I am watching a documentary on TV called Bomb Harvest about Aussie ordinance disposal guys who are training people to disarm bombs in Laos. They mentioned figures for the number of bombs but they seemed ridiculous - no one was at war in Laos.
However it all turned out to be true:
*In Laos, unexploded bombs left over from the Vietnam war are being scavenged to sell as scrap metal.
During the nine years of the Vietnam War the US dropped more cluster bombs on neighbouring Laos than it did world wide during the whole of World War Two. It is estimated that the bombing in Laos equated to a B52 load of cluster bombs dropped every 8 minutes for 9 years, this totals to 260 million bombs being dropped between 1964 and 1973.
Since the 1990s an official clearance operation has been in place but they say that more than 80 million unexploded ordnance (UXO) or cluster bombs still litter the countryside. *
Japanese bombs from WWII have been found in the Pacific Northwest. They were carried there by cleverly constructed balloons and were supposed to start forest fires.
A Japanese sub shelled a US west coast city. Not sure which one. Read it in a book called “I-boat captain”.
On 23 February 1942, the Japanese submarine I-17 shelled the Ellwood Oil Field near Santa Barbara, CA. They only did minor damage to a couple of structures (they missed the oil tanks, and one shell literally missed by a mile), but the hysteria resulted in ‘The Battle of Los Angeles’, in which anti-aircraft artillery was shot into the air for about half an hour. This is the incident underlying Steven Spielberg’s 1941.
In a similar vein, the fax machine was invented in 1843, well before the telephone.
Another military example is the B-52 bomber. It was conceived in the 1940’s, designed in the 1950’s and the current fleet was built in the early 1960’s. Those planes aren’t scheduled to be retired until past 2040 when the planes themselves are about 80 years old and could have been flown by the grandfathers of that generation of pilots. It is still very much in active service as the U.S. primary long-range strategic (nuclear capable) bomber. It can stay in the air for days at a time with in-flight refueling and its missions often originate within the U.S. to a foreign target like Iraq and back again in a single round-trip flight. The B-52 survived several attempts at replacement when no one could figure out to make something that did the job better, more reliably, and as cheaply so the military basically gave up trying for very hard a long-time.
Why unbelievable?
The war in Laos went on for twice as long.
And the US government had decided that the public was unwilling to accept soldier casualties, so they tried to win it with aerial bombing instead of infantry.
