'Triple Nickel' paratroopers subject of museum lecture

MOSES LAKE — The story of a top-secret operation in the closing days of World War II, featuring an elite – and all-black – paratrooper unit will be the subject of a lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Civic Center Auditorium.

“The Triple Nickel: Black Paratroopers in Washington State During World War II” tells the story of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion and its involvement in Operation Firefly. Robert Bartlett, professor with the Department of Sociology and Justice Studies at Eastern Washington University, is the speaker.

The lecture is sponsored by the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center. Admission is free.

Operation Firefly was the country’s top-secret response to an undercover attack by Japan as U.S. forces fought their way toward the Japanese home islands in late 1944 and early 1945. The Japanese armed forces built balloons from which they suspended incendiary devices and bombs and released them to the prevailing winds.

The balloons were supposed to drop the incendiary devices over the forests of the American and Canadian West and start fires. One of the bombs did kill five Oregon residents who found it while on a church picnic. But for a number of reasons – including the efforts of the paratroopers assigned to Operation Firefly – the forest fire campaign was a failure.

The 555th was a highly trained paratrooper unit that didn’t make it overseas in the segregated armed forces of World War II, Bartlett said. Members of the 555th did serve during the Korean War, he said. They were assigned to Operation Firefly in May 1945.

Smoke-jumping was still something very new in 1945, first proposed in the mid-1930s and the subject of experiments in the Methow Valley in 1939. The first time smoke-jumpers were actually used to fight fires was 1940, in Idaho.

“Smoke-jumping was mostly perfected by 1945 when the 555th was cross-trained by members of the Forest Service to jump and fight forest fires,” Bartlett wrote. The unit was among the first responders on 36 forest fires, he said, including the 1945 Mt. Baker fire. One member of the unit was killed while fighting fires.

“I have a few firefighting stories to tell and lots of smoke-jumper gear for display,” Bartlett said. He is a Vietnam veteran and the son of an Army Air Forces World War II veteran.