Jul 14, 2017
Two stories dating back nearly 70 years ago, when something happened that nobody seems to ever talk about it. This is an episode of mysterious balloons, cowboy sheriffs, and nazi prisoners of war living right next door.
JAD: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab and today we’re going to travel back in time to World War II which is a war that has been chronicled and re-chronicled and re-imagined and told a thousand thousand thousand million times. But we actually have two stories for you today that took place during that war, right here on American soil, that were utterly surprising to us, that I’m betting you have never heard. And we’re going to call today’s show, the War on Our Shore. And to start--
PETER: My name is Peter Lang-Stanton.
NICK: My name’s Nick Ferraga
ROBERT: Well, it--we’re gonna get a story from two reporters
PETER: I’m a freelance filmmaker
NICK: Freelance reporter
PETER: Writer slash radio producer, too many slashes
ROBERT: Should we start with, with air currents, or like with--
PETER: I mean I want to start with--can we go to Thermopolis, Wyoming? Because that was one of the first really well-documented landings.
ROBERT: All right. Thermopolis, Wyoming?
RC: Well it’s the first week of December, 1944
MUSIC IN
JAD: This is Ross Cohen, he’s a historian and he wrote a book that’s pretty much the definitive account of the story you’re about to hear. Anyhow, Thermopolis, Wyoming, December 1944
ROSS COHEN: And there are three miners at a place called the Highline Coal Mine, which is outside of Thermopolis. They step outside the mine one evening. It’s just about dusk. And just as they step out of the mine they hear this whistling sound over their heads. And then a moment later there’s [SFX] a tremendous explosion and they see this rising cloud of dust about a mile away across the valley. They turn and look. It’s dusk, and so in the fading twilight they can’t be sure exactly what they’re looking at
NICK: But above them there’s sort of this fluttering, white circle
PETER: Just floating there. They made sense of it by thinking it was a parachutist
ROSS COHEN: They get in their car and they chase after it until eventually they lose sight of it in the
darkness.
NICK: Right around that same time, about 500 miles away in Colorado,
PETER: A boy and his dad are working in the barn when [SFX] they hear an explosion. They run outside and in their yard there’s just this smoldering crater.
ROSS COHEN: In Wyoming a nine year old boy playing in his front yard hears an explosion
NICK: All throughout the winter of 1944
ROSS COHEN: In Burwell, Nebraska
NICK: These strange parachute things
ROSS COHEN: Native residents hear a loud explosion
NICK: Just start appearing in the skies all over America
PETER: Napa, California
NICK: Lame Deer, Montana
PETER: 20 or so miles from downtown Detroit
NICK: Over farms
PETER: Nogales, Arizona
NICK: And slipping behind hills
PETER: Rigby, Idaho.
ROSS COHEN: Everybody who sees these things, all of them have different explanations for what they think they’re witnessing
NICK: The US military sends out an APB to local police stations saying we need information. What are these things?
XX: Try again
MARION HYDE: Testing, testing
XX: A there we go--
MARION HYDE: OK, whoo [RINGING]
NICK: Enter Sheriff
PETER: Warren Hyde
MARION HYDE: My name is Marion Hyde
NICK: Warren Hyde actually died in 1989, so
MARION HYDE: I’m the oldest son of Sheriff Hyde
NICK: We talked to his son
MARION HYDE: He had a presence about him that he kind of commanded a room
PETER: Sheriff Hyde was a big guy
MARION HYDE: Black wavy hair, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the hips
NICK: Stetson, gun on his hip
PETER: And one day
MARION HYDE: From what I understand, a dry farmer called him
PETER: Said there’s this strange contraption in my field
NICK: Some kind of balloon, parachute looking thing floating around
MARION HYDE: So he jumped in the car and went hell bent for leather out in the Blue Creek area
PETER: There’s this crazy story where he rushes out to this farm
NICK: To investigate
PETER: Hops out of his car
NICK: Rips off his belt with his .38 pistol, because a man can’t run with a .38 pistol on his waist
MARION HYDE: And took off after the balloon
PETER: Here’s what he sees in that field. It was-I mean if you look at a picture of this thing, it’s this huge globe. 30 feet in diameter
ROBERT: Oh wow
PETER: Paper white.
NICK: And then coming down from this globe are these thick, 40 foot ropes and at the bottom, attached to it is a heavy metal chandelier with bombs hanging off the bottom. And Sheriff Hyde, he sees this thing, runs out into the field, grabs onto the ropes to maybe tie it down, but just as he grabs it
MARION HYDE: A gust of wind comes by
PETER: Lifts him up off the ground
MARION HYDE: Like he was a paper doll
NICK: And so he’s dangling from the ropes of this thing, the balloon is above him, the explosives are below him and it takes him across this canyon, and he’s holding on just dangling from it, still trying to wrangle it like some bucking bronco. He lands again. He tries to tie it to a juniper bush or something but the wind catches it again and goes back over the canyon
ROBERT: Back over the first side?
NICK: Back to the first side
MARION HYDE: And they started to float around the field. He kept wrestling this balloon for a long time
NICK: He’s nauseous from being spun around on this balloon
PETER: His vision is getting blurry
NICK: His hands are becoming raw from the rope
PETER: But he feels like this sense of duty
MARION HYDE: He knew that the government wanted one of these balloons
PETER: It’s his territory so he’s got to take it down
MARION HYDE: That’s right
PETER: He finally
NICK: Lets himself freefall
PETER: So he can grab it again
NICK: So his weight will jerk the balloon to the ground
ROBERT: Wow
MARION HYDE: Then finally the balloon came down in kind of a little ravine where sagebrush were growing and a root had been exposed on the side of the ravine from a sagebrush
NICK: And he hooks his arm around this root
MARION HYDE: Then he was able to hold the balloon without being carried into the air
JAD: So he actually captured the thing?
NICK: yeah
PETER: J. Edgar Hoover wrote him a personal letter of thanks
ROSS COHEN: They end up shipping all off the evidence off to the Aberdeen military research facility
NICK: Where they had gathered all this different evidence from all over the country. And they were able to tell that
ROSS COHEN: Apparently this bomb matched known characteristics of Japanese bombs.
JAD: So it’s Japanese
ROSS COHEN: Yeah
NICK: But, it’s impossible to send a balloon across the Pacific Ocean at this point. I mean it’s never, never been done. It’s basically an intercontinental ballistic missile. So they’re trying to figure out where it’s coming from. They thought maybe they were being launched from submarines, maybe they were coming from beaches in North America, from saboteurs
PETER: There was even speculation at one point that maybe they were coming from Japanese internment camps in North America
ROBERT: Ah
PETER: Then
ROSS COHEN: Two days before Christmas, 1944
NICK: In Alaska, a native Alaskan trapper tracks one down
ROSS COHEN: And it has two sandbags still attached to the bottom most ring
NICK: And that turns out to be
PETER: They key to the mystery
JAD: Sand?
NICK: Yeah
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Well, not just sand. There’s a lot in there. My name is Elisa Bergslien and I am a forensic geologist
NICK: We called up Elisa to help us understand this next part
PETER: What happened was the sand from the balloons was sent to Washington DC to some scientists at the US Geological Survey
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Right away
ROSS COHEN: They discover that there’s no coral
ELISA BERGSLIEN: So finding no coral, you know, you’re talking cold water now
ROSS COHEN: They look at the diatoms
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Marine bivalves
ROSS COHEN: Microscopic fossils
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Mollusks, minerals
ROSS COHEN: By compiling all of these different characteristics
ELISA BERGSLIEN: But that all together, where would you find these diatoms, these minerals, that you wouldn’t find coral. All those different pieces of information
NICK: All together
ROSS COHEN: The geologists are able to determine that there are two or perhaps three beaches in the world
ELISA BERGSLIEN: That fit all of these qualifications
ROSS COHEN: Where they believe this sand could have come from and all of which are on the east coast of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands
JAD: You can get that kind of specific from sand?
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Yep
ROBERT: Why would the Japanese choose to deliver bomb payloads by balloon. It’s a strange choice
JAD: Particularly after Pearl Harbor, you know, it’s like we already know they can do planes, right
ROBERT: Yeah they got planes
JAD: Yeah, why balloons
ROSS COHEN: Well
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Now it can be told, history in the making
ROSS COHEN: It grew directly out of the Doolittle raid
PETER: Back in April of 1942
ARCHIVAL CLIP: United States Navy aircraft carrier Hornet steams westward across the Pacific
ROSS COHEN: Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders
PETER: Took off from an aircraft carrier deep in the Western Pacific
ROSS COHEN: And dropped bombs on Tokyo and Yokohama and a number of other cities across Japan
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Greatest surprise raid in the history of area warfare
PETER: Now they didn’t do a lot of damage physically
ROSS COHEN: But it was such a shock to the Japanese to think that their homeland could be invaded, that these planes could actually fly over the Imperial Palace, the home of the emperor and--
ROBERT: Doolittle went over the palace, I did not realize that--
ROSS COHEN: Yeah.
ROBERT: He went all the way downtown in Tokyo
ROSS COHEN: Oh yeah, right over the city. And so immediately after the Doolittle raid an order went out, it was just find a way to bomb America
NICK: Now Japan’s navy is stretched so thin at this point in the war, there’s no way they can pull off something like the Doolittle raid
PETER: They didn’t have aircraft carriers that could get their planes close enough to the US mainland
NICK: But what they did have was the wind
ROSS COHEN: Today we call this the jetstream. That name didn’t come along until after the war
PETER: At that point we barely knew about the jetstream
ROSS COHEN: But prior to and during the war, the Japanese did extensive research into these winds
PETER: OK, so in 1924, there’s this meteorologist named Wasserboroish, and he goes to the top of a mountain and he releases a bunch of these little paper weather balloons. And he discovers that at about 30,000 feet up, there’s this river of fast moving air, speeds up to 170 miles per hour, carrying everything in its midst. Pollen, insects, all the way to North America within days.
NICK: And after the Doolittle raid they thought maybe if we were to release a bunch of balloons in just the right place at just the right time
PETER: Maybe this jetstream of air could
ROSS COHEN: Push these balloons across the pacific ocean
ARCHIVAL CLIP: [Japanese]
PETER: So this is Tetsko Tanaka. She was interviewed in this independent documentary called On Paper Wings
ARCHIVAL CLIP: [Japanese]
NICK: In 1944 she says she was a teenager when the Japanese military came to her school and basically turned it into a factory.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: [Japanese]
PETER: She and hundreds of other school children were conscripted to begin making this special kind of paper out of mulberry wood called
MA HO SHINA: Wasi. Handmade, Japanese traditional paper
NICK: This is Ma Ho Shina, who now works at the Noborito Institute in Japan
MA HO SHINA: A huge amount of paper was required
PETER: Ma Ho says that girls would work 12 hour days making thousands, tens of thousands of these sheets and gluing them together
NICK: And after they finished producing the balloons and after the balloons were strapped with bombs, they were shipped off to those beaches. And just let go.
PETER: People from the Japanese side watching them take off said they looked like huge jellyfish swimming through a pale blue sky.
ROSS COHEN: These perfectly silent vehicles, the only sound was the rustling of the paper as they took off
ROBERT: How many were launched?
ROSS COHEN: From November 1944 to April 1945 they launched 9,000 balloons
JAD: Wow
ROSS COHEN: They I guess figured it would be more terrifying to have bombs raining down silently from above with no calling card than with a Japanese calling card
ARCHIVAL CLIP: And as the last sandbag is dropped, now only the central payload is left
NICK: This is audio from a declassified Navy instructional video made about these balloon bombs in 1945:
ARCHIVAL CLIP: In the event one of these units is found, do these two things to render it harmless
NICK: It explains to soldiers how to--what to do if they find one of these bombs and how to defuse the bomb. But I think one of the most interesting thing about the video is this text that’s written in huge block letters right at the bottom of the screen. It says, do not aid the enemy by publishing or broadcasting or discussing information
MIKE SWEENEY: Information can be a powerful tool. It can be a powerful tool for good and a powerful tool for evil
NICK: This is professor Mike Sweeney
MIKE SWEENEY: And i’m a historian of wartime censorship
NICK: And he says that immediately after those first balloons landed
MIKE SWEENEY: There are a few stories that appear in the local newspapers in the far west. Stories about a Japanese attack on the mainland of the United States
NICK: Time and Newsweek even picked it up
MIKE SWEENEY: Saying, we’re not sure what these are, but are these Japanese spies coming in on these balloons?
NICK: Is this a large scale attack?
MIKE SWEENEY: What is going on? And then very shortly thereafter
NICK: Just three days after those Time and Newsweek articles
MIKE SWEENEY: The office of censorship initiated a press blackout
ROSS COHEN: This blackout on news
NICK: They sent out memos and telegraphs to all major wire services
ROSS COHEN: The UP, the AP, and the INS saying
MIKE SWEENEY: Keep any news of these Japanese balloons off the wires and out of print
ROSS COHEN: Any stories of these bombs will have to be approved by the appropriate authority of the US Army if you wish to publish or broadcast news about them
JAD: And why would they want to keep this secret?
MIKE SWEENEY: So the government’s ideas about why balloon bombs should be censored, in particular army’s ideas, were number one, to avoid panic
PETER: These things are instruments of terror, right. You can’t be afraid of something you don’t know exists
MIKE SWEENEY: Number two is avoid helping Japan. It was thought then that if we printed exact coordinates of particular bomb landings that this would help Japan better target the bombs
JAD: And what did the reporters think about this?
MIKE SWEENEY: They grumbled sometimes but they complied
ROBERT: Really?
MIKE SWEENEY: Yeah. Everyone in the news industry was as patriotic as the rest of the country, that is the vast majority of journalists supported the war.
ROSS COHEN: And of course if you screwed up and sent out a story that got American lives killed, you could be prosecuted under the espionage act. Furthermore, could you imagine what your listeners would do if you were the radio station identified as killing a hundred American sailors?
NICK: So the newspapers and radio stations kept their mouths shut, which meant that most Americans never even heard this was happening, and more importantly, the Japanese weren’t really hearing about whether their bombs made it or not. So, they probably concluded that it was basically a failed experiment. Which largely it was. Of the 9,000 released, virtually none caused any damage, and certainly not any terror. Except for this one balloon
PETER: That’s coming up
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JAD: Hey I’m Jad Abumrad
ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich
JAD: This is Radiolab. We continue now with our story from reporters Peter Lang Stanton and Nick Farago about the 9,000 or so balloon bombs that Japan sent to America in 1944 and 45 that rained down on American soil and created nothing. Nothing really. Nothing happened. No damage, no terror, nothing
NICK: But then we get to this tiny little town called Bly
CORA CONNOR: To me, there’s no place like old Bly
NICK: Bly is this sleepy little logging town in the base of Gearhart Mountain in South Central Oregon
CORA CONNOR: Lots of pretty scenery
NICK: And Cora Connor, who you just heard, was born and raised there
CORA CONNOR: You know everybody and you’re just like a big family out there
NICK: In the 40s when Cora was a young girl, there were about 700 people living there
CORA CONNOR: Yeah. But we did all kinds of fun things. We had a fish fry up at Dog Lake, huge catfish fry. The whole town stayed all night, went back home the next day. In the winter the canals would freeze over and we’d have bonfire and ice skating parties and it was a fun place to live
NICK: Can you tell me about the morning--it was a Sunday?
CORA CONNOR: Let’s see what happened. I’m trying to think. Saturday I think. May 5th is all I can remember. Yep, that was may 5th
ROSS COHEN: May 5, 1945
CORA CONNOR: I thought it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining bright
ROSS COHEN: And the Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife Elsie who was five months pregnant with their first child
CORA CONNOR: Knew them very well. Sunday school. I went to church and took vacations of up there
ROSS COHEN: They took their Sunday School class out for a picnic. There were five children that went along on that trip, ages 11 to 14
NICK: And one of the kids
CORA CONNOR: We called him Dickie. He had a crush on my sister who was a little younger than
PETER: So Archie and Elsie and the five kids get back into the car
ROSS COHEN: And they drove up to Gearhart Mountain
PETER: And a couple miles up a logging road they pass some forest service guys working on the road. They go a little further to where the road comes near a creek
ROSS COHEN: And Archie pulled the car around and parked. They kids jumped out of the car and started running down toward the creek. Elsie who was pregnant as I mentioned she was feeling a bit carsick, she jumped out to get some fresh air and to chase after the kids while Archie went around to the trunk of the car to get out the fishing poles and the picnic baskets, et cetera. One of the children saw something on the ground. A large canvas, white gray, balloon of some kind spread out on the ground. Called to the other children to come have a look. The children and Elsie apparently gathered in a tight circle around the balloon. Archie later reported that while he was getting the picnic basket out of the trunk, his wife called to him, honey look at what we found. He turned and took a few steps towards them and at that moment--we’ll never know exactly what happened, but apparently one of the children reached down to pick up the device. The bomb detonated. All five children and Elsie Mitchell were killed instantly.
PETER: The forest service guys down the road were close enough to hear the blast
ROSS COHEN: They come running when they hear the explosion and they see Archie Mitchell has run to the site and his wife’s clothes were ablaze. And Archie was kneeling over his prostate wife beating out the fire with his bare hands.
JAD: Hm
[WALKING SOUNDS]
PETER: There’s no wind
NICK: On our last day in Bly we went to visit the site where the bomb went off
NICK: It’s the middle of nowhere. It’s just a chain--it’s just a little fenced off area. Like a little pen.
NICK: And there were these tall pine trees.
NICK: It’s just huge cuts in the tree
JAD: Were those shrapnel cuts in the tree?
PETER: Yeha
NICK: Yeha, they still--this hasn’t, has not healed.
PETER: Eerie place
CORA CONNOR: Of course I didn’t know what was going on.
PETER: This is Cora Connor again. At the time she was at her job, watching the switchboard when
CORA CONNOR: A guy that was working up there for the forest service comes rushing into the telephone office and I mean he was scared. Pure white and scared. And I thought, my god what’s going on? What’s happening? And he came in and made the call to Lakeview
PETER: The naval base in Lakeview. And about half an hour later you know this big, imposing military guy comes in
CORA CONNOR: He was all medals and all full uniform, you know. And he must have made it it seemed like in the blink of an eye. And I thought, my god what has happened? And then when the--he talked over the phone I knew what was going on. He said they’d had a bomb explode up there, with casualties. And then he talked to me. He said, do not talk to anybody about anything that you’ve heard here. Not your mother, not anybody. He says, now you’re not to leave this office. By then I was just jelly I was so terrified
NICK: He leaves and the world is trickling around, spreading around town
CORA CONNOR: They knew something had gone wrong. And they gathered around the phone office because the phone office knows everything in the whole valley. And they knew I knew what was going on, and that’s when it all hit
NICK: Pretty soon there was a crowd outside
Cora Connor: Screaming and yelling at me
NICK: At you?
CORA CONNOR: Yeah. We know you know what’s going on. You better come out and tell us. We’re coming in there and you’re gonna tell us what’s happened
PETER: These people are your neighbors and things like that?
CORA CONNOR: People--yeah.
PETER: That know you and they’re saying
CORA CONNOR: That know. Yeah, because Bly’s a very tiny place. I probably knew every one of them. I was about--you can imagine the state I was in. And Mr. Patsky
PETER: Dickie’s father. Dickie was the boy who had a crush on Cora’s sister
CORA CONNOR: I can tell you exactly how he was dressed that day. He had on a read and black checkered hunting shirt and his red hunting cap.
NICK: At the time all he knew was that his son was missing
CORA CONNOR: He stood out there and he shook his fist and he yelled and he scared me half to death, threatening to come in and all that. He says, you know what’s happening. Let us know what’s happening. And I couldn’t do anything. I sat there all day
PETER: How old were you?
CORA CONNOR: 16. You know, it really really tore me apart. I was just in a complete fog for days. I’d never talked too much about it. Nope.
PETER: Within a day or so the military told ost of the town what actually happened that day
CORA CONNOR: And a short time after that a big army truck--well there was two big army trucks and they stopped right out in front of our house. We wondered what was going on you know, your little town like that, anything different everyone goes to the window and takes a look. And here come--OK, this is awfully hard for me. A woman and a little kid jumped out of the back of that truck. She was Japanese. They were on their way to the Tooley Lake
NICK: The Japanese internment camp nearby
CORA CONNOR: And she’s screaming and crying and praying. Please, we need water, we need water. It was hot. It was really hot that day and they were in a canvas covered truck, jammed in there. And I grabbed a pitcher, a bucket or whatever was in the kitchen, filled it with water and started out the door. By that time they were throwing rocks at that lady and her kid. People in that town were so terribly upset and they were throwing rocks at her. And mom wouldn’t let me go. And I screamed and cried at my mother because she wouldn’t let me--she says, well you can’t go out there. They’ll throw rocks at you. I won’t let you go. And to this day that picture is in my mind. And I’ve prayed to the Lord to forgive the people that were doing that and try to--I can’t accept it. Nothing can make me accept what happened. I thought that was the most horrible thing in the world people could do. A woman and child they had nothing to do with the bomb, nothing to do with the war. Nothing. It--still hard. How can people be that way? It upset me so horribly bad. I didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t talk for 40 years.
JAD: It’s weird like, there’s a kind of weird scary symmetry to this thing. Like the Japanese military was trying to create terror, right. Like what they felt after Doolittle. And so they wanted to make this situation where like bombs were falling silently from the sky. We couldn’t even tell where they were coming from. Almost like the gods were dropping them. But we kept it quiet so nobody panicked. Except by not saying anything, at least in this one small instance, it created exactly the situation that the Japanese military wanted. I mean not on the scale that they wanted but like in its effect. It’s like a concentrated version of the thing they were trying to create.
ROBERT: Right but that’s the war
JAD: That’s the problem
ROBERT: That’s not a problem. Five is a sacrifice in war, what is it five, six people. There wre 125 million people in America then.
JAD: Hm. I think there actually might have been a little bit more than that
ROBERT: Well you can see what it would have been like listening to this story, you could see what it would have been like if this story had been well-known and had been told from person to person, if everybody was looking up wondering where the next strange thing was coming from
JAD: Well they wouldn’t--there might have been panic, but those kids wouldn’t have tugged on the balloon
ROBERT: That’s the choice
JAD: Because they would have known, yeah
ROSS COHEN: At the end of the war, the war department destroyed all of the evidence. They didn't want these--any evidence of these balloons just out there in general circulation
ROBERT: Huh
ROSS COHEN: This is one of those footnotes to the war that you know, at the end of the war, just never--people forgot about something they didn’t know about anyway
ROBERT: Wow
PETER: Ross, are there anymore out there?
ROSS COHEN: It’s estimated by the war department that of the 9,000 released, they thought that maybe seven to ten percent of the total would have survived the transoceanic crossing and arrived in North America. That’s 900. 300 are confirmed as having arrived in North America. So that means there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, that arrived in North America but were never accounted for. In the ten or 12 years immediately after the end of World War II, a couple dozen of these things were found. And then the recoveries stopped more or less
ROBERT: Were they alive, like the one in Oregon--if you touched them would they blow up?
ROSS COHEN: Some of them were. Some of them were. Now here’s the fascinating part. October of 2014, I kid you not
BRAD SINGLINGER: Dave was ahead of me and he’d stopped and said, I think I found a bomb
ROSS COHEN: A couple of loggers
BRAD SINGLINGER: My name is Brad Singlinger
DAVID BRIDGEMAN: My name is Dave Bridgeman
ROSS COHEN: In Lumey, British Columbia who were doing some survey work
DAVID BRIDGEMAN: You know, this is the middle of nowhere
ROSS COHEN: Found the remnants of a Japanese balloon that had been on the ground for 70 years
BRAD SLINGLINGER: And we definitely work in remote areas in general and we don’t see much except trees and rocks and you know, there are those odd special days where you see things that no one else gets to see
ROSS COHEN: I tell ya, if you’re hiking, if you’re out in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, watch where you step.
ROBERT: Thank you to Peter Lang Stanton and to Nicker Ferago for their reporting and extensive reporting
JAD: Yeah. Big thanks to them, big thanks to them. Also thanks to Illana Soul whose documentary On Paper Wings was a big source for us that you heard those Japanese voices in the middle of the story. That came from her documentary. Also we have original music for this hour from a couple of folks: Jeff Taylor, Michael Manning, David Wingo, Justin Walter. And if you want to see these balloon bombs we have some incredible pictures on our website, radiolab.org. Coming up next we’ve got one more story about the war on our shores and I’ve got to say this one is a real doozy. I remember it when it was pitched, the entire staff just sat there like riveted. That’s coming up next.
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JAD: Hey I’m Jad Abumrad
ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we’re telling war stories. And this next one, well
ROBERT: What we’re going to tell you is an old story. It’s about 70 years old, but it’s not really as old as that at all because you’ll notice that it hasn’t ended.
JAD: And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin
KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah
JAD: OK, where to start--do you have a sense of where to start?
KAREN: Well I could blame it on my dad
DAD: And that’s the house I grew up in, just so you know
KAREN: Oh, right.
DAD: That’s my bedroom window
JAD: This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home
KAREN: He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen
KAREN: Good old Aberdeen, I forgot how much--
JAD: On a potato farm.
KAREN: He loves to talk about the farm. Like he thinks we should all live on a farm.
DAD: It’s pretty cool
KAREN: So we were talking one day and he mentions very casually as if its like something we all know, he says, yeah back when we had Nazi prisoners of war working on our farm. And I was like, time out. What?
ROBERT: Really that’s what he-- this was parenthetical?
KAREN: Yeah it was totally like, yeah we’re picking potatoes and then yeah the Nazi prisoners of war were helping us
DAD: Sort of remember how old I was just by how tall the guards were. They were very tall.
KAREN: He was only three or four at the time
KAREN: Do you know if there were like dozens of prisoners or just like a handful?
DAD: Oh, there was a bunch
JAD: I didn’t even know there was prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America ever
KAREN: Yeah. Me either.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Yeha, OK, so that was the first time--
KAREN: So after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historien
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Kathy Kirkpatrick
KAREN: Because i wanted to know, was this just an Aberdeen thing?
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: No. Like you were talking about Idaho
KAREN: She told me that in Idaho alone
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: There’s branch camps in Aberdeen and Blackfoot and Emmett and Folly Lake and Idaho Falls
KAREN: There were 23 different camps. Generally you had prisoners that were in churches
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Tent cities, St. Paul
KAREN: Rodeo grounds
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Dormitories
KAREN: High school gyms
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Sugar City
KAREN: And this was the case all across the country.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: The only state that did not have prisoners of war was Vermont
JAD: Wow
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: And the maximum we had over 371,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians and 5,000 Japanese.
KAREN: Almost half a million people
JAD: Oh my god
KAREN: Why does nobody know about this?
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: We just don’t talk about it--I think we don’t--I don’t know.
JAD: But today we are going to talk about it. But not just because it’s a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question
CLIP: Breaking news this noon, a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees--
JAD: A question that
CLIP: On top secret interrogation tactics
JAD: With torture reports
CLIP: Bizarre, even sadistic--
JAD: And Abu Ghraib
CLIP: Prisoners being abused by American soldiers
JAD: Guantanamo Bay. Questions that we are still trying to answer today, which is, you know, when you capture an enemy soldier, take them out of the battle, out of the fight, how should you treat that person?
ROBERT: And if both sides agreed to follow certain rules and one side doesn’t, what do you do?
JAD: And the interesting thing was 70 years ago this question was playing out in this really dramatic way in all of these towns across America
KAREN: There were about 200 basecamps that were huge. They were like up to 8,000 people
JAD: And by the way that’s like 70 times the size of Guantanamo Bay currently. In any case, as she was researching, Karen started to zoom into one camp in particular
KAREN: So this is really illustrative of what happened. There’s this one camp in Aliceville, Alabama. It’s this tiny town of like 1,500 people. But the camp has 6,000 people.
JAD: Wow that’s like four times the size of the town
KAREN: Yeah. So I went and interviewed a bunch of people--guards, prisoners, locals, from Aliceville and
THOMAS SWEET: It was quite a day
KAREN: That’s Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me the day the prisoners came, so a thousand of them came at first, and the police were like, nobody allowed on the street. But of course
THOMAS SWEET: When word got out that the first train load was coming everybody rushed out on the street
MAN: The say the train come in there wasn’t supposed to be any townspeople. But of course there was
WOMAN: Everybody was out
MAN: The road was lined with kids from three years old up to people 70 years old
KAREN: So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville.
WOMAN: So we all climbed the lumber pile so we could see them when we got off the train
KAREN: So everybody’s super nervous
CLIP: [indistinct yelling]
KAREN: Because they have these images in their head
MAN: In my mind, just like a lot of people in Aliceville, they didn’t know what kind of devils was going to get off that train. Guys with horns on their head
KAREN: So these prisoners that were sent to Aliceville were actually part of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and these guys were the most feared of Hitler’s fighters
MAN: They were supposed to be the elite
ARCHIVAL CLIP: So-called Nazi superman
KAREN: The Nazi superman, right. So the train pulls up.
MAN: They stop right on the main highway
KAREN: Doors open. And then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out
WOMAN: And they were marching with that German march.
KAREN: And they’re singing their military songs in German
CLIP: [German singing]
WOMAN: Tell us about what is was like, what you thought when you got off the train. What did they look like, did they have on uniforms?
WOMAN: Oh yes.
KAREN: So when you listen to the oral histories, it’s really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people in Aliceville
WOMAN: The people of Aliceville were scared to death
MAN: I didn’t know whether I was going to be mad at them when they first come in or what, but when I see they were just a bunch of whipped kids
WOMAN: There was a feeling of concern in our hearts for them
MAN: When I seen them they was nothing but a bunch of young kids
WOMAN: How young they were
MAN: Haggard looking and washed up and beat
WOMAN: Wounded and some of them had maggots--oh just gruesome
MAN: You could tell they’d been through a rough time
HANS COPER: It was awful for us
KAREN: That’s Hans Copera, he was one of the prisoners stepping out of the train that day. He’d been drafted into the army against his will, captured in North Africa, and then he was sent to America in the bottom of this big cargo ship
HANS COPERA: and in one room they crowded 700 people. You couldn’t even sit. There was no toilet, of course, we had only ten boxes. We all were wet, soaked with urine. It was awful. It was an awful trip
MAN: And you kind of had to feel sorry for them
KAREN: And then on the other hand and you hear this too in the oral histories, the people in Aliceville are thinking, these are Nazis. These are the men who are killing our sons
WOMAN: You know, I had three brothers overseas at the same time. So we didn’t like them. That’s just the way we felt.
KAREN: OK, so there’s that question in people’s mind, and this is playing out all across the country, here’s the enemy at your mercy. What do you do? How do you treat them? They’re in your hands. Nobody's’ watching. You can do whatever you want with them at that point. In theory.
JAD: But in practice?
KAREN: Well actually this was a significant moment for the world. I mean, 14 years before a bunch of countries had gotten together and they’d made up rules for exactly this kind of moment
ARCHIVAL CLIP: In 1929 at Geneva, long before Hitler and his partners began to eye the real estate of the world, there was an international conference. Here nations solemnly promised to uphold the rules covering the treatment of prisoners of war.
ARNOLD KRAMER: Oh it was a series of dos and don’ts.
KAREN: That’s historian Arnold Kramer. He’s a professor at Texas A&M. Some of the rules he says are pretty basic
ARNOLD KRAMER: That women and children should be protected
KAREN: So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Prisoners are entitled to the same quantity of rations, clothing, and living quarters as afforded our own troops
KAREN: And then there’s rules about medical attention, labor
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: While the Geneva convention says yes you can use people for labor
KAREN: Kathy Kirkpatrick again
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: You also should be paying people for labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day
KAREN: So the Geneva conventions are this attempt to kind of civilize the uncivilized thing which is war
ARNOLD KRAMER: You see the first World War was so horrific
KAREN: Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in POW camps
ARNOLD KRAMER: There were no real regulations with regard to prisoners. Sides did almost anything they wanted
KAREN: So the Geneva conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right
ARNOLD KRAMER: Because people kind of just couldn’t fathom another war to end wars
THOMAS SWEET: We were well-trained in the Geneva convention
KAREN: That’s Thomas Sweet again. He was actually one of the guards at camp Aliceville. And what he said is that even before the POWs arrived, the Geneva conventions were drilled into their heads. They had lectures, the rules were posted in the rec hall and in the officers club
THOMAS SWEET: We had to--the prisoners had to be treated the same as you would your own fellow soldiers
KAREN: Which sounds kind of basic. But for somebody like Hans who’s stepping off this train and wondering how he’s gonna be treated
HANS COPERA: It was--I should say it was really a sort of heaven
MAN: When they got into the barracks had all been laid out
WOMAN: Barricks were fresh and clean
MAN: They had towels and shaving equipment for each one of them at each one’s bunks
KAREN: The prisoners washed up and then the guards opened up the cafeteria
WF: Then we got to eat good things
KAREN: This is Walter Fetzholder, he was another prisoner at Aliceville
WALTER FETZHOLDER: We got a piece of white bread, of your American white bread. And we got peanut butter. I didn’t know what a peanut was. And it tasted wonderful, wonderful. It was the best dinner I ever had. And I always when I think on the good times, I think on peanut butter.
KAREN: And here’s the funny thing. Like, as you look into this, you start to realize we’re not just following the Geneva conventions the letter of the law. WE’re going above and beyond and within two months they have an orchestra. Within a year they have three orchestras.
JAD: This is POW-led orchestras?
KAREN: Yes. Yes.
JAD: So they’re being given instruments?
KAREN: They’re making instruments, the locals are donating instruments, the YMCA is giving them instruments
CLIP: [German singing]
KAREN: They open a school
CLIP: [German singing]
KAREN: You can learn anything from pottery to mathematics, almost any language you want to learn
CLIP: [German singing]
KAREN: And they set up correspondence programs with the local universities. You could get credit
ROBERT: Wow
THOMAS SWEET: They had soccer games just about every day. They drew big crowds
KAREN: They had a newspaper. Their newspaper was called the Fenced Guest and it had like poetry
JAD: The Fenced Guest
KAREN: Right. They also did a lot of theatrical productions
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: And sometimes threw regular art shows
KAREN: So this is where things get a little bit strange
EW: On December 18th, there was another art exhibition
KAREN: This is a woman named Ellen Wanders, whose father was a POW at the camp. And here she’s reading from his diary
EW: December 12, de fuhrer--that means Hitler--had sent 12,572 dollars to open the art exhibition in camp V.
JAD: OK wait she’s saying that Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing?
KAREN: Yep.
JAD: While--during--while we’re fighting Hitler he’s sending money?
KAREN: Yeah.
CLIP: [German singing]
KAREN: Um, OK so--
JAD: OK. So with Hitler’s Christmas gift to the art show and the ham and the bands and all that stuff, did people in the, outside the camp know what was going on inside?
KAREN: You know, once they start, so--I think it was in 1943 was the point at which we started realizing we’re running out of American men to do labor and we look around and we’re like, well actually we have quite a few men who might be able to do some work here.
MAN: A lot of them prisoners worked on farms down there. Picking cotton, peanuts
KAREN: So some of the farmers would bring them in the house for lunch. They would drink with them
THOMAS SWEET: They were drunk.
KAREN: There’s some really funny stories of like
THOMAS SWEET: It was probably moonshine
KAREN: The prisoners getting drunk with the farmers and then they get in trouble because they come home late
THOMAS SWEET: [laughs]
KAREN: One of the biggest things that the war department says when they start sending the men out is like if you make friends with these POWs, it’s against the rules. But they do it all the time
ROBERT: Did anybody fall in love with anybody
KAREN: Oh yeah. I mean not a lot but it definitely happened. So as these prisoners are out in the community, they’re forming friendships, a few of them are falling in love, word starts to get out about how they’re being treated. And meanwhile across America there’s rationing. And so when they learn that the POWs are getting food that they might not be getting, a lot of the American public, they get pissed.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Walter Winchell
KAREN: Especially this radio guy, Walter Winchell, who sort of made this his cause. They call him the Rush Limbaugh of World War II
JAD: Was he that well-known?
ROBERT: Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Walter Winchell
KAREN: So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Winchell just starts to rant about it
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: The United States Army caters to the Nazis as though they were kings. They get more food than our soldiers get. Ponies, radios, luxuries and all sorts of leniency beyond imagination.
KAREN: And he would do this week after week
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: We -- over here won’t have any Nazis to capture and fatten up on steaks on ham and bacon or chopped chicken liver--
KAREN: People start writing articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe. Citizens start flooding the war department with letters
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: I know sir that your YMCA war prisoners aid does all it can to make Nazi war prisoners over here comfortable
KAREN: And in the meantime, according to Thomas Sweet, inside the camp some of these prisoners are starting to get kind of bold
THOMAS SWEET: For a couple of nights they cut out swastikas and took a kite and was flying the kite and had these swastikas on the box underneath the kite with a string that down to the ground. And they handeed the string to one of the--one of guards and said, pull this string and when they pulled the string the trapdoor opened on the gadget they had made and all these swastikas started falling all over, all over the camp and in Aliceville too. And the townspeople started calling the base mad about that
KAREN: Add to that, we don’t have enough men to guard all these camps. So the prisoners are starting to get more and more control of the camp.
MAN: The prisoners had the run of the camp
KAREN: And in some cases the Nazi hardliners would start to torment the non Nazis. They would threaten them, they might beat them up. There were even a couple of murders.
ROBERT: Who was not a Nazi inside of these camps?
KAREN: If you had been drafted but you didn’t--you weren’t ideologically--
ROBERT: I see
KAREN: So the perception that is coming out of these camps is that we’ve created these hotels on American soil where Nazis could start radicalizing. And people get so mad that there’s actually a congressional investigation into the coddling of prisoners of war. So I spent a lot of time at the National Archives trying to get to like, all right. What are the arguments. And here’s kind of how it went. You have this congressman on one side, Richard Harlice, and he’s saying you’re coddling them.
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: Congressman Harlice of Arizona called the Nazi prisoners of the United States pampered and privileged
KAREN: And on the other side you have the guy who’s now running the prisoner of war program, Archer Lurch, adn he’s basically saying, no
CLIP, LURCH: We do not coddle them
KAREN: He says, we’re just following the Geneva conventions. And the reason that he gave was the same reason that Joe Biden would give almost 60 years later
CLIP, JOE BIDEN: There’s a reason why we sign these treaties, to protect my son in the military
ROBERT: We torture them, they torture us
KAREN: Reciprocity
CLIP, JOE BIDEN: That’s why we have these treaties, so when Americans are captured they are not tortured. That’s the reason. In case anybody forgets it. That’s the reason
KAREN: One problem though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Unarmed American prisoners fell to the machines of our enemies
KAREN: News breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany are gunned down after they surrendered
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Four weeks later their frozen bodies, hands and ankles bound, were found where they fell
KAREN: We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany and we find misery. Nothing like Aliceville
ARCHIVAL CLIP: American prisoners of war report inhuman hospital conditions
KAREN: Walter Winchell gets back on the airwaves
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: Attention--
KAREN: He says look, reciprocity hasn’t worked. Our generosity
ARCHIVAL CLIP, WALTER WINCHELL: Has not been reciprocated and our boys were not treated the same
KAREN: And a few months later, things get even worse
ARCHIVAL CLIP: It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi concentration camps
KAREN: We start going into concentration camps
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: --the truth that man had indeed sunk below the level of animal beastiality
KAREN: And we start seeing what the German had done, what the Nazis had done
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Thousands of dead bodies were piled everywhere, most never having received the dignity of burial, but what was even more frightening were the living dead left behind
KAREN: So Congress decides to hold a second investigation into the treatment of prisoners. But this time it’s real soul searching. I mean, we had just seen the full horrors of the Holocaust so we’re thinking, anything we do to these guys at this point they deserve. And we’re also realizing we’re not really getting reciprocity so we don’t really have a practical reason to treat them well anymore. So at this point, the question has really become, do we continue to be good even when we’re not getting anything in return? And the kind of amazing thing to me is we decide, yeah. We’re gonna stick to the Geneva conventions. Archer Lurch who runs the POW program at this point, he gets up and he says, we are not going to lower ourselves to Nazi standards. We are not gonna let the enemy decide who we are as a country.
JAD: And that argument stuck?
KAREN: Yeah
ARNOLD KRAMER: I think that most people associated with the prison camp experience
KAREN: That’s historian Arnold Kramer again
ARNOLD KRAMER: Felt that we treated them well not because they treated ours well, but that we are decent people and probably would have done this anyway
ARCHIVAL CLIP: What makes an American is not any special precious sort of blood, but the tradition we have inherited. It’s tradition, not blood, that patterns the way we think and act and feel
DAVID GOLDFIELD: There’s a great belief that we have a special mission and we have a special history
KAREN: This is David Goldfield. He’s a historian at UNC Charlotte
DAVID GOLDFIELD: And that’s the ideal. But no. I mean, you only have to look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II
KAREN: He says, don’t forget, right as we’re giving the Nazis massive amounts of ham, we’re also rounding up tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens. Citizens. And we’re throwing them into these cramped camps that are way worse than Aliceville. And if you ask David why are we treating the Germans so much better
DAVID GOLDFIELD: They look like us.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: These people look all right. The mailman, the farmer. They all pretty much look like the folks back home.
DAVID GOLDFIELD: The major reason, race
KAREN: The Germans were white. They seemed familiar.
DAVID GOLDFIELD: There was a connection between the German POWs and the folks in the American South, not only because of the ethnicity of the Germans, not only because of their economic benefit to the region, but also because of their racial ideology. If you go to Nuremberg, there’s a museum there and you will see that the laws against the Jews were copied from the Mississippi black codes. And there are direct quotes from both the black codes and the Jewish codes
JAD: This is the most horrifying thing I’ve heard in a long time. I mean, is it really true that like all the niceness was just a perverse form of racism?
PAUL SPRINGER: Well I would say racism plays an enormous role in why Japanese citizens were interned in the first place. I don’t think there’s any question about that.
KAREN: That’s Paul Springer. He’s a military historian
PAUL SPRINGER: Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
KAREN: He’s not quite sure that race explains all of this. He says, you know what, you’ve got to be careful because you’re comparing treatment of citizens to treatment of prisoners of war. And that’s different.
PAUL SPRINGER: It’s not a fair comparison. For the case of why you treat the German POWs better, well, because they’re prisoners of war. The Japanese POWs were also exceedingly well-treated. They were treated much better than the Japanese citizens of the United States and I think that’s the comparison that’s probably more interesting, is why did you treat enemy soldiers from Japan better than you treated citizens of the United States of Japanese heritage?
KAREN: And he says very simply that with prisoners of war, it’s because we had a rule
PAUL SPRINGER: Governing international law
KAREN: Like the Geneva conventions
PAUL SPRINGER: There’s no similar law at that time that says what you can and can’t do towards your civilian populations.
JAD: That’s interesting. So it’s like maybe we’re not racist or noble, but both. And it’s the rules that allow us to be our better selves.
KAREN: I mean, here’s what I take from this. I think that in a time of war it’s incredibly difficult to be good to your enemy. It’s not just about aspiring to be good, this American ideal, it’s about having 97 really nit-picky, tiny tedious rules to tell you exactly what you can do and what you can’t do. Because it would just be so easy to not be the person that you want to be in that moment.
JADD: It does kind of make you think back to February of 2002.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Good afternoon. I have an announcement to make. President Bush today that the Geneva convention will apply to the Taliban detainees, but not to the Al-Qaeda international terrorists. The President has maintained the United States’ commitment to the principles of the Geneva convention while recognizing that the convention simply does not cover every situation in which people may be captured or detained by military forces, as we see in Afghanistan today. Yes John
ARCHIVAL CLIP: What you’re telling us is the Taliban prisoners, detainees, at Guantanamo will not get any more protections than they already are given under the Geneva convention. What you’re telling us is the Al-Qaeda detainees will get fewer.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: No. There’s no change in the protections they will be provided. They’re-- They’ve always been treated with the principles consistent with the Geneva convention, which means they’ll be treated well. If you’re looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement is that they will not receive stipends from the American taxpayers. They will not receive musical instruments courtesy of the United States military. They would have received those had they been declared POWs. They will continue to be treated well because they’re in the custody of America.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: But the concern--the debate here was about if you don’t do it here, then US soldiers could be mistreated abroad, isn’t that correct? Isn’t that a big, a big motivation here--for the US soldiers get the same kind of treatment?
ARCHIVAL CLIP: It’s important for all nations, throughout the world, to treat any prisoners well. And that is something the United States always expects, and the United States always does. We have time for one more question and then there’s a-- Hold it. Go ahead. David.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: --US special forces. They don’t, they often do not wear uniforms, they often do not carry their weapons outwardly. If they are captured, they wouldn’t be prisoners of war?
ARCHIVAL CLIP: The terms of the Geneva convention apply to all. The terms speak for themselves. OK, thank you everybody.
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