The secrecy of the war effort in the 1930s and 1940s is barely imaginable in our information age.

During World War II, an airplane was made in DeKalb that was so top secret, it was not declassified until the 1960s.

Imagine a wooden plane loaded with a 500-pound bomb and a television camera in its nose. Then, imagine a person in another airplane watching a TV, aiming the plane into a target.

“The reason it was so top secret is the television camera. It was totally built as a remote control plane, so it would actually take off from a dead stop on the runway,” said historic preservationist Roger Keys.

The technology of remotes and joysticks available today was not around in the 1930s and ‘40s, so a different method was used.

“To control this radio-controlled [plane], they used a telephone dial, an old, little rotary telephone dial. They would dial, like, 3, and it would tell the plane to do something. [Dial], like, a 6, and it would tell the plane to do something else.”

Should the plane need to be flown a longer distance, a pilot could fly the plane for a while. When the plane landed, it could be converted to remote control, Keys said.

When WWII began, DeKalb had a musical instrument plant called Wurlitzer, with skilled craftsmen who knew how to work well with wood and glue. Throughout the war, about 220 attack drones were built in DeKalb, Keys said.

“[The planes] only had one use. They were going to fly them in and blow them up,’ said communication professor Jeffrey Chown. “They wanted to put a 500-pound bomb on them so they had a big impact.”

These airplanes were often tested at the airport and flown around DeKalb, Keys said.

“Students always think this is a small, discreet town,” Chown said.

With the invention of barbed wire in DeKalb, work done on pasteurizing dairy products and the war effort in the 1940s, DeKalb has more history than students may guess, Chown said.

Other businesses that also got involved in the war effort by making radio cabinets and tank track links were DeKalb Commercial Body and Northern Illinois Corp., Keys said.

“People were not allowed to talk about what they did. That was how top secret it was. So, at night, you guys go and hang out at the bar; well, these guys left at night and they went and hung out at the corner bar and stuff. But, they would have spies in the bars so that anybody who was talking about it would get taken out of the bars and then get ratted on, so that no one talked about this,” said landmark commission member Mary Keys.

One German craftsman worked in one corner away from everybody else, simply because it was war, and he was German, Keys said.

“Each department was separate and [workers] weren’t allowed to go into different departments. It was that type of top secret. They had more than 1500 people working on this project, and a majority of them were probably women. They didn’t know it had been flown in the South Pacific and used, and they had no idea about the telephone camera,” he said.

There is one of these planes in the Navy Museum in Pensacola, Fla.

“Eventually, a lot of the remote-controlled equipment to control the plane eventually evolved into what is today’s auto-pilot systems,” Keys said. “There was a lot of groundbreaking technology in radio, television and actually controlling airplanes.”