Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.
I…I recognize the joke, but these are totally different kinds of bows, each with its own benefits and suited to its user.
Bard’s using a longbow.
Longbows are awesome and take a fuckton of regular practice to use, because the muscle strain required to be a longbowman(/woman) actually deforms the arms and back of the user.
“Bard the Bowman” is still known by that sobriquet even though he’s low status, his family’s life and profession changed when the dragon attacked. Why would he be called that, if not that he’s still in regular practice and people see him using the thing over and over and over?
Longbows are less-damaged by damp than composites, being made of once single piece of wood rather than layers of material, which is handy if one lives in the middle of a freaking lake.
The longbow changed the face of warfare in real life, esp. for England. They’re effective killing machines over long distance, even against armored enemies.
Conclusion: Bard’s a tank-muscled distance shot used to fighting with good sightlines.
Legolas and Tauriel use recurve bows, albeit in different styles.
Legolas’ looks like a Turkish bow, though I don’t recall seeing him use a thumb draw (which is not mandatory if you’ve got super strong elf-fingers, I guess).
Tauriel’s looks to be a Scythian composite bow by the shape.
Composite recurve bows are much easier to use in confined spaces and at odd angles.
They have been historically used by folks who specialize in archer tricks like multiple arrow shots (a thing we have seen Legolas do).
Because of the curves, composites pack heavy draw weight (the factor that determines with what force, i.e. how fast and far, the arrow will travel) into limited space.
Short draw (the distance you have to pull back the arrow to shoot it) means a quicker release time and quicker time to get your next arrow on the string.
Legolas and Tauriel fight in a forest, not know for long sight lines or easy travel, nor for enemies who can be seen coming. They need weapons that won’t be getting caught on a bush at an inopportune time. Likewise, you see fewer spears and longswords among the elves of the Greenwood.
Conclusion: Legolas and Tauriel are guerrilla fighters from a heavily-forested territory and their weapons reflect that.
Kili also uses a composite recurve bow.
For practical purposes, note that Kili has significantly shorter arms than any of the other archers here mentioned. Long draws, like on Bard’s longbow, are not feasible and that means he’s not going to get the power he is capable of producing.
Dwarves are fucking strong, all right? That wee little bow looks very like the Mongolian horse-bow in size and shape that my friend used with a draw weight of 55 lbs. (I’m not a weakling and I can draw 35 for a decent length of time when in practice). Kili’s could easily be upwards of 75-100 lbs.
Kili’s a hunter. Likely, his main concern with a bow (when not following his uncle on an inadvisable quest) is the procurement of dinner for his family. To do that with a bow you need to be very quiet or very quick on the draw. Dwarves are not known for being super-quiet, though I believe I remember something about Fili and Kili being better at that than is typical.
Anything that can kill a deer can probably kill a person (or an orc). That little horse-bow can easily kill or maim.
Conclusion: Kili is a hunter. He uses a bow that allows for the production of a lot of power at short notice and is suited to his size and strength.
Bigger is not always most effective. Your medieval weaponry rant has concluded for the day, unless someone wants to talk to me about swords.
Fiction: I hate sewing, it’s so fucking pointless and lame. My sisters and my mom are so stupid, I’m smart, I’m going to go ride my pony and learn how to use a sword. Rar, I’m fierce.
History: Without my needle, you would all be naked and dead. Excuse me, I have to go throw a party and negotiate a land deal.
We need more stories like this to be revealed. These “Hidden Figures” we never knew about have done so much that we can’t even imagine. And noone knows about them! People need to know their heroes. This is one more story , where we see the miracle when a black person is given a chance to shine. Incredible story. I want a movie about this ,too.
One of the books we are reading for Fundamental Theology notes that the stories written in Exodus were composed before Genesis, and that the Hebrews fist understood God as their savior from slavery, and then “projected” back to understand him as creator of the world. This is the same as saying that Israel’s understanding of God started with the small and then grew out, and he got bigger and bigger.
That got me thinking. It’s essentially saying that at first Israel thought YHWH was just another tribal God. Some folks had Isis, others Set, others Baal and so forth. But then something changed. The god of the Hebrews suddenly started getting stuff done. Why else would the Hebrews have suddenly begun to teach that their god was not simply a god, but The God, the God of gods? Why was his Name to holy to speak?
The answer would seem to be the Exodus. I’m pretty sure scholars say that the oldest part of the Pentateuch is the hymn in Ex. 15 celebrating their salvation from slavery: “YHWH is a warrior, YHWH is his name! Pharaoh’s chariots and army he hurled into the sea; the elite of his officers were drowned in the Red Sea. The flood waters covered them, they sank into the depths like a stone.” At the very least something incredibly significant happened in the history of the Hebrew people; something made them stop and say: Wait a minute – our God is not like other gods.
The Church obviously allows for allegorical and aetiological and metaphorical readings of scripture (particularly in the cases where it is apparent that the writer was not writing historical record, and taking into mind contemporary literary practices), so I’ve never been too hung up on taking the events in the book of Exodus as more or less historical. But something had to have happened, and it would have had to have been something incredible. We have the same sort of situation in the New Testament, actually. Looking at the history objectively, something very unusual must have happened around AD 30 in Judea, because 300 years later you’ve got the Roman Emperor worshiping an old Jew killed by Roman executioners. Christianity had to have come from somewhere, and there’s really no reason to think that it happened gradually. The earliest of Paul’s Letters, 1 Thessalonians in AD 50, points to one Christian community among many throughout the Mediterranean with quite a few members itself. A pretty large church grew up in the time that the Acts of the Apostles says it did. Something very strange and unusual must have happened to suddenly get a whole bunch of people worshiping a dead Jew.
If the initial community that gathered around Jesus had been mostly political or reformist, and had he not risen from the dead, it would have continued on as such, lead by probably James or Peter, who would have then been seen as the “real” Messiah, since Jesus, dead and rotting, couldn’t possibly have been a messiah, just as how John the Baptist couldn’t have been.
But something downright weird happened to make Christianity what it was (and still is).
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
and look at his little face!
this needs to be a movie.
I love this story SO MUCH. You know what he did in Venezuela? He owned a bookstore & gift shop. Someone in Great Britain tracked him down in 1984 and was like, “Hey, come on back over here and say hi to your former colleagues.” So he did. A+ life all around.
(Also: His wikipedia page has an ORG CHART of all the people he made up. It is delightful.)
2000 years later: “The strange glyphs appearing on gravestones from the early 21st century onward remain a mystery. These astoundingly complex patterns (no two exactly the same) have been found on many other 21st century artifacts, and are believed to have religious significance. Recovered images suggest they were probably sacred to the ancient North American god, Apple, and were meant to ensure that the departed would continue to be financially successful in the afterlife.”
As an archaeologist I can confirm that that is pretty much exactly what will happen in the future.
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
so what you’re saying is fairies are another fantastic species that belong to us now
ALRIGHT SO I went ahead and googled “unsolved historical mysteries” for Vampire humor, but I ended up getting too deep into historical conspiracy sites, as you do.
Anyway, I found out about this event called “The Devil’s Footprints.” Apparently, in 1855, a bunch of people in Devon woke up to discover 40 miles of “hoof-like” footprints in a single line made in the snow.
It was reported that “some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity” had apparently made them in the night.
They even found the tracks on top of houses and in people’s gardens.
As always, everyone freaked out, dismissed it, or tried to find an explanation.
As funny as it is to imagine an incredibly dedicated supernatural creature with a cloven-hoofed pogo-stick manifesting physically for a 40-mile trek to parts unknown, I have to say I love the theories from the time even more.
Mike Dash, now officially a hero in my book, suggested that “hopping mice” made the tracks. Apparently, the dashed tracks of jumping mice would resemble hoof-prints. I’m still waiting to hear why mice would have been jumping forty miles through deep snow overnight, but I think my window to ask good old Mike closed a century or two ago.
Well-meaning Reverend Musgrave made up a story about escaped Kangaroos to calm down the good people afraid of God and The Devil. He later confessed to having made it up. I’m sure everyone in Britain in February was SHOCKED to find out Kangaroos weren’t actually running marathons by light of the moon.
Someone suggested a badger. Other suggested mass-hysteria, and that forty miles of country folks had simply just imagined or extrapolated the whole thing.
But my ULTIMATE favorite explanation is that an “experimental” balloon simply escaped the Davenport Dockyard with two shackles dragging behind it on a rope. Apparently, it had destroyed some greenhouses and caused other damage on its vie for freedom, so it was all covered up. This theory was put forward by an author, who knew a guy, who had a grandpa who worked at the Dockyard. So that’s a pretty valuable source, if you ask me.
Anyway, it’s never been solved or explained in a way that makes any real sense, and I’m honestly enamored of the whole thing.
Who are you, mystery hooved British snow-cryptid? Where did you come from, where did you go?
I actually have a book about strange phenomena and traditions. It’s 40 years old though and I’ve had it since I was 8. This particular story holds a special place in my heart. Apparently, the tracks appeared to be made by a bipedal horseshoe clad something. What’s weirder is that the prints melted into the ice like a heated horseshoe and the mystery something left track along the length of a drainpipe. They had also passed through a 4 inch hole in a shed. The tracks began in the middle of a garden. It is dark and 1 o’clock so I don’t want to freak myself out by fetching the book, so this is constructed from memory. If I have to be honest with you, the book has tons more information than Wikipedia.
Ah!!! What is the title of the book!!!!
“Martha Washington often recalled the two saddest days of her life. The first was December 14, 1799 when her husband died. The second was in January 1801 when Thomas Jefferson visited Mount Vernon. As a close friend explained, “She assured a party of gentlemen, of which I was one…that next to the loss of her husband” Jefferson’s visit was the “most painful occurrence of her life.”
The Blue Castle 