Radiolab - The War on Our Shore

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Foreign enemies have seldom brought war to U.S. soil… right? In this episode from 2017, we tell you strange stories of foreign enemies landing on our shore. From bombs floating across the country without a sound (or even a discussion), to Nazi prisoners of war leading placid lives in towns nationwide, listen to how war quietly wormed its way into the heartland of the United States. Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]   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.

Hey, flew a Miller. I am just popping on here real quick before today's show to say, OYEMG! O-M-G, OYEMG! A little show called More Perfect is coming back. More perfect, of course, is the podcast that OG Radio Lab host, Chad Abumrod co-created with Kelsey Patchett and Susie Lektemberg. And it's a show that takes on stories about the Supreme Court, in surprisingly fresh and human and sound-rich ways. And now it is coming back with a brand new season and a brand new team.

The old team has passed the torch to host Julia Lengoria, 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 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. 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 us way down at the the bottom go go see what's going on there if you never did that's more Perfect, I'm really excited. I will be listening and I hope you do too 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 head we're diving headfirst into the war. You've probably heard the most about world war two To hear two stories. You've likely never heard But haven't had 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's called The War on Our Shore. I'm Robert Crowley, this is Radio Lab and today we're going to travel back in time to World War 2, which is a war that has been chronicled and re re-cronicle, and reimagined,

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 in American soil, that were utterly surprising to us, that I'm bending you have never heard. And we're gonna call today's show, The War on Our Shore.

It's a start. My name is Peter Langstanton. My name is Nick Faragga. Well, we're gonna get a story from two reporters. I'm a freelance filmmaker, freelance reporter, writer, slash radio producer, too many slashes. Should we start with air currents or like, what would you mean?

I mean, I want to start with, could we go to Thermopolis, Wyoming? Cause that was one of the first really well-documented landings. Thermopolis, Wyoming. Well, it's the first week of December 1944. 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. And there are three miners at a place called the Highline Cole Mine, which is outside of Thermop miners at a place called the Highline Colmine, 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. But above them, there's sort of this fluttering white circle just floating there. They made sense of it by thinking it was a parachute test. They get in their car and they chase after it until eventually they lose sight of it in the

darkness. Right around that same time, about 500 miles away in Colorado, 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. In Wyoming, a nine-year-old boy playing in his front yard, here's an explosion. All throughout the winter of 1944, in Burwell, Nebraska, the strange parachute things.

Native residents hear a loud explosion. Just start appearing in the skies all over America. Napa, California, lame deer Montana, 20 or so miles from downtown Detroit, over farms, no golees, Arizona, slipping behind hills, rigby Idaho, everybody who sees these things. All of them have different explanations

for what they think they're witnessing. The US military sends out an APB to local police station saying we need information. What are these things? Testing, testing. There we go. Okay. Whoa.

Enter Sheriff Warren Hyde. My name is Marion Hyde. Warren Hyde actually died in 1989. So I'm the oldest son of Sheriff Hyde. We talked to his son. He had a presence about him that he kind of commanded a room. Sheriff Hyde was a big guy. Black wavy hair brought at the shoulder, narrow at the hip.

Statson, gone on his hip. One day, from what I understand, a dry farmer called him. Said there's a strange contraption in my field. Some kind of balloon parachute looking thing floating around. So he jumped in the car and went hell-bent for leather out into the blue creek area. There's this crazy story where he rushes out to this farm to investigate.

Hopped out of his car, Ripsoff is belt with his 38 pistol because a man can run with a 38 pistol on his waist. And took off after the balloon. 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. Oh, wow. Paper white, 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, 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 fucking 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, back to the first side. Back to the first side. And they started to float around the field. He kept wrestling this balloon for a long time. He's nauseous from being spun around on this balloon.

His visions getting blurry. His hands are becoming raw from the rope, but he feels this like sense of duty. He knew that the government wanted one of these balloons. His territory, so he's got to take it down. That's right. He finally lets himself free fall, so he can grab it again. So his weight will jerk the balloon to the ground.

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. And he hooks his arm around this root. Then he was able to hold the balloon without being carried into the air. So we actually captured the thing? Yeah.

J.A.V.R.R. wrote him a personal letter of thanks. They end up shipping all of the evidence off to the Aberdeen military research facility, where they had gathered all this different evidence from all over the country. And they were able to tell that apparently this bomb matched known characteristics of Japanese bombs. So it's Japanese, yeah. 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. There was even speculation at one point that maybe they were coming from Japanese internment camps

in North America. Ah. Then two days before Christmas, 1944, in Alaska, a native Alaskan trapper tracks one down. And it has two sandbags still attached to the bottom most ring. And that turns out to be the key to the mystery. Sand? Yeah. Well, not just sand, there's a lot in there. My name is Elisa Bergzlin, and I am a forensic geologist.

We called up Elisa to help us understand this next part. What happened was the sand from the balloons was sent to Washington DC to some scientists at the US Geological Survey. Right away. They discover that there's no coral. So, you know, finding no coral, you know, you're talking cold water now. They look at the diatoms. Marine, bivouc,

microscopic fossils, mullisks, minerals. By compiling all of these different characteristics. Put that all together. Where would you find these diatoms? These minerals that you wouldn't find coral, though all those different pieces of information. All together,

the geologists are able to determine that there are two or perhaps three beaches in the world that fit all of these qualifications 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 you can get that kind of specific from sand? Yup

and why would the Japanese choose to deliver bomb payloads by balloon? that's a strange choice and particularly after Pearl Harbor choose to deliver bomb payloads by balloon. It's a strange choice. And particularly after Pearl Harbor. You know, it's like they win over, you know, they can do planes. Yeah, I got planes. Yeah, why have it lived?

Well, now it can be told, history and the making. It grew directly out of the Do Little Raid. Back in April of 1942, United States Navy aircraft carrier Hornet streams westward across the Pacific. Jimmy Do Little and his raiders took off from an aircraft carrier, deep in the western Pacific. And dropped bombs on Tokyo and Yokohama and Kobe

and a number of other cities across Japan. The greatest surprise rate in the history of aerial warfare. Now, they didn't do a lot of damage physically, 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. Do a little bit over the Palace? I didn't realize that. Yeah, he went all the way downtown in Tokyo. Oh yeah, right over the city.

And so immediately after the Do Little Rade, in order went out, it was just find a way to bomb America. 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 Doe Little Rade. They didn't have aircraft carriers that could get their planes close enough to the U.S. mainland, but what they did have was the wind. Today we call this the jet stream. That name didn't come along until after the war. At that point we barely knew about the jet stream. But prior to enduring the war, the Japanese did extensive research into these winds. Okay, so in 19, 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 mists, pollen, insects,

all the way to North America within days. And after the duet little raid, they thought maybe if we were to release a bunch of balloons in just the right place at just the right time, maybe this jet stream of air could push these balloons across the Pacific Ocean. So this is Tetsuko Tanaka. She was interviewed in this independent documentary called On Paper Wings.

In 1944, she says she was a teenager when the Japanese military came to her school and basically turned it into a factory. She and hundreds of other school children were conscripted to begin making this special kind of paper out of Mulberrywood called Washi Handmeit Japanese traditional paper. This is Mahoshina, who now works at the Nobureto Institute in Japan. Huge amount of paper was required. Maho says that girls would work 12 hour days making thousands, tens of thousands of these sheets and gluing them together.

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. People from the Japanese side watching them take off said they looked like huge jellyfish swimming through a pale blue sky. These perfectly silent vehicles, the only sound was the rustling of the paper as they took off. How many were launched? From November 1944 to April 1945, they launched 9,000 balloons.

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 the Japanese calling card. And as the last tan bag is dropped, now only the central payload is left. This is audio from a declassified Navy instructional video made about these balloon bombs in 1945. In the event one of these units is found, do these two things to render at harmless? It explains to soldiers 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. Information can be a powerful tool. It can be a powerful tool for good and a

powerful tool for evil. This is Professor Mike Sweeney. And I'm a historian of wartime censorship. And he says that immediately after those first balloons landed. 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. Time and news week even picked it up. Saying, we're not sure what these are, but are these Japanese spies coming in on these balloons?

Is this a large-scale attack? What is going on? And then very shortly thereafter, just three days after those time in Newsweek articles, the Office of Censorship initiated a press blackout, this blackout on news. They sent out memos and telegraphs to all the major wire services. The UP, the AP and the INS, saying, keep any news of these Japanese balloons off the wires and out of print. 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. And why would they want to keep this secret? So the government's ideas about why balloon bombs should be censored in particularly army's ideas were number one to avoid panic. These things are instruments of terror, right? You can't be afraid of something you don't know exists. 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 bomb.

And what do the reporters think about this? They grubble sometimes, but they complied. Really? 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 on the Espionage Act. Furthermore, can you imagine what your listeners would do if you were the radio station identified as killing 100 American sailors? 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 9000 released virtually none caused any damage and certainly not any terror. Except for this one balloon. That's coming up. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crowich.

This is Radio Lab. We continue now with our story from reporter's Peter Langstatin and Nick Farago about the 9,000 or so balloon bombs that Japan sent to America in 1944 and 1945 that rained down on American soil and created nothing, really nothing happened, no damage, no terror, nothing. But then we get to this tiny little town called Bly. To me, there's no place like old Bly. Bly is this sleepy little logging town at the base of Gear Hard Mountain in South Central Oregon. A lot of pretty scenery.

And Korra Connor, who you just heard, was born and raised there. You know everybody in your, they're just like a big family out there. In the forties, when Korra was a young girl, there were about 700 people living there. Yeah, but we did all kinds of fun things. We had a fish fry up at Dog Lake.

Huge catfish fry up there. The whole town catfish fry. Up there, the whole town stayed all night, went back home the next day, and the winner of the canals would freeze over and we could have bonfire and ice-skating parties. It was a fun place to live. Can you tell me about the morning, was it a Sunday? Let's see what happened. I have to kind of think Saturday, I think. May 5th, that's all I can remember. Yep, that was May 5th. May 5th, 1945. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining bright. And the Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife, Elsie, who was five months pregnant with her first child.

Do him very well. Sunday school, I went to church, it took occasionally up there. They took their Sunday school class out for a picnic. There were five children that went along on that trip. Ages 11 to 14. And one of the kids, we called him Dickie. He had a crush on my sister who was 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 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 short day. And my day to work, the switchboard, which usually made me pretty angry, but it was my job. And she said, no, no way. Well, my sister didn't really want to go because she really wasn't encouraging this relationship too much. No. So Archie and Elsie and the five kids get back into the car.

They drove up to Geerhart Mountain. A couple of miles up a logging road they passed them for a service guy working on the road. They go a little further to where the road comes near a creek and Archie pulled the car around and parked the kids jumped out of the car and started running down toward the creek LC who was pregnant as I mentioned and she was feeling a bit car sick 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 up the fishing poles and the picnic baskets, etc. One of the children saw something on the ground, a large canvas, white gray balloon of some

kind spread out on the ground, called their other children to come have a look. The children and LC 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 LC Mitchell were killed instantly. The Forest Service guys down the road

were close enough to hear the blast. 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 up the fire with his bare hands. Hmm. over his prostrate wife beating up the fire with his bare hands. There's no wind. On our last day in Gly we went to visit the site where the bomb went off. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's just a chain, it's just a little fence-dough area.

It's a little pen. And there are these tall pine trees. Yeah, it's just huge cuts in the tree. Those are shrapnel cuts in the tree? Yeah, they still. This hasn't... It's not healed. You're in place.

Of course I didn't notice. I don't know what was going on. This is Korra Conner again. At the time she was at her job watching the switchboard when... The guy that was working up there for the Forest Service come 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. The naval base in Lakeview. And about a half an hour later, this big and posing military

guy comes in. He was all meadows and all, and he's full uniform, you know. And he must have made it. It seemed like an o' 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, you 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. He leaves and the word is trickling around spreading around town. 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. Pretty. There was a crowd outside screaming and yelling at me and 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 People yeah They know yeah, because blight's very They know, yeah. Because Blah is a very tiny place. I probably knew every one of them. I was about, you could imagine, the state I was in. And Mr. Patsky. Dickie's father, Dickie was the boy who had a crush on Coruscistor.

I can tell you exactly how he has dressed that day. He had on a red and black checkered hunting shirt, and his red hunting cap. At the time, all he knew was that his son was missing. He stood out there and he shook his fist, and he yelled, and he scared me to have to death. Threatening to come in, and all that. He says, you know what's going on happening.

Let us know what's happening. And I couldn't do anything. I sat there all day. It's 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. No. I never, never talked too much about it.

No. Within a day or so, the military told most of the town what actually happened that day. And then a short time after that, a big army truck, well, there was two big army trucks. They stopped right out in front of our house. We wondered what was going on. You know, your little town like that, anything different. Everybody goes to the window and makes a look. And here come...

Okay, this is softly 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 Puli Lake. The Japanese internment camp nearby. And she screamed and cried and prayed. 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 picture of 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 said, you can't go out there.

They'll throw rocks at you. I won'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 today's day, that picture is in my mind. And I prayed to the Lord to forgive the people that were doing that and try to accept it. There's no... nothing can make me accept what had happened. I thought that was the most horrible thing in the world people could do. A woman and a child 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. It's weird, like, it's a kind of weird scary symmetry to this whole thing, like the Japanese military was trying to create terror, right? Like, what they felt after too little. And so they wanted to make the situation where like bombs were falling silently from this guy, 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're trying to create. Right, but that's the problem. That's not a problem. Five is a sacrifice in war. What, is it five, six people? Yeah, that's right. There were 125 million people in America there. I think there actually might have been a little bit more than that.

Well, you can see what it would have been like, listen 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. Well, there might have been panic, but those kids wouldn't have talked on the balloon. That's the choice. Because they would have known, yeah. At the end of the war, the war department destroyed all of the evidence. They didn't want these any evidence of these balloons, um, just out there in general circulation. Huh.

This is one of those footnotes to the war that, you know, at the end of the war, just never, people, people forgot about something that they didn't know about anyway. Well, Ross, are there any more out there? It's estimated by the war department that of the 9,000 release, they thought that maybe 7 to 10% of the total would have survived the trans-Oceanic 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 recovery's stopped. And were they live like the one in Oregon? Or like if you touched them with a blow? Some of them were. Some of them were. Now here's the fascinating part.

October of 2014, I kid you not. Dave was ahead of me and he'd stopped and said, I think I thought it was a bomb. A couple of loggers. My name's Brad Senninger, and I have Steve Bridges. In Lumbi, British Columbia, who were doing some survey work, this is the middle of nowhere. Found the remnants of a Japanese balloon

that had been on the ground for 70 years. We definitely work in remote areas. And in general, we don't see much except trees in Iraq. But there are those odd special days where you see things that no one else gets to see. I tell you, if you're hiking, if you're out in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, watch where you step. Thank you to Peter Langstanton and to Nick Faragel for their reporting and extensive reporting. Yeah, big thanks to them. Big thanks to them. Also thanks to Ilana Sol, who's documentary on paper wings was a big source for us.

You heard those Japanese voices in the middle of the story that came from our documentary. Also we have original music 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. We're sad to report that since we first aired this episode, Professor Mike Sweeney passed away in 2022. Coming up next, we've got one more story about the war on our shores, and I've got to see this one is a real doozy. I remember when it was pitched, the entire staff just sat there, like, riveted.

That's coming up next. This is Radio Lab and today. Well 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 will notice that it hasn't ended. And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So where to start? I mean do you have a sense of where to start?

I feel like I could blame, well I can. I could blame this on my dad. And that's the house I grew up in, just so you know. Oh, right. Well that was my bedroom window. This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home. He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen. It all Aberdeen I forgot how much on a potato farm. He loves to talk about the farm like he thinks we saw live on a farm. On the garden. It's pretty cool. 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? Really? That's just parenthetical? Yeah, it was totally like, yeah, we're picking potatoes, and then yeah, the Nazi prisoners of war were helping us. Sort of remember how old I was just by how tall the guards were. They were very tall. He was only three or four at the time. Very, very tall. Do you know if there were like dozens of prisoners

or just like a handful? Oh, there was a bunch. I didn't even know there were prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America ever. Yeah, me neither. Oh, OK. Yeah, so that was the first. So after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historian, Kathy Kirkpatrick.

Because I wanted to know, was this just an Aberdeen thing? No. Like you were talking about Idaho. She told me in Idaho alone, there's branch camps in Aberdeen and Blackfoot and Emmett and Polylate. The Idaho Falls. There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches.

Tenth cities, in Paul, rodeo grounds, dormitories, high school gyms, sugar city. And this was the case all across the country. The only state that did not have prisoners of war was Vermont. Wow.

At the maximum, we had over 371,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians, and 5,000 Japanese. Almost half a million people. Oh my God. Oh, no. Nobody knows this. I don't even remember. It doesn't even strike a little cord

that maybe I once learned about it in junior high school. 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. But today, we are going to talk about it. We just don't, I think we don't, I don't know. But today we are going to talk about it. And not just because it's a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question. Breaking news this new and a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees

a question that, you know, with the torture reports and and Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, that we are still trying to answer today, which is when you capture an enemy soldier, take him out of the battle, out of the fight. How should you treat that person? And if both sides of agreed to follow certain rules, and one side doesn't? What do you do? 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. There were about 200 base camps that were huge. They were like up to 8,000 people. 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. 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. Well, it's like four times the size of the town. Yeah, so I went and interviewed a bunch of people, guards, prisoners, locals from Aliceville and... It was quite a town. Yeah, so I went and interviewed a bunch of people, guards, prisoners, locals from Aliceville and... It was quite a day. 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... When word got out that the first train load was coming, everybody rushed out on the street. The day the train came in, there wasn't supposed to be any townspeople, but of course there was. Everybody was out.

The road was lined with kids from three years old, up to people 70 years old. So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville. So we all climbed the lumber pile so that we could see them when they got off the train. So everybody's super nervous. Because they have these images in their head.

In my mind, just like a lot of people in Aliceville, they didn't know what kind of devil we was going to get off of that train. Guys were horned on their head. So these prisoners that were sent to Aliceville were actually part of Rommel's Africa Corps. And these guys were the most feared of Hitler's fighters. They were supposed to be the elite. So called Nazi Superman.

The Nazi Superman, right? So the train pulls up. They stopped right on the main highway. Doors open, and then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out. And they were marching with that German march. And they're singing their military songs in German. Oh yeah, yeah, it's all the thing I can't be sorry. Tell us about what it was like when what you thought when I got off the train. What did they look like? Did they have a beautiful? Oh yes.

When you listen to the oral histories, it's really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people in Aliceville. That people of Aliceville was gay today. I didn't know what I was going to be mad at them when they first came in, or what, but when I seen it, it were just a bunch of whipped kids. There was a feeling of a concern in our hearts for them. When I seen them, there was nothing but a bunch of young kids. How young they were.

Haggard looking and washed out and beat. We ended, and some of them, they. It's, oh, just gruesome. You could tell they've been through a rough time. It was, it was awful for us. 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. And in one room, they crowded 700 people. You couldn't even sit. There was no toilet, of course. We had only 10 boxes. We all were wet full, soaked with urine.

It was an orphan trip. And you kind of had to feel sorry for. But on the other hand, and you hear this too in the oral histories, the people in Alice Fill are thinking these are Nazis. These are the men who are killing our sons. You know, I had three brothers. I was these at the same time. So we didn't like them. That's just the way we felt. Okay, so there's that question in people's mind.

And this is playing out all across the country. Here's the enemy way we fail. 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. In practice? 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. 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. Oh, it was a series of do's and don'ts.

That's a story in Arnold Kramer. He's a professor at Texas A&M. Some of the rules he says are pretty basic. That women and children should be protected. So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food. But prisoners are entitled to the same quality ration, clothing, and living quarters as are afforded our own troops.

And then there's rules about medical attention, labor. Well, did Geneva Convention says yes, you can use people for labor? Kathy Kirkpatrick again. You also should be paying people for labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day. So the Geneva Convention's are this attempt to kind of civilize the most uncivilized thing which is war. You see, the first world war was so horrific.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in POW camps. There were no real regulations with regard to prisoners. Sides did almost anything they wanted. So the Geneva Conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right. Because people just couldn't fathom another war to end wars. We were well trained in the Geneva Convention. 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 Convention were drilled into

their heads. They had lectures, the rules were posted in the Recall and in the officers club. We had to, the prisoners had to be treated the same as you would your own fellow soldiers. Which sounds kind of basic, but for somebody like Hans who's stepping off this train and wondering how is he going to be treated? It was, I should say, it was really a sort of heaven. When they got in to the barracks, it all been laid out. The barracks were fresh, clean. They had towels and shaving equipment for each one on each one's bunk.

The prisoners washed up and then the guards opened up the cafeteria. Then we got to eat good things. This is Walter Feldtulter, he was another prisoner at Aliceville. We got a piece of white bread, of you American white bread, and we got peanut butter. I didn't know what it, what peanut was. And it chased it, wonderful, wonderful. It was the best dinner I ever had. And I always, when I think on good times, then I think on peanut butter. And here's the funny thing. 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. The voice came to me every day. Please tell him, 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. So they buried the hand. And a lot of it. We buried a lot of the hand because we didn't know what to do with it.

And they also didn't like corn, but they kept getting corn. And so they buried corn. And then they get caught because corn starts growing. So everyone's like, wait a minute. Very bad corn hiding. Within two months they have an orchestra. Within a year they have three orchestras. This is a POW lead orchestra.

Yes, yes. And that's so they're being given instruments? They're making instruments, the locals are donating instruments, the YMCA is giving them instruments. They open a school. You can learn anything from pottery to mathematics, almost any language you want to learn. They set up correspondence programs with the local universities, you could get credit. They had soccer games just about every day. They drew big crowds.

They had a newspaper, their newspaper was called The Fence to Guest, and it had like poetry. They also did a lot of theatrical productions and sometimes they were regular art shows. So this is where things get a little bit strange. On December 18th, there was another exhibition. This is a woman named Ellen Vonder, whose father was a POW at the camp, and here she's reading from his diary. December 12th, the fewer, that means, Hitler,

had sent $12,572 to open the art exhibition in Camp V. Okay, wait, she's saying that wait, Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing? Yep. While we're fighting Hitler, he's sending money. Yeah. While we're fighting Hitler. While we're fighting Hitler, he's sending money. Yeah. While we're fighting Hitler. While we're fighting Hitler. That's really strange.

We all the way to... I found a girl in England That's family and to her, yeah. Um, okay, so... So, okay, with Hitler's Christmas gift, Yeah. To the art show, In the hand,

In the bands, and all that stuff. Did people in the outside They came know what was going on inside? 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. A lot of them prisoners worked on farms down there,

picking cotton, peanuts. So some of the farmers would bring them in the house for lunch. They would drink with them. They were drunk. They. There's some really funny stories of like, there's probably moonshine.

The prisoners getting drunk with the farmers, and then they get in trouble because they come home late. One of the biggest things that the word apartment 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. Does anybody fall in love with anybody? 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, where it 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 may get pissed.

Especially this radio guy, Walter Winchell, who sort of made this his cause They call him the rush limbaugh of world war two. See that well known Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America He spoke like he was on the telegram Why can't you want to go? I want to go who we have to go Why would he have to go? And he's spoken as funny nasal, but oh my god. That's exactly what it sounds like So in any case when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Wintel just starts to rant about it. The United States Army caters to the Nazis as though they were kings.

They get more food than our soldiers get. Polies, radios, luxuries, and all sorts of leniency beyond imagination. And he would do this week after week. We cuddle his over here, we'll have any Nazis to capture and fatten up on states but are ham and bacon or chap chicken live us. People start writing articles in the New York Times that Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, citizens start flooding the war department with letters. I know, sir, that your YMCA war prisoner's aid does all it can to make Nazi war prisoners

over here comfortable. And in the meantime, according to Thomas Sweet, inside the camp, some of these prisoners are starting to get kind of bold. For a couple of nights, I cut out swastikers and took a kite and was flying the kite and had these swastikers in a box underneath the kite with a string that down to the ground. And they handed the string to one of the guards and said, pull this string and when they pull the string, the trap door opened on the gadget they had made. And all these swastika started falling all over the camp

and in Aliceville too. And the townspeople started calling the base mad about that. Had 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. The prisoners had the run of the camp. 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. Who was not a Nazi inside of these camps? If you had been drafted, but you weren't ideologically. Oh, you weren't in the IC. So the perception that's 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, alright, what are the arguments? And here's kind of how it went. You have this congressman on one side, Richard Harliss, and he's saying, you're coddling them.

Congressman Harliss on Arizona called an acting prisoner of the United Stateslis, and he's saying you're cuddling them. Congressman Harlis and Arizona called the Nazi President of the United States, President and Pavilion. And on the other side, you have the guy who's now running the Prisoner of War program, Archer Lurch, and he's basically saying no. Wait, you're not cuddling them. 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. And there's a reason why we sign these treaties to protect my son in the military. We are tortured them, they'll torture us. Rest of the property. 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. Case anybody forgets it.

That's the reason. One problem though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944. Unarmed and defenseless American prisoners fell to the machine guns of our enemies. News breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany, are gunned down after they surrendered.

We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany and refine misery. Nothing like Aliceville. American prisoners of war report in human hospital conditions. Walter Winchill gets back on the airways. Attention, Mr. Prime Minister of the United States. He says, look, reciprocity has not worked. Our generosity has not been reciprocated, and our boys were not treated the same.

Prisoners of the world have been protected as much by our red tape as by the one-sided Geneva Condentary Room. And a few months later, things get even worse. It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. We start going into concentration camps. The incredible truth that man had indeed sunk below the level of animal bestiality. And we start seeing what the Germans have done, what the Nazis have done. 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. 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 going to stick to the Geneva conventions.

Archer Alert 2 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 going to let the enemy decide who we are as a country. And that argument stuck? Yeah. I think that most people associated with the prison camp experience... That's history and Arnold Kramer again.

...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. For 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. There's a great belief that we have a special mission and we have a special history. This is David Goldfield, he's a historian at UNC Charlotte. Now that's the ideal.

But no, I mean, you only have to look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. 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? They look like us.

These people look alright. The mailman, the farmer, they all look pretty much like the folks back home. The major reason, race. The Germans were white, they seemed familiar. 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. David told us that he's looked at the historical documents

and he thinks the German laws against the Jews were essentially copied from the Mississippi black codes. 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. So there was already a connection between the American South and Nazi Germany.

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? 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. That's Paul Springer. He's a military historian. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. 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. It's not a fair comparison. For the case of why you treat the German POWs better, well, because the 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? And he says very simply that with prisoners of war, it's because we had a rule. Governing international law. Like the Geneva Convention.

There's no similar law at that time that says what you can and can't do towards your civilian populations. 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. 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 nitpicky, 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. Does kind of make you think back to February of 2002. Good afternoon. I have an announcement to make.

When 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' commitment to the principles of the Geneva Convention, while recognizing that the Convention civilly does not cover every situation in which people may be captured or detained by military forces, as we see in Afghanistan today. 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're seeing to be telling us is that the al-Qaeda detainees will get fewer. No, there's no change in the protections they will be provided. They have always been treated consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention, which means they will be treated well. If you are looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement, it is that they will not receive stipends when 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 The concern the debate here was about if you don't do it here Then US soldiers could be mistreated abroad is not correct. And so is not a big a big motivation here The US holders get the same kind of treatment. 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 pull back. Hold it. David?

We'll get it. David will get one more, and then we'll go around. Go ahead. The big point 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 know what we're probably just under the Geneva Convention, then our soldiers are going to be in peril.

David, I was not in the NSC, the Liberations were various issues were raised, so really there's no way I can accurately answer that question. Go ahead ahead David. Forces, they don't, they often do not wear uniforms, they often do not carry their weapons out really. If they are captured, they wouldn't be preserved. Turn the genie convention apply to all and those terms speak for themselves. Okay, thank you everybody. Thank you to reporter Karen Duffin and also producer Kelsey Paget. This is 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, and to John Gillum and Mary Best Palutzi, current and former Aliceville museum directors. Ruth Beaumont Cook who wrote a great book

about the Aliceville camp and Nancy Waymac for a research help. I'm Chad Ibu Murad. I'm Robert Kroelich. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abberrod and is edited by Sorn Wheeler. I am Robert Kroich. Thanks for listening. Eddie Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Pasco, T.R.S., Sindhu Nyanasanban Dhan, Matt Q.T., Anime Q.N. Alex Mason, Sarah Curry, and a Rascwed Pass, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinyales.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Kriger, and Natalie Medleton. Hi, this is Finn calling from Stores, Connecticut. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. for radio lab was provided by the Alfred Peace Lone Foundation.