James Clare Lamph, Bountiful, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, March 4 & 9, 2004: Saving the Legacy tape no. 646

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J M L REL MPH R 4 9 2 04 BEC: That would have made sense. JIM: To me it made sense. So, that was basically what happened at Portland. It wa nothing different, just the regular routine. Then one day, they told us we were going to ship out again. I thought, "Here we go to the Pacific.' We'd heard about it. I might comment that the Japanese are pretty smart. I don't know if I should tell this story, but I will. It was during the time that I was in Portland there was a tremendous number of forest fires up in the Pacific Northwest. The air was smoky quite a bit of the time, one time, especially. The whole country was afire. You never read about it in the newspaper, never heard about the fires on the radio. Publicly, they never talked about the fires. The reason was all the public communications had been ordered by the government to not say anything. What the Japanese had done was they had sent a flight of helium-filled balloons with thermite bombs attached to them. Thousands of helium balloons with a small thermite bomb attached to the balloon. They had launched them in mass, by the thousands, on the trade winds. The trade winds blow from west to east. They launched all these balloons with thermite bombs attached to them, and they had landed in the Pacific Northwest and set fires everywhere. There was so many fires that they couldn't control it, because there was fires everywhere. The Japanese had succeeded in dropping these little bombs by the helium filled balloons that they launched from Japan. They flew clear across the Pacific on the winds and landed all over that Northwest Territory and set fires. The reason for the secrecy was that if the Japanese had heard that they were a success they would have really launched a full assault, because they knew fire would 21