![]() ![]() It was believed that they had to fall for some of it,” Stolarczyk wrote in an email as he reviewed Ministry files for his upcoming book, tentatively titled How Carrots Helped Win World War II. “There are apocryphal tales that the Germans started feeding their own pilots carrots, as they thought there was some truth in it.” ![]() “I have no evidence they fell for it, other than that the use of carrots to help with eye health was well ingrained in the German psyche. The ruse, meant to send German tacticians on a wild goose chase, may or may not have fooled them as planned, says Stolarczyk. Image courtesy of Flickr user US National Archives Bot One of the many advertisements that appeared during WWII that encouraged the consumption of carrots for help seeing during the blackouts. According to “Now I Know” writer Dan Lewis, also a contributor, the Ministry told newspapers that the reason for their success was because pilots like Cunningham ate an excess of carrots. He’d later rack up an impressive total of 20 kills-19 of which were at night. In 1940, RAF night fighter ace, John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat’s Eyes”, was the first to shoot down an enemy plane using AI. But to keep that under wraps, according to Stolarczyk’s research pulled from the files of the Imperial War Museum, the Mass Observation Archive, and the UK National Archives, the Ministry provided another reason for their success: carrots. ![]() The on-board Airborne Interception Radar (AI), first used by the RAF in 1939, had the ability to pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. The Royal Air Force were able to repel the German fighters in part because of the development of a new, secret radar technology. In order to make it more difficult for the German planes to hit targets, the British government issued citywide blackouts. ĭuring the 1940 Blitzkrieg, the Luftwaffe often struck under the cover of darkness. Stolarczyk is not confident about the exact origin of the faulty carrot theory, but believes that it was reinforced and popularized by the Ministry of Information, an offshoot of a subterfuge campaign to hide a technology critical to an Allied victory. ![]() His virtual museum, 125 pages full of surprising and obscure facts about carrots, investigates how the myth became so popular: British propaganda from World War II. “Somewhere on the journey the message that carrots are good for your eyes became disfigured into improving eyesight,” Stolarczyk says. But carrots cannot help you see better in the dark any more than eating blueberries will turn you blue. But as John Stolarczyk knows all too well as curator of the World Carrot Museum, the truth has been stretched into a pervasive myth that carrots hold within a super-vegetable power: improving your night-time vision. A 1998 Johns Hopkins study, as reported by the New York Times, even found that supplemental pills could reverse poor vision among those with a Vitamin A deficiency. The science is pretty sound that carrots, by virtue of their heavy dose of Vitamin A (in the form of beta carotene), are good for your eye health. ![]()
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