Editor’s note: Brendan Riley’s Solano Chronicles appears in every other Sunday’s print edition of the Times-Herald.

Concrete bomb shelters on the Navy’s former Mare Island shipyard provide rock-solid evidence of rampant fears early in World War II that carrier-based enemy planes might reach the West Coast and target the important military base. But only old news accounts and photos remain to tell the story of huge barrage balloons floating above Mare Island and nearby Vallejo as part of wartime national defense efforts.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, made air defense a top priority and the Mare Island-Vallejo area just north of San Francisco was soon “bristling with anti-aircraft batteries” and “a herd of barrage balloons was tethered above the island, their purpose

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