At War With the Potato Beetle

It is a warm spring day as you tend to your growing potato field. High above in the sky you hear the muffled drum of an engine, looking up you see two American cargo planes with their hatches open and tiny particles falling out. As you wonder what the planes are doing you kneel down to observe one of your potato plants that is now covered in tiny orange specks. 

Public education poster on how to identify the potato beetle and its larvae. Courtesy of potatobeetle.org.

The Potato Beetle 

The Colorado Potato Beetle is an invasive species native to the South West region of North America. It has an oval shaped body that is only three-eighths of an inch long. Its thorax is a yellowish-orange color and has 10 black stripes running across it lengthwise, the head is orange and it has orange legs that turn black at the feet. It has semi clear white wings and orange antennas that turn black towards the tip. The larvae are much smaller and are a red color with black spots running along either side of its body. As they mature they turn a salmon pink color before morphing into adults. 

Colorado Potato Beetle. Courtesy of Gardener’s Path.

The beetles mainly feast on potato stalks and stems but will also eat other plants from the nightshade family, such as tomatoes and peppers. The larvae are responsible for as much as 75% of crop damage as they develop quickly, in ideal circumstances as soon as 10 days. This makes killing the eggs and larvae a top priority when it comes to ridding an area of them, unfortunately they are difficult to kill without dedicated efforts and many do not realize they have an infestation until the eggs have already hatched and the plants destroyed. 

Colorado Potato Beetle larvae. Courtesy of Ben Bradford.

The Beetles Go to War

On May 23, 1950 two United States cargo planes were spotted flying over East German potato fields, the very next day farmers in the area were shocked to discover that their crops were covered with Colorado Potato Beetles.  The East German government was quick to jump on the story and began printing out pamphlets blaming the US for dropping beetles all over the country. The press reported on several instances of U.S. planes flying overhead with beetle infestations following soon after. Politicians called them "six-legged ambassadors of the American invasion" and one of the government reports even described the incidents as "a criminal attack by American imperialist warmongers on our people's food supply”. 

Propaganda poster showing the beetles painted in American national colors. Courtesy of potatobeetle.org.

East Germany began to mobilize against the insect invader by launching a massive propaganda campaign and involving everyday citizens in the work required to eradicate the pests. Leaflets and posters were printed depicting the beetles as tiny American soldiers wearing army boots or helmets. Radio commentators lashed out, likening them to the atomic bomb and calling them “one of the greatest crimes of the post-war period”. The press published stories about them and dubbed the little pests “Amikafer”-Yankee beetles. They railed against the Western press’ narrative that called the appearance of the beetles a “natural phenomenon”. Children all over the country were sent out after school to collect the bugs. The British Broadcasting Company later did interviews with these children, now adults, and Ingo Materna who was 18 at the time recounts his experience in the field.  “We would go down the rows of potatoes and everyone would try to pick up as many beetles as they could, maybe 20 or 25 in a day. And then we would put them in pots or little glass jars and they would be taken away and destroyed. The really dangerous ones were the larvae, because they eat the most. They were sort of fleshy and soft, and we had to pick them up with our fingers - we didn't have tweezers or rubber gloves. The girls in particular didn't like it… We didn't want to touch them either, but what could we do?" One of the reasons this was such a concentrated effort was because potatoes were the main food crop in East Germany and many would starve without them. Erhard Geissler, another person interviewed by the BBC, recalls, “Potatoes were the main thing we had to eat in East Germany at the time. My father and mother and I would all share a single potato for breakfast. We were shocked to hear that our food supply was under threat.”

Children holding up glass jars filled with the potato beetles. Courtesy of Buzz On Live.

What Really Happened? 

Colorado Potato Beetles were already common in Germany before World War Two started, being accidentally introduced to the European continent by potato shipments from America in the 19th century. In the 1950s there were certainly more of them in East German crops than previously but it was not due to American intervention. There were a couple different reasons for why the bugs grew in number. One of the biggest is because pesticide production was down in the post war years and the chemicals that were being produced were sent to the Soviet Union. Another large factor was that many of the men who worked the fields that were soldiers during the war were still trapped in Russia performing hard labor there. Without the two biggest forces that kept the bugs at bay their population exploded. 

Propaganda poster showing the beetles being dropped out of an American plane. Courtesy of Thinking Sideways Podcast.

To the credit of the East German population, many citizens did not believe the propaganda spread by their government, and the only ones that did were those that lived in the rural and less educated parts of the country. Ingo Materna recalls his feelings about the misinformation campaign, “We didn't take it seriously at all. The idea that the Americans were dropping them - of course, that was nonsense. Some of the stories were probably true and some of them definitely weren't, this beetle story was one of the ones that wasn't.” In 1950 the Minister of Agriculture did release a report to back up the claims of American sabotage, even containing interviews from eyewitnesses and experts. However these “experts” had never studied Colorado Potato Beetles and were mainly comprised of the country's politicians. Many accounts say that the East German politicians did not actually believe the stories themselves but since they were in a Cold War they had to spin it against the United States and try keep from making their own government look incompetent. Really there was no factual basis behind the “Yankee Beetles”.

Propaganda leaflet showing teenagers picking up the beetles. Courtesy of potatobeetle.org.

How did the East German government come up with the idea then? First off there were American cargo planes that flew over East Germany however this was because they were on routine missions airdropping supplies to West Germany. Secondly, the idea to airdrop potato beetles to devastate crops was an idea that had been around for decades. The French and British considered dropping potato beetles on Germany during World War One, but Britain lacked the resources and France was afraid that the bugs would spread to their own fields. In World War Two Germany uncovered plans in a captured French biological weapons lab to drop the potato beetle on German crops. This discovery made the German leadership realize that they were woefully behind their foes when it came to biological warfare. Hitler did not want to use biological weapons but he OK’d research to defend against the beetles. Unbeknownst to him the research quickly turned to the offensive and the scientists began a large scale breeding effort in order to drop the dreaded bugs on one of Britain's largest potato fields. However after a few test runs with mixed results the German high command was hesitant to use up resources to deliver the insects on enemy shores. No one ever took into account that these tests spread potato beetles all over Germany, and it was no small amount either as roughly 54,000 of them had been dropped and very few were ever recovered. If anyone was to blame for the beetle infestation in 1950 it was likely Germany itself. 

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Personal Thoughts

You can’t really blame the East German government for trying to blame America for the beetles since they were in the midst of the Cold War, and they were likely being manipulated by the Soviet Union. It’s definitely an interesting part of the Cold War and I can sympathize with the farmers as my grandfather always grows a huge garden and has struggled with beetles in the past. However his beetle troubles stemmed from the invasive Japanese Beetles, every year he’d put up these large traps that would catch them and by the end of the summer they would be filled with hundreds of beetles. When I was little I would go out with my BB gun and shoot them off of the plants, not to brag but even when I was little I was quite the marksman. 

Sources 

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23929124

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/spru/hsp/documents/CWCB33-Garrett.pdf

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/amikafer.htm

https://extension.umn.edu/yard-and-garden-insects/colorado-potato-beetles