Bizarre History (19 page)

After a few days, the Defense Minister ordered a complete withdrawal. The emus had won.

Although most people would say that the Foo Fighters is a rock band, the term actually goes back to World War II. During the war, many Allied pilots reported seeing mysterious orbs of light that would follow them on their missions and keep pace with each maneuver. These flying objects were spotted both in the Pacific and European theaters of operation and appeared from 1941 until the end of the war. Eyewitness accounts describe these lights as “a strange globe glowing with greenish light,” “a large cylindrical object that traveled thousands of miles per hour,” “two fog lights flying at high rates of speed that could change direction rapidly,” and more. Allied pilots began calling these glowing balls Foo Fighters
(foo
was a popular nonsense word at the time and the terms flying saucer and UFO weren’t used yet). The Foo Fighters never attacked, and at times seemed almost playful in their ability to keep pace with the planes and then suddenly shoot off into the sky. After the first sightings, Allied forces investigated whether or not these lights were some sort of secret German weapon. They soon learned, however, that Japanese and German pilots also reported seeing the same weird glowing balls. Were Foo Fighters optical illusions, electrostatic discharges, ball lightning … or aliens watching the humans destroy one another? No satisfactory explanation has ever been offered.

During World War II, the British, in dire need of a weapon to combat tanks (due to their lack of antitank guns), came up with the Anti-Tank No. 74, also known as the sticky bomb. It was actually a hand grenade that consisted of a glass sphere containing nitroglycerin. The sphere was covered in a strong adhesive and surrounded by a metal casing. The user simply had to pull the pin to remove the casing and then throw or place the grenade, which would stick to the enemy tank. Sounds reasonable, yes? Home Guard member Bill Miles recounted an unexpected problem with the grenade: “It was while practicing that an HG bomber got his stick(y) bomb stuck to his trouser leg and couldn’t shift it. A quick-thinking mate whipped the trousers off and got rid of them and the bomb. After the following explosion the trousers were in a bit of a mess, though I think they were in a bit of a mess prior to the explosion.”

Maria “Belle” Boyd was a seventeen-year-old debutante in 1861, when an incident at her house in Front Royal, Virginia, turned her into one of the best-known spies of the Civil War.

Rumors abounded that her home was flying one or more Confederate flags. A few drunk Union soldiers went to check it out. Belle’s mother got angry and one of the soldiers pushed her aside to get to a flag. At that point, Belle interjected her own opinion into the matter by pulling out a pistol and shooting the pushy soldier to death. She was exonerated (her actions were declared self-defense), but sentries were posted around the house. She charmed one of the sentries into revealing military secrets. She later wrote, “To him I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and last, but not least, for a great deal of important information … I must avow the flowers and the poetry were comparatively valueless in my eyes.” Belle made sure those secrets got into the right Confederate hands, and a spy was born.

One of her more famous excursions occurred in May 1862. Upon hearing that a Union general and his staff were gathering at a local hotel, Boyd hid herself in the room just above where they were meeting and listened in through a knothole in the floor that she may have enlarged earlier in the day. She learned that part of the Union army was heading east, leaving their position at Front Royal weak. She relayed this information, and when the Confederate army attacked a few days later, Boyd ran across enemy lines to greet Stonewall Jackson’s army, yelling, “The Yankee force is very small. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all!” That’s just what Jackson did, and that very evening he sent her a note that said, “I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today.” She was also awarded the Southern Cross of Honor and made both a captain and an honorary aide-de-camp. Another memento of her bravery that day was the skirt she wore, which was now filled with bullet holes from her dangerous jaunt.

She continued spying, even though she was captured and imprisoned three separate times. (The first time her boyfriend turned her in.) She sailed for Britain in 1864, supposedly to deliver some letters from Jackson. The ship was captured by the Union Navy, but she was allowed to escape by a Union sailor named Lieutenant Samuel Hardinge. He had fallen in love with her, and they later met up in Britain and married. Boyd gained much fame as a spy. French newspapers called her “la Belle Rebelle,” and Boyd used her notoriety to get into acting.

Alvin Cullum York was born in 1887 in a log cabin in Pall Mall, Tennessee. A wild youth and expert shot, he converted to Christianity after a friend was killed in a bar fight. He joined a church that forbade violence, and when he was drafted in 1917 for World War I, he wrote on his draft notice, “Don’t want to fight.” Yet fight he did.

He was sent overseas, and during a battle in the Argonne Forest in France, he and sixteen other soldiers were sent behind German lines to capture machine gun positions and a rail line. They captured a bunch of German soldiers eating breakfast, but then the machine guns turned around and started shooting at them. Six of York’s comrades were killed and two were wounded, and York found himself in charge. York, reminded of the turkey shoots back home, “began to exchange shots with them. In order to sight me or to swing their machine guns on me, the Germans had to show their heads above the trench, and every time I saw a head I just touched it off.” Growing up, York had learned that the best way to hunt geese was to shoot the birds in the back of the row first so the others didn’t scatter. He did the same thing when a group of six Germans rushed at him—knocking off the ones in the back before shooting the ones up front.

The Germans had seen enough and surrendered. York and the seven remaining Americans had more than eighty prisoners on their hands, but they were still behind enemy lines. York put a German major at the head of the line of prisoners, held a gun on him, and began to escort them back to the American side. By the time they got there, they had more than 130 prisoners. It was determined that York had single-handedly killed twenty-eight Germans.

He received the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, as well as France’s Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor. The Supreme Allied Commander said, “What York did was the greatest thing accomplished by any soldier of all the armies of Europe.” York was played by Gary Cooper in a movie about his heroic deeds.

Pharaoh Ramses II (aka Ozymandias) was soundly defeated by the Hittites at the Battle of Kedesh in 1288 BCE. Afterward, Ramses built a memorial to his amazing triumph. Huh? That’s right, Ramses II returned to his empire and declared victory, even though he was ambushed by the Hittites and forced to retreat. The Hittites are gone. All eyewitnesses are gone. Ramses’s memorials to his “victory” remain, and it has only recently been unearthed by archaeologists that Ramses was fibbing.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Moldova (located between Romania and Ukraine) declared itself an independent state. It sought closer ties with Romania, but the area of the country closest to Russia and Ukraine broke away in 1990 and named itself Transnistria. The two sides battled on and off from March till July 1992, when a ceasefire was declared. But it seems there were plenty of ceasefires every evening—when combatants on both sides of the conflict would put down their weapons to drink together.

The song “Yankee Doodle Dandy” was written by a British surgeon during the French and Indian War to ridicule the colonial militiamen who were fighting alongside British soldiers. As the American Revolution drew near, the song became a popular insult the British soldiers used—often making up new verses that mocked the colonists.

On April 19, 1775, as British troops marched toward Lexington and Concord, Redcoats played the song on fife and drum and sang it heartily. However, as rebels battled with the British, eventually turning them back, the Redcoats were surprised to hear the colonists singing “Yankee Doodle.” One British soldier later said, “Damn them, they made us dance it till we were tired.”

From that moment on, the colonists sang the song in battle, taking delight in the self-mockery. They even played it while the British surrendered at Saratoga and Yorktown. British Lieutenant Thomas Anburey wrote: “… the name [Yankee] has been more prevalent since the commencement of hostilities … The soldiers at Boston used it as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker’s Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean, a favorite of favorites, played in their army, esteemed as warlike as the Genadier’s March—it is the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby … it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender.”

SIDE NOTE:
The term
Yankee
may have come from the Dutch word
jahnke,
which was used to describe an uncultured person. The word
doodle
referred to uneducated farmers and backwoodsmen—hicks. Meanwhile,
macaroni
referred to certain young foppish British men and women who at the time wore outlandish clothing and spoke Italian in an affected way to show that they were cultured. They were called
Macaronies.

During the War of 1812, Abigail and Rebecca Bates, daughter of Captain Simeon Bates, prevented an attack by the British on their town. Their father was the keeper of the lighthouse in Scituate, Massachusetts, a fishing village about thirty miles from Boston. During the summer of 1814, the girls saw two barges from a British ship filled with soldiers. With no time to call an alarm, the girls grabbed a fife and drum from the lighthouse, hid behind some trees, and began playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as loudly as possible. The British thought the sounds were coming from a regiment of American soldiers and retreated.

In 1918, during a World War I dogfight, British flying ace Reginald Makepeace of the No. 20 Squadron went into a steep dive to dodge German gunfire. Captain J. H. Hedley, who was in the back seat of the cockpit, was thrown from the plane. As the plane leveled off several hundred feet below, Hedley landed on the tail of the plane and hung on for dear life as the plane landed safely.

In 1942, Calvin Graham enlisted in the US Navy. He was quickly shipped out to the Pacific, where he joined the crew of the USS
South Dakota
as a gunner. During the Battle of Guadalcanal, he was seriously wounded while helping fight a fire aboard the ship. For all his efforts, he was dishonorably discharged, stripped of his medals, and put in the brig. Why? After he received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, Calvin’s mother revealed Calvin’s secret: he was only twelve years old. After a couple of months in the brig, Calvin went back to seventh grade. He spent much of his adult life trying to clear his record and get his medals and disability benefits back. He was finally awarded an honorable discharge in 1978 and he received disability and back pay in 1988. Rick Schroder played him in a TV movie of his life.

Let’s travel back to 371 BCE and the Battle of Leuctra. The famed Spartan army was defeated by armies of the city-state Thebes—effectively ending Sparta’s dominance over Greece. The key point of the battle came when an elite Theban unit known as the Sacred Band led a breakthrough against Spartan defenses. These three hundred soldiers were fierce, brave, committed … and gay. The unit was composed of 150 gay couples, and the thinking of the band’s organizer, Gorgidas, was that each man would fight his best to protect his lover, who was fighting alongside him. The band remained undefeated for more than thirty years, until, surrounded by Macedonian forces, they fought to the death (while other Theban troops retreated). A giant stone lion resides at the burial site of the Sacred Band in the town of Thebes.

Archimedes, master mathematician, inventor, and all-around genius, nearly single-handedly fended off a powerful Roman force that was attacking the city of Syracuse in 213 BCE. Although the Roman fleet commanded by Marcus Claudius Marcellus was impressive, their siege, which had been estimated to take a week, lasted nearly two years. As military advisor to the king of Syracuse, Archimedes developed several weapons that helped keep the Romans at bay. One such weapon consisted of several mirrors, which Archimedes used to direct the sun’s rays onto the Romans’ ships, setting them ablaze. Other inventions included catapults that could hurl a ton of stones onto the ships, mousetrap-like mechanisms that sent rocks down onto siege ladders, and a giant grappling claw, called the Claw of Archimedes, which lifted ships by the bow and dropped them against the rocks, sinking them. The Romans finally succeeded in breaching the city’s defenses, and although General Marcellus ordered Archimedes not to be harmed, a Roman soldier killed him.