by Cracked. com
The great Robert E. Lee himself ordered more than twelve thousand soldiers across an open field and into the waiting guns of their enemy. In less than an hour, more than half of them were dead. And this was the guy the Dukes named their Charger after? What were they thinking?
THE MYTH: The Confederate flag looked like the one on the car in The Dukes of Hazzard (Figure 6.22).
FIGURE 6.22 What you think the Confederate flag looked like.
THE TRUTH: No. No, it didn’t.
The first Confederate flag was the Stars and Bars flag (Figure 6.23), which originally showed seven stars (and later thirteen). One problem. In the blur of battle, the stars and bars looked a little too much like the stars and stripes on the American (and Union) flag. Bad news for any poor Rebel who lost an eye and was looking for his way back to the right team. The Confederate solution was a second design that incorporated the square Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia onto a brilliant white background (Figure 6.24).
New problem: This flag looked a little too much like a flag of surrender. So in 1865, with the war nearly over, the Confederate congress decided “whatever” and adopted a third and final flag: the Blood-Stained Banner (Figure 6.25). It was the same as the previous design, except with a vertical red bar so that it wouldn’t be confused with the actual flags of surrender the Confederates would start flying one month later.
So what the hell is that “Confederate flag” everyone keeps fighting over today up in Figure 6.22? It’s a dark blue variant of the Confederacy’s navy flag. Although occasionally used on the battlefield as just one of countless regimental colors, this particular version enjoyed renewed popularity after its use by several self-styled “Rebel” companies in the Pacific during World War II. Now completely misunderstood throughout the country today, this flag endures as a powerful symbol of how little the South should be trusted with its own Civil War history.
FIGURE 6.23 The original Confederate flag, known as the Stars and Bars or Ol’ Futility.
FIGURE 6.24 The second Confederate flag was eventually dumped for being too white, even by a slave-owning society’s standards, thus earning the nickname Ol’ Irony (from us just now).
FIGURE 6.25 Final design and still the official Confederate flag, Ol’ Running Out of Ideas.
World War II: America Does 5 Percent of the Work, Takes All of the Credit
THE MYTH: The United States won the war.
If there’s one thing we know about World War II, it’s that it was the most photogenic war ever waged. And if there’s a second, subsequent thing we know, because we’re dumb enough to believe what the thousands of movies and television series and video games and children’s placemat word scrambles at misguided history-themed diners tell us, it’s that the United States played the most important role in Hitler’s downfall. Our nukes forced the Japanese to surrender, our boys on the beaches of Normandy took care of Europe, and the Inglourious Basterds shot the Führer’s face into an old worm-eaten catcher’s mitt sort of deal.
Anyplace we’re forgetting?
Oh, right, the Russian Front. Nothing cool besides Enemy at the Gates happened there, right? Just cold and shit. All the real action was safely in the hands of the country that would coincidentally go on to supply most of the world’s media about the war after the fact. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
FIGURE 6.26 Sure, America had more heart than anyone else on the team, but, at the end of the day, heart doesn’t win wars. Have fun on the bench, Rudy.
THE TRUTH: World Warring 101: Whoever has Russia wins.
Eighty percent of the casualties inflicted on Hitler’s army came at the hands of the Russians. The combined might of all of the rest of the Allies took out a fifth of the Nazis that Russia did by itself. And it paid a massive price for it, too—the Soviets suffered 8 million military casualties and lost 13.7 million civilians.
All told, the Russian Front was roughly four times the scale of the Western Front, the part the United States was involved in, and larger than all other phases of the war put together. The Battle of Stalingrad is considered by many World War II historians to be the most decisive turning point in the war.
Hack directors and video game designers take note: There are a bunch of great unoptioned stories from the Soviet side of the Big One, too. Like the one about Yakov Pavlov, the guy who held off a dozen Nazi tanks, alone, from inside an apartment building rigged with mines and mortars, all to protect civilians holed up in the basement (legend holds that he also told “In Soviet Russia . . .” jokes whenever one rang a bell). Might want to get Zack Snyder on that one.
Truman’s Decision to Drop an Atomic Bomb on Japan Wasn’t Really a Decision
THE MYTH: Allied victory was a foregone conclusion when America dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
The atomic bomb may be the most frightening specter of death the modern world has conjured into existence. We got our first taste of apocalypse on August 6, 1945, when a plane named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Nearly 300,000 people succumbed to the blasts and the resulting plague of radiation sickness. The event essentially began the nuclear era and the Cold War, and it’s still debated today how dick of a move that was.
THE TRUTH: The alternative was way worse for both sides.
Strangely, and tragically, most facts seem to suggest that the disintegration of thousands of civilians may have been, all things considered, the best we were going to get out of the situation. Or at least better than the mind-numbing, globe-darkening horror that would have been Operation Downfall.
FIGURE 6.27 Unless the Operation Downfall estimates were sarcastic exaggerations, it was a fairly easy decision.
Operation Downfall was America’s backup plan, the alternate battle plan to take Japan by land, air, and sea, via traditional military means, if we had decided not to go ahead with the “level two entire cities in a matter of seconds” option. What was wrong with Operation Downfall? It was the same as the Japanese plan.
Due to the geography of Japan, the best points of attack were fairly self-evident, and it’s now known that the Japanese had planned to defend essentially right where the United States planned to attack. The result of proceeding with Operation Downfall would have been, almost without a doubt, a protracted and bloody siege. Even though the Japanese war machine was running on fumes by the summer of 1945—they’d lost the backing of Germany (now surrendered), and their government at the time was split between war and peace factions, with the latter being led by the emperor himself—an American victory would have come at a steep cost. Historians and tactical reports from the era estimate that casualty rates could have been anywhere from 1.7 to 4 million on the American side, and 5 to 10 million on the Japanese side.
In fact, the U.S. leaders were so close to opting for Downfall that they minted 500,000 Purple Hearts to give to wounded soldiers, a number so large, we’re still working our way through that initial batch today (as of the second Iraq War, we had about 100,000 left over).
So until the day the bastards finally blow it all to hell and we enter the Mad Max era, it can fairly be said that the atomic bomb has likely saved more lives than it has cost.
Most of What You Know About the Cold War Is Fiction
THE MYTH: The space race was like one big scientific pep rally.
When JFK challenged America to beat Russia to the moon, it elicited the sort of uncynical display of national unity you just don’t see anymore. Americans responded to their president’s call to action with a decade-long display of nerd arts and national pride. And when America finally pulled it off? The moon landing? The freaking moon landing?! Let’s just say, minds were blown.
THE TRUTH: One small step for man, one giant “Who gives a shit?” for mankind.
When it comes to breaching the forbidden blackness of our earthly envelope, slipping the surly bonds of gravity, and touching the face of our nearest celestial neighbor: No. No, Americans didn’t give a shit. Not if t
hey were like most people, anyway.
Throughout the U.S.-Soviet space race, including the years leading up to and after the moon landing, a majority of people polled in the United States opposed spending the government’s money on the lunar mission. After all, there was a cold war on, and people were a little more concerned with how things were going in their immediate vicinity than on a lifeless frozen rock thousands of miles away (if only they’d known all that we’d learn by succeeding!).
Naturally, JFK said, “Screw what the people want, we’re doing it anyway, and I spit in the face of any god who thinks he can strike me down!” And in fact, the public did warm to the idea . . . immediately after the 1969 moon landing was broadcast on TV, a whopping 53 percent of people polled believed the trip had been “worth the cost.” Taking margin of error into account, that’s a narrow majority! No wonder NASA remains such a well-funded and vital institution to this day.
THE MYTH: The Cold War was fought by undercover agents and cloak-and-dagger spies.
International relations during the Cold War were conducted via one long chase scene between men in trench coats trying to kill each other with weapons disguised as things that aren’t weapons. If you’ve seen even one James Bond film, you know that being a Cold War–era spy was freaking awesome. If you haven’t, the movie posters for You Only Live Twice should do in a pinch.
FIGURE 6.28 The life of a Cold War–era spy, from top to bottom: Trying to decipher which of the nine women in the hot tub is jerking you off at the moment; keeping your arms crossed while steering experimental aircraft presumably with your penis.
THE TRUTH: For most spies and other military personnel, the Cold War was like one long adrenaline hangover from World War II—the six-year period when the entire world turned into a far-fetched, big-budget action movie that Michael Bay would call indulgent.
With the world locked in a Mexican standoff, all the creative energy that had gone into killing Nazis was funneled into designing insane weapons that we couldn’t actually use anywhere, except in novels and movies.
According to John le Carré’s account of his time in the British intelligence community, the cloak-and-dagger spying that we’ve come to associate with the Cold War was mostly imaginary. The job was often so boring—most of their days were spent watching people go in and out of important buildings; most of them probably just to use the bathroom—that spies would go on fake missions and basically play-act the sort of stuff that made it into his books. He goes on to talk about a form of madness that infected Cold War intelligence communities where agents chose paranoia and flights of imagination over the boring reality that nobody was trying to kill them.
THE MYTH: The nuclear arms race was an unavoidable by-product of U.S.-Soviet competition.
For America, it all started with the missile gap, when intelligence estimates revealed that Russia was kicking our ass. From then through the Reagan administration, it was on like nuclear Diddy Kong. The U.S. and Russian governments kept tabs on each other, with each side trying to catch up with, and then one-up, the other. Neither side was going to admit that they didn’t have the most weapons.
THE TRUTH: The arms race was a decades-long con job motivated by financial gains.
Now, we aren’t saying that they didn’t build all those bombs, or that all those bombs couldn’t have been unleashed and vaporized the globe many times over . . . both of those things are true. But the motive behind the manic construction of, all told, more than ninety thousand nuclear warheads was less patriotic and more capitalistic than you might think.
The fact is, the folks who ran the U.S. companies producing the warheads (and bombers and missile defense systems and anything else they could sell) were the same people who made up the “missile gap.” Basically, they told the U.S. government that Russia had enough nukes to blow up the planet, and that the only way to defend America was to build enough American nukes to, um, also blow up the planet . . . and then they got rich building them.
The CIA now openly admits that from 1955 to 1961, U.S. Air Force Intelligence exaggerated the missile gap between the United States and the USSR in order to drive up their operating budget, and transcripts exist of President Kennedy straight-up calling them out for selling the American people a “misguided myth.”
In the end, the arms race was really a get-rich-quick scheme that got out of hand when the USSR mistook all the U.S. missile building as a threat (go figure), instead of a cash grab.
6.D
Fictional Scenes from U.S. History
And the Deleted Scenes They Should Have Left In
They say a little bit of information is a dangerous thing, and the ideologues who ran the world during the first half of the twentieth century proved that edict with extreme prejudice. More recently we’ve learned that an outrageous glut of information can also be dangerous. The written record that served us well for so many years has exploded into a vast tangle capturing every side of every conceivable story. You might think we’d be better at keeping track of the facts, since we’re capturing them on video from just about every possible angle; the truth is we’re only getting more full of shit, and worse at coming to terms with it.
FICTIONAL SCENE: Protest via Burning Underpants
People in the ’60s never burned bras. Sure, maybe one or two oddball zealots or accidental shirt-fires resulted in a torched brassiere here and there, but it was not a “movement.” So why do we believe it? Well, we tend to think people with nonmainstream opinions are crazy and do crazy things to support their craziness. A woman asking for equal pay is a problem; a woman burning a bra and claiming that it’s a torture device is just an idiotic sideshow you can safely dismiss after a few minutes of vigorous masturbation.
A BETTER, TRUE STORY: The Straw Hat Riot
In 1922, the young men of New York City staged a three-day riot over whether it was appropriate to wear hats after September 15. Back in the good old days, when men were men and hats were a God-blessed right, it was considered bad form to wear a straw hat past September 15 for reasons that, if they were ever clear, were probably always stupid. Those who did not abide had their hats knocked right off their heads if they were lucky; their heads went along with them if they weren’t.
In that fateful year of haberdashery and bloodshed, a group of teenagers decided to knock the straw hats from the heads of a bunch of NYC dockworkers, who responded to the insult like, well, like a bunch of NYC dockworkers. In other words, they beat the shit out of those kids. The brawl got so bad that it stopped traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. But it didn’t end there: Soon, groups of teens several hundred strong roamed the streets, slappin’ hats like it was going out of style (or rather, like it was in style, but not this season . . . or fine for part of this season, but not after the second week of the first Mon— Oh, never mind). It got so bad that the youths would attack open streetcars if they saw a single hat-wearing passenger, and even off-duty policemen weren’t safe from the fashion gestapo. The “Straw Hat Riot” raged on for a full three days, because every time police responded to one disturbance, some reckless bastard would try to keep the sun out of his eyes in the wrong way.
Studio Notes:
Love the crazy women burning their bras. There’s something so human about it that really pops. We’re a little concerned about the believability of the hat riot. We totally get that it actually happened, but getting all worked up about fashion just feels more like a girl thing. What if we changed the men to women, the hats to bras, and instead of knocking them off each other’s heads, they kept accidentally touching each other’s boobs? Also, it’s raining. Just spit-balling over here! Let us know when you have a draft of Boob Riot City.
Chaz Blazer
Development Executive
20th Century American History
There Was No Mass Panic following the War of the Worlds Broadcast
THE MYTH: On the night before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles and his troupe of radio clowns’ broadcast of H. G. Wells’s science-f
iction novel The War of the Worlds caused a mass panic.
Frightened listeners overloaded phone lines, fled cities, rushed to warn their loved ones, rioted, and even attempted suicide in fear of the alien attack. People of the 1930s, right? They were the stupidest.
FIGURE 6.29 It’s worth noting that in 1938, anything printed on paper was legally “journalism.”
THE TRUTH: No one killed themselves. No one panicked.
Almost everyone who heard the original War of the Worlds broadcast reacted in exactly the way you would have: They flipped to another station and called somebody to ask what was going on. Reports of people immediately flying into a panic—attempting suicide, hallucinating alien death rays, or stripping naked and welcoming the mothership—were almost all anecdotal stories told secondhand with no names attached.
FIGURE 6.30 “Should we sacrifice the girl-child to the martians or just change the station, darling? Your call.”
So why do modern readers think that 1930s people were stupid enough to kill themselves over a radio drama? Because newspapers of the day had their own irrational panic going on. Just as the late 2000s brought a wave of blog-fearing newspaper journalists, 1930s newspapermen feared the immediacy and popularity of the radio, and they loved the idea of the scary radio broadcast as a menace to public safety. In the same way the modern media likes to get worked up about cyberbullying and sexting, newspapers pointed to the nonexistent War of the Worlds panic for proof that radio was irresponsible and dangerous. So they were inventing a fake radio panic in order to create a real panic about radio and, specifically, its ability to cause panics—a plan that only makes sense when you realize it was originally spoken by someone who talked like the characters in the The Hudsucker Proxy.