I found this “Stray” in QST 70 years ago (June 1945) interesting. When servicemen wrote home about ham radio, phrases unfamiliar to the censor were frequently deleted. But when the serviceman wrote a marginal note to the censor explaining the meaning, then the term was passed without censorship.
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Preparing to launch psy ops balloons over German lines.
Seventy years ago this month, the June 1945 issue of Popular Science
carried an interesting article on psychological warfare in all of its forms. The main method of directly reaching enemy troops was the leaflet, which could be dropped from airplanes, balloons, or even artillery shells.
In an earlier series of posts, we looked at the Japanese balloons designed to travel from Japan to North America, and the ingenious control mechanism to keep them at altitude. Since Allied propaganda balloons had a much shorter distance to travel, they simply employed a fuse that would burn the ropes at the proper time, or maybe drop some ballast for longer flights.
The leaflet shown here was typical. According to the article, the Japanese text read as follows:
SOLDIERS OF THE IMPERIAL ARMY!
You have fought well, but the battle is lost. You are cut off with no hope of escape. Soon your food and ammunition will be gone.
You have only two fates–annihilation because unwise commanders sent you into our trap. Or good treatment behind the Allied lines.
Think it over. Ghosts in Yasukuni cannot help Japan. Death without meaning is only for fools.
Some of your friends know this. They have come over to us and they are safe. They are eating rice, smoking cigarettes, sleeping in peace. They know that life is precious. They are not ashamed to live.
Join them now. You will receive plenty of good food and kind treatment. Your identity will not be disclosed.
This is our only offer. If you do not accept it, we will be forced to destroy you.
–THE COMMANDER
The leaflet went on to give directions for safe surrender. Japanese were told to approach Allied positions singly by day and without arms. They were told to raise their hands and wave the pass.
For encouraging hold-out snipers to surrender, the army also employed trucks with large sound systems. But since bullets can travel about as far as sound, this was the most dangerous activity for psychological operations personnel.
The article also talked about the use of radio for psychological operations purposes. It noted that before the war, the U.S. had 11 shortwave stations, but now had 40, including six putting out 200 kilowatts. On the west coast, KGEI had been the only shortwave station, but now there were ten. There were also shortwave transmitters in Honolulu, Saipan, and the Phillipine Islands. Powerful mediumwave stations were in place in North Africa and England broadcasting to Europe. As soon as countries were liberated, a priority was getting broadcast stations on the air.
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Generals Montgomery, Eisenhower, Zhukov, de Lattre at signing of Berlin Declaration. Wikipedia photo.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Berlin Declaration, with which the Allies formally assumed control of German territory, divided it into four sectors, and dissolved the Third Reich.
Among other things, Article 9 ordered that “all radio and telecommunication installations and other forms of wire or wireless communications, whether ashore or afloat, under German control, will cease transmission except as directed by the Allied Representatives.”
It appears that Berlin radio was already off the air. While Berlin was still listed in the station list of the June 1945 issue of Radio Craft, it was absent from the July list.
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The New York war workers shown here are the “millionth of an inch” girls of Reeves Sound Laboratories. They are etching quartz crystals to set the exact transmitting frequency of the completed crystal.
Prior to World War 2, quartz crystals were not manufactured in large quantities. But wartime needs called for crystals in massive quantities. One of the manufacturers that went to work to fill the need was Reeves Sound Laboratories of New York City. In October 1942, the company procured the equipment and leased a former furniture warehouse at 52 West 47th Street, near Times Square. In the first month of production, the company turned out sixteen crystals. The company had a contract to ship 1600 crystals by the end of December, and actually shipped 2200. By February, it was shipping 8700 per month.
The whole painstaking process of turning raw quartz from Brazil into precisely cut crystals can be seen in the army film in the video below. The purity of the crystal, the angle of the cut, and the exact thickness of the crystal are all critical in determining the crystal’s operating frequency. The “millionth of an inch girls” shown above were the last step in the manufacturing process. They carefully etched the crystal by hand that last millionth of an inch while checking their work with an oscillator showing whether the crystal was on frequency. It was highly skilled, but also highly monotonous, work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b–FKHCFjOM
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After my series on the Japanese Fu-Go fire balloons of World War II, a reader forwarded this cartoon, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 8, 1945, about three months after the fatal Oregon attack. It appears to be warning kids to stay away from unexploded bombs. And while it doesn’t match exactly, the last panel sure looks to be bombs mounted on a balloon, complete with Japanese lettering on the side of the bombs.
Thank you to Ed Maurus for sharing this!
Seventy five years ago today began the evacuation of Dunkirk. 40,000 British soldiers were stranded in France. They were miraculously evacuated with a flotilla of hundreds of ships. Since the soldiers were stranded on shallow beaches, larger ships were unable to approach the shore. Admiralty officials scoured the Thames looking for suitable vessels, and the “Little Ships,” 700 smaller boats were hastily requisitioned.
Contrary to popular perception, most of these craft were not crewed by their owners, although a few were. In most cases, they were crewed by the Royal Navy. Most were used to shuttle soldiers to larger ships, but in many cases, the rescued soldiers made the crossing in these smaller vessels.
A number of recordings of broadcasts are available at the BBC.
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Seventy years ago today, President Harry Truman sent this handwritten letter to former president Herbert Hoover, inviting him to come to the White House to discuss the brewing humanitarian crisis in Europe. With the war in Europe over, the population would need to be fed.
As Hoover would put it the next year, “we do not want the American flag flying over nationwide Buchenwalds,”
In making this invitation, Truman set aside partisan differences to seek out the man with a proven record in fighting wartime hunger. Both during and after the First World War, he had headed American relief efforts. They started in 1914 assisting Americans who had found themselves stranded in Europe at the outbreak of war. From his own resources, he made loans and cashed checks for Americans. He went on to save millions of lives, first in Belgium, and then elsewhere in Europe at the war’s end.
It was a welcome change. In the days following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had summoned adviser Bernard Baruch and asked who was best fit to organize the home front. Baruch quickly replied that Hoover would be best suited, but the suggestion was rebuffed. Since Hoover was a convenient scapegoat throughout Roosevelt’s presidency, Roosevelt reportedly replied, “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not raising him from the dead.”
After Truman’s summons, Hoover approached the problem the same way he had approached it during and after the First World War, as an engineering problem. He set out on a tour of Europe to determined the needs and resources of each country, and saw to it that resources were directed appropriately.
There was a lifetime friendship between the two presidents. Truman spoke at the dedication of the Hoover presidential library in 1962 and told the crowd, “I feel sure that I am one of his closest friends and that’s the reason I am here.” Later that year, Hoover wrote to Truman:
Yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know. I gave up a successful profession in 1914 to enter public service. I served through the First World War and after for a total of about 18 years. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, I at once supported the President and offered to serve in any useful capacity. Because of my various experiences . . . I thought my services might again be useful, however there was no response. My activities in the Second World War were limited to frequent requests from Congressional committees. When you came to the White House, within a month you opened a door to me to the only profession I know, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in prior years.
Truman had the letter framed and placed on his desk at the Truman library.
Harry, is there something we can do to save the land we love?
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In an earlier post, we looked at a 3-element VHF yagi shown in a historical photo of the Siege of Bastogne in December 1944. It was part of a U.S. Army Signal Corps FM relay which linked the isolated forces to the Army landline telephone network.
A similar setup was used a few months earlier on D-Day, as shown from this diagram in the May 1945 issue of Radio Craft magazine. The link shown here was operational the second day after the initial Normandy landing and carried facsimile and voice traffic from London to the front. Within a few months, additional stations were added to the network, and the magazine notes that the network thus established covered an area equivalent to that from New York to Chicago and Detroit to Atlanta.
The army primarily relied upon wire communications, but even on the continent, radio links such as these provided an important backup function. On one occasion, the main cable across France had been cut, but nearly 2709 messages were handled during a 24 hour period.
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US Army photo, via Wikipedia.
In part 3 of this series, we looked at some of the remarkable distances covered by the Japanese Fu-Go fire balloons of World War II. Some of these balloons were found far inland in North America, including balloons found in Iowa, South Dakota, Manitoba, and Michigan. There’s no record of any of these balloons making it to Minnesota (although there’s the possibility that somewhere in Minnesota lies the rusting wreckage of one). But one of them played an interesting role in Minnesota postwar aviation.
As we covered in part 3, one of the balloons landed near Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was largely intact, and quickly whisked away by the FBI. It ultimately found its way to Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, where it remained until the end of the war. In 1946, a young sailor named Don Piccard was stationed there, and was tasked with taking the craft to the dump. (The balloon was labeled as having come from Flint, Michigan, but it’s believed that it was actually the Grand Rapids balloon.)
Lakehurst is famous for lighter-than-air flying, and Piccard was undoubtedly stationed there for a reason. His family had long been active in ligher-than-air flight. His father was Swiss-born Jean Felix Piccard, then a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota. His mother was Jeanette Piccard. Jean Felix and Jeanette in 1933 had piloted a balloon 57,579 feet into the stratosphere. This constituted the world record altitude for flight by a woman, a record held for 29 years until Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. If Wikipedia is to believed, Gene Roddenberry named the character Jean-Luc Picard after Jean Felix Piccard or his brother Auguste, another aviation pioneer. In fact, Jean-Luc is supposed to be a descendant of one of the men.
(Jeanette also became, in 1974, the first woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. At the age of 11, in response to the question of what she wanted to be when she grew up, she answered “a priest.” Her mother reportedly ran out of the room in tears. But after her long career in aviation, at the age of 79, she was ordained as one of the “Philadelphia Eleven.”)
Rather than taking the balloon to the dump as directed, the younger Piccard obtained a property pass to keep possession of the war trophy. Upon his discharge, he became a student at the University of Minnesota where his father taught. And he set out figuring out how to fly the balloon.
The Civil Aviation Agency had, at that time, the category of free balloon pilot, but no such license had been issued. A license for an airship pilot carried privileges for free balloons, and Piccard had accomplished most of his flight requirements in balloons with airship pilots. But he had not yet soloed, and he saw the war souvenir as an opportunity to do just that.
While the balloon was apparently in relatively good condition, it did have tears and was in need of repair. A glue adequate to do the job had to be procured. In addition, he needed funds to purchase the hydrogen, as well as kiln-dried sand to serve as ballast. (Sand with moisture would freeze, making for a lethal projectile when dropped.)
Piccard preparing for the 1947 flight. Image courtesy of Michigan Aviation Archaelogy.
To get the necessary funding, he sought the sponsorship of the Minneapolis Daily Times, which was granted, and the craft bore the paper’s name, above its N number, NX79598. Piccard was also a member of the Army Air Corps ROTC, which became the U.S. Air Force days before the flight. It was also sponsored by the ROTC, and Piccard wore a hastily assembled U.S. Air Force uniform during the flight. He later recounted that not only was his the first U.S. Air Force flight to take place in Minnesota, but also that his was quite possibly the first U.S. Air Force uniform ever worn.
The flight took place on February 16, 1947, from Minneapolis to White Bear Lake. After launch, apparently from South Minneapolis, Piccard had to maintain his altitude by venting the balloon and dropping ballast. He had originally intended to climb to the calculated maximum altitude of 12,000 feet and then begin his descent. But an overcast required him to control the altitude throughout the flight. The winds carried him to White Bear Lake, during which time Piccard had remained aloft for more than the two hours necessary to qualify for his solo flight, and he the CAA subsequently issued him the first ever free balloon pilot license. (This was the balloon’s last flight. Since Piccard didn’t have a bill of sale for the Japanese balloon, he was unable to register the craft.)
The flight received media attention nationwide, and also caused quite a commotion as it landed in White Bear Lake. Apparently, nobody had told the White Bear Lake Police Department that the flight was headed their way, and they were unprepared for the resulting commotion as hundreds of curiosity seekers flooded the area, trespassing on private property. At one point, the officers threatened to arrest the army personnel in the chase vehicle, who they determined must be responsible for the breach of the peace.
Scene of the landing in White Bear Lake. Image courtesy of Michigan Aviation Archaeology.
The last flight of a Fu-Go balloon. Image courtesy of Michigan Aviation Archaeology.
Since the Daily Times was actually an afternoon newspaper, the morning papers all managed to scoop the sponsor of the flight, although they didn’t refer to it in print as being the Daily Times Flight. Piccard later wrote a detailed account of his flight for Air & Space Smithsonian.
Don Piccard. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Piccard is regarded as the driving force behind the sport of ballooning, and is still active with his company, Piccard Balloons. When I looked at Piccard’s personal web page, www.N6US.com, I mistakenly assumed that he was a ham. While the URL looks like an Amateur Radio call sign, it should be remembered that aircraft tail numbers (or whatever they’re called on balloons) also use the same international prefixes as radio call signs. In this case, N6US is not a radio call sign issued by the FCC, but an aircraft registered to Mr. Piccard.
In 2008, Piccard was inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame. (The other member of the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame who has been mentioned in this blog was Sherman Booen, about whom we wrote in connection with the 1940 Armistice Day Blizzard.)
The balloon after launch. Image courtesy of Michigan Aviation Archaeology.
Image courtesy of Michigan Aviation Archaeology.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Jeffrey Benya of Michigan Aviation Archaelogy for giving permission to use the images of the newspaper clippings shown here.
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In part 1 of this series, we looked at the ingenious control mechanism employed by the Japanese Fu-Go fire balloons of World War II. The balloons were launched from Japan and traveled to North America where they dropped incendairies. They were also equipped with a demolition charge set to destroy the weapon after it had served its purpose.
One of these balloons was responsible for the war’s only civilian deaths within the 48 United States caused by enemy action. The last balloon was launched in April 1945, but the deaths occurred seventy years ago this month, on May 5, 1945.
Southern Oregon was seemingly far removed from the war. Victory in Europe was only three days away, and the war raging in the Pacific seemed far away. The papers that Saturday morning were full of war news, but the news was all good, such as this photo of American POW’s being liberated in Germany.
Archie Mitchell was the 27-year-old pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Bly, Oregon. His wife, née Elsie Winters, 26, was five months pregnant.
On May 5, 1945, Rev. and Mrs. Mitchell took a group of five children from the church on a picnic and fishing trip at Gearhart Mountain, on land within the Fremont National Forest owned by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. The road near Leonard Creek was under construction. Mrs. Mitchell and the children got out of the car while Rev. Mitchell turned the car around and started getting out the picnic lunch.
While hiking around the area, Mrs. Mitchell and the children spotted one of the Japanese balloons. Due to the news blackout, they were oblivious as to its possible origin. One of the road workers nearby saw the six gathered around in a semicircle, but wasn’t able to see what they were looking at. Mrs. Mitchell called out to her husband to come look at it, and he responded that he would come and look.
But before he could get there, there was a huge explosion, throwing debris over 150 yards. Rev. Mitchell and the worker ran to the scene, only to find four of the children already dead. Mrs. Mitchell and the other child died within a few minutes, never regaining consciousness.
The victims of the attack were:
These were the only civilians killed by enemy action within the continental United States during the war.
Because of the deaths, the news embargo was lifted a few weeks later. By this time, however, the Japanese had abandoned the program.
One would think that this is the end of the story. But Rev. Mitchell had not seen the end of wartime tragedy. Within two years, he was remarried to Betty (née Patzke) and the couple was called as missionaries to Asia. Eventually, they were stationed in Vietnam and worked at the Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium, located about nine miles from the town of Ban Me Thuot. By 1962, the couple had four children, ages 4-13.
At dusk on May 30, 1962, the staff of the leprosarium were gathering for their weekly prayer meeting when twelve members of the Viet Cong entered the grounds. The missionaries convinced the Viet Cong that if they left Mrs. Mitchell and the children alone, that they would fully cooperate. They left the compound a couple of hours later with Rev. Mitchell and two other captives.
Military intelligence was able to track the hostages’ location for a number of years, but a military rescue mission was not possible. The Christian and Missionary Alliance engaged in negotiations to free the three, but the negotiations collapsed in 1969.
In the next part of this series, we’ll look at some of the extraordinary distances covered by some of the balloons, some of which were recovered in places like Nebraska, Iowa, and Michigan. Click here to continue to part 3. In the final installment, we’ll learn how one of these balloons found its way to Minnesota.
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