Nine-year-old Lawrence “Buzz” Bailey and two neighbor kids ran excitedly toward a large balloon floating to earth on farmland in North Dorr, a rural community in Allegan County south of Grand Rapids. It was Feb. 23, 1945, and they didn’t realize they were discovering the remnants of a Japanese attack on the U.S.
Bailey went on to serve in the U.S. Army in Germany in the early 1950s. "I tell the guys in the VFW post I'm a part of that I was in the Second World War at age 9," says Bailey, now 84 and living in Newaygo. "I was a balloon expert."
November marks the 75th anniversary of the start of an unusual, mostly unknown chapter of World War II — Operation Fu-Go, the Japanese launching of more than 9,300 large, bomb-laden, hydrogen balloons, carried east across the Pacific Ocean by the jet stream at high altitudes to cause destruction and chaos in the U.S. and Canada.
