War and Savior

War can bring out the best in some people, leading to curious stories...like these.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
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. Nobody is just one thing.

(00:38):
For example, an accountant is more than someone who crunches
numbers all day. They might be a mother, or a father,
or a sibling. They may play the guitar or volunteer
in a soup kitchen on the weekends. People contain multitudes,
and we don't always know a person entirely, even someone
we may see every day, like Anthony. Anthony was born
in August of nineteen twenty six in Queens, New York.

(01:01):
Unlike the Billy Joel song, it wasn't Anthony who worked
in a grocery store. It was his father, an Italian
immigrant who had come to the United States in nineteen
oh six. His mother, Anna, was a seamstress, born in
the US to parents from the Calabria region of Italy.
Anthony grew up in poverty, but he found solace in music.
He loved listening to singers like Judy Garland and Bing Crosby,

(01:23):
and he even had a tap dancing uncle on the
vaudeville circuit. That introduction to show business lit a fire
in him and inspired him to pursue his passion singing. Unfortunately,
Anthony's foray into performing would have to wait. He was
drafted into the army in nineteen forty four, where he
became an infantry rifleman. But fighting for his country wasn't

(01:44):
all guts and glory for an eighteen year old Italian
kid from New York. He was faced with a heavy
dose of racism, especially from a sergeant who put him
on KP duty whenever he could, simply because of his ethnicity. Anthony, though,
eventually made his way to France in January of nineteen
forty five, where he was placed with the sixty third
Infantry Division. The Allies had suffered considerable losses in the

(02:07):
Battle of the Bulge, and Anthony's battalion had been brought
into help. He then traveled from France to Germany, where
he got a close look at the horrors of war.
He would later call it a front row seat in hell.
But the fight raged on until Anthony pressed into Bavaria.
He was one of the many soldiers who helped liberate
the Coaufering Concentration Camp, a subcamp of Dachau. One of

(02:29):
the first things that he and his men did was
get food and water to the people being held captive,
but they had been beaten down so severely that they
didn't think the Allies were there to help. Sadly, the
troops had arrived just a bit too late. Anthony learned
that all of the women and children had been killed already,
and half of the surviving captives had already been shot.
The experience changed him and turned him into a staunch

(02:51):
passivist for the rest of his life. But once he
got home, he enrolled at the American Theater Wing, a
New York based nonprofit that helped him reade discover his
love of music. Anthony soon found work as a singing waiter,
a job that he'd had before joining the army. He
even cut a few records, but didn't find much success,
not until nineteen fifty when he was signed to Columbia

(03:14):
Records by big time record producer Mitch Miller. Miller had
worked with the likes of Doris Day and Dinah Shore,
and he heard something in Anthony, a voice that could
croon with the best of them. Except there was already
another big star already at Columbia, a guy named Frank Sinatra.
But Old Blue Eyes had hit a slump and his
last few albums had fallen short. He was leaving for

(03:36):
Capitol Records, so Anthony found himself in the unique position
to pick up where Sinatra had left off. He began
by singing popular songs of the era, and his first
big hit came in nineteen fifty one with his rendition
of the nineteen forty song Because of You. It sat
at number one of the Billboard charts for ten weeks
and sold a million copies. Over the next few years,

(03:58):
he covered countries, became a teen heart throb, and established
himself as the pre eminent singer of the Great American songbook.
But perhaps his best known hits was recorded in nineteen
sixty two. It was a song that followed him throughout
his whole career. Originally written by George Corey and Douglas
Cross in nineteen fifty three as a love letter to

(04:19):
their hometown. They'd come from New York to California, where
feeling homesick, they had penned a little ditty about their city.
By the bay I left my Heart in San Francisco
became the signature song of World War II hero Anthony
Dominic Benedetto, better known to audiences today as the late
Great Tony Bennett. Heroism can be measured in a number

(04:56):
of ways, whether someone is stopping a robbery or running
into a burn building to save a child. As the
saying goes, not all heroes wear capes, but sometimes a
hero is someone who chooses a different path. They use
their words instead of their fists. They speak up when
no one else will. For Desmond Doss, hero is a
meant fighting for his country in World War Two without

(05:18):
ever touching a gun. Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia,
in nineteen nineteen. His father worked as a carpenter, while
his mother worked in a shoe factory when she wasn't
tending to the home. Desmond was raised as a Seventh
day Adventist, a denomination of Christianity that observed the Sabbath
on Saturday, but Dos took things a step further. He

(05:38):
was also a vegetarian and a pacifist, refusing to turn
to violence in any situation. He was working at a
shipyard in Newport News, Virginia when the attack on Pearl
Harbor occurred. His job granted him the option to request
a deferment rather than to serve, but something compelled him
to do more. He didn't just want to sit out
while others were off doing their part. In listed with

(06:00):
the Army, he had hoped that being a conscientious objector
would be his ticket to a position as an Army
combat medic. He had no interest in picking up a gun. Instead,
he was.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Made a rifleman with the seventy seventh Infantry Division, but
Dos was a firm believer in not killing any other
living soul. He refused to carry a rifle even when
ordered to. One fellow soldier, who saw him as a
misfit and a coward, threatened to make sure he didn't
come back from the front lines alive. Others tried to
have him court martialed, but nothing worked. Dos continued to

(06:32):
serve while being bullied and beaten by the men in
his platoon, and he never let it get to him
during his entire military career. Then, in April of nineteen
forty five, Dos and his battalion were summoned to Okinawa.
Their mission was to ascend and capture a massive four
hundred foot tall cliff known as Hacksaw Ridge. They eventually
reached the top, only to be faced with thousands of

(06:54):
Japanese soldiers hiding in nearby caves waiting for them. A
retreat was ordered and the men scrambled to make it
back down the cliff safely, but the Japanese soldiers prevented
many of them from getting away. A fraction of Allied
soldiers were actually able to climb back down, with many
being killed or wounded in the process, but Dos refused
to flee. He saw his fellow soldiers, the ones who

(07:17):
had insulted him and made his life a living hell,
dying in enemy territory, and he couldn't just leave them there.
He ran back toward the fight, spending hours dragging men
to the edge of the cliff and lowering them down
a makeshift rope sling that he had fashioned together himself.
The army believed his bravery has saved the lives of
one hundred soldiers, but Doss claimed that he had only

(07:39):
managed to rescue fifty. The army split the difference and
noted the final number at seventy five, and that wasn't
the end of his heroic feats. Days after the events
at Hacksaw Ridge, the young Seventh Day Adventist was wounded
by shrapnel from a Japanese grenade. It embedded itself in
his legs and hip, but not wanting to bring another
medic into danger, he dressed the wounds himself as best

(08:02):
he could. He then crawled to safety, only to find
himself in a sniper's crosshairs. The bullet from the rifle
shattered the bones in DOS's arm, but when several of
his fellow soldiers tried to haul him away on a stretcher,
he gave it up so that they could take another
man who was in worse shape. Until the bitter end,
Desmond Doss put others above himself. Surprisingly, despite his severe wounds,

(08:26):
Dos survived the war. He received the Medal of Honor
for his bravery and for saving the lives of dozens
of men. He passed away in two thousand and six
at the age of eighty seven. Desmond Doss had demonstrated
true heroism during World War II by picking up a
bandage and a rope instead of a rifle. I hope

(08:50):
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 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

(09:12):
you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.