The War on Our Shore
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey, it's Lulu Miller. I am just popping on here real quick before today's show to say, Oy yay MG. O-M-G. Oy yay MG. A little show called More Perfect.

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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 diving headfirst 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. Wait, you're listening? Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. Rewind.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab. And today we're going to travel back in time to World War II, which is a war that has been chronicled and re-chronicled and 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 on American soil.

that were utterly surprising to us, that I'm betting you have never heard. And we're going to call today's show The War on Our Shore. And to start... My name is Peter Lang Stanton. My name is Nick Farago. Well, we're going to 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? I mean, I want to start with, can we go to Thermopolis, Wyoming? Because 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 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. But above them, there's sort of this fluttering white circle just floating there. They made sense of it by thinking it was a parachutist. 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 hears an explosion. All throughout the winter of 1944. In Burwell, Nebraska. These 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, Nogales, Arizona, and slipping behind hills, Rigby, Idaho. Everybody who sees these things, all of them have different explanations for what they think they're witnessing. The U.S. military sends out an APB to local police stations saying, we need information. What are these things? Try again.

Testing, testing. Ah, there we go. He fixed it. Okay. Cool. 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, broad at the shoulder, narrow at the hip. Stetson, gun on his hip. And one day... From what I understand, a dry farmer called him. Said there's this 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. 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. 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...

A gust of wind comes by. Lifts him up off the ground. Like he was papered off. 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...

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. 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 vision's 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.

It's 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 he actually captured the thing? Yeah. J. Edgar Hoover wrote him a personal letter of thanks. They end up shipping all of the evidence off to the Aberdeen military base.

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 or

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, it's not just sand. There's a lot in there. My name is Elisa Bergsland, 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, D.C., to some scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. Right away, they discover that there's no coral. So, you know, finding no coral. Yeah.

You know, you're talking cold water now. They look at the diatoms. Marine bivalves. Microscopic fossils. Mollusks. 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? All those different pieces of information. All together. The geologists are able to determine that there are

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? Yep. And why would the Japanese choose to deliver...

bomb payloads by balloon. It's a strange choice. Particularly after Pearl Harbor. We already know they can do planes. Yeah, they got planes. Yeah, why balloons? Well... Now it can be told. History in the making. It grew directly out of the Doolittle Raid. Back in April of 1942... United States Navy aircraft carrier Hornet steams westward across the Pacific. Jimmy Doolittle 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. 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. Doolittle went over the palace? I didn't realize that. He went all the way downtown in Tokyo. 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.

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. 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 and during the war, the Japanese did extensive research into these winds. 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.

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, 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 schoolchildren

were conscripted to begin making this special kind of paper out of mulberry wood called... This is Maho Shina, who now works at the Noburito Institute in Japan. 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 a Japanese calling card.

And as the last sandbag 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 it 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...

Time and Newsweek even picked it up. Is this a large-scale attack? What is going on? And then... Very shortly thereafter... Just three days after those Time and 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 U.S. 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, and particularly the 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 bombs. And what did the reporters think about this? They grumbled sometimes, but they complied. Really? Yep. 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 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 9,000 released, virtually none caused any damage and certainly not any terror. Except for this one balloon. That's coming up.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. We continue now with our story from reporters Peter Langstanton 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.

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 Gearhart Mountain in south-central Oregon. A lot of pretty scenery. And Cora Connor, who you just heard, was born and raised there. You know everybody, and they're just like a big family out there. In the 40s, when Cora 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 stayed all night, went back home the next day. In the winter, the canals would...

freeze over and we'd have bonfire and ice skating parties. It was a fun place to live. Can you tell me about...

the morning was it a sunday let's see what happened i was trying to think saturday i think may 5th that's all i can remember yep that was may 5th may 5th 1945 but 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 knew him very well sunday school i went to church 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 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 and 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 that 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. Yeah, Dickie, yeah. No. So Archie and Elsie and the five kids get back into the car. And they drove up to Gearheart Mountain. 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. 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, and 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, 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 the other children to come have a look, and

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. 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. There's another wind. On our last day in Bly, 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 a little fenced off area. It's a little pen. And there are these tall pine trees. Yeah, it's just huge cuts in the tree. Was there shrapnel cuts in the tree? Yeah. Yeah, they still... This hasn't... Has not healed. Eerie place. Of course, I didn't know what was going on.

This is Cora Connor 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, you know, big imposing military guy comes in. He was all...

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, you 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. 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 soon, 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 going to tell us what's happened. And... People, yeah. They know, yeah. Because Belize is 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. Dickie's father. Dickie was the boy who had a crush on Cora's sister. 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 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. 16. You know, it really, really hurt.

tore me apart. I was just in a complete fog for days. I never talked too much about it. 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, and they stopped right out in front of our house. We wondered what was going on. You know, your little town like that, anything different, 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. The Japanese internment camp nearby. 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 prayed to the Lord.

to forgive the people that were doing that and to try to... I can't accept it. Nothing can make me accept what happened. I thought that was the most horrible thing in the world people could do. A woman and a 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.

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? Mm-hmm. Like, what they felt after Doolittle. And so they wanted to make the 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'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. There were 125 million people in America then. 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 tugged 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 any evidence of these balloons 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. Ross, are there any more out there?

It's estimated by the War Department that of the 9,000 released, they thought that maybe 7 to 10 percent of the total would have survived the trans-oceanic crossing and arrived in North America. That's 900. 300 are confirmed as

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. Were they live, like the one in Oregon? If you touched them, would they blow up? 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 stopped and said...

I think I found a bomb. A couple of loggers... Yeah, my name's Brad Simlinger. My name's Dave Bridgman. ...in Lumbee, British Columbia, who were doing some survey work... You know, 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 and rock, but...

You know, 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 Lang Stanton and to Nick Farago for their reporting and extensive reporting. 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. You heard those Japanese voices in the middle of the story that came from her documentary 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 say, 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. Yep, that's who you think it is. The Grimmest Mud. The Hello Kitty keychain. Barbie herself.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab, and today... What we're going to tell you is an old story. It's about 70 years old, but it's not really as old as that at all, because you will notice that it hasn't ended.

And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin. Yeah. Okay. All right. 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. No, 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. Good old Aberdeen. I forgot how much it was. On a potato farm. He loves to talk about the farm. Like he thinks we should all live on a farm. In the garden.

That's pretty cool. So we were talking one day. Let the record show. 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? It was 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 didn't 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. Okay, 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 Holly Lake. Idaho Falls. There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches. Tent cities. And halls. 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. Why does nobody know this? It doesn't even strike a little chord 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. And not just because it's a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question. Breaking news this noon, a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees. A question that, you know, with the torture reports and Abu Ghraib, 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? And if both sides have agreed to follow certain rules and one side doesn't, what do you do? And the interesting thing is 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. Wow, that'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 day. That's Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me that the day that the prisoners came, so 1,000 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 sad. 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 Ellisville. So we all climbed the lumber pile so that we could see them when they got off the train. So everybody's super nervous. Everybody!

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 devils we was going to get off of that train. Guys with horns on their head. 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. They were supposed to be the elite. So-called Nazi supermen. The Nazi supermen, 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. There is enough.

Tell us about what it was like, what you thought when they got off the train. What did they look like? Did they have a uniform? 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. The people of Aliceville were scared to death. I didn't know whether I was going to be mad at them when they first came in or what, but when I seen they 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. Wounded. And some of them, they're maggots. Oh, just gruesome. You could tell they'd been through a rough time. It was, it was awful for us.

That's Hans Koperre. 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 tin boxes. We all were wet, full, soaked with urine. It was awful. It was an awful trip. And you kind of had to feel sorry for them. 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. You know, I had three brothers overseas 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 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. But 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.

Oh, it was a series of do's and don'ts.

That's historian 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. Prisoners are entitled to the same quality rations, clothing, and living quarters as are afforded our own troops. And then there's rules about medical attention, labor. While the 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 Conventions 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 Conventions were drilled into their heads. They had lectures, the rules were posted in the rec hall 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, the barracks had all been laid out. Barracks were fresh and 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 Feldholter. He was another prisoner at Aliceville. We got a piece of white bread, of new American white bread, and we got peanut butter. I didn't know what peanut was. And it tasted 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. Ha ha ha.

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 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. So they buried the ham.

And a lot of it. We buried a lot of the hemp 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.

Is this a POW-led orchestra? Yes, yes. And 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, like, mathematics, almost any language you want to learn. Hey!

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 Fenced Guest, and it had, like, poetry. The Fenced Guest? Right. They also did a lot of theatrical productions. And sometimes there were regular art shows. So this is where things get a little bit strange. On December 18th, there was another art exhibition called

This is a woman named Ellen Vonders, whose father was a POW at the camp. And here she's reading from his diary. December 12th, the Fuhrer, 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. That's really strange. Okay, so... So, okay, with Hitler's Christmas gift to the art show and the ham and the bands and all that stuff, did people outside the camp know what was going on inside? You know, once they start...

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. Yeah.

There's some really funny stories of like... It was 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 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. Did 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, 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. Especially this radio guy, Walter Winchell, who sort of made this his cause. They call him the Rush Limbaugh of World War II. Was he that well-known? Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America. He spoke like he was on a telegram. Washington!

And he spoke in this funny nasal voice. Oh my God, that's exactly what it sounds like. So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Wintle 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. Ponies, radios, luxuries, and all sorts of leniency beyond imagination. And he would do this week after week. We coddlers over here won't have any Nazis to capture and fatten up on steak, butter, ham and bacon, or chopped chicken liver. People start writing articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe. Citizens start flooding the War Department with letters. I know, sir, that your YMCA war prisoner's aide does all it can to...

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, 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 down to the ground. And they handed the string to 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 the place.

over the camp and in Aliceville too, and the townspeople started calling the base mad about that. 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. 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. I see. 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, 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. Congressman Harless of Arizona called the Nazi prisoners in the United States pampered and privileged. 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. We do not coddle them. Hmm.

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. There's a reason why we signed these treaties. To protect my son in the military. If we torture them, they'll torture us. Reciprocity. That's why we have these treaties. So when Americans are captured, they are not tortured. That's the reason.

One problem, though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944...

News breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany, are gunned down after they surrendered. Four weeks later, their frozen bodies, hands and ankles bound, were found where they fell. We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany, and we find misery.

Nothing like Aliceville. American prisoners of war report inhuman hospital conditions. Walter Winchell gets back on the airwaves. Attention, Mr. and Mrs. United States. He says, look, reciprocity hasn't worked. Our generosity has not been reciprocated, and our boys were not treated the same. Prisoners of war have been protected as much by our red tape as by the one-sided Geneva Convention rule. 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, lifeless.

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 Lurch, who runs the POW program at this point, he gets up and he says, we are not going to lower ourselves to Nazi standards. We are not 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 historian 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...

that we have a special mission and we have a special history. This is David Goldfield. He's a historian at UNC Charlotte. 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 looked like us. These people look all right. 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 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? And he says very simply that with prisoners of war,

It's because we had a rule. Governing international law. Like the Geneva Conventions. 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. Hmm.

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. It does kind of make you think back to February of 2002.

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' 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. 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. No, there's no change in the protections they will be given.

provided they have always been treated consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention, which means they will be treated well. If you're looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement, it 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.

The concern, the debate here was about if you don't do it here, then U.S. soldiers could be mistreated abroad. Isn't that correct? And so isn't that a big motivation here to make sure that U.S. soldiers 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 pool of action. Hold it. David, we'll get one more and then we'll come around. Go ahead. 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 accord privileges under the Geneva Convention, then our citizens would be in peril. David, I was not in the NSC deliberations where various issues were raised, so really there's no way I can accurately answer that question. Go ahead, David. ...forces, 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. The terms of the Geneva Convention apply to all, and those terms speak for themselves. Okay, thank you, everybody.

Thanks for listening.

Radio Lab 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: With help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

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