The family and BFF family went to the fish fry at a VFW hall. Adorning the walls were WW2 era propaganda posters and ads, including this ad for Packard cars. The headline was “Through the London blitz and robot bombing and always on the job”. My first thought was of WW2 steampunk mecha like this. However, this didn’t appear to be the case…

The poster didn’t have anything that looked like a robot. (click small pic for detail) With a little research (i.e. google.com), I found out about the real robot bombing in WW2.

Turns out that “Robot bomb” was the term for the V1 bomb that used “autopilot”. Sort of like an early cruise missile. It was also use to describe balloons of explosives that the Japanese sent over the the US west coast. (And was kept a secret by the US goverment and the press.) From Chapter IV of “Guarding The United States And Its Outposts“, published by the US Army:

The Japanese launched the balloons from the Sendai area of northern Honshu Island. The bags of the balloons were 331/2 feet in diameter and lifted various mechanisms and a load of from 25 to 65 pounds of incendiary and antipersonnel bombs. The balloons were carried across the north Pacific by high air currents in as little as four days. About 9,300 were launched, and some drifted as far east as Michigan and south into Mexico. Many landed in Alaska and Canada, and a few in Hawaii. They did almost no damage, and there is no proven instance of a balloon igniting a forest fire. The only casualties traceable to them occurred at Bly, Ore., on 5 May 1945, when a woman and five children on a Sunday School picnic were killed when they tried to take a bomb apart. The press co-operated in keeping balloon sightings and recoveries a secret, and the lack of news about them may have helped persuade the Japanese to discontinue the operation in the spring of 1945.