Top Secret

Published Nov 18, 2021, 10:00 AM

Old traditions and new ways of thinking are both excellent sources of curious stories.

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Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, 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. War is a time of action where men and women serve their country by putting their lives on the line. But wars are not won by fighting alone. Winning a war takes cunning and planning. It is a test of strategy as much as it is a test of metal on the battlefield. In fact, during World War Two, one division works so well as a team they didn't even have to use guns to succeed. The group wasn't formed until nine when men were hand picked to serve as part of a new unit. It was called the twenty third Headquarters Special Troop or Ghost Army, and it was tasked with some of the most difficult missions of the war. For example, in September of ninety, a couple of American divisions in France had been moving toward Germany for an assault. As they drove to Mets, a French city near the border. They found themselves vastly outnumbered against the German forces waiting for them, But they had a backup plan in the form of the sixth Armored Division, who had spent the night moving twelve M four tanks in a position along the tree line. Lieutenant Dick Syracuse's platoon listened to the sounds of their treads moving over the terrain for hours. The next morning, Syracuse woke up to a U. S. Cavalry colonel screaming about tanks among the trees. Syracuse asked the colonel to elaborate, just as the man had been saying, there was an array of M four tanks lined up several hundred feet away. The lieutenant pulled him aside and explained the truth of the situation. Those weren't the sixth Armored Division at all. Those tanks had been rolled in by the twenty three Headquarters Special Troop. Well rolled is a bit of an understatement. It was more likely that they had been picked up and dropped into place because they were made of rubber and had been inflated like balloons. You see, the twenty third Headquarters Special Troops weren't normal soldiers. They had specific talents the other divisions lacked. For one, the group was made up of artists and creative types recruited from ad agencies and art schools. They weren't expected to fight. They were expected to put their heads together to deceive the enemy, which they did. The sounds that the platoon had heard the night before were pumped in through a speaker system that had been mounted on a military transport. The noise itself had been recorded and mixed together to form the sound effects track meant to trick the enemy into thinking the Special Troops were much larger than they actually were. It was a technique known as sonic deception. Throughout the latter days of the war, the Ghost Army developed several ways of fooling the Germans, many of which looked like something one might have seen on an episode of The A Team decades later. They generated fake radio traffic they knew would get intercepted, providing the Nazis with fake positions for American troops. They also used their limited resources to inflate their presence as well. Along with their specially made sound effects, the Ghost Army would drive two to three real tanks around in a loop to make it look like they had a full convoy. They completed the deception by painting specific insignia on buildings and having some soldiers wear different uniforms to create what they called atmosphere. It was to give the illusion that there was more than one unit nearby at any given time. This was demonstrated in March of nine when the twenty three deployed a fleet of inflatable aircraft carriers along the Rhine River valley. Thanks to some fake radio transmissions broadcast over open channels, the Germans were convinced that the Allies were preparing to attack a particular spot in a valley at a particular time. They pulled all nearby troops and sent them to that location to prepare for battle. Instead, the Allies were six miles away, crossing the Rhine with ease, since the Nazi defense posts were now all but abandoned. Meanwhile, the twenty third had inflated over six hundred rubber tanks and dressed up a bunch of mannekins and uniforms from varying units. They wanted to show that they were not a small outfit of troops, but rather two separate divisions of thirty thousand Allied soldiers. The sounds of rolling tanks and bombers flying overhead rang out from giant speakers as well. The Germans bought it and attacked with full force. Countless mannekins lost their lives that day, but it was believed that tens of thousands of actual Allied soldiers were saved thanks to the efforts of the Ghost Army. They were the unsung heroes of World War Two, using their brains to overcome German braun. I love it when a plan comes together. There's an old story told in executive leadership meetings everywhere. A young girl is in the kitchen with her mother watching her bake a ham for a big dinner. The mother cuts off the ends of the ham before sliding it into the oven. Why do you cut the ends off the ham before you put it in the oven, the girl asks, because that's the way my mother always did it, the mother says, So, the girl calls up her grandmother and asks the same question, why did you cut off the ends of the ham before putting it in the oven, And the grandmother responds with a familiar answer, that's the way my mother always did it. So finally, the girl calls up her great grandmother and asks why she used to cut the ends off the ham before she put it in the oven. The great grandmother says, because my pan was too small to fit the whole ham. Some traditions exist simply because their traditions small ceremonies that have gone on so long it seems strange to stop them now, because we've always done it. That way doesn't fly in a fast moving corporate environment. But traditions aren't always meant to be stopped or changed. They also connect us to our past, helping us feel closer to those who have left us and to a time gone by. Perhaps that's why the City of London still feels obligated to pay the Queen rent for two plots of land at first least eight hundred years ago. They're known as quit rents, and they are upheld by a person called a remembrance er. Yes that's a real word. Their whole job is literally to remember important things on behalf of the King or Queen, usually involving taxes and debts. It was a title first created by King Henry the Second in eleven fifty four. The remembrance or wears a judicial wig beneath a black tricorn hat a sign that they are a judge of the ex Checker Court. The ex Checker Court dealt with payments of rent and debt settlements. In fact, the name ex checker came from the checkered cloth covering the table behind which that remembrance or sat. He would use the squares in the pattern to keep track of the payments made and the debts that were still owed, sort of a cloth spreadsheet well ahead of its time. Of course, London has changed a lot over the last eight hundred years, and so the locations of the original properties have been lost, but what hasn't changed are the rents. One of the properties is known as the Moor's, a on acre plot located about two and a half hours northwest of London in Shropshire. It was leased back in twelve eleven, possibly earlier, and occupied by a man named Nicholas Damore, who paid the hefty sum of two knives for it, one sharp and one blunt. Eventually, the City of London became the tenants of the land and so were then forced to pay the two knife fee to maintain the rights, although these days, rather than the knives, the city pays using a curved farming knife known as a bill hook, as well as a sharpened axe, which are both taken possession of by the remembrance Sir. To verify the payment is correct, the blades are tested against a pile of sticks. If the bill hook is unable to cut through them, it is accepted. The axe must then slice through the same number of dicks with little effort in order for it to also be approved, at which point the remembrance as says good service and takes them. The other property used to be home to a blacksmith forage in the city of Westminster around twelve thirty five. The rent for this location total sixty one nails and six horseshoes For this payment, the City of London actually uses the same nails and horse shoes each year. Once the rent is paid, the remembrance or talies up the objects, says good number, and the items are loaned back to London until they're due again the following year. And best of all, folks today can witness the quit rent ceremony. It's open to the public, although it isn't highly publicized, not for any secretive reason, mind you, only because it's old news after all. It's been going on for over eight centuries, you know, because they've always done it that way. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for me on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey 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. Yeah,

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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