Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abrogate.

This day, April 28, 1942, the U.S. government asks cities along the East Coast to

dim their lights in order to be less visible to enemy submarines that were thought

to be just off the coast.

The dimouts of 1942 were of course just one of many collective wartime efforts.

Hear the talk about that, what they may have to say about today's collective efforts is as always

Nicole Hemmer of Columbia hello Nicky.

Hi Jody.

Where do you want to start? You want to start big think like what does it all mean to

band together or do you want to start with some of the small details about what

happened in the dim out of 1942.

I'll let you choose but we're definitely going to touch on both.

Well I want to do the little details because it's the little details of this story that are so fascinating because I think we've largely forgotten that the places on the coast did this during the war.

Because when we think about the US coming under attack during World War II, it's Pearl Harbor, but then the rest of the country seems kind of safe for the rest of this war that's happening in Europe and the Pacific.

But there were German submarines lurking right off the coast and because of cities having their lights on.

Any merchant ship passing near 15-30 miles from the coast were all the sudden thrown up into silhouette and German

subs could see what direction they were heading and how fast they were going and then could

attack them.

And so this dim-out order was the army which had just kind of taken control of the East Coast

saying, y'all got to turn out your lights, particularly on the coastline, in order to save the people and the goods

aboard these ships. And I think the regulation was initially it was 15 miles

...