20 Strangest Facts from World War I | Pigeons, Ghost Armies, Beer Pipelines & the Red Baron

0:00 Speaker 1: Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to the Strange History Podcast,

0:03 Speaker 1: where we travel back in time and rummage through history's

0:06 Speaker 1: attic only to find something weird and covered in mud.

0:10 Speaker 1: Today we're diving into the Great War. Yes, World War One,

0:15 Speaker 1: the war that gave us trenches, tanks, and some of

0:17 Speaker 1: the strangest stories you'll ever hear. Because let's be honest,

0:22 Speaker 1: World War One wasn't just politics in generals, it was

0:25 Speaker 1: pigeons wearing medals, goats saving lives, and soldiers who literally

0:30 Speaker 1: glowed in the dark. And yes, as always, today's show

0:34 Speaker 1: is proudly sponsored by fake companies that never existed. So

0:38 Speaker 1: strap on your steel helmet, grab your trench whistle, and

0:41 Speaker 1: let's get weird.

0:42 Speaker 2: The war started with a sandwich.

0:45 Speaker 1: It's nineteen fourteen in Sarajevo. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his

0:49 Speaker 1: wife Sophie are on a goodwill tour. Unfortunately, goodwill is

0:54 Speaker 1: not on the menu for the group of Serbian nationalists

0:57 Speaker 1: who want him dead. One of them, Gavrilo Princy, already

1:00 Speaker 1: missed his chance earlier that morning. He's sulking, stomach growling

1:05 Speaker 1: and decides to grab a sandwich at a little cafe.

1:08 Speaker 1: Now here's the kicker. While he's sitting there, the Archduke's

1:12 Speaker 1: car takes a wrong turn and literally stops right in

1:15 Speaker 1: front of the cafe. Prinsip, sandwich in hand, looks up,

1:20 Speaker 1: sees his target, and bang. World history changes forever. Some

1:25 Speaker 1: historians argue about whether it was a sandwich or a pastry,

1:29 Speaker 1: but the point is this a bad lunch break sparked

1:32 Speaker 1: a world war.

1:34 Speaker 3: This portion of the show is brought to you by

1:37 Speaker 3: Princip's Delhi changing the course of history since nineteen fourteen.

1:43 Speaker 3: Try the Archduke Combo comes with chips, a drink, and

1:46 Speaker 3: just a dash of world conflict.

1:49 Speaker 2: The Christmas Truce of nineteen fourteen.

1:53 Speaker 1: It's Christmas Eve in the trenches. The mud is ankle deep,

1:57 Speaker 1: the rats are everywhere, and the smell let's just say

2:01 Speaker 1: o to decomposing mule is not going to catch on

2:04 Speaker 1: at Sephora. Suddenly, British soldiers hear German voices singing, still Enacht.

2:11 Speaker 1: The Brits respond with silent night. Before long. Men climb

2:15 Speaker 1: out of trenches, meet in no man's land and exchange

2:19 Speaker 1: small gifts, cigarettes, chocolate, tins of food. One British soldier

2:24 Speaker 1: wrote in his diary, it was like a dream. We

2:28 Speaker 1: shook hands, wished each other Merry Christmas, and played football

2:32 Speaker 1: in the mud For a few hours. The war stopped.

2:35 Speaker 1: Commanders on both sides hated it, because if soldiers see

2:39 Speaker 1: each other as human, it gets a lot harder to

2:41 Speaker 1: order them to shoot. By New Years, fighting resumed, but

2:46 Speaker 1: for one night, humanity briefly won.

2:49 Speaker 2: Exploding pigeons.

2:51 Speaker 1: The unsung heroes of World War One weren't generals or kings.

2:55 Speaker 1: They were pigeons. Thousands of them carried messages across enemy

2:59 Speaker 1: fire when radios failed. One named Shaer, a me, saved

3:03 Speaker 1: nearly two hundred men by flying twenty five miles with

3:06 Speaker 1: a bullet wound and one leg dangling. She delivered the

3:10 Speaker 1: message strapped to her good leg, collapsed, and became a

3:14 Speaker 1: decorated war hero. The Germans were so desperate to stop

3:18 Speaker 1: pigeon mail that they trained hawks to intercept them, and yes,

3:21 Speaker 1: sometimes they strapped tiny bombs to captured pigeons in the

3:25 Speaker 1: hopes they'd fly back home and blow up their own loft.

3:28 Speaker 1: It rarely worked, but the fact that they tried tells

3:31 Speaker 1: you how serious pigeon warfare was.

3:33 Speaker 3: Need to send a message. Forget texting, try pigeon plus

3:37 Speaker 3: guaranteed delivery unless intercepted by a hawk. Extra charges may

3:42 Speaker 3: apply if your bird explodes on arrival.

3:45 Speaker 1: The fake tree snipers trench warfare meant spying was a nightmare.

3:51 Speaker 1: So what did engineers do. They built hollow steel trees,

3:55 Speaker 1: painted them to look charred and dead, and place them

3:58 Speaker 1: at night in no man's land. Inside a sniper or

4:02 Speaker 1: observer would climb up and peer out through hidden slits.

4:06 Speaker 1: Belgian soldier Louis Lejeune described it as sitting in a coffin,

4:10 Speaker 1: listening to the war through bark. If the enemy spotted

4:14 Speaker 1: the fake tree, good luck. You were basically sitting in

4:18 Speaker 1: a tin can waiting for artillery. Its camouflage meets horror

4:22 Speaker 1: movie set design.

4:23 Speaker 2: Russia's Lost Division.

4:26 Speaker 1: In nineteen sixteen, Czar Nicholas the Second sent an entire

4:29 Speaker 1: Russian expeditionary force to help France. They fought bravely at

4:33 Speaker 1: Champagne and Verdun. Then the Russian Revolution happened. Back home,

4:38 Speaker 1: Suddenly these men had no country. Some refused to fight,

4:42 Speaker 1: some joined the French Foreign Legion, Others were interned in camps.

4:46 Speaker 1: Their paperwork was such a mess that later historians joked

4:50 Speaker 1: the division simply disappeared. The reality they became a ghost army,

4:56 Speaker 1: forgotten by their homeland, abandoned in a foreign war.

5:00 Speaker 2: The Hello Girls.

5:02 Speaker 1: Picture a general in France yelling into a phone, get

5:05 Speaker 1: me artillery support, and on the other end, a nineteen

5:08 Speaker 1: year old American woman, fluent in French, calmly rooting the call.

5:13 Speaker 1: Over two hundred Hello Girls worked twenty four to seven

5:16 Speaker 1: on switchboards. They handled thousands of calls, often while shells

5:21 Speaker 1: exploded nearby. General Pershing called them as essential as the soldiers.

5:27 Speaker 1: After the war, the army told them they were civilian

5:29 Speaker 1: contractors and denied them benefits. It wasn't until nineteen seventy seven, yes,

5:34 Speaker 1: sixty years later, that they were finally recognized as veterans. Ladies,

5:40 Speaker 1: you ran a world war on wires, and you had

5:42 Speaker 1: better diction than any general.

5:45 Speaker 2: Glow in the dark wounds.

5:48 Speaker 1: Soldiers noticed something eerie. Some of their wounds glowed faintly

5:52 Speaker 1: blue at night. Doctors discovered it was bioluminescent bacteria fodor

5:57 Speaker 1: habdis luminescence. Turned out, these glowing microbes killed more harmful bacteria,

6:03 Speaker 1: so glowing wounds often healed better. Troops called it the

6:08 Speaker 1: angel's glow. Imagine lying in a trench leg glowing like

6:12 Speaker 1: a firefly while your buddy jokes, hey, mate, you're lighting

6:16 Speaker 1: up my book here. Creepy, yes, but it saved lives.

6:21 Speaker 2: The Paris Taxi army.

6:24 Speaker 1: The Germans were closing in on Paris in nineteen fourteen. Desperate,

6:28 Speaker 1: the French government commandeered six hundred Renault Taxis soldiers piled

6:33 Speaker 1: in rifles, sticking out windows like frat boys in a

6:37 Speaker 1: clown car. The sight of endless taxis streaming out of

6:40 Speaker 1: Paris became a symbol of resistance. Did it change the battle?

6:45 Speaker 1: Not much, but morale skyrocketed. Paris had literally ubered its

6:51 Speaker 1: army to the front.

6:52 Speaker 2: Lawrence of Arabia and explosive camels T. E.

6:56 Speaker 1: Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, led air Arab

7:00 Speaker 1: rebels and sabotage missions. They blew up Ottoman railways constantly,

7:05 Speaker 1: often using camels to carry dynamite. Sometimes the camels bolted,

7:10 Speaker 1: dropping explosives in all the wrong places. Lawrence himself admitted

7:14 Speaker 1: it wasn't foolproof, but it worked enough that Ottoman trains

7:17 Speaker 1: became moving targets of paranoia. Picture an engineer jumping every

7:21 Speaker 1: time a camel sneezed beer pipelines In Flanders, soldiers were miserable, mud, blood,

7:29 Speaker 1: and no beer, so brewers built a literal pipeline to

7:32 Speaker 1: the front lines. Gallons of beer flowed underground into the trenches.

7:37 Speaker 1: Soldiers said it tasted muddy, but hey, better than water

7:41 Speaker 1: full of cholera. Sadly, shell fire soon destroyed the pipeline.

7:46 Speaker 1: War may be hell, but losing your beer supply that's worse.

7:50 Speaker 3: Today's show is sponsored by Trench brew Now with thirty

7:54 Speaker 3: percent fewer rat droppings. Drink responsibly or irresponsibly, not your

8:00 Speaker 3: commanding officer.

8:01 Speaker 2: Sergeant Bill the Goat.

8:03 Speaker 1: Canada's fifth Battalion had a goat named Bill who wasn't

8:07 Speaker 1: just a mascot. He was a life saver. He sensed

8:10 Speaker 1: gas before humans did, bleeded warnings, and once shoved a

8:14 Speaker 1: soldier into a trench just before an artillery shell exploded.

8:18 Speaker 1: He even headbutted enemy soldiers. Yes, this goat fought in combat.

8:23 Speaker 1: When he returned home, Sergeant Bill was decorated as a

8:27 Speaker 1: war hero, and he probably still demanded snacks.

8:30 Speaker 2: Em You feathers.

8:32 Speaker 1: Australian soldiers wore emu feathers in their hats as a

8:35 Speaker 1: sign of pride. The birds symbolized toughness and survival in

8:39 Speaker 1: the outback. But here's the twist. Twenty years later, veterans

8:44 Speaker 1: fought the Great Emu War back home. They used machine

8:48 Speaker 1: guns against actual EMUs and lost. Turns out the birds

8:53 Speaker 1: were faster, smarter, and had better battlefield tactics. The Wipers

8:58 Speaker 1: Times sold and ePRESS stumbled on a printing press. Instead

9:03 Speaker 1: of producing propaganda, they published The Wiper's Times, a satirical

9:07 Speaker 1: trench newspaper. It mocked officers, printed fake ads like mud

9:12 Speaker 1: for sale, and joked about rats, lice and death. Humor

9:17 Speaker 1: kept them sane. One soldier wrote, we live like kings.

9:21 Speaker 1: Mud for breakfast, shells for supper, rats for dessert. Honestly,

9:26 Speaker 1: it sounds like college dorm food.

9:28 Speaker 2: Gramophone submarine detectors.

9:31 Speaker 1: Before sonar, Britain used gramophone horns underwater to listen for submarines.

9:37 Speaker 1: Picture sailors lowering a giant victrola horn into the sea.

9:40 Speaker 1: Did it work? Sort of? They could sometimes hear propellers,

9:45 Speaker 1: but it also meant confusing fish noises with U boats captain,

9:50 Speaker 1: I hear movement, relaxed Jenkins, that's a dolphin fart. Dazzled

9:55 Speaker 1: camouflage ships painted in cubis stripes looked like floating optical illusions.

10:01 Speaker 1: It didn't hide them, but it made torpedo targeting nearly impossible.

10:05 Speaker 1: German U boat captains complained they couldn't tell which way

10:08 Speaker 1: the ships were moving. One sailor joked, our ship looks

10:12 Speaker 1: like Picasso had a nightmare.

10:14 Speaker 2: The Red Baron's funeral.

10:16 Speaker 1: Manfred von Richthoven, the Red Baron, was shot down in

10:20 Speaker 1: April nineteen eighteen. Feared by all, he had eighty confirmed kills,

10:25 Speaker 1: but when he died, the British buried him with full honors.

10:29 Speaker 1: Soldiers lined his grave, placed wreaths, and saluted their fallen enemy.

10:34 Speaker 1: Chivalry may have been outdated, but for one day, respect

10:38 Speaker 1: for bravery transcended borders.

10:42 Speaker 2: Gas Masks for animals.

10:44 Speaker 1: Dogs carried messages, horses hauled supplies. Both needed gas masks.

10:50 Speaker 1: Photos showed giant rubber contraptions strapped to animals faces. They

10:54 Speaker 1: looked like horror movie props, but they saved countless lives.

10:58 Speaker 1: One horse named Warriors, survived dozens of battles and poison

11:02 Speaker 1: gas attacks. He returned home a decorated veteran, though I

11:06 Speaker 1: bet he never looked at a feedbag the same way again.

11:09 Speaker 2: Claude Shools bullet headed veteran.

11:12 Speaker 1: Claude Shools was shot in the head during World War One.

11:15 Speaker 1: The bullet stayed lodged in his skull for life. He

11:19 Speaker 1: went on to serve in World War II as a

11:21 Speaker 1: demolition expert in Australia, lived to one hundred ten and

11:25 Speaker 1: became the last combat veteran of World War One. When

11:30 Speaker 1: asked about war, he said it was a terrible waste.

11:33 Speaker 1: Simple honest from a man who lived through two phantom guns.

11:38 Speaker 1: Both sides used deception, fake cannons made of wood, loudspeakers

11:43 Speaker 1: blasting fake gunfire, phantom camps with dummy fires to fool

11:48 Speaker 1: aerial recon. One German officer wrote, we bombarded shadows for

11:53 Speaker 1: two days before realizing our mistake. That's like rage quitting

11:57 Speaker 1: a video game after realizing you've been shooting at a wall.

12:00 Speaker 1: The first tanks to hide their invention, the British called

12:04 Speaker 1: armored vehicles tanks, pretending they were water carriers when they

12:09 Speaker 1: rolled onto the battlefield. Germans panicked, calling them devil's chariots.

12:14 Speaker 1: Were they effective barely? They were slow, broke constantly, and

12:20 Speaker 1: smelled like an iron furnace, But psychologically they terrified the enemy,

12:25 Speaker 1: and the name tank stuck. And there you have it, folks,

12:29 Speaker 1: Twenty of the strangest, quirkiest, and most jaw dropping facts

12:33 Speaker 1: from the war that was supposed to end all wars.

12:36 Speaker 1: From goats to glowing wounds, beer pipelines to pigeon heroes,

12:41 Speaker 1: World War One proves that history is always weirder than

12:44 Speaker 1: we think.

12:45 Speaker 3: This episode was also brought to you by Mud, the

12:48 Speaker 3: official sponsor of World War One. Mud, It's in your boots,

12:53 Speaker 3: your food, your bed, and now your soul.