Learning about things that happened in the past can generate a sense of wonder. And these two stories are bound to do just that.
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Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Bravery comes in all shapes its sizes. It might be the kid who stands up to the bully at school, or the person who asks their crush out on a date. Bravery doesn't have to mean putting one's life in danger. Of course, any action movie will tell you it means big muscles and even bigger guns. But one World War Two soldier proved Hollywood all wrong. His was a story about bravery that was almost too good to be true. And his name was Leo Major. Major was born in nineteen twenty one in Massachusetts. His parents were French Canadian, but his father had brought his mother's stateside while he was working for the American Railroad Company. Before Leo turned one, Mr Major moved every wooden back home to Montreal, Canada as he got older, Though the young Major didn't get along with his father and went to live with an aunt when he was just fourteen. There weren't many opportunities for work where he lived, but he did have a desire to show his father that he could make something of himself, so when he turned nineteen, he joined the Canadian Army. From the get go, Major did more than make something of himself. He proved everyone that he was a force to be reckoned with. He stormed the beaches of Normandy in nineteen forty four and single handedly captured a German armored personnel carrier. Then he took out a handful of s S patrolman a few days later, only to be or severely injured by a phosphorus grenade thrown by the enemy. The explosion cost Major one of his eyes, after which he was told to go back to England. He was told he could no longer work in this condition, but he disagreed, saying he only needed one eye to shoot with, and he was allowed to stay. Major was hurt again in nineteen forty five when the carrier he was writing was struck by a mine. The driver and the chaplain on board were killed, but Major survived with two broken ankles and a broken back that he refused to let fully heal. Against everyone's better judgments, he went right back to fighting. Nothing was going to keep him away. The Canadian Maverick returned to the front lines. He traveled to the Netherlands to help his fellow Canadians, as well as the Polish and British, clear the shipping route to Antwerp. Report there was instrumental in getting supplies to the Allies station North. The seventh Canadian Infantry Brigade took up a position just outside of the town as Wall in Holland, but had no intel on the enemy forces already there. Major and his comrade, Corporal Wilfred Arsenal, volunteered to check things out and report back. They set out around eleven o'clock that night of April thirteen, where they stumbled upon a German outpost. Corporal Arsenal was killed by several s S soldiers. Major returned fire and took them out before getting away. Armed with just a pair of guns and a bag of grenades, Major continued onto the Empties Wall with one goal in mind, liberation. The citizens were all in their homes due to a town wide curfew, but he needed a safe place where he could read the map in his jacket pocket. He knocked on a few doors and was ignored. No one would let him in, especially because on first glance he looked like a Nazi. He soon realized the only way he was going to get what he needed meant breaking into a house by force. His first attempt startled the young family with small children, but one glimpse of the Canadian flag on his uniform and they knew that he wasn't there to hurt them. Major studied his map with their blessing, and then ventured back out into town. He managed to locate a machine gun outpost and capture the ten soldiers inside using only his machine pistol and three grenades. He then found the German officers quarters and convinced one of the senior officers that he was one of an entire Canadian army ready to take control of the town. The Germans could leave now with their lives, or stay and face the consequences. Major even let him keep his gun as a show of good faith, and it worked. After locating the leader of the Dutch resistance, Major drove through town in a commandeered German military car, firing his machine gun at Nazi soldiers and vehicles along the way. Many of them had already fled, believing the Allies had arrived. Those who were still in the streets were gunned down by Major as he drove by, and the coast was finally clear. The resistance went to town hall and encouraged citizens to come out of hiding. Wall was finally free. Leo Major had almost single handedly liberated the town, capturing ninety three German soldiers and set the s S headquarters on fire. He had demonstrated bravery in the face of adversity many times before, never taking no for an answer and refusing to give up. But on the night of April, Leo Major became more than a brave soldier. He weighed a one man war on the Third Reich and turn himself into a living legend. His actions earned him the Distinguished Conduct Medal, as well as a pretty colorful nickname. They called him the one eyed Ghost. Our methods of communication are part of what sets us apart from other species. A written word has been a large part of how we communicate with others. Before technology, people frequently wrote in journals and to one another. In the entertainment world, musicians and authors wrote music and stories. Scholars and scientists passed along information and made critical nuts. Businesses kept track of receipts and orders. All of this writing is how we've gained knowledge about civilizations throughout time in the world, over census records, whether reports, news of the day. We owe much of what we've learned from the written word, and for as long as there have been letters, there have been people who decipher ancient language is no longer used. We've learned about historical events from history is most famous, and about the lives of everyday people as well. Without someone to decipher ancient languages, though, much of what we know would only be an educated guess, according to experts. In a Syriology, Adolph Leo Oppenheim had read more of the ancient language than any one of his generation. Like others in his field, he studied the history, the archaeological finds, and the language of Mesopotamia, a region that now covers Iraq and northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and parts of Iran. The language Oppenheim studied is called kunea form which is a set of symbols found in fifteen or more languages in ancient times. Symbols were used to form words starting as far back as the Bronze Age all the way through the Common era. Canea form and Egyptian hieroglyphs are two of the earliest systems of recorded writing, and among his peers no one was more qualified to read the four thousand year old Clay's tablet, written around seventeen fifty BC. The discovery had been made by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, who led an expedition with the University of Pennsylvania and British Museum in the Sumerian city of Ur. The crew had come across ruins during their twelve year dig from nineteen twenty two to nineteen thirty four. The clay tablet had been part of other similar tablets found on the site for years. The Babylonian tablets sat in storage until they became part of the British Museum's collection in nineteen fifty three, but it wasn't until the nineteen sixties before the tablets found their way to Oppenheim at the University of Chicago for translation. The tablets all contained similar messages, but two things were clear. The site had belonged to a copper Merchant and customers had written the tablets. Tablet writing, by the way, was no small feat. The letter writer had to make the tablet with clay and water, and while the tablet was still wet, the writer used a read as a pen to inscribe the symbols onto the surface. Then the tablets were left to bake in the sun. The less important tablets were delivered and read, and then reused by soaking them in water, but the ones Wooly found had been kilned fired. The people who had written the Copper Merchant had all taken considerable time and effort to make and write the notes, much less sending a messenger to deliver them. In particular, Oppenheim noticed how lengthy the note was from one customer he identified as a man named Nanni. It's not clear exactly where Nannie lived in relation to the archaeological site, although he mentioned that the Copper Merchant was in enemy territory. Oppenheim and the other experts also determined that Nannie's clay tablet predated the others that Willy's team had found. Before Oppenheim passed away at the age of seventy in nineteen seventy four, he wrote a book on clay tablets that he transcribed through the years, including the ones Willie had found. As it turns out, Nannie's tablets is the very first of its kind in history. He'd been one of re customers who had either not received copper ingots from the merchant or had received subpart copper. That's right, long before the days of customer service, Nannie had written the oldest known customer complaint. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.