Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 11

 

Join me on my trips down the rabbit hole, looking just a little deeper into interesting things I come across as I read and watch stuff that pique my interest or rekindle my curiosity.

Hans Massaquoi

Have you ever seen this photo before?  Definitely one of those pictures that's worth thousands of words. The boy in the center of the picture was Hans Massaquoi, and it was taken in 1933 in Hamburg, Germany.  Hans was a mixed-race child of a German woman and a Liberian diplomat living in Germany.  Like many boys in Germany, Hans was enamored by the pageantry and bluster of Nazism, and he was devastated to learn that he was not allowed to join the Hitler Youth, the only excluded boy in her class, because he was a "non-Aryan."  He encountered racism as a child but still considered himself German.  The 1935 Nuremberg laws blocked the pathway to higher education because of his status, and he was placed into a blacksmith apprentice program.  A sympathetic vocational counselor and SS officer told him not to worry, there will be a chance to serve the Reich in the future for people like him once Germany conquers Africa.  As he aged, he grew to hate Nazism, and he and his mother went into hiding in Hamburg, aided by friendly families.  (His father had been recalled to Liberia years before, and his mother had chosen to keep Hans in Germany.)  After the war, his father arranged for Hans to move to Liberia, but he grew disenchanted with Liberia and had a falling out with his father.  He then immigrated to the US in 1950.  There he studied journalism, and he forged a successful career, eventually becoming the managing editor of Ebony magazine.  He published his autobiography in 1999, called Destined to Witness in English.  He died in 2013.

William the Conqueror and the Witch of Ely

Every student of history knows the story of William the Conqueror invading England and instituting Norman rule in 1066, but resistance didn't end there.  William spent at least the next five years putting down various Saxon revolts.  One of the most interesting of these revolts was led by Hereward the Wake.  Hereward had been abroad, in Flanders, during the initial invasion and first Saxon revolts, but he returned to family land to find his home and family in ruins.  After exacting revenge on the perpetrators of the outrage, he emerged as a leader and amassed an army around him.  He established a base of operations at the Isle of Ely, not really an island, but a region in eastern England surrounded by marshes and bogs, making it nearly impenetrable and relatively secure from Norman aggression.  It became a Saxon enclave.  In 1069 and 1070, William vowed to destroy Saxon resistance and launched the "Harrowing of the North," a full-scale military assault against the rebels.  Soon, the last hold out was Hereward.  In 1071, William and his Norman army surrounded Ely.  A siege would prove fruitless because Ely was actual on high, fertile ground, and it would have been impossible to starve the defenders into submission.  The only option was to cross the bogs in a full assault.  William first built a pontoon bridge which sunk as soldiers crossed it, leading to a major loss of lives.  Finally, William turned to witchcraft.  He ordered a witch to climb to the top of a tower and to cast spells on the enemy.  She did this, yelling, screaming, and casting every spell, using every incantation and gesticulation that she knew, including repeatedly mooning them.  It seemed to have little effect. Hereward's army successfully pushed forward, setting fire to the towers that William had built, including the witch's.  She was forced to jump off the burning structure to her death.  Eventually, the Norman army prevailed, and Ely was captured.  It is not known what happened to Hereward.

 Carrot Propaganda

Maybe you heard as a child that eating carrots was good for your eyesight.  Did you know that was all a myth created by British propagandists during WWII?  Yes, the whole story was concocted by military intelligence.  When Royal Air Force Pilots successfully shot down German Luftwaffe planes on their nightly bombing missions against Britain, the British intelligence didn't want to reveal the real reason for their surprising defense, radar.  Radar was a new invention and a huge advantage; the British didn't want the Germans to know that it existed, so they had to come up with another explanation.  They settled on carrots.  The government began a campaign touting the health benefits of carrots, claiming that carrots increased one's night vision.  The stories claimed that British pilots ate lots and lots of carrots and urged everyone else to follow the suit so that they could see better during blackout conditions.  Propaganda posters, radio jingles, and carrot recipes were created.  Dr. Carrot became a ubiquitous character.  The propaganda reached the German military, but it's hard to say with certainty how much of the propaganda, if any, the Germans believed.  There were stories that German pilots started getting more carrots in their meals, but it's hard to prove their validity.  Nevertheless, the connection between carrots and improved vision became entrenched in popular culture for decades despite the fact that there is little evidence to support it.

Pythagoreanism

Everyone knows his name, and everyone learned his namesake equation, even if they've ever really used it outside of the math classroom.  Pythagoras is considered a giant in science, mathematics, logic, and philosophy.  He was recognized as a genius during his lifetime (570 - c. 495 BC), and his ideas went on to influence Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, among many others.  Some sources assert that he was the first to identify himself as a "philosopher," a "lover of wisdom."

His teachings formed the basis of a religious movement that lasted a couple of centuries.  Pythagoras believed in sacred mathematics and thought that the universe could be understood through numbers. Pythagoreanism was more than a cult of numero-philes. Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, embraced an egalitarian communal lifestyle, and practiced a rigid set of daily rituals and dietary restrictions.  They sought to imitate Pythagoras' own austere lifestyle, often practicing silence and vegetarianism, believing that a healthy body and soul worked in tandem.  The cult also believed in universal music or harmony of the spheres, wherein it was believed that the movements of celestial bodies were a form of music. Pythagoreans even broke cultural norms by admitting women into their ranks equally.  They spent their lives in a quest to use mathematics and music to uncover the secrets of the universe and to achieve harmony with the universe, thereby ending the chain of reincarnation.   Pythagoreanism began to decline in the 4th century BC, but there was a revival in the 1st century BC, and the philosophy continued to influence many religious communities, including some early Christians,  for centuries.

Arthur John Priest is not somebody to cruise with

Arthur John Priest (1887-1937) was a fireman and stoker on board several British steam-powered ocean liners, one of the crewmen charged with fueling the furnace.  It was a hard life for the crewmen, spending long hours in the deep, dark holds of the ships, stripped to the waist in the incredible heat, constantly covered in soot and inhaling heat and ash.  The work took its toll, and Priest actually retired from the sea at age 30, dying of pneumonia at age 49 in his Southampton England home.

According to him, health wasn't the only factor in his decision to retire; he said he was forced to retire because no one would sail with him on board.  Why?  Priest actually survived the sinkings of four ships and two other ship collisions, earning the nickname "the unsinkable stoker."   The ships in question were RMS Asturias (collision on her maiden voyage, 1908), RMS Olympic (collision with HMS Hawke, 1911), RMS Titanic (sunk by an iceberg, 1912), HMS Alcantara (sunk in combat with SMS Greif, 1916), HMHS Britannic (sunk by a mine, 1916) and SS Donegal (torpedoed by SM UC-27, 1917). 

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

My last rabbit hole post was about a lucky survivor of the Titanic sinking, but Arthur John Priest's fortune was nothing compared to today's subject, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the man lucky - or unlucky - enough to survive both atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Although it is estimated that 160 people were somehow affected by both, Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a survivor of both.  

Yamaguchi (1916-2010) was a marine engineer who worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagasaki in 1945.  On August 6, he happened to be in Hiroshima on a business trip when the atomic bomb exploded.  The explosion ruptured his eardrums, temporarily blinded him, and left him with radiation burns on the left side of the top half of his body.  He returned to Nagasaki the following day and received medical treatment.  Still bandaged, he reported for work on August 9.  As he was explaining his experience to his supervisor, the bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" exploded over Nagasaki.  This time he wasn't injured, but he suffered from a high fever and vomiting for over a week.  He and his wife, a Nagasaki survivor, had radiation-linked medical issues throughout their lives, as did their three children, all born after the war,  He continued to work, however, and he became a nuclear disarmament activist.  His wife died in 2008 of liver and kidney cancer at age 88, and Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer at age 93.  

Bat Bombs

Those who are very familiar with World War II's more bizarre stories have certainly heard of the secret weaponization of bats tested by the US, but some of you may not have.  A dental surgeon and acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt named Lytle S. Adams had a brainstorm and shared it in a letter.  He knew bats roosted at night, often on the eaves of buildings, and he knew that most homes in Japan were constructed of wood.  He proposed attaching timed incendiary devices to the bodies of live Mexican free-tailed bats and dropping them over Japanese cities at night.  The bats would instinctively roost under the eaves of the buildings, the incendiary device would explode, and huge swaths of Japanese cities would burn down.  President Roosevelt gave his approval, the US assembled a research team, and thousands of bats were captured.  The researchers decided on napalm as the active incendiary agreement.  The devices would be glued to the bats' bodies, the bats would be chilled to force hibernation for transport and packing into 4-5 feet long bomb tubes, and then dropped from above.  The tubes would open and the bats would disperse and roost.  Researchers estimated that the bat bombs would create 10 to 15 times more fires than standard incendiary bombs.

There were a couple of testing setbacks.  In one incident, some escaped bats roosted under a fuel tank and caused great damage to a base near Carlsbad, New Mexico.  The Air Force passed the project on to the Navy who then passed it on to the Marines.  Eventually, high officials realized the project would probably not be ready until mid-1945, and they killed the project.  Atomic bomb research soon overtook bat bomb development.

Claude Duval

Claude Duval (1643-1670) was a French-born highwayman active in Restoration England who became the inspiration for the "gallant rogue" archetype in folklore, literature, and song over the next couple of centuries.  According to the stories, Duval was born to a once noble family in Normandy that had lost its land and prestige, and he was forced to become a domestic in Paris at age 14.  He was employed by an exiled family of English royalists who returned to England following the Restoration of King Charles II, and they took Duval with them.  Soon he became a highwayman, stopping travelers and stagecoaches on the roads to London.  He was noted for his fancy, dandyish clothes and for his impeccable manners and for his charm, especially toward women.  He was never accused of violence, supposedly only stole valuables from men, and once he interrupted his robbery for a dance with the lady of the carriage.  Authorities offered a large reward, and Duval was arrested in a Covent Garden tavern, convicted of six robberies (There were several more for which he was not tried.), and hanged in 1670.  Poets, authors, and playwrights, told, and embellished his story, romanticizing the English highwayman in popular culture into the Victorian period.