Sometimes when I read stories from the homefront during the war I try to imagine what it must have been like. The months right after the attack on Pearl Harbor are compelling. I wrote earlier about the Battle of Los Angeles.
On June 21, 1942 Civil-War era Fort Stevens, near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, was shelled by Japanese forces. The Japanese submarine I-25, with a crew of 97, and armed with a 14 cm deck gun and carrying a seaplane, opened fire. Fort Stevens commander ordered an immediate blackout, and held all fire. This prevented the submarine from accurately targeting the base. Of the seventeen shots, the only damage was to some telephone poles near the base–the remainder landed on a baseball field or a nearby wetland. Just past the battery of Fort Stevens was the northern Kaiser shipyard, which was at that time turning out a Liberty Ship each week.
Nearby training planes called in an A-29 bomber, but the submarine submerged untouched, having dodged the bombs.
This attack on continental US military base–the only one by Axis forces in WWII–led to fear of a West Coast invasion. With contemporary sinkings of passenger and freight ships off the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, it caused fear to mount, and support for the war effort to grow.
The Japanese submarine I-25 was one of the I-15 class submarines produced for the war. It weighed in at 2,600 tons, was 350 ft long, and carried a reconnaissance plane. The plane was carried in a hangar below the deck disassembled. Quickly assembled it could carry 2 men and land on the sea. Subs of the I-15 class could travel 27 mph on the surface, and 9 mph submerged, with total range of 16,000 miles before it needed refueling. The I-25 was just off the shore of Oahu during the Pearl Harbor attack, after which it patrolled the waters off the US coast near the mouth of the Columbia River.
The night before the attack on Fort Stevens, the I-25 torpedoed and damaged a Canadian freighter loaded with cargo for England off the coast of Washington. To get up the river past minefields the next day, the crew followed fishing vessels.
On a later mission, I-25 launched its seaplane from off the coast of California, near the Oregon border. The plane flew inland into southern Oregon, and dropped incendiary bombs over forests in an attempt to cause wildfires. Recent rain and quick work by forest service personnel contained the fire quickly. In the process of putting out the fire, they recovered bomb fragments that identified the source of the fire.
I-25 was sunk off the coast of New Hebrides by the USS Ellet on September 3, 1943.
This is a picture of the I-25's seaplane with the pilot.
This is a map of where the I-25's plane dropped incendiary bombs later.
This is a photo of personnel from Fort Stevens examining craters from the shells fired on it.
This is a photo of the I-26, which was very similar to the 1-25.
All images are from Wikimedia Commons.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
On Saturday May 13th, 40 teams from Louisiana and Alabama gathered to compete and share their project designs in The Monuments Men–the theme for this year’s robotics challenge.
The robot competition involved students programming their Lego Mindstorms robots to complete 11 tasks. These tasks represented the efforts of the Monuments Men and others in Europe dedicated to saving the cultural heritage of Europe. For example, robots rescued paintings from boxcars, moved the Mona Lisa and a Nike statue from the Louvre, and cleared and posted sentries on damaged monuments.
Teams also designed bridges to carry their robots. This represented the effort to rebuild the bridges of Florence. As the German forces retreated they destroyed the bridges to slow the advancing Allies.
Awards are given annually for the best competitors in the robot competition, and for robot design, and project. In addition, judges pick a Grand Champion. The Grand Champion may or may not win at any of the individual events, but embodies the spirit of the challenge. This year’s Grand Champion team won, in addition to the usual trophy, copies of The Monuments Men, signed by author Robert Edsel. We thank Mr. Edsel for this generous contribution.
Grand Champion
St Michaels of Crowley, LA
Competition
1st place-Tie between SJ Green Charter School of New Orleans and St Pius of Lafayette
2nd place-St Theresa of Gonzales, LA
3rd place-JLT Imaginations of Prairieville, LA
Design
1st place-Our Lady of Fatima of Lafayette, LA
2nd place-Kenner Discovery Health Sciences Academy of Kenner, LA
3rd place-St Theresa of Gonzales, LA
Project
1st place-Girls Scouts of Gonzales, LA
2nd place-St George’s Episcopal of New Orleans, LA
3rd place-Metairie Park Country Day School of Metairie, LA
Next year’s theme will be The Pelican State Goes to War, in honor of the opening of our traveling exhibit of the same name. It will take place May 12th 2018, and registration will open in January.
Thanks to Chevron, who sponsors the event and sends volunteers, and to Fontainebleu High’s RoboDawgs, who volunteer as referrees and table setters.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
On the morning of May 19, 1942, the Heredia was steaming from Guatemala to New Orleans. Just as it reached the mouth of the Mississippi River with 1,500 tons of bananas and coffee, it was intercepted by German U-boat 506 and hit with three torpedoes. The explosions after the hits destroyed four of the ship’s emergency vessels, and sunk it in three minutes. Sixty two people were on board the ship—36 died and 26 survived. Two lifeboats were launched, and several other people were rescued by shrimp trawlers in the area.
The Heredia, owned by United Fruit, was the second ship sunk by U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico. On May 4, the Norlindo, which was carrying only ballast, was sunk much farther south in the Gulf. From early 1942 into 1943, about 20 U-boats patrolled the Gulf of Mexico, looking especially for oil tankers carrying oil from Louisiana and Texas. In all, the U-boats sent 56 vessels to the bottom of the Gulf. Only one U-boat was sunk by US ships.
The wreck of U-166 lies near the mouth of the Mississippi, sent there by depth charges from PC-566. This patrol boat was accompanying the Robert E. Lee, a passenger ship that was transporting the survivors of other U-boat attacks back to New Orleans. On July 30, 1942, the Robert E. Lee was attacked and sunk by U-166, killing 25 of the 430 on board. PC-566 couldn’t save the ship, but it got vengeance.
Almost a mile of water sits over the remains of U-166, which was discovered during exploration for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil well in 2001. In 2014, a National Geographic expedition led by Robert Ballard sent remotely operated vessels to map and photograph the wreckage.
In 1943, Allied forces achieved advances in radar that shifted the balance of naval warfare, and the Axis and its U-boats never could match them. Casualties from—and tonnage lost to—U-boats decreased dramatically from 1943 on.
From a report of the Minerals Management Service on WWII era shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico.
Front page of the Times Picayune, reporting the May 19th of 1942 attack.
A photo of a family riding as passengers on the Heredia when it was sunk. From the Times-Picayune.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
Last autumn my neighbors were having a birthday party in their front yard. The highlight of the decorations was a bundle of helium-filled mylar balloons. It was windy, and they worked themselves free. I was working in my yard, and looked over when I heard sounds of dismay, and I watched the balloons slowly drift towards the power pole across the street. The balloons contacted the transformer, there was a very loud bang, and all the lights on our block went out.
In England during WWII they had barrage balloons along the coast and over cities and military installations. They were large, tethered blimps, designed to make enemy aerial navigation difficult by placing obstacles in the way. Their long cables threatened to entangle encroaching aircraft. The barrage balloons occasionally broke loose, like the mylar balloons I witnessed. But the defensive blimps, being anchored by heavy metal cables, caused much worse damage to electrical infrastructure.
In September of 1940 a large storm knocked loose a number of barrage balloons, which glided across the North Sea and caused considerable damage to power lines and radio antennas in Denmark and Sweden. After that, Churchill ordered that the possibility of using ballons like these as weapons be investigated. The Royal Air Force responded with a negative report, believing it to be too costly at a low likelihood of effect. The Navy responded enthusiastically.
Winds at high altitudes (>15,000 feet) tend to move from East to West over the North Sea and Europe, so the conditions were favorable, and the Royal Navy had a surplus of 100,000 weather balloons. Tests were conducted, and plans made.
These balloons were designed to be inflated to 8 ft in diameter. At launch a slow burning fuse was lit, and the balloons ascended rapidly, stopping at 25,000 ft as an internal band stopped further expansion. As the hydrogen used to inflate the balloons slowly leaked away they descended. The fuse would eventually release a small opening in a bucket of mineral oil, and as it leaked away the balloon descended faster.
About half the balloons carried a wire payload. The same fuse that released the mineral oil would also release a coil of wire held by hemp rope to the balloon. The balloon was calculated to maintain an altitude of at least 1,000 feet so that it would keep moving (below that the air can become very calm). In theory, the wire could short circuit high voltage lines, or break transformers.
The other half the balloons carried an incendiary payload. This was either cans of incendiary jelly, bottles of phosphorus grenades, or canvas tubes filled with explosive and fuses. These were all designed to create small fires. These also were items already on hand and easily and cheaply made.
There is a kind of genius in turning an accident, with knowledge, existing supplies, and some creativity, into a weapon.
In the latter half of 1942 the British launched between 1,000 and 1,800 balloons a day from a golf course in Felixstowe and a bay near Dover. All releases were clustered over 3 or 4 hours of a given day. Over 99,000 balloons were launched, and caused a great deal of havoc, confusion, and cost for the Germans. The biggest impact was from a balloon that hit a power line near Leipzig, and caused a fire that burned down the electrical station.
Launches were suspended during Allied bombing raids, for fear they would interfere with aircraft. In mid 1944, because of the great frequency of bombing raids, the release schedule was changed to single releases every 10 minutes during daylight hours. The last balloon was launched in September of 1944.
Barrage balloons defending London during WWII.
Release of weather balloons with offensive payloads from Felixstowe, some time between 1942 and 1944.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
JS Hey died on 27 February of 2000, at the age of 81.
Born in Lancashire, England, he was the third son of a cotton manufacturer. He entered University of Manchester and got his degree in physics in 1930, and a masters in x-ray crystallography in 1931.
Hey taught physics at schools in Northern England until 1942, when he joined the Army Operational Research Group. We was assigned to work on radar jamming. At that point the Allies were using a form of radar with relatively long waves. Axis forces could not only detect this radar, but jam it. Using radar jamming two German warships had recently escaped through the English Channel. At the same time the Allies were losing an unsustainable tonnage of cargo to U-Boats in the Atlantic.
75 years ago this month Hey was monitoring radar jamming when he noticed a great deal of noise in the 4-8 m jamming Allied radar sets. Following the source, he noticed that it moved slowly, tracking the sun. Looking up meteorological data, he discovered that the Sun had a very active solar spot that day. Solar spots had been hypothesized to produce streams of ions and magnetic fields. Hey interpreted the phenomenon of the radar jamming as support of this hypothesis.
Development of radar using much shorter waves generated by the cavity magnetron allowed the Allies to avoid jamming by the Axis powers. Using this microwave radar Hey was tracking V2 rockets heading towards London in 1945 when he noticed transient radar echoes at about 60 miles of altitude. The echoes arrived at a rate of 5-10 per hour and persisted after the V2s were gone. It turned out the echoes were the vapor trails of meteors, and Hey showed that meteors could be tracked this way in the day when they were not visible to the eye.
JS Hey was not able to publish his results until after the war, for security reasons. Shortly after the war he was appointed to head the Army Operational Research Group, and he worked at the Royal Radar Establishment, where he continued his work in radio astronomy.
Hey published his results on tracking meteors and sunspots with radio waves after the war was over.
Hey published his results on tracking meteors and sunspots with radio waves after the war was over.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
The night of February 24, 1942, and the hours before dawn of the 25th, the sky over Los Angeles was lit by search lights, the city was under a blackout, and more than 1.400 shells were shot from .50 caliber guns into the air. When the all-clear was sounded at 7:21 AM on the 25th, the only casualties were buildings and cars hit by shell fragments, and 3 civilians killed in car accidents.
The immediate cause of the false alarm was a rogue weather balloon. When spotted from the ground by nervous watchers, lit from underneath by search lights, it was identified as an enemy aircraft.
The real cause was nervousness and a heightened watchfulness that resulted from events on the previous day, a short ways up the California coast.
On the evening of February 23, President Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat radio broadcast. Less than three months since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the nation was anxious, and in the midst of preparations for war. In the speech, Roosevelt said “…the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies.’’ In the weeks since Pearl Harbor the United States had heard more bad news of advancing Japanese forces across the Pacific Ocean and Asia, and U-boat attacks from the German Navy in the Atlantic.
Perhaps as a means to undermine Roosevelt’s confident speech, a Japanese submarine patrolling the West Coast surfaced offshore north of Santa Barbara, and launched 13 shells towards oil wells and equipment in Ellwood, CA. It completely missed the gasoline plant there, caused minor damage to the piers and wells, and stayed 2,500 yards offshore, but the submarine’s impact on popular anxiety was great. The night of the shelling the Army Air Force sent a handful of pursuit planes and bombers to find the submarine, but was loath to commit more forces.
Intelligence supplied by loyal Japanese Americans had suggested that there might be some action to disturb the President’s speech. It also suggested that Los Angeles might be attacked the next night. The state of readiness itself led to the false alarm.
Confused reports from the night of the event, secrecy after it, and anxiety led to many conspiracy theories. This might even be counted as one of the first major events in the history of UFO conspiracies. Radar sightings of the objects triggering the artillery fire suggested they were moving far too slowly to have been planes. The use of radar for these purposes was new, and inexperienced operators may have been part of the problem. Visual sighting under night conditions is unreliable. Without context objects like weather balloons in the sky, especially with uncertain lighting, are difficult to scale.
The event led to better coordination of civilian and military defenses on the West Coast, and to more surveillance of activities and objects around plants and other installations near the shore. It might also have contributed to popular sentiment in support of Japanese Internment. Roosevelt had authorized Executive Order 9066 just days before.
A clipping from the Los Angeles Times the day after the Battle of Los Angeles. From the Los Angeles Times.
A period photo of a Japanese submarine similar to the one used in the Ellwood Bombardment. From Wikimedia Commons.
Newspaper headlines from the Santa Barbara News after the Ellwood Bombardment.
A newspaper clipping about the Ellwood Bombardment. From the Santa Barbara News.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum
Today, TV screens are everywhere. There are several in most American homes, most restaurants and bars have them, they dominate the electronics sections of stores.
During WWII, radio filled that niche in electronics and mass communication. During national elections and other big events or disasters today, we gather around televisions to find out what is happening. During World War II, families gathered around radios. They had their days to hear their favorite programs, as I remember Sunday nights watching nature programs on TV with my family.
The technology underlying the radio and the television are basically the same. Manipulation of an electromagnetic field creates waves in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum at the transmitter. At some distance these waves are turned into an electrical current again by a receiver. In radios the receiver’s current makes a magnet attached to a paper or fabric cone move and generate sound waves. In the original televisions, the current was used in a cathode-ray tube (CRT) to make patterns on a phosphorescent screen. Today’s televisions put a current through a matrix of materials that responds to current by making different colors.
The original radio waves transmitted by Marconi in the 1890s could only travel a couple of miles. Since then, engineers have developed ways to make all sorts of different electromagnetic waves. These made radio better, but also made RADAR possible, and microwaves, and x-ray machines (the first x-rays were made with radioactive material but now they use electronically generated energy).
We are constantly in fields of anthropogenic electromagnetic waves. They come unintentionally from the electricity in the buildings we live in. The come intentionally from all sorts of devices. The many remote controls in a home, the cell phones, wireless phones, Wi-Fi routers, Bluetooth devices—all of these use electromagnetic waves to communicate at a distance. (As an aside, land-line phones and cable signals come into your home as electrical currents, but satellite services uses waves).
Much of the consumer technology of the last century has been about finding better and better ways to harness electromagnetic waves. Amplitude modulation (AM) of waves was replaced by Frequency Modulation (FM)—although AM is still used and has its uses. Broadcasters have recently been adding HD signals, which can contain more information in waves. That’s why multiple broadcast “stations” can be received at a single frequency of waves.
World War II was a huge time for the expansion of this engineering. Necessity then for portable radios drove miniaturization and vacuum-tube technology. RADAR development created shorter wavelength generation. Cleaning up radio reception led to the discovery of cosmic background radiation and also led to radio astronomy.
Compared to 75 years ago, the technology we use today to communicate and entertain may seem completely different. But in essence it is still the manipulation of electricity to make electromagnetic waves to be received at a distance.
On 14 January 1942 Sikorsky Aircraft successfully flew for the first time the contraption later called the YR-4 (or the Hoverfly in England). This rotary winged craft became the first mass-produced helicopter.
In a test flight it went from the company’s Connecticut headquarters to Wright Air Field in Ohio (over 700 miles) with a ceiling of 12,000 feet and a top speed of 90 mph. Within a year the US Army Air Force and the Royal Navy were testing prototypes. After the engine capacity was increased (to 165 hp) and stability improved by increasing the rotor length and displacement of the tail rotor, the helicopter went to training and field testing.
The first mission in which the YR-4 was used was a combat rescue mission in the China=Burma theater in April of 1943. Throughout the war it was used primarily for rescue missions.
Igor Sikorsky, who designed this craft, was a Russian immigrant born in Ukraine in 1889. His story is one that reflects many from the time, and resonates today. He studied engineering in Paris and Kiev, and established a successful company building aircraft, including bombers for Russian forces in WWI. He briefly worked for the French forces in Russia as an engineer, but believing the October Revolution to threaten both his career and life, he emigrated to the US in 1919. He worked as a school teacher in NY until he obtained a position on the engineering faculty at the University of Rhode Island in 1933. In 1923, with backing from Russian expats like Rachmaninov, he formed the Sikorsky Manufacturing Company and built the one of the first dual-engined planes in the US. This plane, the S-29, carried 14 passengers and could fly at 115mph. His company was acquired by United Aircraft and Transport Company (today’s United Technologies Corporation) in 1929, and he helped them make the boat-planes that Pan-Am used for its cross-Atlantic routes.
He married in 1924 and became a naturalized citizen in 1928. He lived until 1972. Always a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, he authored 3 books, one about his helicopters, and two about theology.
This is Igor Sikorsky in 1914 when he was making aircraft for the Russian forces to use in WWI
This is Sikorsky's first successful helicopter design, which he developed into the YR-4.
That is Sikorsky, sitting in the doorway of one of his YR-4 helicopters.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
Now a quintessentially American icon, the P-51 Mustang had very English origins. That famous plane, used by the Eighth Air Force over western Europe to defend bombers, the ride of the Tuskegee Airmen, was displaced from the front of the US air arsenal only when jets arrived. But before it was replaced it also served in the North African, Mediterranean, Italian and Pacific Theater in WWII, and well into the Korean War.
However, the first of these planes were built by North American Aviation (NAA) in 1940 to fill an order for the British Purchasing Commission. The commission had asked for P-40s for the Royal Air Force, but rather than licensing from Curtiss, NAA proposed an upgraded design. The purchase and delivery of the planes came under the famous Lend-Lease agreement, and they were named Mustang Mk1.
The plane was meant to be a tactical-reconnaissance fighter and bomber to be used a relatively low altitudes. The range on the planes was much longer than the planes the British were using. The Allison engine in the original planes had a single-stage supercharger. This limited the power of the engine at high altitudes. After a test flight, Ronald Harker of Rolls Royce was impressed with everything about the plane but its power-plant. He suggested that the Merlin 61, which was being used in the latest Spitfires, would do very well in the aircraft, and even made some rough measurements of the engine compartment to verify that it would fit. The Merlin 61 was designed with a two-stage intercooled supercharger that increased horsepower and operational altitude and speed. The heavier engine gave engineers a chance to add an additional fuel tank behind the pilot, that balanced the center of gravity and provided longer range.
The Merlin 61 was licensed to Packard to build in the US as the V-1650 Merlin. Packard was building and shipping them to England to supplement production there. Addition of the two-stage supercharger had been made for use in the British Wellington VI bomber, and was later used for Spitfires as well.
After encouragement, NAA switched the power-plant in the Mustang MK1 to the Merlin, and the plane was made for the USAAF as well—as the P-51 Mustang.
Although much of the power-plant engineering was British, the critical two-stage supercharger was French, and the Americans added a new alloy to the ball bearings that prevented wear and decreased maintenance. The amazing aerodynamics of the plane—the airfoil of its wings has very low drag at high speed—were all American.
Much of what you see on the outside of the iconic American plane is American—but inside you’ll find some British and a little French. Like much of the rest of the story of WWII, cooperation among allies was the key to victory.
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
The Logo of North American Aviation, which was a subsidiary of General Motors, and later became part of Boeing. Their plant was in Inglewood, CA.
A P-51 Mustang in flight. From The National WWII Museum.
This is a picture of one of the first planes delivered from NAA to the RAF. From Wikimedia Commons.
During WWII the Navy used a foam to put out fires of oil and gasoline. This foam was called Aer-O-Foam, and is still made today by Kidde Fire Fighting. The foam is made from soy protein and water, mixed and then aerated in a nozzle. The foam smothers the fire, coating the oil and preventing oxygen from getting to it. Seamen called the mixture ‘bean soup,’ since it was made from soybeans.
National Foam System (today owned by Kidde) got a sample of the soy protein from the Glidden Company in 1941. Glidden employed an organic chemist named Percy Julian, who had devised a way to separate soy protein from soybean meal. Glidden hired Julian in 1936 because of his resume, and because he was fluent in German, having done his dissertation work in Austria. Glidden had just purchased a modern solvent extraction plant from Germany, and needed someone to supervise the extraction of oil from soybeans, and the production of coatings, solvents, and glues from soy products.
Percy Julian was very happy to have the job, having been refused work at DuPont (because when he arrived they realized he was black), and at the Institute of Paper Chemistry (because the town where it was located didn’t allow black residents). Although frustrating, this discrimination was not surprising for Julian, who was well acquainted with Jim Crow. He grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and went to college at DePauw University, where he was not allowed to room on campus, and had trouble finding a place that would serve him food. He attended Harvard on a fellowship for graduate studies, but left with only a masters degree, because they withdrew his teaching assistantship. They were concerned their undergraduates would not like being taught by an African American.
Julian took up teaching at Howard University, and left when he received a Rockefeller fellowship to finish his graduate studies at the University of Vienna. Ironically, given the rising fascism in Europe, he found freedom from racial prejudices there, like many black artists and intellectuals of the era. After receiving his PhD in 1931 he returned to Howard.
There he got caught up in personal and political controversies, and was forced to resign his position. A former professor at DePauw offered Julian a temporary position in the chemistry department. While at DePauw he worked to synthesize stigmasterol from a west African bean, the calabar. Stigmasterol, extracted from soybean until then, was an important and expensive precursor to steroid hormones. Julian’s discovery of a method for creating stigmasterol from inexpensive raw products was thus a boon to pharmaceutical research. Despite this accomplishment, Percy Julian was denied a professorship at DePauw because he was black. Thus he ended up working in industry at Glidden.
At Glidden, Percy Julian developed many products for paper coatings and glues and paints. During the war some of these were used to coat airplanes and paint ships and boats. Later he was able to produce soy sterols to be used in producing sex hormones. Some of the products he produced were so valuable that they were shipped to manufacturers in armored cars.
When Glidden gave up pharmaceutical work in 1953, Julian left the company and started his own. At the time he was being paid $50,000 a year (about $440,000 in today’s dollars). Percy Julian’s later life was a mixture of success and obstacles. His company was fairly successful, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (in 1973, on the second African American in the Academy). On the other hand, he faced continued discrimination. For example, in 1950, when he moved his family into a ‘nice’ neighborhood in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, someone fire-bombed the house on Thanksgiving Day. Later that year someone tossed dynamite into their house.
There is a fine documentary about Percy Julian, produced by PBS’ Nova. Named ‘Forgotten Genius,’ it first aired in 2007.
All images from PBS media
After they moved in, terrorists threw a dynamite bomb at the house.
Before his family moved in, a gasoline bomb was used by terrorists to damage his home in Oak Park.
Percy Julian was one the best organic chemists of the 20th century
Posted by Rob Wallace, STEM Education Coordinator at The National WWII Museum.
