June 20, 2018 • 39 mins
All six of today’s topics are mass evacuations of children and youth because of a war or other unrest, and include Kindertransport, Operation Pedro Pan, and Operation Babylift.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, before we get started, we just wanted to let
you know we have so many upcoming live shows to
talk to you about. Yes, on July seven, I will
be at History Camp Boston. That's me Tracy, only Holly
won't be at that one. I will be in the
History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, July, we
will both be doing a live show at Adams National
(00:20):
Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. It's an outdoor show. It
will happen rainer shine, and since parking is limited at
the park, people are encouraged to take public transportation. That
is probably how I will be getting there. Also in July,
we will be back at Convention Days at Women's Rights
National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York. Convention Days
is running from July twenty, and our show is going
(00:43):
to be on Saturday July. And then we have big, big,
big news that we are both very excited about. We
are going on an actual multi city tour. We're going
to hit the East coast in August or we will
be coming to Atlanta, Georgia, Riley, North Carolina, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn,
New York, and washing To d C. And then in
October my favorite spooky time of year. We will be
(01:04):
coming to the West coast with stops in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. You can find
more information about all these shows at our website, which
is Missed in History dot Com. Click on the link
in the menu that says live shows. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
(01:32):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. It's time for six Impossible Episodes, Everyone's
favorite time for new listeners. A couple of times a year,
we put together an episode on six topics that, for
one reason or another, can't exactly work as well as
a standalone show. All six of today's topics are examples
(01:54):
of mass evacuations of children and youth because of war
or some other unrest, and we've gotten multiple requests for
some of them, including Kinder Transport, Operation pedro Pan and
Operation Babylift, as well as its tragic plane crash. And
some of these are big enough stories that they probably
could stand on their own as their own episode, but
(02:16):
then that would make it a lot harder to ever
talk about any of the other ones, and they also
have a lot of overlap. And one thing that's true
of all of these evacuations, which are not going to
repeat every single time, because it is true of all
of them, is that these children's experiences after being evacuated
were really all over the place. Some of the evacuees
(02:36):
developed strong and close and loving relationships with their foster
families and other caregivers, but there were also reports of
physical and sexual abuse, both in foster homes and in
group living situations like hostels and camps that were used
in some of the evacuations. So we're only going to
be making note of those sorts of issues when there's
(02:57):
something unique with them in a particular of acuation. Otherwise
it was just an element in all of them. First up,
we're going to talk about kinder transport, and this is
a name that was coined later in the twentieth century
to describe a collection of programs to evacuate children from
Germany and German occupied territory and to take them to
the United Kingdom. These evacuations took place between nineteen thirty
(03:21):
eight and nineteen forty, with most of them happening before
the start of World War Two in Europe in nineteen
thirty nine. This all started after krystal Nacht, or the
Night of the Breaking Glass. This was a program that
took place on November nine, tenth night. When this happened,
Nazi forces arrested nearly thirty thousand Jewish men and sent
them to concentration camps. Nazis also murdered at least a
(03:44):
hundred Jews and destroyed hundreds of synagogues and community buildings.
Thousands of homes and shops were also destroyed. World leaders
had been discussing the quote refugee problem in Germany and
German occupied territory for months of this point. The problem
was that aid organizations had thousands of applications from people
(04:05):
seeking refugee status, but most nations were reluctant to let
them in the horrors of Crystal Knox made the situation worse,
but it didn't really change the other nation's minds. This
was also true in the UK, where Jewish and human
rights organizations had been lobbying extensively for more German Jews
to be given refugee status. It was really only through
(04:28):
this continual advocacy that the British government finally changed its mind. Ultimately,
the British government announced that it would allow children under
the age of seventeen to enter the country and stay
under a temporary visa. But the government also stressed that
idea of temporary the children were intended to be reunited
with their families after the crisis had passed. Relief organizations
(04:52):
had to guarantee that until that happened, the children wouldn't
be a burden on state finances or threaten the British
job market. The children's parents also were not part of
the program. The Kinder Transport only evacuated children. To try
to ensure that these children stay was temporary, a bond
of fifty pounds had to be posted for each of them,
(05:15):
and then a wide range of religious and secular groups
all became part of the effort to raise funds and
fine temporary homes and arrange of their care. These included
the Jewish service organization Beni Brith, as well as the
Society of Friends and the y m c A. Private
citizens played a big part two by donating funds and
clothing and offering their own homes as shelter. After a
(05:38):
radio appeal on November twenty, more than five hundred private
citizens offered to act as foster parents. Multiple organizations on
both ends of the journey identified the children who needed
to be evacuated and then made arrangements to do so.
In Britain there were the British Committee for the Jews
of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children
(06:00):
and From Germany, which was later known as the Refugee
Children's Movement. On the continent, there were the Reich Representation
of Jews in Germany in Berlin and the Jewish Community
Organization in Vienna. The Reich Association of Jews in Germany
succeeded the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany in late
nineteen thirty nine. The first children to be evacuated were
(06:22):
the ones who were in the greatest danger, so orphans
whose orphanages had been destroyed, children whose parents had been deported,
murdered or sent to concentration camps, children whose homes had
been destroyed. In the programs, the first arrivals were nearly
two hundred children from an orphanage in Berlin that had
been destroyed during Krystal Knock. They arrived on December second,
(06:45):
nineteen thirty eight. As the evacuation went on and a
lot of the most urgent cases were handled, relief organizations
started to focus on the children that seemed like they'd
be able to assimilate well. There was an ongoing fear
that this influx of child refugees was going to lead
to an increase in anti Semitism and anti refugee sentiment,
(07:06):
so as time went on, the focus turned to children
who seemed bright, tidy, and well behaved, and teenagers who
had some kind of job or domestic skills that would
be useful but not overwhelmed the job market. Throughout this evacuation,
children traveled by train supports in Belgium and the Netherlands,
where they would cross the English Channel by boat. They
(07:27):
left from major cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Children
who lived outside of the city's traveled to gathering points
to get onto the trains. A very few children were
flown directly from Czechoslovakia, and in the very earliest days
of the evacuation, a few transport left directly from Germany itself.
By ninety the Kinder Transport had evacuated between nine thousand
(07:51):
and ten thousand children from Germany and German annexed territory.
About half of these children stayed with sponsors and foster families.
Those who didn't initially have sponsors or foster families temporarily
stated at facilities like summer camps. In some cases, larger
groups of children lived together in hostels. Those who were
(08:11):
over the age of fourteen often got some sort of
job training and then went on to do domestic or
agricultural work. Apart from the reports of abuse that we
mentioned at the top of the episode, the conditions that
these children faced and Britain really varied. Even when it
came to children who were generally treated with compassion and kindness,
a lot of the host families just didn't have a
(08:32):
lot of cultural competence about the religious or social needs
of Jewish children. Some of the host families also volunteered
basically so they could get an older child to work
as a household servant. In nineteen forty, a public panic
erupted over the idea that a so called fifth column
of Nazi sympathizers was at work in the UK. In
(08:53):
the wake of this panic, more than one thousand child
refugees over the age of sixteen were placed in internment
camps enemy aliens. Some of these children were deported from
Britain and placed in camps in Australia and Canada. Often
their conditions at the camps and in transit were appalling.
Even so, a number of Kinder transportees also known as Kinder,
(09:16):
joined the British Armed Forces after turning eighteen. Although this
whole program had started with the idea that the children
would return to their families after the crisis was over,
obviously most of the children couldn't. Many of their parents
were murdered during the Holocaust, and few of the Kinder
ever saw their families again after the war was over.
(09:36):
Many eventually became citizens of the United Kingdom or immigrated
to other countries, including Israel, after it was founded in
ninety In nineteen eighty nine, the first Kinder Transport Reunion
was held in London, with Kinder from all over the
United Kingdom, Israel, Australia and other countries reconnecting with each other.
The Kinder Transport Association formed after this reunion, and it
(10:00):
has continued to work to reunite Kinder with their host
families and each other. Today, December two is recognized as
World Kinder Transport Day. Although the Kinder Transport is generally
celebrated as a humanitarian effort to protect children, it really
should be noted that most children weren't protected. The Kinder
Transport rescued between nine thousand and ten thousand Jewish children,
(10:24):
but nearly two million Jewish children died during the Holocaust. Uh.
We are going to take a quick sponsor break, and
then after that we will talk about some other evacuation
efforts in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. We're going
to return to a World War two for a moment
(10:45):
with what might be the most well known mass evacuation
of children. It's Operation Pied Piper. This was the evacuation
of children out of British cities and into the countryside
during World War Two due to the fear of German
air strikes. Of the children also went to Canada, South Africa, Australia,
New Zealand, and the United States, and smaller evacuations after
(11:06):
the first big one continued until n This evacuation is
really just part of the public memory in the United Kingdom.
It is depicted in a lot of literature. That's why
the children are in that country house with the wardrobe
in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Operation Pied
Piper began on September one, ninety nine. That's the day
(11:30):
that Germany invaded Poland, but the order to quote evacuate
forthwith actually came from the Ministry of Health at about
eleven am the day before. Following this order, over the
first four days of September, more than a million people
were evacuated from Britain's urban areas. The vast majority were children.
These children traveled by bus and train, and they all
(11:51):
had tags bearing their names and addresses pen to their clothing.
About a hundred thousand teachers also worked as guardians during
transit in this big wave of evacuations. By the end
of the war, more than three million people had been
evacuated from areas that were considered to be in danger.
This was a colossal movement of people, and particularly at
(12:14):
the destinations, the scene was often chaotic. Although the government
had ordered the evacuation, local municipalities often didn't get much
direction beyond handle it as best you can. Sometimes children
arrived at the wrong destination and local authorities didn't have
rations or housing ready, or sometimes a town was expecting
(12:34):
hundreds of children, but received thousands instead. But of today's
six evacuations, Operation Pied Piper is the one in which
some of the evacuees described the whole thing is feeling
like an adventure, at least at the beginning. A lot
of the children had never left their own neighborhoods before,
and they looked forward to seeing another place as they
were evacuated. A lot of them didn't have a clear
(12:56):
idea of what was really going on or what had
motivated their journey. They thought they were going on some
kind of field trip. As adults, many of the evacuees
talked about not understanding at first why their parents and
the other grown ups around them were crying, And of
course a lot of that initial optimism and excitement faded
due to homesickness and separation from their parents and siblings.
(13:18):
Some of the children who were evacuated in September of
nineteen thirty nine returned home again during the Phony War,
also known as the Sitzkrieg, which lasted from September ninety
nine until May of nineteen forty. In most cases, the
children who returned home during these eight months were evacuated
again after Germany invaded France and the Low Countries. In
(13:39):
addition to the children who were evacuated out of urban
areas in Great Britain, which is the more well known story,
there was also a mass evacuation from Guernsey and the
Channel Islands. About five thousand children were evacuated with their
schools in June of nineteen forty and this was the
start of a major evacuation of everyone on the island,
(14:00):
although by the time Germany occupied Guernsey at the end
of June, only half of its population, or about seventeen
thousand people, had been evacuated. Our next evacuation was also
during the World War two years and it was connected
to the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland.
Sometimes you'll see the Winter War folded into the larger
(14:20):
arc of World War Two, and it started when Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin demanded that Finland surrender some of its
territory to create a buffer around Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg.
Finland refused, and after a series of failed negotiations, the
Red Army invaded on November nineteen thirty nine. Almost immediately
(14:41):
people started talking about evacuating Finland's children to Sweden to
try to keep them safe. There were a number of
women's organizations and other non governmental organizations all working toward
that same end. On December thirty, nineteen thirty nine, they
formed the Center for Assistance to Finland to coordinate this
whole effort. Finlin's Ministry of the Interior spread the word
(15:03):
that children and the mothers of young children could evacuate
to Sweden. Of the six evacuations we're talking about today,
this is the only one that included mothers in any
kind of larger scale, And at first there wasn't a
lot of interest, but that changed as the war progressed
in the situation became more threatening. In the end, children
(15:25):
and eleven dred adults were evacuated during the winter War.
They traveled out of Finland by train, plane, and ship.
Most went to Sweden, although some went to Norway and Denmark.
The children's parents were expected to contribute to their cost
of transportation and care. On March third, one of the
trains that was being used for transport during this evacuation crashed.
(15:48):
Three nurses, fifteen children, and one pregnant woman died in
the accident. About twenty people were also injured. The winter
war ended ten days later. In the evacuees return home,
although not immediately. Many wanted to wait for the country
to stabilize before returning. In June of nineteen forty about
eight hundred evacuees had not come home again. Eight people
(16:12):
who had evacuated were still out of the country by
the end of nineteen forty. War returned to Finland in
nineteen forty one, when Fenland and Nazi Germany fought the
USSR during the Continuation War, and then Fenland was at
war with Germany from September nineteen forty four to April
nineteen forty five. In these later years, nearly fifty thousand
(16:33):
finished children between the ages of one and ten were
once again evacuated into Sweden. There have been several studies
exploring the idea of whether all these children were really
better off in their evacuation. By looking at their health
later in life based on increased incidents of conditions like
heart disease and diabetes, researchers have concluded that the stress
(16:56):
of the evacuation may not have outweighed being out of
the war zone. Yeah have all of these evacuations, Like
I found a lot of papers that included oral histories
and kind of sociological studies of what the evacuation was like.
And this is the only one that I found a
big focus on health outcomes later in life and what
that might say about the stress of the evacuation and
(17:16):
whether it was ultimately worth it. Yeah, there's not a
lot of focus on long term health in general, I
would say, but specifically not from something that happened to
a group of people when they were very young and
then tracking them into their adulthood is very rare. Yeah.
So our last evacuation that took place during the years
(17:36):
surrounding World War two actually connects to the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War started in nineteen thirty six and
it followed a failed military coup. On one side was
the Spanish Republican government. On on the other side where
the Nationalists who had orchestrated the coup. The Nationalists were
led by General Francisco Franco and they had the support
(17:57):
of Fascist Italy and Germany. On April seven, seven, German
and Italian forces, acting at the behest of General Franco,
bombed the Basque city of Gernica. Gernica was of no
strategic importance in the war, so most other nations regarded
this bombing is completely senseless. It also inspired Pablo Picasso's
(18:19):
painting Gernica, which will also often here pronounce Gernica, which
is how I learned it from an art teacher. But
that is one of his most famous works and is
described as one of the world's most famous anti war paintings.
That's the one that has like the strange cows and
the woman holding the child, and it's like a mural
(18:39):
sized painting. I don't haven't done a very good job
of describing it. Um if you think of of uh,
if you think of Picasso, that maybe the the image
that immediately leaps into your mind. So there was an
immediate call for nations to accept refugees from Gernica, and
(19:00):
first the British government, as had happened in the Kinder Transport,
or as would happen in the Kinder Transport, refused, but
in the face of huge public pressure, the government reluctantly agreed.
But as would be the case with the Kinder Transport,
they set very clear expectations for this program. Relief organizations
that were making all these arrangements had to guarantee that
(19:21):
they would be solely responsible for these children and all
costs associated with them for the entire length of their
stay in the UK. One of the big proponents of
this plan and allowing these refugees into the UK was
Eleanor Rathbone, who was the independent MP for the Combined Universities,
who would also go on to be a big advocate
for the Kinder transport. About four thousand child refugees arrived
(19:45):
in the United Kingdom on May twenty ninety seven. They
mostly stayed at camps near the town of Eastleigh in Hampshire,
and some stayed in foster homes. After the nationalist side
won the Spanish Civil War in nineteen thirty nine, line
and Franco became its head of state, he demanded that
the children be repatriated to Spain, and although most of
(20:07):
these evacuees were returned to Spain between two d and
fifty and four hundred of them were still in the
UK when World War Two actually started, a few of
them never returned home. We have two more evacuations that
we're going to talk about after we have another sponsor break.
Both of those were connected to the Cold War and
particularly how the United States responded to communism during the
(20:29):
Cold War. Our next evacuation is Operation Babylift, which was
carried out by the United States at the end of
the Vietnam War. So the history of the United States
involvement in Vietnam is long and complicated. I initially tried
(20:51):
to explain it, and it was taking the length of
an entire podcast, So to be extremely brief, the United
States supported the Republic of Vietnam also known as South Vietnam,
against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or North Vietnam, which
was communist. It's obviously a more gigantic story than that,
but that's the basic for the purposes of setting this up.
(21:14):
Those are the broad strokes. Uh The United States direct
military involvement in this war started in nineteen sixty five
under the administration of Lyndon Johnson, and this involvement was
incredibly controversial and divisive. By nineteen sixty nine, the Nixon
administration had implemented a policy known as Vietnamization to try
(21:35):
to end American involvement in the war. In theory, this
policy transferred military responsibility from the US to South Vietnam.
While this did lead to the US pulling the last
troops out of Vietnam in nineteen seventy three, It did
not allow South Vietnam to successfully defend itself. By the
spring of nineteen seventy five, North Vietnam was headed toward victory,
(21:59):
with the city of Saigon about to fall. By this point,
the United States had been evacuating United States citizens and
not essential personnel from more remote areas to the relative
safety of Saigon for months. Aircraft from World Airways are
being used for this purpose, and World Airways President Ed
Daily also had a daughter, Charlotte, who was working with
(22:21):
charities in the United States to try to find adoptive
homes for Vietnamese children. She asked her father to try
to help find a way to get these children to
the United States. Daily used his connections with the government
to try to get authorization to do so, but things
were not happening quickly enough for his satisfaction. So on
April second, nineteen seventy five, a World Airways d C
(22:45):
eight cargo plane took off from Saigon. On board were
fifties three Vietnamese children and twenty two adult attendants. The
flight had no passenger seats, no flight plan, no formal
clearance and no sanction by the US government or by
the government of South Vietnam. Airfield staff cut the runway
lights and unsuccessfully ordered the plane to stop its takeoff,
(23:08):
but it ultimately made it to its final destination of
Oakland International Airport. The next day, as word of all
of this spread, President Gerald Ford authorized and announced Operation
Baby Lift. This would be a mass effort to rescue
as many South Vietnamese orfens as possible and bring them
to the United States, where they would be placed with
(23:29):
adoptive families. This also became part of a larger effort
to transport South Vietnamese refugees out of the country, and
that greater efforts would start on April seventeenth of nine,
and the words of Henry Kissinger quote, twenty years of hope, frustration,
and discord over Vietnam had now been reduced to a
(23:49):
single objective to save a maximum number of potential Vietnamese
victims from the consequences of America's abandonment. The first official
flight in Operation Baby Lift took off on April four nine,
and it ended in tragedy. The plane was immensely crowded
with children in both the passenger and cargo areas of
(24:10):
the plane. In the passenger area, toddlers and young children
were strapped into to a seat, and in the cargo area,
babies were on blankets and secured to the floor in groups.
A crew of nurses and volunteers were on board to
look after them in flight, but shortly after takeoff from
Tonstunte air Base, the rear cargo doors blew out because
(24:32):
of a maintenance problem, thus destroyed the rear of the aircraft,
and it caused a rapid loss of pressure inside of
the aircraft. The pilot, who was Captain Dennis Trainer, known
as Bud, turned around to try to make an emergency
landing back at the air base, but the plane crashed
a couple of miles short of the runway. Seventy eight
children and about fifty adults died in this crash. Most
(24:55):
of the more than one seventy survivors had been in
the passenger compartment, while many in cargo area were killed.
The program continued after the crash of that first flight, though,
and in the end more than two thousand children were
evacuated from South Vietnam to the United States and a
few other countries. Around the end of the war. A
lot of mainstream coverage of Operation Babylift in the United
(25:18):
States has framed it in a positive humanitarian way, but
it continues to be surrounded by controversy. There's some debate
about how many of these children were really orphans. It's
certain that some of them had living parents who either
didn't have the means to take care of them because
the war, or who thought they would be better off
outside of Vietnam. There have also been allegations that American
(25:42):
personnel took some children off the streets of Saigon without
really knowing what their family situation was, and some of
the children had been fathered by American military personnel who
were stationed in Vietnam outside of the context of this evacuation.
Transracial adoption has its own controversies and its own complexities,
(26:03):
some of which frankly our way outside of our lane.
Some Vietnamese children were adopted into white families who didn't
necessarily know any other Vietnamese people or know anything about
Vietnamese culture. Sometimes the adoptive families seemed motivated by a
desire to sort of demonstrate how generous and patriotic they
were by adopting one of these Vietnamese children, and as
(26:26):
the children of Operation Baby Lift have grown into adulthood,
a lot of them has tried to figure out who
their families were in Vietnam and tried to reconnect with
their Vietnamese heritage. On top of all of this, Operation
Baby Lift was very political. The United States involvement in
the Vietnam War was incredibly contentious and as we said, divisive,
(26:49):
and US actions during the war had directly contributed to
what was happening in South Vietnam at the end of
the war. So Operation Baby Lift was simultaneously a genuinely
humanity are in effort, a paternalistic attempt to save South Vietnam,
and an attempt to restore some goodwill and create good
pr for the United States. The President himself even greeted
(27:11):
a plane full of orphans in San Francisco on April five,
where his picture was taken holding babies from the plane. Yeah,
there was just a lot of very positive attempts to
spend this as look at how we are rescuing our
allies in South Vietnam, just sort of leaving off the
(27:33):
part of having largely made the problem in the first place. Also,
this controversy is not news. It's not something people have
just started talking about in the last five years. A
number of lawsuits were filed in the wake of Operation
Babylifts soon after it happened. Because included a class action
lawsuit contending that it was unconstitutional and in violation of
(27:55):
international treaties. There were also lawsuits against Lockheed Mark that
stemmed from the crash of that first Baby Lift flight.
By the end of April, ninety people had been evacuated
from Saigon, including about three thousand babies and young children
in Operation Baby Lift, and about two thousand of these
(28:16):
children were adopted in the United States, about one thousand
were adopted in Canada, Australia and in the u S
allies in Europe, and as was the case with Kinder Transport,
I mean people talk about how many people were evacuated,
but many, many more people were left behind at the
end of the war. Our last mass evacuation in today's
(28:37):
episode is Operation Pedro Pan sometimes called Operation Peter Pan,
and this was a mass evacuation of unaccompanied miners from
Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power following the Cuban
Revolution in nineteen fifty nine, making Cuba, the first communist
state in the Western Hemisphere. At first, Operation pedro Pan
(28:57):
was a program to allow and even in courage, people
who were fighting against the Castro regime to send their
children to the United States. The idea was that they'd
be able to focus on the resistance without having to
care for their children or to worry about their children's safety.
The children came into the United States on student pieces,
which were issued from the US Embassy in Havana, but
(29:19):
the United States cunt diplomatic ties with Cuba and closed
the embassy in Havana on January third, nineteen sixty one,
and at this point Operation pedro Pan began to broaden
to include anyone who wanted to send their children out
of Cuba. People did this for a lot of different reasons.
Some people really were counter revolutionaries who were fighting against
(29:40):
the Castro regime and were worried that their own activities
could endanger their children. Catholic families were also becoming concerned
for their religious freedoms as Castro began nationalizing Catholic schools
and expelling Catholic clergy from Cuba. Some parents worried that
the Castro regime was going to end parents legal authority
(30:00):
over their children, or that their children were going to
be indoctrinated. The United States, especially when it came to
these last too, definitely helped spread these fears through media
and propaganda. After closing the embassy in Havannah, the United
States State Department worked with the Catholic Welfare Bureau to
continue these evacuations. The State Department gave monsenor Brian Walsh
(30:22):
the authority to sign visa waivers for Cuban children under
the age of sixteen. This visa waiver would allow them
to fly from Havana to Miami. PanAm flew to direct
flights today, and these planes became increasingly filled with unaccompanied miners.
Between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty two, fourteen thousand unaccompanied
(30:44):
miners flew from cubit to Miami. About half of them
were met at the airport by friends or relatives, maybe
not close relatives, but someone they at least were related to.
The rest of them were placed with foss their families,
or were housed in hostels or other group living situations.
Most of these children were from the Cuban middle and
(31:06):
lower class, because wealthy Cubans who had wanted to leave
the country had already done so before this program really started.
This whole situation was supposed to be temporary. The idea
was that the US and counter revolutionaries in Cuba would
overthrow Fidel Castro and then the children would return home
to their families, but that is not what happened. Not
(31:27):
only did Castro stay in power, but children were only
reunited with their families if their families left Cuba as well.
The United States also stopped all commercial flights between the
United States and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in
nineteen sixty two. That ban on flights stayed in place
for three years, and during that time, the only way
(31:48):
for these children to be reunited with their parents was
if their parents made the dangerous crossing from Cuba to
Florida by boat. After commercial flights resumed in nineteen sixty five,
freedom flights began taking off from Havana to carry refugees
to the United States. The first of these left Havannah
on December one, nineteen, and this is really when the
(32:11):
evacuated children, known as pedro Punnis, resumed being reunited with
their families. But this had its own level of difficulty.
Some of the pedro Panas who did not already have
friends or family in the US had been sent to
foster homes far away from Miami, and that's where their
parents had to go, sometimes moving to a place where
(32:32):
there were few, if any other Cubans because that's where
their children had been placed. Yeah, when we say far
away from Miami, we don't mean like Orlando. Yeah, we
mean like Minnesota, like really and and in in some
cases there was just no Cuban community. They're not really
a lot of resources. As it was going on, Operation
(32:57):
Pedro pan was not really publicized. The State Department and
the Catholic Welfare Bureau really tried to keep it out
of the press as much as possible. But at the
same time, once it did make the news, it was,
as with the case of Operation Babylift, very politicized. For example,
the Miami Harold ran a headline quote, eight thousand Cuban
(33:18):
children saved from Communist brainwashing. Today, this is regarded very
differently in Cuba versus in the United States. In Cuba,
especially while Fidel Castro was still in power, it was
viewed as a nefarious and coordinated CIA effort to destroy
Cuban families. Stories of pedro Panas experiences with racism, abuse,
(33:41):
and homesickness became part of anti American propaganda, but in
Cuban American cultural memory, it has more often been seen
as a necessary flight from the castro regime that came
with some hardships but still allowed children and their families
to escape. Yes, some of that reception has become a
little more nuanced. Similarly with Operation Babylift, whereas the children
(34:05):
who had been evacuated grew up, they started telling their
own stories more and some of that has happened with
Operation Pedro pan as well. And we said earlier that
this operation was meant to be temporary. For most of
the pedro Pans. The separation from their families was temporary.
Most of them were reunited with at least some family members,
(34:27):
although in a lot of cases it took years for
that reunion to happen. But overwhelmingly their state in the
United States was not temporary. Most pedro Panas have never
returned to Cuba, and at various points it's been illegal
for them to do so. On November two, nineteen sixty six,
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which set
(34:48):
up a process for these and other Cuban refugees to
become permanent residents of the United States. Operation pedro Pan
made news again in in both Cube and the United
States during the Alien Gonzalez controversy. Gonzalez's mother had fled
Cuba with him, and she had died in a shipwreck,
(35:09):
and this led to an enormous international custody dispute, with
images of Operation pedro Pan again heavily politicized being used
by both sides. Federal agents took Alien Gonzalez at gunpoint
on April twenty two, two thousand, and returned him to Cuba,
something that was seen as an outrage among most Cuban
(35:29):
Americans and a victory among most Cubans in Cuba. I
was of all of these evacuations. I was astounded to
learn about fourteen thousand unaccount unaccompanied miners. I will tell
you a funny thing, which is that when you first
just kind of said that number to me, that phrase
with no context. In my head, I envisioned fourteen thousand
(35:50):
children flying a plane by themselves, like I completely like
made a really completely inappropriate cartoon version um and then
I was like, oh, no, they were on regular transport.
They were just they didn't have any adults with them.
I see, I see, I see, so yeah yeah, so
yeah those are Those are six evacuations of children, all
(36:13):
of them having some elements in common, but especially those
last two having sort of a dramatically different political use
almost in terms of propaganda and pr I also have
some listener mail that sounds grand. This is from Lauren
Laurence says, Hi, Tracy, and Holly. I work at the
(36:35):
Minnesota Historical Society, which manages historic Fort Snelling, and I
was so excited when I listened to your episode on
the NISSA in World War Two and heard you talking
about the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota. There's
a piece of Minnesota history I didn't know about, and
still until I started working at m n h S.
Here are a few more details about the m I
(36:57):
S l S is time in Minnesota that I find
super fascinating. One when the school had to leave California
after Executive Order six, the Army tried to find somewhere
to move, but several states completely refused to accept the
school in their borders. So Minnesota was unique for saying yes,
and being fairly welcoming to these students. To the school's
(37:18):
time in Minnesota actually significantly changed the population demographics of
our state. In the nineteen forty census, only about fifty
people of Japanese descent lived in the state, and by
nineteen fifty, over a thousand people lived here. After their deployments,
many of the former m I s l S students
remembered their experiences training in Minnesota and decided it would
be a great place to live. And today at m
(37:41):
NHS we do a lot of work with the Twin
Cities Japanese American Citizen League, mostly with descendants, but there
are a few m I SLS trained World War Two
vets who are still alive. To make sure this history
keeps being told. We're also always working to better document
this history in our collection because it's not as robust
as we'd like. And then she uh talks about working
(38:04):
with us and and finding some new photos of students,
and she sent a link to a press release that
had some stories about these students and how they wound
up training in Minnesota, and she says to please let
her know if we ever need any Minnesota history ideas.
Thank you, so much Lauren for sending that UM. One
of the articles UM that I found as I was
(38:27):
doing the research on this was really all about how
the Military Intelligence Service had been UH viewed in Minnesota
and how it like how that had worked within the community,
and it just was not one of the things that
we had time to deeply get into in the episode.
So thank you so much for sharing that. If you
would like to write to us. Were a history podcast
(38:48):
at how Stuffworks dot com, and there were also all
over social media at missed in history dot com, and
that is our Facebook and our Twitter, in our Instagram
and our Pinterest. You can come to our website, which
is missing a Street dot com and find show notes
for all the episodes that Holly and I have ever
worked on. That includes links to all the sources that
we use. There's also a searchable archive of every episode ever,
(39:10):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
Google Play, and wherever else do you find podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff Works dot com.
Hey, before we get started, we just wanted to let
you know we have so many upcoming live shows to
talk to you about. Yes, on July seven, I will
be at History Camp Boston. That's me Tracy, only Holly
won't be at that one. I will be in the
History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, July, we
will both be doing a live show at Adams National
(00:20):
Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. It's an outdoor show. It
will happen rainer shine, and since parking is limited at
the park, people are encouraged to take public transportation. That
is probably how I will be getting there. Also in July,
we will be back at Convention Days at Women's Rights
National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York. Convention Days
is running from July twenty, and our show is going
(00:43):
to be on Saturday July. And then we have big, big,
big news that we are both very excited about. We
are going on an actual multi city tour. We're going
to hit the East coast in August or we will
be coming to Atlanta, Georgia, Riley, North Carolina, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn,
New York, and washing To d C. And then in
October my favorite spooky time of year. We will be
(01:04):
coming to the West coast with stops in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. You can find
more information about all these shows at our website, which
is Missed in History dot Com. Click on the link
in the menu that says live shows. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
(01:32):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. It's time for six Impossible Episodes, Everyone's
favorite time for new listeners. A couple of times a year,
we put together an episode on six topics that, for
one reason or another, can't exactly work as well as
a standalone show. All six of today's topics are examples
(01:54):
of mass evacuations of children and youth because of war
or some other unrest, and we've gotten multiple requests for
some of them, including Kinder Transport, Operation pedro Pan and
Operation Babylift, as well as its tragic plane crash. And
some of these are big enough stories that they probably
could stand on their own as their own episode, but
(02:16):
then that would make it a lot harder to ever
talk about any of the other ones, and they also
have a lot of overlap. And one thing that's true
of all of these evacuations, which are not going to
repeat every single time, because it is true of all
of them, is that these children's experiences after being evacuated
were really all over the place. Some of the evacuees
(02:36):
developed strong and close and loving relationships with their foster
families and other caregivers, but there were also reports of
physical and sexual abuse, both in foster homes and in
group living situations like hostels and camps that were used
in some of the evacuations. So we're only going to
be making note of those sorts of issues when there's
(02:57):
something unique with them in a particular of acuation. Otherwise
it was just an element in all of them. First up,
we're going to talk about kinder transport, and this is
a name that was coined later in the twentieth century
to describe a collection of programs to evacuate children from
Germany and German occupied territory and to take them to
the United Kingdom. These evacuations took place between nineteen thirty
(03:21):
eight and nineteen forty, with most of them happening before
the start of World War Two in Europe in nineteen
thirty nine. This all started after krystal Nacht, or the
Night of the Breaking Glass. This was a program that
took place on November nine, tenth night. When this happened,
Nazi forces arrested nearly thirty thousand Jewish men and sent
them to concentration camps. Nazis also murdered at least a
(03:44):
hundred Jews and destroyed hundreds of synagogues and community buildings.
Thousands of homes and shops were also destroyed. World leaders
had been discussing the quote refugee problem in Germany and
German occupied territory for months of this point. The problem
was that aid organizations had thousands of applications from people
(04:05):
seeking refugee status, but most nations were reluctant to let
them in the horrors of Crystal Knox made the situation worse,
but it didn't really change the other nation's minds. This
was also true in the UK, where Jewish and human
rights organizations had been lobbying extensively for more German Jews
to be given refugee status. It was really only through
(04:28):
this continual advocacy that the British government finally changed its mind. Ultimately,
the British government announced that it would allow children under
the age of seventeen to enter the country and stay
under a temporary visa. But the government also stressed that
idea of temporary the children were intended to be reunited
with their families after the crisis had passed. Relief organizations
(04:52):
had to guarantee that until that happened, the children wouldn't
be a burden on state finances or threaten the British
job market. The children's parents also were not part of
the program. The Kinder Transport only evacuated children. To try
to ensure that these children stay was temporary, a bond
of fifty pounds had to be posted for each of them,
(05:15):
and then a wide range of religious and secular groups
all became part of the effort to raise funds and
fine temporary homes and arrange of their care. These included
the Jewish service organization Beni Brith, as well as the
Society of Friends and the y m c A. Private
citizens played a big part two by donating funds and
clothing and offering their own homes as shelter. After a
(05:38):
radio appeal on November twenty, more than five hundred private
citizens offered to act as foster parents. Multiple organizations on
both ends of the journey identified the children who needed
to be evacuated and then made arrangements to do so.
In Britain there were the British Committee for the Jews
of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children
(06:00):
and From Germany, which was later known as the Refugee
Children's Movement. On the continent, there were the Reich Representation
of Jews in Germany in Berlin and the Jewish Community
Organization in Vienna. The Reich Association of Jews in Germany
succeeded the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany in late
nineteen thirty nine. The first children to be evacuated were
(06:22):
the ones who were in the greatest danger, so orphans
whose orphanages had been destroyed, children whose parents had been deported,
murdered or sent to concentration camps, children whose homes had
been destroyed. In the programs, the first arrivals were nearly
two hundred children from an orphanage in Berlin that had
been destroyed during Krystal Knock. They arrived on December second,
(06:45):
nineteen thirty eight. As the evacuation went on and a
lot of the most urgent cases were handled, relief organizations
started to focus on the children that seemed like they'd
be able to assimilate well. There was an ongoing fear
that this influx of child refugees was going to lead
to an increase in anti Semitism and anti refugee sentiment,
(07:06):
so as time went on, the focus turned to children
who seemed bright, tidy, and well behaved, and teenagers who
had some kind of job or domestic skills that would
be useful but not overwhelmed the job market. Throughout this evacuation,
children traveled by train supports in Belgium and the Netherlands,
where they would cross the English Channel by boat. They
(07:27):
left from major cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Children
who lived outside of the city's traveled to gathering points
to get onto the trains. A very few children were
flown directly from Czechoslovakia, and in the very earliest days
of the evacuation, a few transport left directly from Germany itself.
By ninety the Kinder Transport had evacuated between nine thousand
(07:51):
and ten thousand children from Germany and German annexed territory.
About half of these children stayed with sponsors and foster families.
Those who didn't initially have sponsors or foster families temporarily
stated at facilities like summer camps. In some cases, larger
groups of children lived together in hostels. Those who were
(08:11):
over the age of fourteen often got some sort of
job training and then went on to do domestic or
agricultural work. Apart from the reports of abuse that we
mentioned at the top of the episode, the conditions that
these children faced and Britain really varied. Even when it
came to children who were generally treated with compassion and kindness,
a lot of the host families just didn't have a
(08:32):
lot of cultural competence about the religious or social needs
of Jewish children. Some of the host families also volunteered
basically so they could get an older child to work
as a household servant. In nineteen forty, a public panic
erupted over the idea that a so called fifth column
of Nazi sympathizers was at work in the UK. In
(08:53):
the wake of this panic, more than one thousand child
refugees over the age of sixteen were placed in internment
camps enemy aliens. Some of these children were deported from
Britain and placed in camps in Australia and Canada. Often
their conditions at the camps and in transit were appalling.
Even so, a number of Kinder transportees also known as Kinder,
(09:16):
joined the British Armed Forces after turning eighteen. Although this
whole program had started with the idea that the children
would return to their families after the crisis was over,
obviously most of the children couldn't. Many of their parents
were murdered during the Holocaust, and few of the Kinder
ever saw their families again after the war was over.
(09:36):
Many eventually became citizens of the United Kingdom or immigrated
to other countries, including Israel, after it was founded in
ninety In nineteen eighty nine, the first Kinder Transport Reunion
was held in London, with Kinder from all over the
United Kingdom, Israel, Australia and other countries reconnecting with each other.
The Kinder Transport Association formed after this reunion, and it
(10:00):
has continued to work to reunite Kinder with their host
families and each other. Today, December two is recognized as
World Kinder Transport Day. Although the Kinder Transport is generally
celebrated as a humanitarian effort to protect children, it really
should be noted that most children weren't protected. The Kinder
Transport rescued between nine thousand and ten thousand Jewish children,
(10:24):
but nearly two million Jewish children died during the Holocaust. Uh.
We are going to take a quick sponsor break, and
then after that we will talk about some other evacuation
efforts in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. We're going
to return to a World War two for a moment
(10:45):
with what might be the most well known mass evacuation
of children. It's Operation Pied Piper. This was the evacuation
of children out of British cities and into the countryside
during World War Two due to the fear of German
air strikes. Of the children also went to Canada, South Africa, Australia,
New Zealand, and the United States, and smaller evacuations after
(11:06):
the first big one continued until n This evacuation is
really just part of the public memory in the United Kingdom.
It is depicted in a lot of literature. That's why
the children are in that country house with the wardrobe
in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Operation Pied
Piper began on September one, ninety nine. That's the day
(11:30):
that Germany invaded Poland, but the order to quote evacuate
forthwith actually came from the Ministry of Health at about
eleven am the day before. Following this order, over the
first four days of September, more than a million people
were evacuated from Britain's urban areas. The vast majority were children.
These children traveled by bus and train, and they all
(11:51):
had tags bearing their names and addresses pen to their clothing.
About a hundred thousand teachers also worked as guardians during
transit in this big wave of evacuations. By the end
of the war, more than three million people had been
evacuated from areas that were considered to be in danger.
This was a colossal movement of people, and particularly at
(12:14):
the destinations, the scene was often chaotic. Although the government
had ordered the evacuation, local municipalities often didn't get much
direction beyond handle it as best you can. Sometimes children
arrived at the wrong destination and local authorities didn't have
rations or housing ready, or sometimes a town was expecting
(12:34):
hundreds of children, but received thousands instead. But of today's
six evacuations, Operation Pied Piper is the one in which
some of the evacuees described the whole thing is feeling
like an adventure, at least at the beginning. A lot
of the children had never left their own neighborhoods before,
and they looked forward to seeing another place as they
were evacuated. A lot of them didn't have a clear
(12:56):
idea of what was really going on or what had
motivated their journey. They thought they were going on some
kind of field trip. As adults, many of the evacuees
talked about not understanding at first why their parents and
the other grown ups around them were crying, And of
course a lot of that initial optimism and excitement faded
due to homesickness and separation from their parents and siblings.
(13:18):
Some of the children who were evacuated in September of
nineteen thirty nine returned home again during the Phony War,
also known as the Sitzkrieg, which lasted from September ninety
nine until May of nineteen forty. In most cases, the
children who returned home during these eight months were evacuated
again after Germany invaded France and the Low Countries. In
(13:39):
addition to the children who were evacuated out of urban
areas in Great Britain, which is the more well known story,
there was also a mass evacuation from Guernsey and the
Channel Islands. About five thousand children were evacuated with their
schools in June of nineteen forty and this was the
start of a major evacuation of everyone on the island,
(14:00):
although by the time Germany occupied Guernsey at the end
of June, only half of its population, or about seventeen
thousand people, had been evacuated. Our next evacuation was also
during the World War two years and it was connected
to the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland.
Sometimes you'll see the Winter War folded into the larger
(14:20):
arc of World War Two, and it started when Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin demanded that Finland surrender some of its
territory to create a buffer around Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg.
Finland refused, and after a series of failed negotiations, the
Red Army invaded on November nineteen thirty nine. Almost immediately
(14:41):
people started talking about evacuating Finland's children to Sweden to
try to keep them safe. There were a number of
women's organizations and other non governmental organizations all working toward
that same end. On December thirty, nineteen thirty nine, they
formed the Center for Assistance to Finland to coordinate this
whole effort. Finlin's Ministry of the Interior spread the word
(15:03):
that children and the mothers of young children could evacuate
to Sweden. Of the six evacuations we're talking about today,
this is the only one that included mothers in any
kind of larger scale, And at first there wasn't a
lot of interest, but that changed as the war progressed
in the situation became more threatening. In the end, children
(15:25):
and eleven dred adults were evacuated during the winter War.
They traveled out of Finland by train, plane, and ship.
Most went to Sweden, although some went to Norway and Denmark.
The children's parents were expected to contribute to their cost
of transportation and care. On March third, one of the
trains that was being used for transport during this evacuation crashed.
(15:48):
Three nurses, fifteen children, and one pregnant woman died in
the accident. About twenty people were also injured. The winter
war ended ten days later. In the evacuees return home,
although not immediately. Many wanted to wait for the country
to stabilize before returning. In June of nineteen forty about
eight hundred evacuees had not come home again. Eight people
(16:12):
who had evacuated were still out of the country by
the end of nineteen forty. War returned to Finland in
nineteen forty one, when Fenland and Nazi Germany fought the
USSR during the Continuation War, and then Fenland was at
war with Germany from September nineteen forty four to April
nineteen forty five. In these later years, nearly fifty thousand
(16:33):
finished children between the ages of one and ten were
once again evacuated into Sweden. There have been several studies
exploring the idea of whether all these children were really
better off in their evacuation. By looking at their health
later in life based on increased incidents of conditions like
heart disease and diabetes, researchers have concluded that the stress
(16:56):
of the evacuation may not have outweighed being out of
the war zone. Yeah have all of these evacuations, Like
I found a lot of papers that included oral histories
and kind of sociological studies of what the evacuation was like.
And this is the only one that I found a
big focus on health outcomes later in life and what
that might say about the stress of the evacuation and
(17:16):
whether it was ultimately worth it. Yeah, there's not a
lot of focus on long term health in general, I
would say, but specifically not from something that happened to
a group of people when they were very young and
then tracking them into their adulthood is very rare. Yeah.
So our last evacuation that took place during the years
(17:36):
surrounding World War two actually connects to the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War started in nineteen thirty six and
it followed a failed military coup. On one side was
the Spanish Republican government. On on the other side where
the Nationalists who had orchestrated the coup. The Nationalists were
led by General Francisco Franco and they had the support
(17:57):
of Fascist Italy and Germany. On April seven, seven, German
and Italian forces, acting at the behest of General Franco,
bombed the Basque city of Gernica. Gernica was of no
strategic importance in the war, so most other nations regarded
this bombing is completely senseless. It also inspired Pablo Picasso's
(18:19):
painting Gernica, which will also often here pronounce Gernica, which
is how I learned it from an art teacher. But
that is one of his most famous works and is
described as one of the world's most famous anti war paintings.
That's the one that has like the strange cows and
the woman holding the child, and it's like a mural
(18:39):
sized painting. I don't haven't done a very good job
of describing it. Um if you think of of uh,
if you think of Picasso, that maybe the the image
that immediately leaps into your mind. So there was an
immediate call for nations to accept refugees from Gernica, and
(19:00):
first the British government, as had happened in the Kinder Transport,
or as would happen in the Kinder Transport, refused, but
in the face of huge public pressure, the government reluctantly agreed.
But as would be the case with the Kinder Transport,
they set very clear expectations for this program. Relief organizations
that were making all these arrangements had to guarantee that
(19:21):
they would be solely responsible for these children and all
costs associated with them for the entire length of their
stay in the UK. One of the big proponents of
this plan and allowing these refugees into the UK was
Eleanor Rathbone, who was the independent MP for the Combined Universities,
who would also go on to be a big advocate
for the Kinder transport. About four thousand child refugees arrived
(19:45):
in the United Kingdom on May twenty ninety seven. They
mostly stayed at camps near the town of Eastleigh in Hampshire,
and some stayed in foster homes. After the nationalist side
won the Spanish Civil War in nineteen thirty nine, line
and Franco became its head of state, he demanded that
the children be repatriated to Spain, and although most of
(20:07):
these evacuees were returned to Spain between two d and
fifty and four hundred of them were still in the
UK when World War Two actually started, a few of
them never returned home. We have two more evacuations that
we're going to talk about after we have another sponsor break.
Both of those were connected to the Cold War and
particularly how the United States responded to communism during the
(20:29):
Cold War. Our next evacuation is Operation Babylift, which was
carried out by the United States at the end of
the Vietnam War. So the history of the United States
involvement in Vietnam is long and complicated. I initially tried
(20:51):
to explain it, and it was taking the length of
an entire podcast, So to be extremely brief, the United
States supported the Republic of Vietnam also known as South Vietnam,
against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or North Vietnam, which
was communist. It's obviously a more gigantic story than that,
but that's the basic for the purposes of setting this up.
(21:14):
Those are the broad strokes. Uh The United States direct
military involvement in this war started in nineteen sixty five
under the administration of Lyndon Johnson, and this involvement was
incredibly controversial and divisive. By nineteen sixty nine, the Nixon
administration had implemented a policy known as Vietnamization to try
(21:35):
to end American involvement in the war. In theory, this
policy transferred military responsibility from the US to South Vietnam.
While this did lead to the US pulling the last
troops out of Vietnam in nineteen seventy three, It did
not allow South Vietnam to successfully defend itself. By the
spring of nineteen seventy five, North Vietnam was headed toward victory,
(21:59):
with the city of Saigon about to fall. By this point,
the United States had been evacuating United States citizens and
not essential personnel from more remote areas to the relative
safety of Saigon for months. Aircraft from World Airways are
being used for this purpose, and World Airways President Ed
Daily also had a daughter, Charlotte, who was working with
(22:21):
charities in the United States to try to find adoptive
homes for Vietnamese children. She asked her father to try
to help find a way to get these children to
the United States. Daily used his connections with the government
to try to get authorization to do so, but things
were not happening quickly enough for his satisfaction. So on
April second, nineteen seventy five, a World Airways d C
(22:45):
eight cargo plane took off from Saigon. On board were
fifties three Vietnamese children and twenty two adult attendants. The
flight had no passenger seats, no flight plan, no formal
clearance and no sanction by the US government or by
the government of South Vietnam. Airfield staff cut the runway
lights and unsuccessfully ordered the plane to stop its takeoff,
(23:08):
but it ultimately made it to its final destination of
Oakland International Airport. The next day, as word of all
of this spread, President Gerald Ford authorized and announced Operation
Baby Lift. This would be a mass effort to rescue
as many South Vietnamese orfens as possible and bring them
to the United States, where they would be placed with
(23:29):
adoptive families. This also became part of a larger effort
to transport South Vietnamese refugees out of the country, and
that greater efforts would start on April seventeenth of nine,
and the words of Henry Kissinger quote, twenty years of hope, frustration,
and discord over Vietnam had now been reduced to a
(23:49):
single objective to save a maximum number of potential Vietnamese
victims from the consequences of America's abandonment. The first official
flight in Operation Baby Lift took off on April four nine,
and it ended in tragedy. The plane was immensely crowded
with children in both the passenger and cargo areas of
(24:10):
the plane. In the passenger area, toddlers and young children
were strapped into to a seat, and in the cargo area,
babies were on blankets and secured to the floor in groups.
A crew of nurses and volunteers were on board to
look after them in flight, but shortly after takeoff from
Tonstunte air Base, the rear cargo doors blew out because
(24:32):
of a maintenance problem, thus destroyed the rear of the aircraft,
and it caused a rapid loss of pressure inside of
the aircraft. The pilot, who was Captain Dennis Trainer, known
as Bud, turned around to try to make an emergency
landing back at the air base, but the plane crashed
a couple of miles short of the runway. Seventy eight
children and about fifty adults died in this crash. Most
(24:55):
of the more than one seventy survivors had been in
the passenger compartment, while many in cargo area were killed.
The program continued after the crash of that first flight, though,
and in the end more than two thousand children were
evacuated from South Vietnam to the United States and a
few other countries. Around the end of the war. A
lot of mainstream coverage of Operation Babylift in the United
(25:18):
States has framed it in a positive humanitarian way, but
it continues to be surrounded by controversy. There's some debate
about how many of these children were really orphans. It's
certain that some of them had living parents who either
didn't have the means to take care of them because
the war, or who thought they would be better off
outside of Vietnam. There have also been allegations that American
(25:42):
personnel took some children off the streets of Saigon without
really knowing what their family situation was, and some of
the children had been fathered by American military personnel who
were stationed in Vietnam outside of the context of this evacuation.
Transracial adoption has its own controversies and its own complexities,
(26:03):
some of which frankly our way outside of our lane.
Some Vietnamese children were adopted into white families who didn't
necessarily know any other Vietnamese people or know anything about
Vietnamese culture. Sometimes the adoptive families seemed motivated by a
desire to sort of demonstrate how generous and patriotic they
were by adopting one of these Vietnamese children, and as
(26:26):
the children of Operation Baby Lift have grown into adulthood,
a lot of them has tried to figure out who
their families were in Vietnam and tried to reconnect with
their Vietnamese heritage. On top of all of this, Operation
Baby Lift was very political. The United States involvement in
the Vietnam War was incredibly contentious and as we said, divisive,
(26:49):
and US actions during the war had directly contributed to
what was happening in South Vietnam at the end of
the war. So Operation Baby Lift was simultaneously a genuinely
humanity are in effort, a paternalistic attempt to save South Vietnam,
and an attempt to restore some goodwill and create good
pr for the United States. The President himself even greeted
(27:11):
a plane full of orphans in San Francisco on April five,
where his picture was taken holding babies from the plane. Yeah,
there was just a lot of very positive attempts to
spend this as look at how we are rescuing our
allies in South Vietnam, just sort of leaving off the
(27:33):
part of having largely made the problem in the first place. Also,
this controversy is not news. It's not something people have
just started talking about in the last five years. A
number of lawsuits were filed in the wake of Operation
Babylifts soon after it happened. Because included a class action
lawsuit contending that it was unconstitutional and in violation of
(27:55):
international treaties. There were also lawsuits against Lockheed Mark that
stemmed from the crash of that first Baby Lift flight.
By the end of April, ninety people had been evacuated
from Saigon, including about three thousand babies and young children
in Operation Baby Lift, and about two thousand of these
(28:16):
children were adopted in the United States, about one thousand
were adopted in Canada, Australia and in the u S
allies in Europe, and as was the case with Kinder Transport,
I mean people talk about how many people were evacuated,
but many, many more people were left behind at the
end of the war. Our last mass evacuation in today's
(28:37):
episode is Operation Pedro Pan sometimes called Operation Peter Pan,
and this was a mass evacuation of unaccompanied miners from
Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power following the Cuban
Revolution in nineteen fifty nine, making Cuba, the first communist
state in the Western Hemisphere. At first, Operation pedro Pan
(28:57):
was a program to allow and even in courage, people
who were fighting against the Castro regime to send their
children to the United States. The idea was that they'd
be able to focus on the resistance without having to
care for their children or to worry about their children's safety.
The children came into the United States on student pieces,
which were issued from the US Embassy in Havana, but
(29:19):
the United States cunt diplomatic ties with Cuba and closed
the embassy in Havana on January third, nineteen sixty one,
and at this point Operation pedro Pan began to broaden
to include anyone who wanted to send their children out
of Cuba. People did this for a lot of different reasons.
Some people really were counter revolutionaries who were fighting against
(29:40):
the Castro regime and were worried that their own activities
could endanger their children. Catholic families were also becoming concerned
for their religious freedoms as Castro began nationalizing Catholic schools
and expelling Catholic clergy from Cuba. Some parents worried that
the Castro regime was going to end parents legal authority
(30:00):
over their children, or that their children were going to
be indoctrinated. The United States, especially when it came to
these last too, definitely helped spread these fears through media
and propaganda. After closing the embassy in Havannah, the United
States State Department worked with the Catholic Welfare Bureau to
continue these evacuations. The State Department gave monsenor Brian Walsh
(30:22):
the authority to sign visa waivers for Cuban children under
the age of sixteen. This visa waiver would allow them
to fly from Havana to Miami. PanAm flew to direct
flights today, and these planes became increasingly filled with unaccompanied miners.
Between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty two, fourteen thousand unaccompanied
(30:44):
miners flew from cubit to Miami. About half of them
were met at the airport by friends or relatives, maybe
not close relatives, but someone they at least were related to.
The rest of them were placed with foss their families,
or were housed in hostels or other group living situations.
Most of these children were from the Cuban middle and
(31:06):
lower class, because wealthy Cubans who had wanted to leave
the country had already done so before this program really started.
This whole situation was supposed to be temporary. The idea
was that the US and counter revolutionaries in Cuba would
overthrow Fidel Castro and then the children would return home
to their families, but that is not what happened. Not
(31:27):
only did Castro stay in power, but children were only
reunited with their families if their families left Cuba as well.
The United States also stopped all commercial flights between the
United States and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in
nineteen sixty two. That ban on flights stayed in place
for three years, and during that time, the only way
(31:48):
for these children to be reunited with their parents was
if their parents made the dangerous crossing from Cuba to
Florida by boat. After commercial flights resumed in nineteen sixty five,
freedom flights began taking off from Havana to carry refugees
to the United States. The first of these left Havannah
on December one, nineteen, and this is really when the
(32:11):
evacuated children, known as pedro Punnis, resumed being reunited with
their families. But this had its own level of difficulty.
Some of the pedro Panas who did not already have
friends or family in the US had been sent to
foster homes far away from Miami, and that's where their
parents had to go, sometimes moving to a place where
(32:32):
there were few, if any other Cubans because that's where
their children had been placed. Yeah, when we say far
away from Miami, we don't mean like Orlando. Yeah, we
mean like Minnesota, like really and and in in some
cases there was just no Cuban community. They're not really
a lot of resources. As it was going on, Operation
(32:57):
Pedro pan was not really publicized. The State Department and
the Catholic Welfare Bureau really tried to keep it out
of the press as much as possible. But at the
same time, once it did make the news, it was,
as with the case of Operation Babylift, very politicized. For example,
the Miami Harold ran a headline quote, eight thousand Cuban
(33:18):
children saved from Communist brainwashing. Today, this is regarded very
differently in Cuba versus in the United States. In Cuba,
especially while Fidel Castro was still in power, it was
viewed as a nefarious and coordinated CIA effort to destroy
Cuban families. Stories of pedro Panas experiences with racism, abuse,
(33:41):
and homesickness became part of anti American propaganda, but in
Cuban American cultural memory, it has more often been seen
as a necessary flight from the castro regime that came
with some hardships but still allowed children and their families
to escape. Yes, some of that reception has become a
little more nuanced. Similarly with Operation Babylift, whereas the children
(34:05):
who had been evacuated grew up, they started telling their
own stories more and some of that has happened with
Operation Pedro pan as well. And we said earlier that
this operation was meant to be temporary. For most of
the pedro Pans. The separation from their families was temporary.
Most of them were reunited with at least some family members,
(34:27):
although in a lot of cases it took years for
that reunion to happen. But overwhelmingly their state in the
United States was not temporary. Most pedro Panas have never
returned to Cuba, and at various points it's been illegal
for them to do so. On November two, nineteen sixty six,
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which set
(34:48):
up a process for these and other Cuban refugees to
become permanent residents of the United States. Operation pedro Pan
made news again in in both Cube and the United
States during the Alien Gonzalez controversy. Gonzalez's mother had fled
Cuba with him, and she had died in a shipwreck,
(35:09):
and this led to an enormous international custody dispute, with
images of Operation pedro Pan again heavily politicized being used
by both sides. Federal agents took Alien Gonzalez at gunpoint
on April twenty two, two thousand, and returned him to Cuba,
something that was seen as an outrage among most Cuban
(35:29):
Americans and a victory among most Cubans in Cuba. I
was of all of these evacuations. I was astounded to
learn about fourteen thousand unaccount unaccompanied miners. I will tell
you a funny thing, which is that when you first
just kind of said that number to me, that phrase
with no context. In my head, I envisioned fourteen thousand
(35:50):
children flying a plane by themselves, like I completely like
made a really completely inappropriate cartoon version um and then
I was like, oh, no, they were on regular transport.
They were just they didn't have any adults with them.
I see, I see, I see, so yeah yeah, so
yeah those are Those are six evacuations of children, all
(36:13):
of them having some elements in common, but especially those
last two having sort of a dramatically different political use
almost in terms of propaganda and pr I also have
some listener mail that sounds grand. This is from Lauren
Laurence says, Hi, Tracy, and Holly. I work at the
(36:35):
Minnesota Historical Society, which manages historic Fort Snelling, and I
was so excited when I listened to your episode on
the NISSA in World War Two and heard you talking
about the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota. There's
a piece of Minnesota history I didn't know about, and
still until I started working at m n h S.
Here are a few more details about the m I
(36:57):
S l S is time in Minnesota that I find
super fascinating. One when the school had to leave California
after Executive Order six, the Army tried to find somewhere
to move, but several states completely refused to accept the
school in their borders. So Minnesota was unique for saying yes,
and being fairly welcoming to these students. To the school's
(37:18):
time in Minnesota actually significantly changed the population demographics of
our state. In the nineteen forty census, only about fifty
people of Japanese descent lived in the state, and by
nineteen fifty, over a thousand people lived here. After their deployments,
many of the former m I s l S students
remembered their experiences training in Minnesota and decided it would
be a great place to live. And today at m
(37:41):
NHS we do a lot of work with the Twin
Cities Japanese American Citizen League, mostly with descendants, but there
are a few m I SLS trained World War Two
vets who are still alive. To make sure this history
keeps being told. We're also always working to better document
this history in our collection because it's not as robust
as we'd like. And then she uh talks about working
(38:04):
with us and and finding some new photos of students,
and she sent a link to a press release that
had some stories about these students and how they wound
up training in Minnesota, and she says to please let
her know if we ever need any Minnesota history ideas.
Thank you, so much Lauren for sending that UM. One
of the articles UM that I found as I was
(38:27):
doing the research on this was really all about how
the Military Intelligence Service had been UH viewed in Minnesota
and how it like how that had worked within the community,
and it just was not one of the things that
we had time to deeply get into in the episode.
So thank you so much for sharing that. If you
would like to write to us. Were a history podcast
(38:48):
at how Stuffworks dot com, and there were also all
over social media at missed in history dot com, and
that is our Facebook and our Twitter, in our Instagram
and our Pinterest. You can come to our website, which
is missing a Street dot com and find show notes
for all the episodes that Holly and I have ever
worked on. That includes links to all the sources that
we use. There's also a searchable archive of every episode ever,
(39:10):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
Google Play, and wherever else do you find podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff Works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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