Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today we're talking about a woman who is not a household name, but in my opinion she probably should be. There are some other people who think she probably should be as well. Uh. She was a Welsh scientist who developed a system of thwarting radar that was invaluable to the Allied forces during World War Two, and what we know of her work is unfortunately entirely pieced together from accounts by her male colleagues, who fortunately recognized the importance of her contributions. So today we are talking about Joan Struthers current. Joan Struthers was born February nineteen sixteen and Swansea, Wales. Joan attended the Swansea Girls High School. She went a scholarship to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge and she enrolled there in nineteen thirty four. She studied physics. Of note here is the fact that Joan, despite doing all of the required coursework at Cambridge, did not get a physics degree That was because it was policy not to issue them two women. So when she finished her undergraduate coursework in ninety eight, but again not a degree, she started her doctor at work and that was actually funded by a government grant and that work was carried out at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and it was there that she met a man named Samuel Curran who she was assigned as a lab partner. Yeah, this whole deal where you could do the whole of the coursework and not be awarded a degree because you're a woman like that was not unique to Cambridge. We've talked about that happening in other schools too. Yeah. Absolutely, that was pretty much der rigor across academia and the nineteen thirties. Yea. So in nineteen forty, Struther and Karen were moved from their physics work at the Cavendish Lab to Exeter and there they were both assigned to research that was to help the war effort. They turned their problem solving skill to the development of proximity fuses. These are explosive device sugars that since when their targets are within a specified range, so close enough to cause damage and then detonate the proximity fuses that Joan Struthers and Samuel Kerran developed targeted rockets and aircraft, and they developed a very closely should JIP over the course of the years being lab partners, and in November nineteen forty Joan and Samuel married and not long after the currents had said their vows, they were reassigned. This time they were sent to the Telecommunications Research Establishment. This was again part of the war effort, and sam worked on centimeter radar and Joan worked in countermeasures. The goal for Jon's work was to figure out a way to fool enemy radar, and the team on this project was led by Robert Cockburn under the leadership of Reginald Victor Jones, who was a British physicist who had become an expert in military intelligence. Just as a quick refresher on radar, that stands for radio detection and ranging. Basically, radar works by sending out a radio signal and wonder action. It looks for a bounce or an echo of that signal, which would indicate that their objects in the path of the signal. Then, using the information gathered that way, including the time it takes for the echo to return, to the point of transmission. Radar can indicate the size, shape, and distance of objects, so the team commissioned by Jones had to somehow thwart that process, and so one of the experiments that Joan Curran began was using thin metal reflectors to disrupt the echo of radar. Large groups of small metal strips could even mimic a large object like an aircraft, when in reality there was nothing substantial there. Even larger groups of strips could create large amorphous blobs that were big enough to hide an aircraft inside. Even if an enemy knew that a plane was somewhere inside such a blob, Figuring out where would be a complete guess if that blob was big enough. And Jones is credited with coming up with this idea and then passing it off to the research group to figure out the particular killers and do testing, and Joan Curran really did a lot of that research. Jones later described the concept in this way years later in his book, which is titled The Most Secret War Quote. The phenomenon on which they depended was that of resonance. If a reflector is made of a simple wire or strip of metal of length equal to half the wavelength used by the radar station. It resonates to the incoming radio waves and reradiates them to such effect that it is roughly equivalent to a whole sheet of metal whose dimensions are square and which has sides equal in length to half a wavelength. Thus, a few hundreds such strips or wires would reflect as much energy as a whole Lancaster bomber. If you recall our episode on the twenty third Headquarters Special Troops that are known as the Ghost Army, you know that creative deception was a valuable tool in the Allied Forces World War two plans. But at the point when Current and the team led by Jones were working on their radar disruptor technology, the US was and even involved in World War Two. Yet Current and her colleagues were leading the effort in trickery as a military strategy, figuring out ways that blobs of reflective material could hint at a faux massive attack force or simply obscure one or two aircraft. And so the practical idea of how this would work is that a lead aircraft would drop bundles of strips to create this radar confusion, and then dropping additional bundles at regular intervals would create complete mayhem for enemy forces that were trying to get a read on this situation. This technology was given the code name Window by British intelligence, although the U S would eventually just kind of use the more casual term of radar chaff. Even after the December seven one bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war, Curran's work was still in the experimental stage. She was testing the best possible materials, the best possible shapes and sizes for these strips. Those decisions weren't made until two and the technology wasn't put into use until ninety three. She performed test first at Swantage on the aisle of Pierbeck and then later at Malvern, Worcestershire. Everything from pieces of metal as big as slips of paper, which were considered as a possible propaganda delivery system as well as being part of this radar disruption. Two very tiny wires were tested before the research led to the decision that aluminum cut into one point five by time strips was the best That is a little bit more than half an inch by a little less than ten inches. According to RV. Jones, the intention had actually been to first use the system Joan Current had tested as early as May of nineteen forty two. He wrote, with the chiefs of Staff's approval, the window packets where I believe actually loaded into bombers for a raid in May two and then we're offloaded again because there was a last minute prohibition of their use. And the reason for that last minute change, according to Jones, was that Fighter Commands Airborne radar Officer Derek Jackson had only heard about the existence of Window right before the mission, and Jackson was understandably concerned that those reflectors might also cause confusion to the radar texts in the British forces, and so he was not comfortable using a brand new technology that he had only just heard of during an active raid. So Window was pulled for additional testing. We'll talk more about how this technique for confusing Germany's radar was eventually put to use, but first we will pause or a sponsor break RV. Jones was against withholding the use of Window, although he also wanted to make sure that when they did deploy it, it was at a time when it would be the most effective and impactful In October ninety two, British intelligence received information that indicated that the Germans knew about this concept, having fired on a dust cloud of aluminum particles that was thrown out of an Allied craft in the Rhineland. Jones made the case to command that they should absolutely used window immediately before German forces might have a chance to figure out a way around it, perhaps even introduced their own version of it, but his efforts were met with dismissal. This discussion did, however, lead to a more detailed analysis of window and how it would impact both the Germans and the British. This led to more specifications around the exact amounts of window material that should be used for various results, and also the calculations of its value in terms of potential casualty reduction. As people were calculating these things, how much to use and what it was what its real value was in terms of war effort, they came up with some different numbers. Dereck Jackson, who was that man who had halted the initial use of window, worked on this analysis as well, and he came up with the weight of eighty four tons of window as the amount needed to make Germany's radar useless. Jackson also believed to reciprocate German forces could render Allied radar ineffective with just one ton of a similar material. R V. Jones made his own calculation, remember he had really um birthed this whole idea, and he landed at twelve tons as the amount needed to wipe out the effectiveness of Germany's radar, and then a whole other colleague came up with the number of forty eight tons. So they were all over the map and what they thought it was going to require to be effective. After a meeting on April second three, in which everyone argued the case for or against Window based on their own calculations, it was decided that it was worthwhile and that a request would be sent to the Prime Minister to use it as soon as possible. The case had to once again be made to Winston Churchill, with some members of the British military still in opposition to using Window, but eventually it was determined that the potential to save lives was worth the perceived risk of disruption to British and Allied radar ratings. At the conclusion of the meeting, according to Jones, Churchill said very well, let us open the window. R V. Jones, knowing that if the plan for Window failed, he would take all the heat, sent his men out to all of the bomber stations where this would be deployed, to give talks about Germany's night defense systems and clearly explain how the packets of aluminum strips were to be deployed and at what rate. As things were finally moving to actual use of the research that Joan Curran had done, there were also concerns that Germany was essentially in the exact same position with a similar radar disruptive technology that they were fearful about putting into use. After the war, RV. Jones discovered that Germans had definitely known about Window and were perplexed as to why it wasn't in use. They also tried a similar tech of their own, but the trials went so poorly that Erman Goring had all the reports related to these tests destroyed. Operation Gomorrah on July was the first time that Window, the culmination of Kurran's experimentation, was used in a bombing raid. The first night of attacks on Hamburg, Germany were considered a success. British forces sent seven hundred and ninety one aircraft out and they lost only twelve. That's a one point five percent loss rate. Similar rates that had happened without the use of window had a six point one percent loss rate. Jones estimated that seventy to eighty aircraft were saved thanks to their parcels of aluminum strips over the course of several raids. The next night, window was used again on our rate in Essen. This time the disruption was so significant that the Germans were not only unable to track enemy bombers, but they also weren't able to track their own planes. The loss rate for the British bombers was slightly higher than the previous night, at three point three percent, but this was still a substantial improvement over previous missions without window. There were additional raids on Hamburg in the days that followed, both by British Bomber Command and by the US. The average loss rate for British forces was two point eight percent averaged out over this series of bombings. While we're talking about the success of these raids, we also have to acknowledge the heavy civilian casualties that took place in these attacks. The ground fires created by the bombing on Hamburg during the second raid, there created a firestorm. The intensity of the fires created their own wind as hot air rows and cold air was pulled down very rapidly that spread the flames, destroying huge swaths of the city and suffocating people. Additionally, a tornado like effect pulled people into the blaze even as they tried to flee. R V Jones's account indicates that Allied forces didn't realize how devastating these bombings were until after the fact, when casualty estimates were placed between forty and fifty thousand people. Uh. Yeah, you will see sometimes even lower numbers and sometimes even higher numbers there. I will tell you this, this is the uh one time that research for this show has ever resulted in me having nightmares. So if you want to go study this firestorm, please know that the images you will see are very disturbing. The stories of survivors are very upsetting. Um. But it's also really important that we talked about it. So. Jones also acknowledged that this was something that seemed very counter to what they had been sort of preaching from the Allied side. He later wrote, quote, we had started the war morally opposed to the bombing of civilian populations, and now we were pursuing it on a horrifying scale. How had this come about? And then he goes on to discuss how that had been something of a gradual process as the realizations came that bomber Command could not always guarantee precision hits to targets, but also that bomber Command was really the only thing that was hurting Germany on the scale that was needed to end the war. Additionally, there was a strategy in play to demoralize the German population by striking a city filled with industrial workers. Jones summarized all of this by writing, quote, it was on the grounds of probable effectiveness and not of morality that the battle was fought. At one point, there was even a brief accusation that the Allies had used chemical warfare at Hamburg, although that was untrue. The source of this allegation had been some of the aluminum strips that the Germans had recovered after a cow had eaten them. It died the strips that have been coated in a black paint to make them invisible at night, and that paint did contain a small amount of arsenic, but not enough to substantiate a claim of chemical warfare. As another aside, because I suspect people will ask, couldn't a cow just die from eating those strips? Um, I'm being grown up the child of farmers. Um. Cows eat metal all the time because often they're fed stuff that's just kind of sloughy and filled with all kinds of craziness. Also, they will sometimes just find things in fields. Some farmers actually put magnets in their cows stomachs to kind of keep those things isolated and not passed through their digestive tract and couse mortality. Um. But yeah, it's not uncommon for cows to eat metal. Uh. Just the same. Despite those chemical warfare claims being abandoned, the attacks on Hamburg and Essen had significantly di and ish both morale and production of war material. Over the course of eight days, the British and US bombing raids destroyed half of Hamburg. While it initially was considered by some to be an active retribution of the Nazi bombings of London and Coventry, the difference in the level of destruction at Hamburg made the ethics of war something that people inside the military considered in a new way, even as newspapers were touting Operation Gomorra as a huge win, and even today, these raids and the balance of moral versus strategic decision making continue to be discussed. We also talked about that a lot in our episode on Sadako Sasaki and her Thousand Cranes and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all that. So it came up a lot all through the war. The system that Jones had conceived and that Joan Curran had tested had worked incredibly well, like keeping German forces confused as their radar failed to give them information that they needed to defend against these bombing raids, and as the Allied forces prepared for D Day, Curran's radar chaft system was used to obscure the details of the planned landings at Normandy. It was important to not only hide the fact that Normandy was their target, but also to misdirect the attentions of the German forces to another location if possible. The hope was that the Allies could convince the Germans that the planned landing was east of the Sin River, so that they would keep most of their troops and artillery there. And then the Allied forces would destroy the bridges that would have enabled them to move out of that area. So they kind of wanted to get them in one place and trap them there. And then to do all this, the Allies needed illusion. They wanted to convince the Germans that a force was coming in from the sea, and they came up with a plan to use Window to do so. Robert Cockburn, who had overseen the testing that Joan Curran had done to develop Window, was the person who developed this plan. And we're going to talk about how that plan was executed with some very dire results. But we are going to take a quick sponsor break before we get into that. On June, the day before D Day, the Lancaster bombers of the six seventeen Air Squadron flew in orbits eight miles long and two miles wide, slowly moving southeast at eight nots to mimic an ocean convoy. According to an account given to the Royal Air Force in Mayen by Wing Commander John Bell MBE, who was part of this mission, quote, while they were flying, there were two air crew in the rear of each Lancaster, and I was one of them. We were handed bundles of aluminum strip which we dropped at approximately three second intervals through the flair shoote. The strips varied in size and went from small to large as we approached the French coast, and large too small when we turned back to the English coast. A green light indicated when it was time to throw it. The efforts of the siv Air squadron were part of what was called Operation Taxable, which played out along the French coast near Coptante Fair. A second operation which made use of window own as Operation Glimmer, made it look as though there was an Allied force crossing a narrow point of the English Channel. For Glimmer, the two squadron was tasked with dropping the chaff, and the deception also included a feint that made it appear that a massive ground force was moving towards pat Calais. To provide additional support for this ruse, dummy parachutists were dropped southwest of deep and Kin in a segment of the plan called Operation Titanic. All of these efforts combined worked as the Allies hoped. The Germans could not get a correct analysis of enemy troop movements and even into the following month, there was still confusion about whether there was a large ground force near the city of Calais. Also in June of nineteen forty four, Sam and Joan Curran were invited to the University of California at Berkeley to work on the Manhattan Project, which they accepted. It was during this time that the pair worked on the development of a scintillation counter to measure the ionization of radiation. While Samuel Kerran has given credit for the invention, which is still used today, he consistently noted his wife's work on the project, and during their time in California, the Currents had their first child, and their daughter was born with an intellectual or cognitive disability. The exact nature of her disability is unclear from the readily available information, but after the war came to a close, the Currents moved back to the UK, where Sam had been offered a position at Glasgow University, and they had three more children after they returned to Europe, all of which were sons. Though her work with the war effort was done, Joan was hardly idle from this point. In nineteen fifty four, she and Sam met with four other couples with the goal of setting up an organization to assist parents of children with learning disabilities. After the first meeting, they printed a notice in the paper inviting people to an open meeting and more than three hundred people attended. This was the beginning of the Scottish Association of Parents of Handicapped Children, which is an organization that still exists, although its name has evolved to be Enabled Scotland, which is a support and advocacy group. Joan Curran continued to work in support of people with disabilities throughout her lifetime. Her close ties to academia led her to advocate on behalf of students with disabilities and work with the Council for Access for the Disabled. Both Sam and Joan were really outspoken proponents of the idea that education was something that should be available to everyone, and this work that she did was one way in which she carried out that mission. She also served on Greater Glasgow Health Board and was part of the Scottish Special Housing Association. At the end of the nineteen fifties, Sam became principal of the Royal College of Science and Technology, which gained its Royal charter and became the University of strath Clyde under his leadership. During this time, Joan founded and served as president of the strath Clyde Women's Group. She also established the Lady Current Endowment Fund for overseas students. In seven, at the age of seventy one, Joan was finally granted an honorary doctorate by the University of strath Clyde, so finally she got her physics degree. Samuel Curran died on February. A plaque was installed in his honor in Barony Hall of Victorian Gothic Church at strath Clyde. Joan unveiled the plaque in a ceremony, although she herself was terminally ill at the time. At the event, she was told that a walled garden at the Ross Priory, also part of strath Clyde, was to be named after her, with the Joan Curran Summer House to be built there. Joan Curran died less than a year after her husband on February and she never had any of her work published, but her contributions to the war effort, science, and her community were recounted over and over in her obituaries. Her obituary in the Scotland Herald open with the paragraph quote it is difficult to separate the lives of Joan and Sam Curran. Although they were a very different temperaments, they made a superb team and partnership and were devoted to each other. Nevertheless, it is very important and Sam always emphasized this to note that she was a considerable scientist in her own right and in the dark days of the Second World War, she, as did Sam, played an important part in the survival of this country. Politician Tim Dalyall wrote an account of his first meeting with Reginald Jones, that person that had spearheaded the window project, and in that conversation, Jones told him quote, in my opinion, Joan Curran made an even greater contribution to victory in than Sam's pretty incredible, it is, and it's one of those things. I'm glad there have been some efforts in both Wales and Scotland over the last probably five to eight years, of people who are pointing out like this is a person that we should be recognizing more than we do. And I love that they're doing. That makes me happy. Um, I have so much listener mail. Well, we have just come off of the holidays, and we are lucky enough to often get some really really lovely UM cards from our various listeners, and I want to to read a couple of them and then talk about one wonderful gift that arrived that I, of course i'm in love with. The first one is from our listener Rebecca, who just sent us a lovely card that is a Doctor SEUs card and says thank you for all your hard work on the podcast. I'm a big fan. I also love the behind the scenes Merry Christmas. UM. Thank you so much, Rebecca. We are long past Christmas at this point, but I hope yours was great as well. We also got a card from uh Test, Bill, Pippy and Buster. Test wrote Holly and Tracy, happy holidays in a very merry Christmas to you and your families. I'm a longtime listener to the show, along with my two cats, Peppy and Buster, who are so stinking cute. I kind of can't deal with it. That's mine, Uh, she's my boyfriend. Bill doesn't quite get the whole podcast thing, but that is his loss. I am going to Rome in January, so I won't be able to go with you two in May bummer, but I still get to go to Rome, so no complaints. Keep up the good work, um she can, she can pre screen it for us and tell us all the good places to eat. That's officially your job now. Our last one is from our listener, Shelly, and she writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I am a total space flight nerd, and I loved every bit of the Apollo eleven fifty at the anniversary celebrations this summer, including your fascinating Thomas Harriet and John Wilkins episodes. I got to see the Columbia command module at Seattle's Museum of Flight, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance to see it. I think it's back at the Smithsonian now as part of the Museum of Flights UH Destination Moon events. I attended a great talk by an astrobiologist titled Life on the Ancient Moon conclusion there could have been some and I picked up these moon photo postcards to send you. I'm glad I didn't get around to sending them right away, because I then saw the build an Orbiter postcard on a more recent visit to the museum, and I could not resist getting it as well. Thank you for all the wonderful work you do on the podcast. I'm always rooting for more episodes on the history of science, space exploration, and women in stem. Yeah. So it's this cool kind of snapped together orbiter model that you can make and it comes in a postcard and it's really cool and I love it. I also will echo her thing. If you ever get to go see any of these marvelous orbiters, please do it. Um. If you go to Kennedy and you see the Atlantis on display, that is one of the most beautiful and moving museum installations I think I have ever seen in my entire life. Um, it is so good. I stood there and cried for like forty five minutes. Um. But I also just recommend that you go and and recognize the amazing things. The thing I always love about space, and I try to explain this to people, like when I look at things like the James Webb's based telescope or any of the space shuttles, etcetera, is that to me, what makes them beautiful is that they are the best of us. Those are a lot of different people from different backgrounds who have all worked really, really hard and come together to make something that transcends our life on Earth. That is why I'm such a space store. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you could do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Again, that is a newish email address. You can also find us across social media as missed in History. UH. If you would like to subscribe to the show, we would like you to do that as well. It's a great way to start the new year. You can do that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios How stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today we're talking about a woman who is not a household name, but in my opinion she probably should be. There are some other people who think she probably should be as well. Uh. She was a Welsh scientist who developed a system of thwarting radar that was invaluable to the Allied forces during World War Two, and what we know of her work is unfortunately entirely pieced together from accounts by her male colleagues, who fortunately recognized the importance of her contributions. So today we are talking about Joan Struthers current. Joan Struthers was born February nineteen sixteen and Swansea, Wales. Joan attended the Swansea Girls High School. She went a scholarship to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge and she enrolled there in nineteen thirty four. She studied physics. Of note here is the fact that Joan, despite doing all of the required coursework at Cambridge, did not get a physics degree That was because it was policy not to issue them two women. So when she finished her undergraduate coursework in ninety eight, but again not a degree, she started her doctor at work and that was actually funded by a government grant and that work was carried out at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and it was there that she met a man named Samuel Curran who she was assigned as a lab partner. Yeah, this whole deal where you could do the whole of the coursework and not be awarded a degree because you're a woman like that was not unique to Cambridge. We've talked about that happening in other schools too. Yeah. Absolutely, that was pretty much der rigor across academia and the nineteen thirties. Yea. So in nineteen forty, Struther and Karen were moved from their physics work at the Cavendish Lab to Exeter and there they were both assigned to research that was to help the war effort. They turned their problem solving skill to the development of proximity fuses. These are explosive device sugars that since when their targets are within a specified range, so close enough to cause damage and then detonate the proximity fuses that Joan Struthers and Samuel Kerran developed targeted rockets and aircraft, and they developed a very closely should JIP over the course of the years being lab partners, and in November nineteen forty Joan and Samuel married and not long after the currents had said their vows, they were reassigned. This time they were sent to the Telecommunications Research Establishment. This was again part of the war effort, and sam worked on centimeter radar and Joan worked in countermeasures. The goal for Jon's work was to figure out a way to fool enemy radar, and the team on this project was led by Robert Cockburn under the leadership of Reginald Victor Jones, who was a British physicist who had become an expert in military intelligence. Just as a quick refresher on radar, that stands for radio detection and ranging. Basically, radar works by sending out a radio signal and wonder action. It looks for a bounce or an echo of that signal, which would indicate that their objects in the path of the signal. Then, using the information gathered that way, including the time it takes for the echo to return, to the point of transmission. Radar can indicate the size, shape, and distance of objects, so the team commissioned by Jones had to somehow thwart that process, and so one of the experiments that Joan Curran began was using thin metal reflectors to disrupt the echo of radar. Large groups of small metal strips could even mimic a large object like an aircraft, when in reality there was nothing substantial there. Even larger groups of strips could create large amorphous blobs that were big enough to hide an aircraft inside. Even if an enemy knew that a plane was somewhere inside such a blob, Figuring out where would be a complete guess if that blob was big enough. And Jones is credited with coming up with this idea and then passing it off to the research group to figure out the particular killers and do testing, and Joan Curran really did a lot of that research. Jones later described the concept in this way years later in his book, which is titled The Most Secret War Quote. The phenomenon on which they depended was that of resonance. If a reflector is made of a simple wire or strip of metal of length equal to half the wavelength used by the radar station. It resonates to the incoming radio waves and reradiates them to such effect that it is roughly equivalent to a whole sheet of metal whose dimensions are square and which has sides equal in length to half a wavelength. Thus, a few hundreds such strips or wires would reflect as much energy as a whole Lancaster bomber. If you recall our episode on the twenty third Headquarters Special Troops that are known as the Ghost Army, you know that creative deception was a valuable tool in the Allied Forces World War two plans. But at the point when Current and the team led by Jones were working on their radar disruptor technology, the US was and even involved in World War Two. Yet Current and her colleagues were leading the effort in trickery as a military strategy, figuring out ways that blobs of reflective material could hint at a faux massive attack force or simply obscure one or two aircraft. And so the practical idea of how this would work is that a lead aircraft would drop bundles of strips to create this radar confusion, and then dropping additional bundles at regular intervals would create complete mayhem for enemy forces that were trying to get a read on this situation. This technology was given the code name Window by British intelligence, although the U S would eventually just kind of use the more casual term of radar chaff. Even after the December seven one bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war, Curran's work was still in the experimental stage. She was testing the best possible materials, the best possible shapes and sizes for these strips. Those decisions weren't made until two and the technology wasn't put into use until ninety three. She performed test first at Swantage on the aisle of Pierbeck and then later at Malvern, Worcestershire. Everything from pieces of metal as big as slips of paper, which were considered as a possible propaganda delivery system as well as being part of this radar disruption. Two very tiny wires were tested before the research led to the decision that aluminum cut into one point five by time strips was the best That is a little bit more than half an inch by a little less than ten inches. According to RV. Jones, the intention had actually been to first use the system Joan Current had tested as early as May of nineteen forty two. He wrote, with the chiefs of Staff's approval, the window packets where I believe actually loaded into bombers for a raid in May two and then we're offloaded again because there was a last minute prohibition of their use. And the reason for that last minute change, according to Jones, was that Fighter Commands Airborne radar Officer Derek Jackson had only heard about the existence of Window right before the mission, and Jackson was understandably concerned that those reflectors might also cause confusion to the radar texts in the British forces, and so he was not comfortable using a brand new technology that he had only just heard of during an active raid. So Window was pulled for additional testing. We'll talk more about how this technique for confusing Germany's radar was eventually put to use, but first we will pause or a sponsor break RV. Jones was against withholding the use of Window, although he also wanted to make sure that when they did deploy it, it was at a time when it would be the most effective and impactful In October ninety two, British intelligence received information that indicated that the Germans knew about this concept, having fired on a dust cloud of aluminum particles that was thrown out of an Allied craft in the Rhineland. Jones made the case to command that they should absolutely used window immediately before German forces might have a chance to figure out a way around it, perhaps even introduced their own version of it, but his efforts were met with dismissal. This discussion did, however, lead to a more detailed analysis of window and how it would impact both the Germans and the British. This led to more specifications around the exact amounts of window material that should be used for various results, and also the calculations of its value in terms of potential casualty reduction. As people were calculating these things, how much to use and what it was what its real value was in terms of war effort, they came up with some different numbers. Dereck Jackson, who was that man who had halted the initial use of window, worked on this analysis as well, and he came up with the weight of eighty four tons of window as the amount needed to make Germany's radar useless. Jackson also believed to reciprocate German forces could render Allied radar ineffective with just one ton of a similar material. R V. Jones made his own calculation, remember he had really um birthed this whole idea, and he landed at twelve tons as the amount needed to wipe out the effectiveness of Germany's radar, and then a whole other colleague came up with the number of forty eight tons. So they were all over the map and what they thought it was going to require to be effective. After a meeting on April second three, in which everyone argued the case for or against Window based on their own calculations, it was decided that it was worthwhile and that a request would be sent to the Prime Minister to use it as soon as possible. The case had to once again be made to Winston Churchill, with some members of the British military still in opposition to using Window, but eventually it was determined that the potential to save lives was worth the perceived risk of disruption to British and Allied radar ratings. At the conclusion of the meeting, according to Jones, Churchill said very well, let us open the window. R V. Jones, knowing that if the plan for Window failed, he would take all the heat, sent his men out to all of the bomber stations where this would be deployed, to give talks about Germany's night defense systems and clearly explain how the packets of aluminum strips were to be deployed and at what rate. As things were finally moving to actual use of the research that Joan Curran had done, there were also concerns that Germany was essentially in the exact same position with a similar radar disruptive technology that they were fearful about putting into use. After the war, RV. Jones discovered that Germans had definitely known about Window and were perplexed as to why it wasn't in use. They also tried a similar tech of their own, but the trials went so poorly that Erman Goring had all the reports related to these tests destroyed. Operation Gomorrah on July was the first time that Window, the culmination of Kurran's experimentation, was used in a bombing raid. The first night of attacks on Hamburg, Germany were considered a success. British forces sent seven hundred and ninety one aircraft out and they lost only twelve. That's a one point five percent loss rate. Similar rates that had happened without the use of window had a six point one percent loss rate. Jones estimated that seventy to eighty aircraft were saved thanks to their parcels of aluminum strips over the course of several raids. The next night, window was used again on our rate in Essen. This time the disruption was so significant that the Germans were not only unable to track enemy bombers, but they also weren't able to track their own planes. The loss rate for the British bombers was slightly higher than the previous night, at three point three percent, but this was still a substantial improvement over previous missions without window. There were additional raids on Hamburg in the days that followed, both by British Bomber Command and by the US. The average loss rate for British forces was two point eight percent averaged out over this series of bombings. While we're talking about the success of these raids, we also have to acknowledge the heavy civilian casualties that took place in these attacks. The ground fires created by the bombing on Hamburg during the second raid, there created a firestorm. The intensity of the fires created their own wind as hot air rows and cold air was pulled down very rapidly that spread the flames, destroying huge swaths of the city and suffocating people. Additionally, a tornado like effect pulled people into the blaze even as they tried to flee. R V Jones's account indicates that Allied forces didn't realize how devastating these bombings were until after the fact, when casualty estimates were placed between forty and fifty thousand people. Uh. Yeah, you will see sometimes even lower numbers and sometimes even higher numbers there. I will tell you this, this is the uh one time that research for this show has ever resulted in me having nightmares. So if you want to go study this firestorm, please know that the images you will see are very disturbing. The stories of survivors are very upsetting. Um. But it's also really important that we talked about it. So. Jones also acknowledged that this was something that seemed very counter to what they had been sort of preaching from the Allied side. He later wrote, quote, we had started the war morally opposed to the bombing of civilian populations, and now we were pursuing it on a horrifying scale. How had this come about? And then he goes on to discuss how that had been something of a gradual process as the realizations came that bomber Command could not always guarantee precision hits to targets, but also that bomber Command was really the only thing that was hurting Germany on the scale that was needed to end the war. Additionally, there was a strategy in play to demoralize the German population by striking a city filled with industrial workers. Jones summarized all of this by writing, quote, it was on the grounds of probable effectiveness and not of morality that the battle was fought. At one point, there was even a brief accusation that the Allies had used chemical warfare at Hamburg, although that was untrue. The source of this allegation had been some of the aluminum strips that the Germans had recovered after a cow had eaten them. It died the strips that have been coated in a black paint to make them invisible at night, and that paint did contain a small amount of arsenic, but not enough to substantiate a claim of chemical warfare. As another aside, because I suspect people will ask, couldn't a cow just die from eating those strips? Um, I'm being grown up the child of farmers. Um. Cows eat metal all the time because often they're fed stuff that's just kind of sloughy and filled with all kinds of craziness. Also, they will sometimes just find things in fields. Some farmers actually put magnets in their cows stomachs to kind of keep those things isolated and not passed through their digestive tract and couse mortality. Um. But yeah, it's not uncommon for cows to eat metal. Uh. Just the same. Despite those chemical warfare claims being abandoned, the attacks on Hamburg and Essen had significantly di and ish both morale and production of war material. Over the course of eight days, the British and US bombing raids destroyed half of Hamburg. While it initially was considered by some to be an active retribution of the Nazi bombings of London and Coventry, the difference in the level of destruction at Hamburg made the ethics of war something that people inside the military considered in a new way, even as newspapers were touting Operation Gomorra as a huge win, and even today, these raids and the balance of moral versus strategic decision making continue to be discussed. We also talked about that a lot in our episode on Sadako Sasaki and her Thousand Cranes and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all that. So it came up a lot all through the war. The system that Jones had conceived and that Joan Curran had tested had worked incredibly well, like keeping German forces confused as their radar failed to give them information that they needed to defend against these bombing raids, and as the Allied forces prepared for D Day, Curran's radar chaft system was used to obscure the details of the planned landings at Normandy. It was important to not only hide the fact that Normandy was their target, but also to misdirect the attentions of the German forces to another location if possible. The hope was that the Allies could convince the Germans that the planned landing was east of the Sin River, so that they would keep most of their troops and artillery there. And then the Allied forces would destroy the bridges that would have enabled them to move out of that area. So they kind of wanted to get them in one place and trap them there. And then to do all this, the Allies needed illusion. They wanted to convince the Germans that a force was coming in from the sea, and they came up with a plan to use Window to do so. Robert Cockburn, who had overseen the testing that Joan Curran had done to develop Window, was the person who developed this plan. And we're going to talk about how that plan was executed with some very dire results. But we are going to take a quick sponsor break before we get into that. On June, the day before D Day, the Lancaster bombers of the six seventeen Air Squadron flew in orbits eight miles long and two miles wide, slowly moving southeast at eight nots to mimic an ocean convoy. According to an account given to the Royal Air Force in Mayen by Wing Commander John Bell MBE, who was part of this mission, quote, while they were flying, there were two air crew in the rear of each Lancaster, and I was one of them. We were handed bundles of aluminum strip which we dropped at approximately three second intervals through the flair shoote. The strips varied in size and went from small to large as we approached the French coast, and large too small when we turned back to the English coast. A green light indicated when it was time to throw it. The efforts of the siv Air squadron were part of what was called Operation Taxable, which played out along the French coast near Coptante Fair. A second operation which made use of window own as Operation Glimmer, made it look as though there was an Allied force crossing a narrow point of the English Channel. For Glimmer, the two squadron was tasked with dropping the chaff, and the deception also included a feint that made it appear that a massive ground force was moving towards pat Calais. To provide additional support for this ruse, dummy parachutists were dropped southwest of deep and Kin in a segment of the plan called Operation Titanic. All of these efforts combined worked as the Allies hoped. The Germans could not get a correct analysis of enemy troop movements and even into the following month, there was still confusion about whether there was a large ground force near the city of Calais. Also in June of nineteen forty four, Sam and Joan Curran were invited to the University of California at Berkeley to work on the Manhattan Project, which they accepted. It was during this time that the pair worked on the development of a scintillation counter to measure the ionization of radiation. While Samuel Kerran has given credit for the invention, which is still used today, he consistently noted his wife's work on the project, and during their time in California, the Currents had their first child, and their daughter was born with an intellectual or cognitive disability. The exact nature of her disability is unclear from the readily available information, but after the war came to a close, the Currents moved back to the UK, where Sam had been offered a position at Glasgow University, and they had three more children after they returned to Europe, all of which were sons. Though her work with the war effort was done, Joan was hardly idle from this point. In nineteen fifty four, she and Sam met with four other couples with the goal of setting up an organization to assist parents of children with learning disabilities. After the first meeting, they printed a notice in the paper inviting people to an open meeting and more than three hundred people attended. This was the beginning of the Scottish Association of Parents of Handicapped Children, which is an organization that still exists, although its name has evolved to be Enabled Scotland, which is a support and advocacy group. Joan Curran continued to work in support of people with disabilities throughout her lifetime. Her close ties to academia led her to advocate on behalf of students with disabilities and work with the Council for Access for the Disabled. Both Sam and Joan were really outspoken proponents of the idea that education was something that should be available to everyone, and this work that she did was one way in which she carried out that mission. She also served on Greater Glasgow Health Board and was part of the Scottish Special Housing Association. At the end of the nineteen fifties, Sam became principal of the Royal College of Science and Technology, which gained its Royal charter and became the University of strath Clyde under his leadership. During this time, Joan founded and served as president of the strath Clyde Women's Group. She also established the Lady Current Endowment Fund for overseas students. In seven, at the age of seventy one, Joan was finally granted an honorary doctorate by the University of strath Clyde, so finally she got her physics degree. Samuel Curran died on February. A plaque was installed in his honor in Barony Hall of Victorian Gothic Church at strath Clyde. Joan unveiled the plaque in a ceremony, although she herself was terminally ill at the time. At the event, she was told that a walled garden at the Ross Priory, also part of strath Clyde, was to be named after her, with the Joan Curran Summer House to be built there. Joan Curran died less than a year after her husband on February and she never had any of her work published, but her contributions to the war effort, science, and her community were recounted over and over in her obituaries. Her obituary in the Scotland Herald open with the paragraph quote it is difficult to separate the lives of Joan and Sam Curran. Although they were a very different temperaments, they made a superb team and partnership and were devoted to each other. Nevertheless, it is very important and Sam always emphasized this to note that she was a considerable scientist in her own right and in the dark days of the Second World War, she, as did Sam, played an important part in the survival of this country. Politician Tim Dalyall wrote an account of his first meeting with Reginald Jones, that person that had spearheaded the window project, and in that conversation, Jones told him quote, in my opinion, Joan Curran made an even greater contribution to victory in than Sam's pretty incredible, it is, and it's one of those things. I'm glad there have been some efforts in both Wales and Scotland over the last probably five to eight years, of people who are pointing out like this is a person that we should be recognizing more than we do. And I love that they're doing. That makes me happy. Um, I have so much listener mail. Well, we have just come off of the holidays, and we are lucky enough to often get some really really lovely UM cards from our various listeners, and I want to to read a couple of them and then talk about one wonderful gift that arrived that I, of course i'm in love with. The first one is from our listener Rebecca, who just sent us a lovely card that is a Doctor SEUs card and says thank you for all your hard work on the podcast. I'm a big fan. I also love the behind the scenes Merry Christmas. UM. Thank you so much, Rebecca. We are long past Christmas at this point, but I hope yours was great as well. We also got a card from uh Test, Bill, Pippy and Buster. Test wrote Holly and Tracy, happy holidays in a very merry Christmas to you and your families. I'm a longtime listener to the show, along with my two cats, Peppy and Buster, who are so stinking cute. I kind of can't deal with it. That's mine, Uh, she's my boyfriend. Bill doesn't quite get the whole podcast thing, but that is his loss. I am going to Rome in January, so I won't be able to go with you two in May bummer, but I still get to go to Rome, so no complaints. Keep up the good work, um she can, she can pre screen it for us and tell us all the good places to eat. That's officially your job now. Our last one is from our listener, Shelly, and she writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I am a total space flight nerd, and I loved every bit of the Apollo eleven fifty at the anniversary celebrations this summer, including your fascinating Thomas Harriet and John Wilkins episodes. I got to see the Columbia command module at Seattle's Museum of Flight, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance to see it. I think it's back at the Smithsonian now as part of the Museum of Flights UH Destination Moon events. I attended a great talk by an astrobiologist titled Life on the Ancient Moon conclusion there could have been some and I picked up these moon photo postcards to send you. I'm glad I didn't get around to sending them right away, because I then saw the build an Orbiter postcard on a more recent visit to the museum, and I could not resist getting it as well. Thank you for all the wonderful work you do on the podcast. I'm always rooting for more episodes on the history of science, space exploration, and women in stem. Yeah. So it's this cool kind of snapped together orbiter model that you can make and it comes in a postcard and it's really cool and I love it. I also will echo her thing. If you ever get to go see any of these marvelous orbiters, please do it. Um. If you go to Kennedy and you see the Atlantis on display, that is one of the most beautiful and moving museum installations I think I have ever seen in my entire life. Um, it is so good. I stood there and cried for like forty five minutes. Um. But I also just recommend that you go and and recognize the amazing things. The thing I always love about space, and I try to explain this to people, like when I look at things like the James Webb's based telescope or any of the space shuttles, etcetera, is that to me, what makes them beautiful is that they are the best of us. Those are a lot of different people from different backgrounds who have all worked really, really hard and come together to make something that transcends our life on Earth. That is why I'm such a space store. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you could do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Again, that is a newish email address. You can also find us across social media as missed in History. UH. If you would like to subscribe to the show, we would like you to do that as well. It's a great way to start the new year. You can do that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios How stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.