by Lewis, Dan
BONUS FACT
Officially, the siege of Fort Sumter had a death toll of two men, both Union soldiers. But those deaths weren’t at the hands of the Confederacy. Fort Sumter, low on provisions and undermanned, was unable to thwart the Confederate bombardment. Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the fort, agreed to surrender after less than two days of bombardment, under the condition that his men be allowed to give a 100-gun salute when lowering the American flag. During that ceremony, some ammunition went off accidentally, killing privates Edward Galloway and Daniel Hough.
RATS!
HOW VERMIN HELPED BEAT THE NAZIS
As war swept through Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s, it became increasingly clear that the previously genteel methods of killing each other were no longer going to cut it. On June 22, 1940, the British government established a group called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret group of spies charged with finding nontraditional ways to disrupt Nazi plans.
The SOE had roughly 13,000 operatives. Many provided support for other fighters, typically to people fighting in the Resistance; for example, in 1943, four SOE operatives in Greece assisted local freedom fighters in the successful kidnapping of the Nazi governor of Crete. But others were saboteurs—and creative ones at that. Which is why, in 1941, the SEO purchased a hundred or so dead rats, formerly used in medical experiments.
Dead rats generally aren’t worth much and, if anything, are a nuisance. (Live rats are probably more so.) This was certainly true for Germans and British alike. Rats had a habit of getting onto trains, and at times, they’d make their way to the boiler room of a steam engine. Firemen, whose job it was to keep tossing coal into the furnace to keep the steam coming, would habitually toss any dead rats into the furnace. So the SOE agents laced these hundred dead rats with a little bit of plastic explosives, enough to sabotage the train and its delivery but not so much as to cause a major disaster (which would cause massive loss of life and prompt an investigation). The rats were then shipped into Germany.
But they were intercepted along the way.
What sounds like a failure, though, turned out to be a success. The Nazis had stopped the first and only shipment of dead rat bombs, but they didn’t know that. All dead rats were now suspect, and German firemen had to be on constant lookout for dead rats among the coal heaps.
The SOE concluded that the subsequent drop in efficiency of German trains was a boon, albeit from their perspective, an accidental one. As the Guardian would later report, official word from the SOE was that “the trouble caused to [the Nazis] was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used.”
BONUS FACT
Hiding explosives in the coal in a train’s boiler room isn’t new or limited to trains. During the Civil War, the Confederacy developed a device called a “coal torpedo,” an explosive-filled iron casting covered in coal. The premise was the same at the rat bombs: The fireman would toss the “torpedo” into the boiler, causing an explosion. The target of the torpedoes were Union steamboats patrolling the south, but we don’t know how effective they were—the Confederate powers that be burned most of the official documents of the pseudo-country just before the end of the war.
THE ASSAULT OF AMAGANSETT
WHEN THE NAZIS INVADED AMERICA
With rare exception, American involvement in World War II was focused in Europe and the Pacific. Few acts of war took place on the North American continent, a function primarily of the United States’s geographic isolation. But this did not keep the Germans from attempting to bring the war Stateside. In fact, on June 13, 1942, four German operatives landed at Amagansett, New York, near the eastern tip of Long Island. Three days later, another four Nazis came ashore at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, just south of Jacksonville.
Their orders? To wreak havoc on America’s infrastructure.
The eight were trained as saboteurs and given targets: hydroelectric plants, a chemical plant, shipping locks in the Ohio River, and, of particular note, the railway industry. Hell Gate Bridge in New York, a four-track bridge that allowed for the transport of both passengers and freight across the East River bordering Manhattan, was specifically targeted, as was Newark, New Jersey’s main train station. Horseshoe Curve, a railroad pass in central Pennsylvania that connected the Pittsburgh steel industry to the industrialized population east, was also on the list of places to be sabotaged, as were the Pennsylvania Railroad’s nearby repair yards. Had the plan succeeded, America’s industrial complex would have stalled.
The plot failed when two of the conspirators instead attempted to defect. George Dasch, who headed up the team, went to the FBI in Washington, D.C., instead of to his German-assigned target. He attempted to turn himself in and, with co-conspirator Ernst Burger (an American citizen), told the FBI about the plot. However, the two were written off as mere nutcases. Dasch was not to be ignored, however. He returned to the FBI, dropped over $80,000 on the desk—money he received to execute the planned sabotage—and was taken seriously. After hours of interrogation, Burger and the other six Nazis were arrested.
Justice was swift. In July, all eight would-be saboteurs—including Dasch—were convicted of various war crimes and sentenced to death by electrocution. On August 8, 1942, six of the eight were indeed executed, but Burger and Dasch were spared. President Roosevelt commuted Burger’s sentence to life in prison and Dasch’s to thirty years. Six years later (after the war), President Truman granted clemency to both so long as they accepted deportation to American-occupied Germany.
The two lived out their remaining days—Burger lived to be sixty-nine years old, Dasch died at age eighty-nine—as men without a country. The United States viewed them as enemy combatants, never issuing them a pardon, whereas the pair’s German compatriots viewed them as traitors who turned on their fellow soldiers.
BONUS FACT
The men above weren’t the only German spies to invade the United States—nor were they the only ones foiled when a compatriot turned himself in. On November 29, 1944, Erich Gimpel (a German) and William Colepaugh (an American who had defected to Nazi Germany earlier that year) were brought to Maine via U-boat. Their orders were to gather intelligence (perhaps to investigate American work on atomic weapons), not to blow anything up. But the plan failed. Colepaugh abandoned the mission, met up with friends in the States, and ultimately turned himself into the FBI. Both he and Gimpel were sentenced to death. Their sentences were commuted to life in prison and they were released on parole by 1960.
WAR GAMES
HOW MONOPOLY AND PLAYING CARDS FREED POWS
During World War II, Nazi Germany took many prisoners of war (POWs), as is common in warfare. Nazi concentration camps were the scenes of endless horrors, but POW camps were relatively humane (again, relatively). The Nazis even allowed the home nations of the POWs to send them mail. Specifically, the Nazis allowed the Allies to send care packages to those imprisoned, which included items such as playing cards and board games.
The Allies used this minor bit of hospitality to their strategic advantage.
The United States worked with the United States Playing Card Company to come up with a special type of Bicycle-brand playing cards. Those cards held escape maps within them, printed directly on the cards. As recounted by the company’s official website, when moistened, the cards’ glue—a special type of glue used for this purpose—would weaken. The cards’ faces would peel away, revealing detailed escape plans.
The United Kingdom pulled off a similar trick. In 1941, British intelligence worked with John Waddington Ltd., the UK company licensed to make Monopoly games, to produce a special version of the classic board game. According to Mental Floss magazine, these sets came with a cornucopia of clandestine goodies. Maps, printed on silk to avoid destruction by weather, were hidden within the box. The games also included metal files and magnetic compasses to facilitate an escape. And included beneath the Monopoly money was real money—French, German, and Italian notes were among the fak
e bills.
These board games would be collectors’ items today, but unfortunately finding one would be a trick all to itself. All the spy-enhanced Monopoly sets were destroyed after the war, according to ABC News.
BONUS FACT
Playing cards had a role in the Vietnam War as well. The Viet Cong were apparently superstitious and fearful of the Ace of Spades, which was previously used by French fortune-tellers in the area to signify death. American commanders requested decks full of only the Ace of Spades, and Bicycle, of course, provided them (for free). American troops left the cards in strategic places, and some Viet Cong would flee upon seeing what they believed was a bad omen.
MISSILE MAIL
A REALLY QUICK WAY TO DELIVER THE MAIL
Norfolk, Virginia is about 600 or so miles from Jacksonville, Florida. Depending on what route you take and how fast you drive, it would take you about nine or ten hours to deliver a piece of mail—say, a postcard—from one city to the other. If you took a plane, assuming you weren’t held up in security or delayed on the tarmac, it would take just over an hour and a half. That’s pretty good, but for decades, postal authorities aspired to deliver the mail faster. Much faster.
And in 1959, the U.S. Postal Service managed to deliver 3,000 pieces of mail from the Norfolk area to Jacksonville in twenty-two minutes. How?
It put them on a nuclear missile.
In the early 1930s and into the 1940s, many postal services were experimenting with the idea of using rocketry as a way to expedite mail delivery. The first known attempts were in Austria in 1931, but the experiments failed to yield long-term use. Around the same time, a German businessman and rocket scientist named Gerhard Zucker became an evangelist for the idea, traveling around both Germany and the United Kingdom to find an audience for his ideas. He ran some test flights in the south of England with mixed results; some of the envelopes exploded along with one of the rockets, but another flight successfully delivered the test mail. No one bought Zuckers’s service, but others tried to recreate it themselves.
The United States made its first attempt at what would later be termed “rocket mail” in 1936, firing a pair of rockets across a lake on the border of New York and New Jersey. But the distance—only about 1,000 feet—wasn’t very impressive. A couple decades later, the Post Office Department (now the U.S. Postal Service) decided to try and make it work, for real. On June 8, 1959, working with the U.S. Navy, they fired a nuclear missile from the USS Barbero, a submarine then stationed a few miles off the coast of Norfolk. The nuclear warhead had been replaced with 3,000 postal covers—basically, commemorative envelopes with precancelled stamps—containing letters from Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield. The letters were addressed to President Eisenhower and a series of governmental and postal officials throughout the United States, and all had the same return address: “The Postmaster General, Washington.”
The missile took flight at 9:30 A.M. Its guidance system was programmed to land at Naval Station Mayport, a military airport a few miles east of Jacksonville, situated on a harbor in Florida. At approximately 9:52, it successfully landed at Mayport. The mission was a success. Postmaster General Summerfield proclaimed that “before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”
He was obviously wrong. Most experts believe that “rocket mail” is too expensive to justify the otherwise very cool idea.
BONUS FACT
The Postmaster General isn’t a general. Neither are the Surgeon General or any of the Attorneys General, for that matter. “General,” in these contexts, is not a noun but an adjective, showing the expansiveness of the postmaster’s (or surgeon’s or attorney’s) expertise. According to Michael Herz, a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, who investigated the question insofar as “attorney general” is concerned, there’s no basis for calling these governmental leaders “generals.” Says Herz, doing so is “flatly incorrect by the standards of history, grammar, lexicology and protocol.”
SPACE MAIL
HOW SOME APOLLO ASTRONAUTS MADE MONEY ON THE SIDE
An old postage stamp cover might not strike you as very exciting. But in at least several cases, those covers have been somewhere you’ll probably never go: the moon. And there’s a very good chance that many of these special envelopes shouldn’t have gone to the moon in the first place. The fact that some of them did may have cost a couple astronauts their jobs.
Apollo 15 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 26, 1971. Its lunar module landed on the moon’s surface four days later. The spacecraft carried three astronauts—Commander David Scott, Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin, and Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden—and 641 postage stamp covers. Of those 641, 243 were authorized by NASA, a common way for space missions at the time to create collectables marking the historic occasions. (Most likely, 250 were authorized, but miscounting or damage to some covers reduced the number actually brought into space to 243.) The other 398—400, minus two that were damaged and therefore discarded—were smuggled aboard.
Before the Apollo 15 mission launch, a German stamp collector named Herman Sieger found out about the 243 NASA-authorized stamp covers and saw an opportunity. He connected with a German man (and naturalized American citizen) named Walter Eiermann, who was well known in the area around Kennedy Space Center and had many contacts within NASA. He convinced the three astronauts to bring the extra 398 stamp covers aboard the flight with them, offering them $7,000 for their troubles, and giving them an extra 100 covers for their own purposes. Scott, who was traveling with an authorized cancellation stamp (for the 243 preapproved covers), was to cancel the 398 contraband covers upon the mission’s return to Earth.
That part of the plan went without a hitch. The stamp covers made the trip and were returned to Sieger, who had originally agreed to not sell any of the stamp covers until after the final Apollo mission came to a close (which, as it turns out, would be another year and a half or so). But Sieger failed to keep that part of the bargain. As reported by the Spokesman-Review, he started to sell them almost immediately after, receiving $1,500 for each. In total, he earned roughly $300,000 (about $1.6 million in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation)—which, of course, caught the eye of critics far and wide.
Even though what the astronauts did was not illegal, many objected, seeing the noble heroes become nothing more than profiteering opportunists. (Irwin, by some reports, would later say that he was simply trying to earn enough money to pay for his children’s college educations.) Congress ordered NASA to take action. NASA reassigned the astronauts to nonflight roles and confiscated their 100 remaining covers, prompting their resignations.
A few years later, in 1983, NASA and the U.S. Postal Service partnered to put 260,000 commemorative stamp covers on the STS-8 Challenger shuttle mission. Noting that what they did was not very different, the Apollo 15 crew took legal action to regain their own stamp covers. According to Worden’s autobiography, they settled with NASA and the covers were returned. As recently as 2011, one of the covers sold at auction for $15,000.
BONUS FACT
Worden has two claims to fame due to the Apollo 15 mission. On August 5, 1971, he made the first walk in deep space, 196,000 miles from Earth; from that vantage point, he was able to see both the moon and Earth, as he told CNN. Second, Worden holds the record for the most isolated known person in human history. While Scott and Irwin were on the moon’s surface, Worden was in orbit above the moon, alone, and at one point was 2,235 miles away from the two men on the surface below. (That’s roughly the distance from Barcelona to Moscow.)
STAR-SPANGLED MOON BANNERS
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FLAGS ON THE MOON?
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon. As part of the Apollo 11 mission, they famously took a flag pole mounted with an American flag
and placed it on the moon’s surface next to a plaque that read “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” The flag’s placement was broadcast back to the rest of us on Earth. More than a half-century later—and no human has returned to the massive rock orbiting our planet in more than forty years—that remains one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.
The flag? It’s almost certainly not there anymore. (And no, aliens did not take it.)
Each of the Apollo missions left an American flag on the moon. When the Apollo 11 crew planted theirs, though, they made one of the few notable (but arguably insignificant) errors of the mission—they placed it too close to the lunar lander. When Armstrong and Aldrin took off from the moon to rejoin Michael Collins in the command module in the lunar orbiter, Aldrin realized the error. As he’d later recount, he saw the flag fall over as the lander’s rockets fired, and assumed that the nylon flag was vaporized in the process. We can’t be sure, but that’s the most likely scenario.
For decades, NASA experts and other researchers believed that, if anything, this minor faux pas had little to no effect on anything, because they generally believed that the flags left behind would have crumbled into space dust (or whatever space items turn into over time) within a few years of their placement. But that turns out to be wrong. The flags—except for Apollo 11’s—are still there.
In 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), an unmanned spacecraft that still orbits the moon, taking pictures of its surface along the way. The LRO is programmed to take pictures of each of the Apollo landing sites and, in 2012, picked up shadows near each site. The flags, NASA concluded, are causing those shadows.