The modern incarnation is called “Godiva Weekend,” and sounds suspiciously like what Americans know as a Renaissance Faire. If you miss it, you can still see Godiva—naked, on horseback, and cast in bronze. Her statue gazes down on the modern Coventry marketplace: a shopping center.
Because he supported violence, Amnesty International never adopted Nelson Mandela.
THE PHANTOM ARMY
* * *
We’ll bet your history teacher never told you that one of the Allies’ greatest weapons in World War II was a colossal hoax that Germany swallowed—hook, line, and sinker!
Behind D-Day’s astonishing success was one of the most sophisticated deception schemes ever perpetrated on an enemy force. It went this way: Hitler knew the Allies were planning an invasion. And he was sure they’d cross the English Channel at the Pas de Calais (what the British call the Strait of Dover) to get to France, because it’s the shortest distance between Great Britain and the continent. But a landing at Calais would put the troops smack dab in front of the strongest section of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall,” a virtual suicide mission. So the Allies chose Normandy for the landings instead.
NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE. . .
This called for some fancy footwork. To mislead the Germans, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff created a mythical 1st Army Group and based it in Britain near Dover, just across the channel from Calais. Eisenhower assigned George S. Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command this army that didn’t exist.
THE PLOT THICKENS
To convince the Germans that the Phantom Army was preparing for invasion, Eisenhower’s staff positioned inflatable tanks, balsa wood bombers, and canvas landing craft where the Luftwaffe could photograph them during aerial reconnaissance. Radio operators were assigned to generate routine radio traffic, and bogus intelligence reports and documents were “lost” and fell into the hands of the Germans. Local newspapers in the towns where the Phantom Army was stationed even carried false marriage and death notices.
STOP THE PRESSES!
One elaborate ruse included National Geographic magazine. The U.S. Army prepared a color spread depicting a variety of 1st Army Group insignias: shoulder patches and the like. When the magazine was published, they allowed some issues to be distributed, but then halted the printing, removed the bogus insignias, and released a revised version of the magazine.
Founded by Union army officers, the NRA was originally out to improve marksmanship.
THE BIG FAKE-OUT
The Allies continuously drew attention to the Channel coast near Calais. During the weeks before the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France. Naval units conducted protracted maneuvers up and down the coast.
On the night of the Normandy invasion, Allied planes dropped silver foil on the Pas de Calais which German radar picked up as an invasion fleet crossing the channel narrows. At the same time, a radar blackout disguised the real movement toward Normandy. All of these ploys were designed to convince Berlin that it needed to prepare for an amphibious assault on Calais.
“YOO-HOO! OVER HERE!”
By the time the invasion finally began, Hitler and his generals had been so thoroughly deceived that they believed the Normandy operation was a diversion. Instead of moving their reserve units to stop the Allies from reaching the beachheads, they continued to wait for what they thought would be the main attack at Calais. By the time that the Germans realized they’d been deceived, it was too late. Allied troops had breached the Atlantic Wall and were headed towards Paris. The “Phantom Army” had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And without ever firing a shot.
“The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
—The Duke of Wellington
When the duke was a boy at Eton College there were no playing fields, nor any organized sports. The supposed reference to the discipline, determination, and comradeship gained through such adolescent activity, therefore, falls flat. The quote was first ascribed to the duke by the French writer Charles de Montalembert in his treatise entitled “England’s Political Future,” which was published three years after Wellington’s death. The Frenchman, however, never met the duke so it is highly likely that he invented the quote himself.
Tennessee teacher John Scopes was actually on the losing end of the famous “Monkey Trial.”
THE HUNCHBACK OF NORTHERN FAME: THE STORY OF RICHARD III
* * *
Was Shakespeare’s villain just a victim of artistic license? Why did so many regular folk, especially in northern England, want to clear the name of Richard III?
Shakespeare’s Richard III is a villain you love to hate. An ugly hunchback, Richard succeeds in his ambition by arranging the deaths of his wife Anne, his brother George Duke of Clarence, his two nephews Edward V and Richard Duke of York, Henry VI, Henry’s son Edward Prince of Wales, and anyone else who stands between him and the throne.
POOR RICHARD
Some folks—especially in the north of England where Richard had been in charge for many years—thought he was a terrific guy. After Richard’s death, even with his enemies in power, city fathers at York referred to Richard as the “prince of blessed memory.” A century later, Sir Francis Bacon reported that ordinary people of the north still grumbled that their Dick had gotten the short end of the stick. Was he a royal psychopath or a just and kindly ruler?
A FAMILY SQUABBLE
Richard was the last of a long line of Plantagenet kings who’d been ruling England since the middle of the 12th century. For several generations, two branches of the Plantagenets—the Lancasters and the Yorks—had been fighting over the crown. In 1462, the Yorks got it, in the person of Richard’s older brother, King Edward IV.
THE GOOD BROTHER
Throughout his reign Edward IV struggled with rebels, always aided by the loyal Richard. Richard was given land and power in the north of England and seemed to be an ideal ruler. Then Edward died. His son, now Edward V, was only 12 years old. So good old Uncle Richard was named regent.
The ACLU was founded as the American Union Against Militarism.
THE ROTTEN REGENT
When Edward IV died, Richard didn’t mess around. He charged down from the north, executed his potential rivals without a trial, and soon had everything running like clockwork. There was one small problem, a guy named Henry Tudor over in France was just itching to cross the English Channel and grab the throne.
THE BAD UNCLE
But Richard grabbed the throne first. Claiming he’d stumbled across evidence that Edward IV and Elizabeth’s marriage wasn’t entirely kosher, he declared his brother’s children illegitimate. He imprisoned young Edward V and the younger Richard Duke of York in the tower of London, and took the throne—though not for long. Henry Tudor crossed the channel after all, and Richard died defending his crown at the fatal Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
TRUTH VS. LEGEND
Those are the facts about Richard. What about the Shakespearean plot?
A hunchback? Nope: Although he may have had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, caused by years of swordplay, Richard seems to have acquired most of his physical deformities after death. In fact, his contemporaries said he was rather handsome, though not a hunk like his brother, Edward IV.
Murdered Henry VI? Maybe: Perhaps Richard killed Henry VI on Edward’s orders. Perhaps not. There’s no evidence either way. Richard was blamed for the murder of King Henry VI’s son Edward, the heir to the crown, but contemporary accounts say the boy was killed on the battlefield.
Murdered his brother George? Unlikely: George had tried to overthrow his brother King Edward IV (talk about your dysfunctional families!), and Richard gave his usual support to the king during George’s trial. But in private, Richard was reported to be genuinely upset at the execution of his feckless brother, who may have been suffering from some form of insanity.
Usurping the throne? Yep: The legitima
cy of Edward’s kids was not as big a deal as Richard made it out to be. He’d seized the throne, which seemed to be a sort of family tradition for the squabbling Plantagenets. Perhaps he’d also had real concerns about the threat to England (and the Yorks) under a child king.
John Adams’s wife Abigail used to hang the wash in the White House East Room.
Did he murder his nephews? Jury’s out: The biggest stain on Richard’s reputation was the accusation that he killed the princes in the tower. Certainly he locked Edward V and his brother, Richard Duke of York, in the Tower of London, and after the summer of 1483, they were never seen again. But killing children wouldn’t endear him to the public, whose support he needed. The boys’ mother, the former Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who’d asked for the protection of the Church when Richard took the throne, decided to come out again—just at the time that the boys were supposedly murdered.
The other suspects and theories: If the princes were still alive after Henry VII became king, he might have done them in for the same reasons attributed to Richard. They weakened his claim to the throne. And the Duke of Buckingham is a major suspect in the royal tot killing. He had access to the children and (since he was also after the throne) a motive to get rid of them. Some believe that the princes were never murdered on purpose, but died in a botched escape.
A mystery through history: Mysteries still cloud the death of the princes. A child-murder would have made great propaganda, but nobody openly accused anybody else of murder. Buckingham could have justified his rebellion by accusing Richard of doing away with the tykes; he didn’t. Richard could have added child murder to the other charges against Buckingham; he didn’t. Or Richard could have produced the living princes to disprove the rumors that they’d been killed. (You guessed it, he didn’t.) As for Henry VII, he never exploited the juicy gossip that the two kids had been offed by their Uncle Dick.
A hit man: Later writers claimed that Richard’s actual hit man, Sir James Tyrrell, had confessed, in writing, to the crime, but the Tudors never made the supposed document public.
Make no bones about it: Perhaps the inability to produce bodies is what kept all three suspects from accusing each other. The bones of two children were found buried in the foundation of a staircase in the tower. But that discovery wasn’t made until 1674. Whatever happened to the two boys, Richard wins no prizes as an uncle or a regent. By imprisoning them instead of protecting them, he’d abandoned the princes to their enemies, even if he didn’t kill them.
U.S. president W. H. Harrison caught pneumonia at his inaugural speech & died 32 days later.
NOT GIVEN A FAIR SHAKE-SPEARE
But Richard didn’t win prizes as the ultimate incarnation of evil, either. Up until 1483, he was an excellent and generous ruler, and a loyal brother, and nobody ever doubted his skill and courage as a warrior. One likely explanation was that, rather than being a murderous schemer, Richard was a decisive soldier, a man of action who wasn’t good at mulling over long-term consequences. Once Edward died, Richard started making plans up as he went along. He may have ended up betraying his own principles—and in so doing, handed Shakespeare the makings of the villain we love to hate.
NOTABLE QUOTABLES FROM RICHARD III
“So wise so young, they say, do never live long.”
Act ii, Scene 4
“The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom.”
Act iv, Scene 3
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
Act v, Scene 4
“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.”
Act v, Scene 3
The first president to be impeached was neither Nixon or Clinton, but Andrew Johnson.
WHO CONQUERED THE NORTH POLE?
* * *
Most people believe Robert Peary tamed the great Arctic frontier in 1909. But a doctor named Frederick Cooke claimed to have beaten him by over 12 months. Recent analysis suggests that maybe neither of them made it.
“Stars and Stripes nailed to North Pole—Peary.” When Robert Peary sent this telegram to the outside world on September 6, 1909, he thought he was making history. Imagine his surprise when he found out that rival explorer Frederick Cooke had announced five days previously that he had reached the North Pole in April 1908—a full year before Peary. This set the scene for a battle of egos that would rage for decades. So, who really reached the North Pole first—Peary or Cooke?
IN THIS CORNER
To Robert Peary, the quest for the North Pole was an obsession. The U.S. Navy civil engineer saw in the accomplishment the road to fame, fortune, and immortality. After telling his mother of his chosen course, he added, “I must have fame and cannot reconcile myself to years of commonplace drudgery.” It might sound a tad grandiose to those of us who face commonplace drudgery every day, but it actually comes off as humble compared to Cooke’s take on it.
AND IN THAT CORNER
Frederick Cooke, a physician from New York, wrote, “I saw myself attempting to win in the most spectacular and difficult marathon for the testing of human strength, courage, and perseverance, of body and brain, which God has offered to man, until I stood alone, a victor, upon the world’s pinnacle.”
TOP OF THE WORLD, MA!
Okay, so maybe a guy can’t talk about conquering a pole without sounding like he has delusions of grandeur. And it was obvious that both had made genuine attempts to reach the North Pole. The question was whether either had managed to go all the way.
FDR had a 25,000-piece stamp collection worth millions of dollars.
WALRUS GREASE, ETC.
Recent analysis of the diaries, journals, and field notes of Peary and Cooke may indicate that they both failed. The following discrepancies support this view:
• Peary’s records never showed his claim to reach the North Pole.
• Peary’s diary entries are remarkably tidy and display none of the walrus grease stains or poor penmanship to be expected from a man writing under extreme arctic conditions.
• Peary’s diary pages for the days during which he claimed to be at the North Pole are inexplicably blank.
• During his testimony before Congress in 1911, Peary often contradicted himself and, when pressed for details of his expedition, he complained of memory lapses.
• Both men claimed to have traveled at incredible rates of speed—more than 15 miles per day over the roughest terrain on earth.
• Cooke’s field notes betray an ignorance of mathematical concepts used to calculate latitude.
• A photocopy of a Cooke notebook shows that he doctored his accounts: writing over dates, renumbering pages, and erasing some of the entries.
• The sled that Cooke designed and used, though innovative (it could fold into a kayak), could probably not have stood up to the harsh conditions of the trip.
• Cooke had earlier faked a claim of climbing 20,000-foot Mt. McKinley.
• When interviewed, two of Cooke’s Eskimo guides who remained at base camp claimed that Cooke was never out of their sight.
WHY WAIT?
Interesting, too, is the fact that Cooke didn’t announce his “victory” until five days before Peary’s announcement, even though he claimed to have reached the North Pole more than a year earlier. (Okay, it took him five months to get home, but still, it’s kind of out of character for a man who claimed that he “stood alone, a victor, upon the world’s pinnacle.”)
SORRY. . .
Oh. Did you think we were going to tell you the answer? Well, heck, we don’t know. The jury’s still out. We’ll just have to chalk it up as one of history’s mysteries.
The presidential election of 1876 was even more heavily disputed than the election of 2000.
FIESTA!
* * *
In Peru and its neighboring countries, there is a special fiesta food: guinea pigs. Sixty-five million of the friendly little
rodents get eaten every year (mostly fried).
Birthdays, weddings, no party would be complete without a tasty dish of fried guinea pigs, often decorated with the severed heads looking up at you cheekily from the plate. The Peruvians breed them at home, dozens at a time, keeping them running around on the floor; they are a part of everyday life. More than half the families in Lima have some. But apart from their value as food, the animals are also supposed to have magical qualities. Traditional healers use them in ceremonies to cure disease, and others use them in spells to drive away bad luck.
These modern traditions are all that’s left of the guinea pig cult of the Incas. Archaeological evidence shows that guinea pigs have been domesticated in the Andes at least since 2,500 B.C., but they had a special place in the Inca civilization that the Spanish Conquistadors found when they arrived in the 15th century. According to a native chronicler, the Incas sacrificed a thousand white guinea pigs every July (along with a hundred llamas), in an offering to the gods that was supposed to protect the fields. These sacred beasts were about twice the size of today’s pet shop variety.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History Page 43