May 12, 2023
Transcript
LULU MILLER: Hey. It's Lulu Miller. I am just popping on here real quick before today's show to say "Oyez, MG. OMG. Oyez, MG. A little show called More Perfect is coming back. More Perfect, of course, is the podcast that OG Radiolab host Jad Abumrad co-created with Kelsey Padgett and Suzie Lechtenberg. And it's a show that takes on stories about the Supreme Court in surprisingly fresh and human and sound-rich ways.
LULU: And now it's coming back with a brand-new season and a brand-new team. The old team has passed the torch to host Julia Longoria, who you may know from being the host of The Experiment, and she was also a producer on the original More Perfect team. She doesn't just understand the show, she is part of the DNA of the show, and stories about the law and court have long been her passion. And she is joined by a whole new team to tell stories about this moment which, you know, maybe just maybe the Supreme Court feels even more relevant and a part of our lives than it did when the show launched seven years ago. So anyway, brand-new season coming, all kinds of stories.
LULU: It's just popping off starting this week. We highly recommend you go check it out. If you subscribed to More Perfect but you've forgotten and it's way down at the bottom, go see what's going on there. If you never did, that's More Perfect. I'm real excited. I will be listening and I hope you do too.
LULU: All right. Now on with our show. Today we actually have another look back. As you may notice, we do this every other week. We're diving head first into the war you've probably heard the most about, World War II, to hear two stories you've likely never heard—unless you heard them here, because again this is a rerun. It's a great one. We hope you enjoy it, it's called The War On Our Shore.
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today, we're gonna 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 gonna call today's show, The War On Our Shore. And to start ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: My name is Peter Lang-Stanton.
NICK FARAGO: My name's Nick Farago.
ROBERT: Well, it—we're gonna get a story from two reporters.
PETER LANG-STANTON: I'm a freelance filmmaker.
NICK FARAGO: Freelance reporter.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Writer slash radio producer. Too many slashes.
NICK FARAGO: [laughs]
ROBERT: Should we start with—with air currents or, like, with ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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?
ROSS COEN: Well, it's the first week of December, 1944.
JAD: This is Ross Coen, 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 COEN: 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 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 FARAGO: But above them there's sort of this fluttering, white circle.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Just floating there. They made sense of it by thinking it was a parachutist.
ROSS COEN: They get in their car, and they chase after it until eventually they lose sight of it in the darkness.
NICK FARAGO: Right around that same time, about 500 miles away in Colorado ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: A boy and his dad are working in the barn, when they hear an explosion. They run outside, and in their yard there's just this smoldering crater.
ROSS COEN: In Wyoming, a nine-year-old boy playing in his front yard hears an explosion.
NICK FARAGO: All throughout the winter of 1944 ...
ROSS COEN: In Burwell, Nebraska ...
NICK FARAGO: ... these strange parachute things ...
ROSS COEN: Native residents hear a loud explosion.
NICK FARAGO: ... just start appearing in the skies all over America.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Napa, California.
NICK FARAGO: Lame Deer, Montana.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 20 or so miles from downtown Detroit.
NICK FARAGO: Over farms ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: Nogales, Arizona.
NICK FARAGO: ... and slipping behind hills.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Rigby, Idaho.
ROSS COEN: Everybody who sees these things, all of them have different explanations for what they think they're witnessing.
NICK FARAGO: The US military sends out an APB to local police stations saying we need information. What are these things?
PRODUCER: Try again.
MARION HYDE: Testing, testing.
PRODUCER: Ah, there we go.
MARION HYDE: Okay. Whoa!
NICK FARAGO: Enter Sheriff ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: ... Warren Hyde.
MARION HYDE: My name is Marion Hyde.
NICK FARAGO: Warren Hyde actually died in 1989, so ...
MARION HYDE: I'm the oldest son of Sheriff Hyde.
NICK FARAGO: ... we talked to his son.
MARION HYDE: He had a presence about him that he kind of commanded a room.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Sheriff Hyde was a big guy.
MARION HYDE: Black wavy hair, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the hips.
NICK FARAGO: Stetson, gun on his hip.
PETER LANG-STANTON: And one day ...
MARION HYDE: From what I understand, a dry farmer called him ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: ... said there's this strange contraption in my field.
NICK FARAGO: Some kind of balloon, parachute-looking thing floating around.
MARION HYDE: So he jumped in the car and went hell bent for leather out into the Blue Creek area.
PETER LANG-STANTON: There's this crazy story where he rushes out to this farm to investigate. Hops out of his car, rips off his belt with his .38 pistol, because a man can't run with a .38 pistol on his waist.
NICK FARAGO: [laughs]
MARION HYDE: And took off after the balloon.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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 LANG-STANTON: Paper white.
NICK FARAGO: 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 LANG-STANTON: Lifts him up off the ground.
MARION HYDE: Like he was a paper doll.
NICK FARAGO: 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 to the first side?
NICK FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: He's nauseous from being spun around on this balloon.
PETER LANG-STANTON: His vision is getting blurry. His hands are becoming raw from the rope.
NICK FARAGO: But he feels this, like, sense of duty.
MARION HYDE: He knew that the government wanted one of these balloons.
PETER LANG-STANTON: It's his territory so he's gotta take it down.
MARION HYDE: That's right.
PETER LANG-STANTON: He finally lets himself freefall so he can grab it again, 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 FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: Yeah.
PETER LANG-STANTON: J. Edgar Hoover wrote him a personal letter of thanks.
ROSS COEN: They end up shipping all of the evidence off to the Aberdeen military research facility.
NICK FARAGO: Where they had gathered all this different evidence from all over the country. And they were able to tell that ...
ROSS COEN: Apparently this bomb matched known characteristics of Japanese bombs.
JAD: So it's Japanese.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Yeah.
NICK FARAGO: But it's impossible to send a balloon across the Pacific Ocean at this point. I mean, it's never, never been done. I mean, 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 LANG-STANTON: There was even speculation at one point that maybe they were coming from Japanese internment camps in North America.
ROBERT: Ah!
PETER LANG-STANTON: Then ...
ROSS COEN: Two days before Christmas, 1944.
NICK FARAGO: In Alaska, a native Alaskan trapper tracks one down.
ROSS COEN: And it has two sandbags still attached to the bottom-most ring.
NICK FARAGO: And that turns out to be the key to the mystery.
JAD: Sand?
NICK FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: We called up Elisa to help us understand this next part.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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 COEN: They discover that there's no coral.
ELISA BERGSLIEN: So finding no coral, you know, you're talking cold water now.
ROSS COEN: They look at the diatoms.
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Marine bivalves.
ROSS COEN: Microscopic fossils.
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Mollusks, minerals.
ROSS COEN: By compiling all of these different characteristics ...
ELISA BERGSLIEN: Put that all together, where would you find these diatoms, these minerals, that you wouldn't find coral? All those different pieces of information ...
NICK FARAGO: All together ...
ROSS COEN: 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 COEN: 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: Yup.
ROBERT: And 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 COEN: Well ...
[NEWS CLIP: Now it can be told. History in the making.]
ROSS COEN: It grew directly out of the Doolittle Raid.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Back in April of 1942 ...
[NEWS CLIP: United States Navy aircraft carrier Hornet steams westward across the Pacific.]
ROSS COEN: Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: Took off from an aircraft carrier deep in the Western Pacific.
ROSS COEN: And dropped bombs on Tokyo and Yokohama and Kobe and a number of other cities across Japan.
[NEWS CLIP: Greatest surprise raid in the history of area warfare.]
PETER LANG-STANTON: Now they didn't do a lot of damage physically ...
ROSS COEN: 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 didn't realize that.
ROSS COEN: Yeah.
ROBERT: He went all the way downtown in Tokyo.
ROSS COEN: 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 FARAGO: 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 LANG-STANTON: They didn't have aircraft carriers that could get their planes close enough to the US mainland.
NICK FARAGO: But what they did have was the wind.
ROSS COEN: Today we call this the jetstream. That name didn't come along until after the war.
PETER LANG-STANTON: At that point we barely knew about the jetstream.
ROSS COEN: But prior to and during the war, the Japanese did extensive research into these winds.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Okay, so in 1924, there's this meteorologist named Wasaburo Oishi, 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 175 miles an hour, carrying anything in its midst: pollen, insects, all the way to North America within days.
NICK FARAGO: 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 LANG-STANTON: Maybe this jetstream of air could ...
ROSS COEN: Push these balloons across the Pacific Ocean.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tetsko Tanaka: [speaking Japanese]]
PETER LANG-STANTON: So this is Tetsko Tanaka. She was interviewed in this independent documentary called On Paper Wings.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tetsko Tanaka: [speaking Japanese]]
NICK FARAGO: In 1944, she says she was a teenager when the Japanese military came to her school and basically turned it into a factory.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tetsko Tanaka: [speaking Japanese]]
PETER LANG-STANTON: She and hundreds of other schoolchildren were conscripted to begin making this special kind of paper out of mulberry wood called ...
MAHO SHIINA: Washi. Handmade Japanese traditional paper.
NICK FARAGO: This is Maho Shiina, who now works at the Noborito Institute in Japan.
MAHO SHIINA: A huge amount of paper was required.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Maho says that girls would work 12-hour days making thousands, tens of thousands of these sheets and gluing them together.
NICK FARAGO: 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 LANG-STANTON: People from the Japanese side watching them take off said they looked like huge jellyfish swimming through a pale blue sky.
ROSS COEN: These perfectly silent vehicles, the only sound was the rustling of the paper as they took off.
ROBERT: How many were launched?
ROSS COEN: From November 1944 to April 1945 they launched 9,000 balloons.
JAD: Wow!
ROSS COEN: They I guess figured it would be more terrifying to have bombs raining down silently from above with no calling card at all than with a Japanese calling card.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructional video: And as the last sandbag is dropped, now only the central payload is left.]
NICK FARAGO: This is audio from a declassified Navy instructional video made about these balloon bombs in 1945.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructional video: In the event one of these units is found, do these two things to render it harmless.]
NICK FARAGO: 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 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 FARAGO: This is professor Mike Sweeney.
MIKE SWEENEY: And I'm a historian of wartime censorship.
NICK FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: Is this a large-scale attack?
MIKE SWEENEY: What is going on? And then very shortly thereafter ...
NICK FARAGO: Just three days after those Time and Newsweek articles ...
MIKE SWEENEY: The Office of Censorship initiated a press blackout.
ROSS COEN: This blackout on news.
NICK FARAGO: They sent out memos and telegraphs to all the major wire services.
ROSS COEN: 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 COEN: Any stories about 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 the Army's ideas, were number one, to avoid panic.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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. And of course, if you screwed up and you sent out a story that got American lives killed, you could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Furthermore, can you imagine what your listeners would do if you were the radio station identified as killing a hundred American sailors?
NICK FARAGO: 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.
JAD: That's coming up.
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, really. Nothing happened. No damage, no terror, nothing.
NICK FARAGO: But then we get to this tiny little town called Bly.
CORA CONNOR: To me, there's no place like old Bly. [laughs]
NICK FARAGO: Bly is this sleepy little logging town at the base of Gearhart Mountain in South Central Oregon.
CORA CONNOR: A lot of pretty scenery.
NICK FARAGO: 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 FARAGO: 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 could have bonfire and ice skating parties, and it was a fun place to live.
NICK FARAGO: Can you tell me about the morning? Was it a Sunday?
CORA CONNOR: Let's see, what happened? I'm trying to think. Saturday, I think. May 5 is all I can remember. Yep, that was the May 5.
ROSS COEN: May 5, 1945.
CORA CONNOR: It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining bright.
ROSS COEN: 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 occasionally up there.
ROSS COEN: 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 FARAGO: And one of the kids ...
CORA CONNOR: We called him Dickie. He had a crush on my sister who was a little younger than me. And they wanted her to come on this picnic, so they came by and stopped, the pastor and his wife stopped, trying to talk—convince my mom to let my sister go or both of us or whatever. But mom didn't want us to go because Saturday was our chore day, and my day to work the switchboard, which usually made me pretty angry, but it was my job. And she said no. Well, my sister didn't really want to go because she really wasn't encouraging this relationship too much. Yeah, Dickie, yeah. No.
PETER LANG-STANTON: So Archie and Elsie and the five kids get back into the car.
ROSS COEN: And they drove up to Gearhart Mountain.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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 COEN: And Archie pulled the car around and parked. The 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, come look at what we found." He turned and just took a few steps toward 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 LANG-STANTON: The forest service guys down the road were close enough to hear the blast.
ROSS COEN: 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 prostrate wife beating out the fire with his bare hands.
ROBERT: Hmm.
PETER LANG-STANTON: There's no wind.
NICK FARAGO: On our last day in Bly, we went to visit the site where the bomb went off.
NICK FARAGO: It's the middle of nowhere. It's just a chain—it's a little fenced off area. It's a little pen.
NICK FARAGO: And there were these tall pine trees.
NICK FARAGO: There's just huge cuts in the tree.
JAD: Those are shrapnel cuts in the tree?
PETER LANG-STANTON: Yeah.
NICK FARAGO: Yeah, they still ...
NICK FARAGO: This hasn't—has not healed.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Eerie place.
CORA CONNOR: Of course, I didn't know what was going on.
PETER LANG-STANTON: 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 LANG-STANTON: The naval base in Lakeview. And about half an hour later this, you know, big, imposing military guy comes in.
CORA CONNOR: He was all medals and all in 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 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 FARAGO: He leaves and the word is trickling around, spreading around town.
CORA CONNOR: They knew something had gone wrong. And they gathered at 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 FARAGO: Pretty soon there was a crowd outside.
CORA CONNOR: Screaming and yelling at me.
NICK FARAGO: 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." And ...
PETER LANG-STANTON: These people are your neighbors and things like that?
CORA CONNOR: People—yeah.
PETER LANG-STANTON: That know you. And they're saying ...
CORA CONNOR: They 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 LANG-STANTON: 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 red and black checkered hunting shirt and his red hunting cap.
NICK FARAGO: 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 LANG-STANTON: How old were you?
CORA CONNOR: 16. You know, it really, really tore me apart. I was just in a complete fog for days. And I never—never talked too much about it. Nope.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Within a day or so the military told most of the town what actually happened that day.
CORA CONNOR: And then 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, you're a little town like that, anything different, everybody goes to the window and takes a look. And here come—okay, 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 Tule Lake.
NICK FARAGO: 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 there 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 go. She says, "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 to try to—I can't accept it. There's 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's 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 whole thing. Like, the Japanese military was trying to create terror, right?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: 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—five is a sacrifice in war, what is it five, six people?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: There were 125 million people in America then.
JAD: Hmm. 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 and 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 COEN: 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 COEN: This is one of those footnotes to the war that, you know, at the end of the war, just never—people forgot about something that they didn't know about anyway.
ROBERT: Wow.
PETER LANG-STANTON: Ross, are there any more out there?
ROSS COEN: It's estimated by the War Department that of the 9,000 released, they thought that maybe seven to 10 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 10 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 live, like the one in Oregon? If you touched them, would they blow up?
ROSS COEN: 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 COEN: A couple of loggers ...
BRAD SINGLINGER: Yeah, my name's Brad Singlinger.
DAVID BRIDGEMAN: My name's Dave Bridgeman.
ROSS COEN: ... in Lumby, British Columbia, who were doing some survey work ...
DAVID BRIDGEMAN: You know, this is the middle of nowhere.
ROSS COEN: ... found the remnants of a Japanese balloon that had been on the ground for 70 years.
BRAD SLINGLINGER: We definitely work in remote areas, and in general we don't see much except trees and rocks but, you know, there are those odd special days where you see things that no one else gets to see.
ROSS COEN: I tell you, 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 Nick Farago for their reporting and extensive reporting.
JAD: Yeah. Big thanks to them, big thanks to them. Also thanks to Ilana Sol, 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 this hour from a couple of folks: Jeff Taylor, Michael Manning, David Wingo and Justin Walter. And if you want to see these balloon bombs, we have some incredible pictures on our website, Radiolab.org.
LATIF NASSER: We're sad to report that since we first aired this episode, Professor Mike Sweeney passed away in 2022.
JAD: 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.
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...
ROBERT: What we're gonna 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: Okay, so where to start? Do you have a sense of where to start?
KAREN DUFFIN: I feel like I could blame—well, I can. I can blame this on my dad.
DAD: And that's the house I grew up in, just so you know.
KAREN DUFFIN: Oh, right.
DAD: So that was my bedroom window.
JAD: This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home.
KAREN DUFFIN: He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen.
KAREN DUFFIN: Good old Aberdeen, I forgot how much ...
JAD: On a potato farm.
KAREN DUFFIN: He loves to talk about the farm. Like, he thinks we should all live on a farm.
DAD: It's pretty cool.
KAREN DUFFIN: So we were talking one day, and he mentions very casually as if it's 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: [laughs] Really? That's what he—this was his parenthetical?
KAREN DUFFIN: 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. [laughs]
KAREN DUFFIN: He was only three or four at the time.
DAD: Very, very tall.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 were prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America ever.
KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah, me neither.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: So okay, yeah so that was the first time ...
KAREN DUFFIN: So after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historian.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Kathy Kirkpatrick.
KAREN DUFFIN: Because I wanted to know was this just an Aberdeen thing?
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: No. Like, you were talking about Idaho.
KAREN DUFFIN: She told me that in Idaho alone ...
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: There's branch camps in Aberdeen and Blackfoot and Emmett and Holly Lake, Idaho Falls.
KAREN DUFFIN: There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches ...
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Tent cities. And Paul.
KAREN DUFFIN: ... rodeo grounds ...
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Dormitories.
KAREN DUFFIN: ... high school gyms.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Sugar City.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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: At the maximum, we had over 371,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians and 5,000 Japanese.
KAREN DUFFIN: Almost half a million people.
JAD: Oh my God!
KAREN DUFFIN: Why does nobody know this? I don't even—it doesn't even, like, strike a little chord that maybe I once learned about it in junior high school.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: No. This was not talked about. We just don't talk about it. We just don't—I think we don't—I don't know.
JAD: But today we are gonna talk about it. And not just because it's a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question.
[NEWS CLIP: Breaking news this noon, a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees.]
JAD: A question that ...
[NEWS CLIP: On top secret interrogation tactics.]
JAD: ... you know, with the torture reports ...
[NEWS CLIP: Bizarre, even sadistic treatments.]
JAD: ... and Abu Ghraib ...
[NEWS CLIP: Prisoners being abused by American soldiers.]
JAD: ... and Guantanamo Bay 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 have agreed to follow certain rules and one side doesn't, what do you do?
JAD: And the interesting thing was that 70 years ago this question was playing out in this really dramatic way in all of these towns across America.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 in to one camp in particular.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: Yeah. So I went and interviewed a bunch of people—guards, prisoners, locals, from Aliceville, and ...
THOMAS SWEET: It was quite a day.
KAREN DUFFIN: That's Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me that the day that the prisoners came, so a thousand of them came at first, and the police were like, "Nobody is allowed on the street," but of course ...
THOMAS SWEET: When word got out that the first trainload was coming, everybody rushed out on the street.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The day the train come in there wasn't supposed to be any townspeople. But of course there was.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Everybody was out.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The road was lined with kids from three years old up to people 70 years old.]
KAREN DUFFIN: So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: So we all climbed the lumber pile so that we could see them when they got off the train.]
KAREN DUFFIN: So everybody's super nervous because they have these images in their head.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: In my mind, just like a lot of people in Aliceville, they didn't know what kind of devils was gonna get off of that train. Guys with horns on their heads.]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They were supposed to be the elite.]
[NEWS CLIP: So-called Nazi supermen.]
KAREN DUFFIN: The Nazi supermen, right? So the train pulls up.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They stopped right on the main highway.]
KAREN DUFFIN: Doors open, and then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: And they were marching with that German march.]
KAREN DUFFIN: And they're singing their military songs in German.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Tell us about what it was like, what you thought when they got off the train. What did they look like? Did they have on uniforms?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Oh, yes.]
KAREN DUFFIN: When you listen to the oral histories, it's really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people in Aliceville.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: The people of Aliceville were scared to death.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I didn't know whether I was gonna be mad at them when they first come in or what, but when I seen they were just a bunch of whipped kids ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: There was a feeling of—of concern in our hearts for them.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: When I seen them they was nothing but a bunch of young kids.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: How young they were.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Haggard looking and washed up and beat.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Wounded. And some of them had maggots—oh, just gruesome!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: You could tell they'd been through a rough time.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: It was awful for us.]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: And in one room they crowded 700 people. You couldn't even sit. There was no toilet, of course. We had only tin boxes. We all were wet, all soaked with urine. It was awful. It was an awful trip.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: And you kind of had to feel sorry for them.]
KAREN DUFFIN: But 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."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 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 DUFFIN: Okay, 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 DUFFIN: 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.
[ARCHIVE 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 DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Prisoners are entitled to the same quality of rations, clothing and living quarters as are afforded our own troops.]
KAREN DUFFIN: And then there's rules about medical attention, labor.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: While the Geneva Convention says yes, you can use people for labor ...
KAREN DUFFIN: Kathy Kirkpatrick again.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: ... you also should be paying people for labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day.]
KAREN DUFFIN: So the Geneva Conventions are this attempt to kind of civilize the most uncivilized thing, which is war.
ARNOLD KRAMER: You see, the First World War was so horrific.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: So the Geneva Conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right.
ARNOLD KRAMER: Because people just couldn't fathom another war to end wars.
THOMAS SWEET: We were well-trained in the Geneva Convention.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: Which sounds kind of basic. But for somebody like Hans, who's stepping off this train and wondering how is he gonna be treated ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: It was—I should say it was really a sort of heaven.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: When they got into—the barracks had all been laid out.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Barracks were fresh and clean.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They had towels and shaving equipment for each one of them on each one's bunk.]
KAREN DUFFIN: The prisoners washed up, and then the guards opened up the cafeteria.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Fetholter: Then we got to eat good things.]
KAREN DUFFIN: This is Walter Fetholter, he was another prisoner at Aliceville.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Fetholter: 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, then I think on peanut butter. [laughs]]
KAREN DUFFIN: And here's the funny thing. Like, as you look into this, you start to realize that we're not just following the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law, we're going above and beyond. And according to Hans, what started out as a great thing, getting all this food, ended up to be kind of a problem.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: The boys came to me every day. "Please tell them we don't want to have so much ham." And the sergeant came to me who heard that and said, "Don't tell the captain that you are going to throw it away. No, no, no, no, no. Take it and make a hole in the sand and put it in the sand."]
KAREN DUFFIN: So they buried the ham.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: And a lot of it. We buried a lot of the ham because we didn't know what to do with it.]
ROBERT: Wow!
KAREN DUFFIN: And they also didn't like corn, but they kept getting corn, and so they buried corn. And then they'd get caught because corn starts growing.
JAD: [laughs]
KAREN DUFFIN: So everyone's like, "Wait a minute!"
ROBERT: Very bad corn hiding!
KAREN: Within two months, they have an orchestra. Within a year, they have three orchestras.
JAD: This is POW-led orchestras?
KAREN DUFFIN: Yes. Yes.
JAD: And so they're being given instruments?
KAREN DUFFIN: They're making instruments, the locals are donating instruments, the YMCA is giving them instruments.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]
KAREN DUFFIN: They open a school.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]
KAREN DUFFIN: You can learn anything from pottery to, like, mathematics, almost any language you want to learn.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: They had a newspaper. Their newspaper was called The Fenced Guest, and it had, like, poetry.
JAD: The Fenced Guest!
KAREN DUFFIN: Right? They also did a lot of theatrical productions.
KATHY KIRKPATRICK: And sometimes there were regular art shows.
KAREN DUFFIN: So this is where things get a little bit strange.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ellen Wanders: On December 18, there was another art exhibition.]
KAREN DUFFIN: This is a woman named Ellen Wanders, whose father was a POW at the camp. And here she's reading from his diary.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ellen Wanders: December 12. Der Führer—that means Hitler—had sent $12,572 to open the art exhibition in Camp V.]
JAD: Okay, wait. She's saying that, wait, Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing?
KAREN DUFFIN: Yep.
JAD: While—during—while we're fighting Hitler, he's sending money?
KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah.
JAD: While we're fighting Hitler.
KAREN DUFFIN: While we're fighting Hitler.
JAD: That's really strange.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]
KAREN DUFFIN: Um, okay. So ...
JAD: So okay, 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 DUFFIN: 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."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: A lot of them prisoners worked on farms down there, picking cotton, peanuts.]
KAREN DUFFIN: So some of the farmers would bring them in the house for lunch. They would drink with them.
THOMAS SWEET: They were drunk. [laughs]
KAREN DUFFIN: There's some really funny stories of, like ...
THOMAS SWEET: It was probably moonshine.
KAREN DUFFIN: ... the prisoners getting drunk with the farmers, and then they get in trouble because they come home late.
THOMAS SWEET: [laughs]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: Oh yeah. I mean, not a lot but it definitely happened. So as these prisoners are out in the community and 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Now to the editorial room of the American Journal and Walter Winchell.]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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. He spoke like he was on a telegram. "In Washington, a reporter—" and he spoke in this funny nasal voice.
KAREN DUFFIN: Oh my God, that's exactly what it sounds like! [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: A radio dispatch from France, dated ...]
KAREN DUFFIN: So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Winchell just starts to rant about it.
[ARCHIVE 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 DUFFIN: And he would do this week after week.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: We coddlers over here won't have any Nazis to capture and fatten up on steaks, butter, ham and bacon or chopped chicken liver.]
KAREN DUFFIN: People start writing articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe. Citizens start flooding the War Department with letters.
[ARCHIVE 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 DUFFIN: 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 in a box underneath the kite with a string that—down to the ground. And they handed the string to one of the—one of the 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 DUFFIN: Add to that, we don't have enough men to guard a lot of these camps. So the prisoners are starting to get more and more control of the camp.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The prisoners had the run of the camp.]
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: If you had been drafted but you didn't—you weren't ideologically ...
ROBERT: I see.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 Harless, and he's saying, "You're coddling them."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Congressman Harless of Arizona called the Nazi prisoners in the United States pampered and privileged.]
KAREN DUFFIN: And on the other side, you have the guy who's now running the prisoner of war program, Archer Lerch, and he's basically saying, no.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Archer Lerch: We do not coddle them.]
KAREN DUFFIN: He says, "We're just following the Geneva Conventions." And the reasons that he gave was the same reason that Joe Biden would give almost 60 years later.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Biden: There's a reason why we sign these treaties, to protect my son in the military.]
ROBERT: We torture them, they'll torture us.
KAREN DUFFIN: Reciprocity
[ARCHIVE 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 DUFFIN: One problem, though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944 ...
[NEWS CLIP: Unarmed and defenseless American prisoners fell to the machine guns of our enemies.]
KAREN DUFFIN: ... news breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany, are gunned down—after they surrendered.
[NEWS CLIP: Four weeks later their frozen bodies, hands and ankles bound, were found where they fell.]
KAREN DUFFIN: We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany. And we find misery. Nothing like Aliceville.
[NEWS CLIP: American prisoners of war report inhuman hospital conditions.]
KAREN DUFFIN: Walter Winchell gets back on the airwaves.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Attention, citizens of the United States ...]
KAREN DUFFIN: He says look, reciprocity hasn't worked. Our generosity ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Has not been reciprocated, and our boys were not treated the same.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Prisoners of war have been protected as much by our dictate as by the one-sided Geneva Convention rules.]
KAREN DUFFIN: And a few months later, things get even worse.
[NEWS CLIP: It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.]
KAREN DUFFIN: We start going into concentration camps.
[NEWS CLIP: Here's the incredible truth that man had indeed sunk below the level of animal bestiality.]
KAREN DUFFIN: And we start seeing what the Germans have done, what the Nazis have done.
[NEWS 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 DUFFIN: 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, you know, anything we do to these guys at this point they deserve. And we've also realized 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 that we decide yeah, we're gonna stick to the Geneva Conventions. Archer Lerch, 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 DUFFIN: Yeah.
ARNOLD KRAMER: I think that most people associated with the prison camp experience ...
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 we probably would have done this anyway.
[NEWS CLIP: But 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 DUFFIN: This is David Goldfield. He's a historian at UNC-Charlotte.
DAVID GOLDFIELD: Now that's the ideal. But no. I mean, you only have to look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: These people look all right. The mailman, the farmer, they all look pretty much like the folks back home.]
DAVID GOLDFIELD: The major reason? Race.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 ...
JAD: David told us that he's looked at the historical documents and he thinks that German laws against the Jews were essentially ...
DAVID GOLDFIELD: ... copied from the Mississippi Black codes.
JAD: We couldn't confirm that they were literally copied, but there are similarities. And a bunch of official Nazi documents from that time praised Southern race laws.
DAVID GOLDFIELD: So there was already a connection between the American South and Nazi Germany.
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 DUFFIN: That's Paul Springer. He's a military historian.
PAUL SPRINGER: Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: And he says very simply that with prisoners of war, it's because we had a rule.
PAUL SPRINGER: Governing international law.
KAREN DUFFIN: 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 DUFFIN: 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.
JAD: It does kind of make you think back to February of 2002.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: Good afternoon. I have an announcement to make. President Bush today has decided 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's 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?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: So Ari, what you're telling us is that the Taliban prisoners, detainees at Guantanamo, will not get any more protections than they already are given under the Geneva Convention. What you seem to be telling us is that the Al-Qaeda detainees will get fewer.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: No. There's no change in the protections they will be provided. They're—they have always been treated consistent with the principles of 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.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: 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? And isn't that a big—a big motivation here, to make sure that US soldiers get the same kind of treatment?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: 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. David—David will get one more and then we'll go around. Go ahead.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: Wasn't this an important concern? I understand what the expectations are, but it was important for this administration to be able to say, look, we want to be able to protect our soldiers in similar situations down the line. And if we don't afford privileges under the Geneva Convention, then our soldiers could be in peril?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: David, I was not in the NSC deliberations where various issues were raised. And so I really—there's no way I can accurately answer that question. Go ahead. David?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: What about 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?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: The terms of the Geneva Convention apply to all. And those terms speak for themselves. Okay, thank you everybody.]
JAD: Thank you to reporter Karen Duffin and also producer Kelsey Padgett. This was such a long and involved reporting process. Big props to them. Special thanks to Sam Love, the filmmaker who collected all those Aliceville oral histories.
ROBERT: And to John Gillum and Mary Bess Paluzzi, current and former Aliceville Museum directors.
JAD: Ruth Beaumont Cook, who wrote a great book about the Aliceville camp.
ROBERT: And Nancy Weymack for research help.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Thanks for listening.
[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Andrew Viñales. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]
[LISTENER: Hi, this is Sven calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
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