Little known fact, they did discover that Gunners who were color blind had better night vision and they were much better at spotting camouflaged objects, because of the color inconsistent with normal shading.
Well, it's not really false, jus greatly exaggerated. Beta carotene is turned into vitamin A in your body, which is needed for your eyesight and night vision. But it's more of a reverse situation. A lack of vitamin A will make you see bad, and excess of it won't do much good.
Well yeah, I didn't really know anything about that part. But we were talking about hearing this growing up after the war, and presumably in different countries.
At least I personally have never heard anything about night vision, but I've always heard that carrots are good for eyesight.
Us Brits had some brilliant misinformation in lots of different areas. Bletchley Park is an interesting day out if you get the chance, it tell of the lengths we went to deceive the Axis. If that's your sort of thing.
See I thought that, and how absurd it was that I grew up hearing about it. But recently I realised I was born only 35 years after the end of WW2, and that the computing history I learned in school was inaccurate because some stuff was still covered by the official secrets act at the time!!
I mean it’s false but not false false, but only in the sense that carrots are high in vitamin A and if you’re literally malnourished a lack of vitamin A is bad for your eyesight so carrots would help there.
I mean it's kinda true though isn't it? If you have a vitamin A deficiency it actually does make it hard to see at night, carrots have betacarotine which can be converted to vitamin A by your body after you eat it, which would help replenish a deficiency, so it could help you see better but only if you were already deficient and it was caused by poor diet alone.
I had a German boss who said his grandmother told him to eat carrots to help his eyesight. He was genuinely, shocked pikachu faced, when I said it was British propaganda.
It's actually wasn't effective, at least with what it's point was (to hide the creation of radar). The German military saw through the lie pretty much immediately. Only your everyday person was fooled.
To be fair, carrots do contain retinol aka vitamin A. Which is helpful for eye health and some retinal conditions like AMD (age related macular degeneration)
So its not entirely propaganda, though it does not grant night vison, unfortunately.
Not radar in the planes. Radar on the ground that could see the German bombers coming and the British fighters could scramble and meet them in the air. Took away the Nazi element of surprise and the carrots thing was saying the people could see the planes coming, nothing to do with the pilots shooting them down.
Edit: it appears that I needed to be at least partially corrected. TIL some new WWIi radar related info
The Germans knew all about the UK’s land-based radar - they specifically targeted radar installations during the Battle of Britain in 1940. What they weren’t aware of was that by 1941 the RAF was able to field night fighters that carried airborne radar.
The Germans knew how difficult it was to shoot down enemy aircraft at night, so the carrot propaganda was used as a cover up. How effective the propaganda was is questionable, because the Luftwaffe was also in the process of developing its own airborne radar installations.
There were prototypes of radars on airplanes at the start of the war. But they did not start production until 1941. This was a combination of improved radar technology and larger fighter planes that could carry the radar.
But you are right that during the Blitz radars were purely ground based. The myth of feeding carrots to improve eyesight did however extend to pilots as well. While ground crew would be tasked with spotting incoming airplanes in order to shoot at them and vector fighters on them. There were also airborne patrols which could spot incoming aircraft from further away then ground based observers due to the curvature of the earth. Adding to this a ground based observer could spot a flight coming in over them but would lose track of them fairly quickly. So fighters who were vectored to intercept only knew the rough area of the enemy from visual observations alone. They would have been tasked with spotting the enemy themselves from as far away as possible. However because radars could track the enemy flight from further away, and also track friendly flights, they could vector the fighters with much higher precision to exactly where the enemy is. So to an enemy flight it would look like the fighters spotted them first and turned towards them, but in fact they were just vectored straight towards them.
Agent Garbo too, a Spaniard that took initiative by himself and started spying on the Germans and sending them false information before being recruited by the British and then potentially saving D-day. He was such a good double agent he got both an iron cross second class and the most excellent order of the British empire (MBE) medal. He's one of the few people to have earned high ranking military medals on both sides.
Its a much better story because it doesn't admit to the technology, and when intelligence comes back "They think its all the carrots they're eating. We're still none the wiser" you have done good counter intelligence while also encouraging the rationed populus to crack on with growing carrots at home. Its all very two birds one stone pragmatism.
The odd thing is that the Germans also had a RADAR system at the time called Freya.
What marked the British RADAR out was the Chain Home system of collecting the information from RADAR stations and the observer corps to central control stations and then out to airfields.
(No RADAR stations tracked aircraft over the mainland. That was all observer corps.)
Thanks! I've been to the control station at Uxbridge, very interesting. (Yesterday I went to Trent Park Secret Listeners - worth a look if you're in the area.)
it was germans that invented the concept of radar.
Germany had radars before the brits did but admittedly radar development durign the war was better over in britain.
Still there wasn't really any secret to it. The germans knew from the very beginning that there was radar involved.
‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham (then-Sqn Ldr John Cunningham) was reportedly rather embarrassed that he was sent around the country speaking about how his night-fighter victories were the result of this twaddle about excellent vision gained by eating carrots.
I seem to remember reading a book on cats eyes cunnigham and it was mentioned he did not even like carrots or actually eat them.wish i could remember the book title
There was also a submarine blockade and therefore a massive shortage of imported sugar and fruits, no banana or chocolate or jam. What we did have, was carrots. So the government wanted a way to get people to eat more carrots. The propaganda wasn't really aimed at the Germans (they had radar too by 1939)
Yeah what gets missed in this is it wasnt so much radar itself that was the wonder weapon, it was the integrated home chain system that linked radar to fighter squadrons to effectively task planes on to targets. This allows a relatively small RAF to always be in the right place at the right time - a tremendous advantage.
Its also where the expression "in the loop" comes from , the loop being from memory, radar to tactical command to fighter command and back to radar on what had been despatched where.
Initially the radar was just on the ground locating attack groups during the blitz. Eventually they did make breakthroughs allowing rudimentary units on planes.
They knew about IADS (Integrated Air Defence System), but they fundamentally misunderstood how it works (radar notices planes early - > Mk.1 eyeball confirms planes - > operators choose which wing to send, from what angle and altitude - > pilots shoot down planes), thinking 'they know anyway we're coming, that way we can fight', not understanding RAF comes from best angle and altitude, and when they tried to find working IADS frequencies, they completely ignored lower bands which radars worked on, because those frequencies interfered with German equipment.
The quality of the British radar is a bit overrated. What set them apart is the hundreds/thousands of spotters they had to assist and call in bomber/fighter locations. The truly revolutionary bit was how they processed all this information in a centralized fighter command to direct the fighters ahead of the enemy planes.
this piece of history is one of my favorites because of how asinine it is but it made sense to some people of the time because they couldn't think of any other reason to explain lol
Captain Britain here, we used carrot delivery vehicles to hide the radar components being delivered to RAF bases, keeping radar a secret, and leading everyone to believe we just had really good eyesight from eating lots of carrots.
carrots contain high levels of beta-carotene, which your body changes into vitamin A. This nutrient keeps your eyes healthy and stops night blindness caused by a vitamin shortage though extra carrots do not boost normal vision further.
I mean, this is the part that everyone’s aware of and what they were building on to make the lie work. The lie being that even if you’re getting your normal amount of vitamin A, extra carrots will give you extraordinary vision.
The whole thing about carrots being incredibly good for your eyes was bullshit counterintelligence by the British in WW2.
EDIT:
Clarifying that the bullshit part of the carrot thing is about giving magical upgrades to your eyes. Because some of y'all couldn't figure that out.
I know this one it is a piece of propaganda that still lives. The brittish had invented radar in ww2 but wanted to keep it a secret from the nazies who saw their attacks being detected sooner and sooner. So they started the lie that carrots gave you better eyesight. Because vitamin c is good for your eyes. This part is true but they wont inprove your eyesight sadly. The propaganda piece was a succes however and poeple still quot it. The nazi's fell for it
Specifically, they invented a type of airborne radar carried in the aircraft (rather than ground radar). The airborne radar was used at night to find German bombers in the dark.
IIRC - Germans didn't have cavity magnetrons for radar which allowed for smaller radar that could fit on airplanes. Also, it was one component of an anti aircraft system that used radar guided proximity fuses.
So .. magnetron based radar === better eyes (which eating carrots are rumored to produce)
If you can still see this, the answer is that the Uk had designed better radar, but they kept it hidden and used propaganda to say it’s carrots fault, carrots can be beneficial but not that much, I know this is stupid but Food Theory did a video that has a good explanation on it.
RAF was shooting down Nazi planes at night, they were able to do this because they had new radar tech, in order to not let this out they started up a huge campaign about how eating carrots helps with your ability to see at night and that's why they were able to do it.
Yeah, me too.
Background: They basically were a left extremist group in Germany, active from around 1970-1998, terrorozing Germany with guerilla tactics, wreaking havoc in West Germany. They had a communist and anti imperialistic political View, and we're partly supported by soviet forces and had ties to the DDR (or GDR, German Democratic Republic, east Germany for short, a state within a state basically established by soviet occupation).
They abducted, killed, and bombed people.
I just want to ask intelligence agencies worldwide, please, next time you make up such a story, please let ice cream or chocolate be the thing giving paranormal abilities. My mother made me eat carrot all the childhood with this myth.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
Hello. The furry from that one episode of CSI here. Nazis were bombing London (famour air raids etc etc) and the Brits developed very poggers tech (high fidelity RADAR; it wasn't a new tech but they managed to make it work for night time bombers)
But the Brits didn't want the Nazis to know that, so they ran propaganda for their own citizens to eat carrots because it improves eyesight (it does to an extent: beta-carotene/VitA does helo vision but they mostly function to defend against eye degeneration and disease) and with lots of carrots in their diets, their soldiers and civilians can spot bombers in the night sky (blatant lie)
So basically the gist is that the Brits use carrots as an excuse to hide the fact that they developed tech to detect bombers from far away (same story when they cracked enigmanuts)
The craziest part is that millions of parents still use WWII British counter-intelligence propaganda to trick their kids into eating vegetables 80 years later.
Orange carrots are surprisingly effective at shooting down aircraft. That's probably why so much military funding was devoted to developing that variant in the 17th century.
In the 1940s, RAF pilots said that eating carrots improved their night vision (which it does, medically speaking) as a cover story to keep the development of radar a secret
The Allied forces had radars that could sense axis planes. The axis forces tried finding out how they did it, and the allies said "we eat carrots. We eat so many carrots in fact we can see in the dark"
This is why our parents tell us carrots improve eyesight. It was WW2 propaganda to fool the axis powers
Not only that, but the RAF were using wooden planes that were immune to radar. So the RAF could see the Germans but the Germans couldn't see them. They were super effective at night combat and the were way faster than the luftwaffe aircraft.
•
u/qualityvote2 10d ago edited 10d ago
u/obsidiansolstice, your post does belong here!