Bizarre History (17 page)

The great pyramids were not built by slaves. Excavated skeletons show that the builders were actually Egyptian laborers who were paid for their work.

Benjamin Franklin told the story of flying a kite with a key attached to the string, but never did it.

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, did not say, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

I
’ve read in a couple of different places that during the last 3,500 years, the world has had around 230 years when there were no wars. I can’t confirm those numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 230 days. Or hours, even. War seems as inevitable as death and taxes—with war making those two even more inevitable. The stories in this chapter focus less on the heroes, winners, and losers and more on the overall weirdness that goes on when humans fight.

Also known as the Football War or the 100-Hours War, this battle was fought by El Salvador and Honduras in July 1969. Tensions were already high between the two countries (border disputes, among other things) when their respective national soccer teams met during a qualifying round for the 1970 World Cup; however, when Honduras beat El Salvador in the Honduran capital on June 8, things went downhill quickly. First, an eighteen-year-old Salvadoran girl, despondent over the loss, shot herself. She quickly became a martyr and the national soccer team even attended her funeral. Then, after two more games, both of which El Salvador won, diplomatic ties were severed and war broke out. After four days, fighting ceased, and though El Salvador gained some concessions from Honduras, their team lost all three games at the World Cup without scoring a goal.

One morning in 1776, British troops in Boston woke up to a surprising sight: Washington’s troops and cannons on top of the city’s hills preparing to attack. The British counted the cannons and realized they needed to retreat against such a demonstration of firepower. They evacuated the city as quickly as possible and Boston was freed without firing a shot. And it was a good thing for Washington that it went down the way it did, because it was all a total bluff. Sure, Washington’s troops had loads of cannons and guns, but they didn’t have the gunpowder to use them. If the British had attacked, the patriots would have been able to shoot off a few cannons before running for their lives.

By the spring of 1944, Hitler knew Allied Forces were going to create a second front in Europe … but where exactly? One good location would be East Anglia and southeast England, where troops could threaten the Port of Calais in France. And that’s just what it looked like was happening. General George Patton was there, and so were thousands of troops, tanks, trucks, aircraft, and more. This massive buildup forced Hitler to keep troops stationed at Calais, even as the Allied invasion of Normandy, more than one hundred miles away, began. So what about Patton’s massive army? Well, one morning, a British farmer in East Anglia woke up to find a column of American tanks on his land. He noticed one of his bulls size up a tank and then lunge for it. The farmer, expecting a sad end for his bull, was more than surprised when, after impact, the tank started hissing and deflating. All the tanks were fake. So were the aircraft, trucks, and most of the troops. It was all part of Operation Quicksilver—an imaginary army group of set designers, artists, and actors pretending to prepare for attack. The tanks were inflatable rubber, the airplanes were canvas, and the soldiers were made out of wood. Soldiers (real ones) even used rolling tools to create fake tread and tire marks on the dirt roads. Quicksilver was so convincing (including hours and hours of fake, scripted radio traffic) that Hitler kept his panzer divisions in place across from the fake army long after the Allies stormed Normandy on June 6.

Here’s another World War II deception that actually worked. It was 1943 and the Allies were planning to invade Sicily, but wanted the Germans to think they were planning to invade Sardinia and Greece instead. Hmm … what to do … what to do? Well, the British decided to find a dead body, give it a Royal Marine’s uniform, chain a briefcase full of top-secret documents to its wrist, throw it from a submarine off the coast of Spain … and then hope for the best. Sure enough, the body washed ashore, the briefcase was opened (they found money, love letters, and a cryptic letter outlining an invasion of either Sardinia or Greece), and the Germans bought it. They pulled thousands of troops from Sicily to defend Sardinia and Greece, and the British parachuted into Sicily.

SIDE NOTE:
The British were actually pretty good at this deception business. In North Africa in August 1942, they placed a corpse in a blown-up scout car with a map showing the locations of nonexistent British minefields. The Germans found the map and routed their panzers to a new location where they got bogged down in sand.

General George S. Patton and his Third Army were bogged down in Belgium, plagued by rain, flooding, and fog. It was early December 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge was upcoming. Patton, desperate for some good weather, called headquarters and asked if anyone had a good prayer for weather. The man who answered the call, Chaplain James H. O’Neill, wrote a prayer, and under the general’s orders had 250,000 copies of the prayer printed and handed out to the whole Third Army.

What happened next during the Battle of the Bulge sounds best coming directly from the chaplain: “On December 20, to the consternation of the Germans and the delight of the American forecasters who were equally surprised at the turnabout, the rains and the fogs ceased. For the better part of a week came bright clear skies and perfect flying weather. Our planes came over by tens, hundreds, and thousands. They knocked out hundreds of tanks, killed thousands of enemy troops in the Bastogne salient, and harried the enemy as he valiantly tried to bring up reinforcements. The 101st Airborne, with the 4th, 9th, and 10th Armored Divisions, which saved Bastogne, and other divisions, which assisted so valiantly in driving the Germans home, will testify to the great support rendered by our air forces. General Patton prayed for fair weather for battle. He got it.”

O’Neill received a Bronze Star from Patton for his prayer.

Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Confederate Army had surrounded the well-manned and heavily fortified Union earthwork at Athens, Alabama, on August 24, 1864. Forrest sent a demand for surrender, but the Union commander, Colonel Wallace Campbell, refused to acquiesce unless it could be proven that he was up against a superior force. Forrest happily obliged; however, as Campbell reviewed the Confederate troops, Forrest had the men whom Campbell had already counted quietly move to the back of the line to be counted again. Campbell counted nine thousand men and twenty-four cannons. Forrest actually only have around 3,500 men and eight cannons. Campbell surrendered without a fight.

The Civil War split the United States in two and was fought along many fronts—even in children’s textbooks. Young boys and girls going to school in the South learned math from Lemuel Johnson’s
An Elementary Arithmetic, Designed for Beginners
textbook. Here are two problems the children had to solve:

A Confederate soldier captured eight Yankees each day for nine days. How many Yankees did he capture in all?

If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers can whip forty-nine Yankees?

Not to be outdone, children learning their ABCs on the northern side of things could read from
The Union ABC
(published in 1865), which was printed in red, white, and blue and taught grammar to preschoolers. Like today’s alphabet books, it presented a word from each letter in the alphabet. Here’s a sample:

General Hideki Tojo was the Japanese Prime Minister during World War II, and he was the one who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, Tojo was soon captured (not before attempting suicide). After recovering from his injuries, he was moved to a prison in Japan where an American dentist, Jack Mallory, was ordered to make him a new set of dentures. Apparently Tojo loved his sweets. The dentist, however, loved his country and secretly engraved a note to Tojo in Morse code on the teeth. The note read: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”