Bizarre History (20 page)

During the First Liberian War in 1992, General Joshua Milton Blahyi would lead his troops wearing only his shoes. He says the devil telephoned him at age eleven and told him that running into battle naked would make him impervious to bullets. Sometimes he and his soldiers would also don colorful wigs and dainty purses. He’s still alive, so I guess it worked. The devil also said it would be a good idea to practice human sacrifice and cannibalism to increase his power. Blahyi admits to sacrificing a small child or teenager before battles, including sometimes cutting out the heart and eating it. Today he is the president of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries, and he has repented his sins, blamed the devil for his actions, and expressed a willingness to be tried for war crimes.

The British had actually buckled to demands and lowered tea taxes before the Boston Tea Party.

An OSS staff psychologist came up with an ingenious (or idiotic) plan during World War II that he believed would send an already unhinged Hitler over the edge. He theorized that Hitler would suffer a mental breakdown if tons of pornography were dropped in and around his home. The Royal Air Force refused to carry out the plan.

At the start of the Civil War, Confederate Robert E. Lee owned no slaves. Union general Ulysses S. Grant did.

Spain declared war against the United States on April 24, 1898. The United States then had the date of its own declaration set at April 21, even though they actually declared war on April 25.

Henry Kissinger and Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi didn’t.

The shortest war on record was fought between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar on August 27, 1896. It lasted around forty minutes, with Britain whipping the Zanzibaris with a massive bombardment that disabled Zanzibar’s defenses.

The
D
in
D-Day
doesn’t stand for
deliverance, doom,
or even
debarkation.
It doesn’t stand for anything. The
D
is derived from the word
day,
and the term
D-Day,
(or
Day-Day)
was used for many different operations, even if it’s only remembered today as the name for the invasion of Normandy.

Arlington National Cemetery, the military cemetery for US armed forces, was established during the Civil War on land “appropriated” from Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Confederate army.

“Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the South during the Civil War, was written in 1859 by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a northerner who was loyal to the Union.

R
ight after a historic moment, we revel in the details. We want to know everything that happened and how it went down and who was there. As years pass, these moments get chopped down into one-sentence sidebars in textbooks. This chapter seeks to correct this injustice with stories about insignificant or just plain weird moments from history’s footnotes, what-ifs, and greatest hits.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a pivotal point in history—sending several countries into a war that would become known as World War I. Perhaps all of that war nonsense could have been avoided if Ferdinand’s driver hadn’t made a wrong turn.

On June 28, 1914, Ferdinand and his wife were in a motorcade in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where tensions were high and Ferdinand wasn’t very popular. At one point a bomb was thrown at his open-topped car. It bounced off and detonated behind them. Ferdinand is known to have shouted, “So, you welcome your guests with bombs!” Later, while either attempting to rush out of the city or to visit those injured in the blast earlier in the day, his driver made a wrong turn and began backing up right near one of the conspirators, Gavilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Slavic Nationalist. While the car slowly backed up not five feet away, and with a second chance just fallen into his lap, Princip drew his pistol and shot the Archduke and his wife.

SIDE NOTE:
If you don’t like the idea of blaming a wrong turn for the start of World War I, consider this: The Archduke was such a perfectionist about the cut and fit of his military uniform that he had a one-piece garment sewn on to him each day. So when doctors attempted to examine his wounds after he was shot, they realized the buttons didn’t work, and by the time they figured out they had to cut the uniform off, the Archduke was dead.