Noted

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
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

(00:26):
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

(00:49):
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.

(01:10):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:34):
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,

(02:55):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:37):
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

(03:58):
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.

(04:21):
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

(04:41):
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

(05:02):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:47):
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,

(06:08):
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,

(06:29):
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

(06:50):
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

(07:12):
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

(07:32):
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

(07:54):
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

(08:15):
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

(08:38):
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

(09:00):
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

(09:23):
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.