Everyone knows the old story that carrots help you to see in the dark. This time-honored fact has been passed down from generation to generation and many, many children have been told to finish their vegetables in the hopes of just such superpowers.
Most who have heard the myth will just brush it off as more received wisdom, with a dubious grounding in actual fact. If pushed most would conclude such claims are probably a ruse by tired parents to get their children to eat the healthy things on their plate.
But such stories of the humble carrot have, in fact, a much more recent provenance, and such tales do not come from ancient history, but rather modern warfare. How did the carrot help win World War Two?
A Deadly Vegetable?
In the early months of World War Two much progressed as the Nazis had intended. Poland had fallen according to plan and when France and Britain had declared war in response, France had fallen swiftly too.
By the summer of 1940 only Britain remained for western Europe to fall to Hitler. However, Britain was a more tricky opponent than the top Nazi brass would like to admit: she was an island, and she had some tricksy things going on over the sea.
Germany’s initial response was straightforward: Britain would be attacked by air, her natural defense negated. The Nazi Luftwaffe would attack in a never-ending barrage, and if too many bombers were lost to defensive fire, then they would attack at night as well.
Night attacks had several advantages. Large cities were generally easy to find, and the German bombers were extremely difficult to locate and shoot down in response. At least, at first.
As 1940 progressed, Nazi night attacks started to meet with fierce and accurate resistance. The Brits seemed to have little trouble in finding the German planes in the dark sky, and seemed able to reliably fly straight to them in the gloom.
How was this possible? Well, one of the tricksy things the British were working on in the run-up to the war was effective ground-based radar, and by 1940 their radar systems could detect incoming Nazi attacks, day or night.
Radar worked because it was unexpected, and a large part of this came from its apparently innocuous appearance to anyone flying over. Radar stations looked like large grids of concrete and metal, not like a weapon at all, and the Nazis did not suspect that these strange defensive buildings were the cause of their airborne losses at night.
Nor did the Allies want them to think this. And so, a military deception was undertaken. Carrots were quickly promoted as improving eyesight, and the Royal Air Force let it be known, through the Ministry of Information, that the night flying pilots had been fed carrots to improve their eyesight.
How many carrots were fed to Axis pilots in an attempt to replicate this performance improvement has not been recorded.
Top Image: The “Chain Home” radar system in the UK, which the Ministry of Information sought to disguise using carrots. Source: RAF / Public Domain.
By Joseph Green
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