather unorthodox plan to attack American civilians right on their home turf. Taking advantage of the easterly winds, the Japanese created “fire-balloon bombs” that would drift across the Pacific, carried by hydrogen power, and explode over the western United States.
On May 5, 1945, three and a half years after Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, and three months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, one of these Japanese balloon bombs actually did explode in rural Oregon, killing six people.
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