By John William Tuohy
On Saturday, May 5, 1945, an Imperial Japanese Fu Go balloon, or fire balloon exploded in a forest near Bly, Oregon. The explosion killed, Edward Engen, age 13, Jay Gifford, age 13, Joan Patzke, age 13, Dick Patzke, age 14, Sherman Shoemaker, age 11 and Elsie Mitchell, age 26, and pregnant. They were the first and only known American civilians to be killed by enemy action in the Continental United States during World War II.
May 5 was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, there was a pleasant wind blowing when the Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife Elsie, 5 months pregnant, loaded the five children from Elsie Mitchell’s Sunday School class and took off for a drive through a rolling mountainous road on their way to a picnic near Klamath Falls.
After a few miles, they came to an impassable section of road being worked on by a construction crew. Elsie told the children to get out of the crowded car and stretch their legs while her husband turned the car around. Elsie and the kids strolled a few hundred yards into the wood and Elsie called out to Archie to come and see what they had found.
A grader operator named Richard Barnhouse, could see the children formed in a semi-circle but couldn’t see what they were looking at. Elsie Mitchell called out two more times to Mitchell who said, ‘Wait a minute, and I’ll come and look at it.'
“As I got out of my car to bring the lunch” Pastor Mitchell recalled “the others were not far away and called to me they had found something that looked like a balloon. I had heard of Japanese balloons, so I shouted a warning not to touch it.”
There was a second or two of silence and then an enormous explosion shook the ground. Richard Barnhouse leaped from his grader and joined Reverend Mitchell in a race to the place where the children had been. They found four of the children already dead, their small bodies badly mangled. They watch the fifth child die and Elsie Mitchell, who was on fire, died a few minutes later.
What the kids had found, what they were holding when it exploded was a Fu Gu bomb. The Fu Go balloons were huge, about 33 feet in diameter, and required 19,000 cubic feet of helium and the Imperial Japanese Air Force had launched more than 9,000 balloons at the United States, carried there by the strong Pacific winds. The balloons were churned out in assembly-line fashion at Japanese defense plants
Although 9,000 of the floating bombs were sent our way, only several hundred are known to have landed on the U.S. mainland but did virtually no harm until the balloon in the Oregon forest killed those five children and the expectant woman.
What the Japanese had hoped to accomplish with the bombs was mass forest fire but what the Japanese had considered was that when they sent the balloons, during the high wind month of November, by the time the balloons made it to the west coast of the United States the rainy season had set in and heavy rains soaked the rice paper balloons and light firing mechanism.
At first, the public, caught in a news blackout, assumed the balloons were being sent from the within the US but after murder of the six civilians, the White House lifted the censorship currant and informed Americans, for their own good, on what the bombs were, who was sending them and what to do should they come across one.
Twenty years passed and in May of 1962, Pastor Mitchell and his new wife, Betty (née Patzke, the older sister of two of the children killed by the fire balloon in Bly) and their four children, were working as missionaries in Da Lat, Viet Nam, a city northeast of Saigon. He had arrived there in 1950, to work at a place called the Leprosarium, a hospital that housed and cared for a leper community.
At dusk on Wednesday, 30 May 1962, a group of 12 armed Viet Cong guerrillas strutted into the Leprosarium compound. They were after medical supplies and personnel. The Viet Cong knew that a medical seminar had recently been conducted at the leprosarium. They needed doctors and assumed doctors would be there.
The Cong split up into three groups of four members each. One group went to the Mitchell home, ordered Archie out of the house, tied him up, and led him away with Dan Gerber, Gerber, a Mennonite farmer from Ohio who oversaw the Lepers farm, while Mitchell’s wife and children looked on in horror.
"They cut ropes from the kids' swings and tied Archie," his wife said.
Another group of Cong went to the home of Houston physician Ardel Vietti, found her in bed, ordered to get up and dress, and then she was led out of the compound, at bayonet point, unbound, to join Pastor Mitchell and Dan Gerber.
The guerillas ransacked the buildings for any supplies they could use, including linens, medicines, clothing, and surgical equipment. At around 10:00 p.m. two hours after they arrived the Cong left with their prisoners, Pastor Mitchell, Dan Gerber, and Dr. Vietti
Dawn Deets, one of the four missionary nurses, watched as the three disappeared into the darkness. "I felt so badly for Dr. Vietti. I remember seeing her being walked away. She had trouble walking. That night we waited and prayed that they might come back."
Pastor Mitchell and Dan Gerber were probably taken because the Viet Cong assume they were. At least that’s one line of thinking. An expert in the case said "The Viet Cong usually did what they said they were going to do. When the communists came in, they took the three people they thought to be in charge of the leprosarium. I have always said they killed them that night, but other missionaries don't want to hear that."
The assumption was that the Viet Cong believed that the missionaries were spies because just before the raid, there had been a firefight between the communists and the South Vietnamese military. A villager came to the leprosarium and sought out the doctor, pleading with her to come and treat someone who had been wounded. Dr. Vietti went and brought the wounded Viet Cong back to the leprosarium, where she performed surgery to remove a bullet. He was still at the hospital when two U.S. military advisers dropped by the leprosarium a few days later, none of this was lost on the Viet Cong who had leprosarium under watch.
Dan Gerber
Right after Viet Cong left the compound, the remaining missionaries notified authorities in Ban Me Thuot and that same night South Vietnamese marines and U.S. military advisers began a search. They caught up with the kidnappers but by then their ranks had been heavily reinforced and an assault on the force would have been bloody and fruitless.
Missionary officials also attempted to negotiate for the release of the captives but to no avail. In 1975, Pastor Mitchell’s wife was also kidnapped along with several other Americans in Ban Me Thuot. The captives were moved to several prison camps before ending up in a Hanoi prison. She was released several months later. One of her captors assured her, "If I ever hear anything about your husband, I will let you know." She adds, "Of course, he never has."
As the war dragged on, reports drifted in from Montagnard tribesmen and other Vietnamese about two white men and a white woman seen around Viet Cong mobile prison camps. In 1967 one report had a white woman asking for a Bible as she was marched past a village. Another report reached the US military in 1968 about the threesome being alive and working a Viet Cong hospital. In 1970, a group of Montagnard reported seeing the three American captives near the Cambodian border.
Victor Vietti, Ardel Vietti's brother said "The Viet Cong have never to this day admitted that they took her. But somebody knows what happened, and someday they are going to return”
None of the three have been seen since. Theirs is the oldest unresolved POW case in Vietnam.
