December 20, 2017 • 32 mins
The exploits of the Special Operations Executive are the stuff of legend. This episode continues to look at a few of the group's missions, and what became of the SOE after WWII.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. This
is a continuation of our episode on the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare. Just like part one, this episode, Part two
(00:25):
is also sponsored by Focus Features. There is a new
movie that is out called Darkest Hour, which features a
very critical point in World War Two as seen through
the lens of watching Winston Churchill deal with all of
that and the pressures and really what he had to
go through. Gary Oldman stars in it. He has gotten
lauded for his amazing performance. It looks absolutely beautiful. I
(00:48):
really think if you're into our show you might enjoy it.
It's not a Winston Churchill biopic. It is literally just
about how he dealt with the pressures of suddenly having
to confront war as a new prime minister. But hey,
if you have not listen to part one of this
two parter, you're probably going to be a little bit
lost if you just jump in right here, So go
back and listen to that first one. And as a
(01:08):
quick recap for those of you who did listen to
part one. We're we covered in that one the founding
of the Special Operations Executive, which is nicknamed the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and we discussed two of its missions,
and today we're going to delve into the stories of
two other missions and then talk about what became of
this super secret war effort after World War Two ended.
(01:30):
So not long after Operation Anthropoid, which was something we
talked about last episode, plans were underway to try to
disable Raml's forces in North Africa. So cutting the supply
lines to the Nazi forces in Africa was the most
efficient way to impact them, and it wasn't long before
the Gorgon Potamos railway viaduct, which was located in central Greece,
(01:52):
was identified as a crucial point on the route that
connected Athens with the port city of Thessaloniki. Two other
had also been considered for destruction. In all of this,
the plan was for a twelve man s o E
team which was made up of British, New Zealander and
Greek operators. There was actually only one Greek operator to
(02:13):
parachute in make contact with the Greek resistance movement that
was already in Greece, sabotage the bridge and then evacuate.
The twelve men were parted out into three groups, each
of its own leader, interpreter, combat engineer, and radio operator.
They had a bit of a false start on the
initial drop attempt, which was on the night of September
(02:35):
to the they were supposed to be signal fires to
guide them, but no fires had been lit in the
three aircraft, each of them carrying a team, all returned
to Cairo with the crews still on board. The drop
was rescheduled for the next night, and this time it
was a success, although the third group never saw their
signal fire and ended up jumping close to an area
(02:56):
that was occupied by Italian troops. Yeah, after the first
night they were like, okay, even without the fires, we
were just going to aim for where we think it
is and we're going anyway. So even though they didn't
have the fire, they were like, well, let's drop. And
it was only after the s O S men were
on the ground in Greece that the Gorgopotamus Viaduct was
selected as the best possible target. It had fewer Italian
(03:17):
troops guarding it and better cover surrounding it than the
other two bridges that had been looked at, and the
sabotage of the bridge was finally scheduled almost two months
after the drop into grease on November. The combined forces
were separated into the groups with specific tasks. The railway
and telephone lines had to be cut on each end
of the bridge had to be covered. A hundred men
(03:39):
from the Greek guerrilla forces were ready to neutralize the
access forces that were stationed at either end of the bridge,
and then the demolitions teams had to travel into the
gorge with mules to attach the explosives to the bridges
girders underneath. After the team split up, it initially seemed
as though something was wrong. The expected gunfire that would
(04:00):
have started at either end of the bridge didn't begin
on schedule, but it did finally start at each end
after a short delay, but things went very differently on
the two ends. The south end of the viaduct was
quickly won by the guerrillas and the Italian soldiers that
were stationed there ran for their lives, but the Italian
garrison on the north end was not so easily dispatched
(04:23):
uh and after more than an hour of gunfire, the
mission commander, Colonel Eddie Meyers, the Royal Engineers, was given
word that the Italians actually had the upper hand. Even
though this had been a sneak attack, Myers wisely had
kept a small fighting force in reserve, and he sent
those men to reinforce the guerrillas, and after a short
but intense second wave of gunfire, the north end of
(04:46):
the bridge was taken by the s OE forces. It
was only after the garrisons on either end of the
bridge had been dealt with the explosives team could move
into position without any worry that they'd be fired upon.
They paid place to their explosives, struck the fuse caps,
lit them, and then ran to get the safety. The
blast was intense and it destroyed the viaduct, and then
(05:06):
a second round of charges was set to just really
destroy it beyond all possible recovery. There were injuries to
some of the attacking forces from the shrapnel, but no
one was killed, and once again, unfortunately, the Germans retaliated
against the locals. Six team villagers were taken into custody
and they were brought to the ruins of this bridge
(05:28):
and shot. After the mission, plans changed for Colonel Myers
and his team. Instead of being evacuated, they were tasked
with staying in Greece and organizing the guerrilla forces into
a unified army. This was no small feat. There was
a lot of infighting and rivalry among the various Greek
resistance groups, but Myers was able to bring a five
(05:48):
thousand man army together, and that army continued to perform
acts of sabotage all around Greece. The last se operation
that we're going to cover in this episode is credit
did with putting a stop to the Nazi development of
an atomic bomb. Germany had occupied Norway in nineteen forty
and had captured the Norse hydro heavy water factory called
(06:10):
the Mark just outside Kruken in Norway, and the location
of this plant was and continues to be roughly one
hundred miles to the west of Oslo. The Nazis had
ordered an increase in the production of deuterium oxide, which
is more commonly known as heavy water, which was an
indicator that they were working on an atomic bomb. The
Germans had actually had an atomic bomb in nuclear research
(06:33):
program since nineteen thirty nine. Business Kurt Deepner led the
project called Uranium Club and it included Werner Heisenberg among
its scientists. The Nazis had made that increase request almost
immediately after taking the plant, and the Allies at that
point had no idea how far along a Nazi project
(06:54):
in atomic bombs might be. But in ninety two, the
Nazis increased production heavy water from the Vermorgue plant again,
this time from a production rate of three hundred pounds
a year, which had been the level after the first increase,
to ten thousand pounds a year. So clearly this was
perceived as a massive threat and thus became a target
of the s o S efforts. Churchill's friend and science advisor,
(07:18):
the British physicist Frederick Lindemann, informed Churchill that the Germans
were stockpiling heavy water that they had accumulated one and
a half tons. They could potentially create a weapon more
powerful than anything that had been seen before once they
had five tons to work with. So a multi stage
mission was planned to take down the plant. The first stage,
(07:39):
called Operation Grouse, was planned to drop Norwegian guerrillas into Norway,
and this was successfully executed in October of n So
those were people that had fled, and then we're dropped
back in the second stage, which was codenamed Operation Freshman
and intended to land British commandos in Norway to rendezvous
with that initial group. Went terribly awry. The aircraft carrying
(08:04):
the British men into Norway crashed and fifteen people were killed.
The survivors were all captured, some killed immediately, some tortured
before being executed. The failure of Operation Freshman cast doubt
on the entire mission, but the possibility of Nazis creating
an atomic bomb was so great a danger that something
had to be done. So to complete this mission, the
(08:26):
s OE needed Norwegian saboteurs. Yeah, there were actually two
different aircraft and it was a one crashed and those
are the people that were killed immediately, and the other
had a crash landing, and those are the men that
were taken into captivity. Um, we're gonna talk about the
sources of some of the Special Operation executives best information
(08:48):
about the North Chydro plant in just a moment, But
first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. A professor
chemistry at the University of Trondheim, Life Transtad had been
the mastermind behind the work of the Vermorque plant in
the nineteen thirties. Transtad had fought against the Germans when
(09:10):
they invaded Norway, and when his home country was defeated,
he went back to his job, but he also began
feeding the Allies information anonymously about the Vermorgue plant in
Germany's interest in it. Transtad had attempted to foul the
existing stock pile of heavy water at the plant once
the Germans had occupied it by adding cod liver oil.
(09:32):
He fell under some suspicion and he fled Norway, leaving
his family behind, going first to Sweden and then to England.
It was only after he arrived in England that he
went back and revealed himself as the anonymous source who
had been sending intel to the Allies from within the
hydro facility. Transtad convinced Allied forces that bombing Vemork, something
(09:53):
that was considered after the failure of Operation Freshman, was
a really bad idea and that it would lead to
a lot of civilian casualty, and that all that effort
would likely not even touch the key components they were
targeting because those were kept in a highly reinforced underground
part of the facility, so Trum's dad offered up all
of the info that he possibly could to the s
(10:13):
o E to assist in planning an alternate approach. He
described the entire layout of the facility to the s
o E and then another employee from North kidro on
Our skinner Land, also made an escape from Norway aboard
a commandeered steamer with five other men. He had gone
to London to tell the authorities about the latest increase
(10:33):
in heavy water production. Additionally, the man who had replaced
tron Stat at the plant, Yomar Bruin, also wanted to
sabotage the Germans and started taking micro photographs of the
plant and sending them to London in toothpaste tubes. Yeah,
all of these Norwegian physicists were like, we were working
on something really cool and you ruined it, and we're
(10:54):
gonna do at everything we can to fight you, which
I love. The Norwegian team was trained by the s
o E, first in their general training facility in Scotland
and then for mission specific training at a hurt Forshire
mansion called Brigdenbury Manor, and there they practiced their mission
plan in a replica of the heavy water room at
the Vermort plant, which had been built in an outbuilding
(11:15):
on the property. Using the photographs from Bruin and the
descriptions from Transtad for reference. One of the interesting aspects
of the mission was a step taken to try to
protect the locals from violent retribution that the Nazis said
at this point become known for to offset the odds
that Norwegians who were living near the North Chydro plant
would take the blame if the s OE operatives are captured.
(11:38):
They all had on British uniforms under their snowsuits. This
is a good example of how Churchill's Secret Force was
trying to mitigate the collateral damage that was being caused
by their missions. Yeah, that was actually really important to
the people that were working in the ministry, Like they
you recognize that there's collateral damage in war, but they
(11:59):
worked really hard to try to minimize it. The team
rehearsed their plan over and over, even in the dark,
so that they would be able to execute the mission
quietly and efficiently when the time came. So precise was
the information supplied by Transtad, even down to where the
bathroom keys were kept, that the men who had never
been in the building, felt as though they knew it
(12:20):
as well as if they had worked there for years
and years. While the saboteurs chosen for the mission didn't
know exactly what the significance of this plant was, they
understood that it was incredibly important and that the whole
thing was risky. They were given sanide death pills to
take in the event of capture. It was made really
clear to them that there was a high likelihood that
(12:41):
they were not going to survive. Transtad told one of
the men, for the sake of those who have gone
before you and are now dead, I urge you to
make this operation a success. You have no idea how
important this mission is, but what you were going to
do will live in Norway's history for hundreds of years
to come. On February steenth three, the group was finally
(13:02):
dropped into the Norwegian wilderness. They were dropped with so
many supplies to survive the freezing cold that even though
they landed almost perfectly, it took them in four hours
to gather up everything, in part because one of a
dozen containers filled with supplies had been blown off course
by a gust of wind. But after they got everything together,
(13:23):
a blizzard set in, and the men who were attempting
to rendezvous with the group that had been dropped in
October during Operation Grouse were fortunate enough to literally stumble
upon a hut that was normally used by hunters, and
so that accidental discovery of shelter in this blizzard almost
certainly saved their lives and the mission. They sheltered in
the hut until February, and that day they were located
(13:46):
by the Grouse team, who had been surviving the harsh
winter conditions by eating the occasional reindeer, but more consistently
eating moss. After the capture of the survivors of the
Operation Freshman team, the Grouse group had needed to stay
hidden in the wilderness to avoid capture themselves. So after
months of living in these grueling conditions, they were not
in great shape, but they were ready to complete the mission.
(14:09):
That mission, codenamed Operation Gunner Side, was carried out just
five days later on February. The only direct access to
the plant was a suspension bridge, and there was of
course constant surveillance of that bridge because it sat on
the precipice of a cliff. The only other options to
reach the mark were to come at it from above,
(14:32):
which include which involved traversing a very steep slope littered
with mines, or to scale the cliff wall and approach
it from below. And the team that had parachuted in
and surveilled the situation opted to climb the five hundred
foot that's a hundred fifty two cliff in the freezing
cold of winter and in the dead of night, and
(14:52):
that meant that they first had to climb down into
a gorge and then make their way across the river
there via ice bridge, which they could only hope was
going to hold their weight. After they crossed the river,
the men still had to climb the cliff wall so
that they could follow a single track railway onto the
plant property. The group was carrying a lot of gear,
which made this trek and the climb even more of
(15:13):
a challenge. Each man had a pistol, a knife, and grenades,
and they also collectively carried two sniper rifles and five
Tommy guns. On top of that, they had the explosive
that were intended for the plant. Climbing up the face
of a frozen cliff wall that high sounds utterly terrifying
to me, and then to add like full kit to it,
(15:37):
I have so much respect for these people. Briefly, once
they had finished scaling that cliff, the men paused in
the shadow of an outbuilding so that they could rest
and to prepare for the next steps. They ate some
chocolate and they all sat very calm and ready, and
several of the group would later describe feeling very confident
in that moment and thankful for the training that had
(15:58):
readied them for the job ahead. Once they got to
the fence outside the facility, a pair of bolt cutters
were used to cut an opening that the team could
pass through. The British military supplied a hacks off for
these kinds of instances, but the team lead, walk him Runeberg,
had purchased the cutters himself for the trip. He was
afraid that a hack saw would take too long and
(16:19):
attract attention. The centuries on guard at the gates were
completely oblivious, so the bolt cutters seemed to have been
the perfect choice. And before we jump into the final
phase of this incredibly daring mission, we're going to catch
our breath with a short little sponsor break. There were
(16:40):
two squads that split apart. Once they were inside, four
men to handle the explosives and the rest to provide cover.
The cover party headed into the plant into an upper
platform where they can watch the guards. The explosives group
then sort of accidentally, it seems like, subdivided into team
into two teams. So the pair that was led by
Roneberg made their way to a door that was supposed
(17:03):
to have been unlocked, but it was not. It turned
out that one of their accomplices that was supposed to
prepare that door and make sure it was unlocked had
gotten sick and did not get into work that day.
And this is actually when all of that time familiarizing
themselves with the floor plans of the facility really paid off,
because Ronneberg knew that there was an alternate route, an
access tunnel. It was like a cable passed through that
(17:25):
was large enough for a man to crawl through, which
led straight to the target area. They got through their crawl,
still carrying their explosives, and made their way to a
high concentration room and subdued the guard there, who had
no idea they were there until they had a gun
to his head. As the explosive charges are being placed
on metal cylinder water production cells. The second two man group,
(17:47):
which also had to improvise their entry into the room,
got there. Ronaberg had expected the second pair to follow
his lead through this tunnel, but they had missed it
and had come in an alternate way from above and
through a w indo. The group checked all of their
charges once they were placed, and they felt so confident,
and they were so worried that their otherwise perfect mission
(18:08):
to be ruined if the time delays on the explosives
took too long, that they actually reset them from the
planned two minutes to thirty seconds, and in an odd
moment of levity that's described in their accounts, the guard
that they had captured actually asked if he could please
retrieve his glasses before the charges were blown, because apparently
they weren't kind he loved and they were going to
(18:29):
be hard to replace. And Runeberg's team obliged, and then
they told him that he needed to take cover the
team with the fuses, and they made their way out
of the building, clearing it by about twenty yards, which
is about eighteen meters. Before they heard the explosion, it
was a quieter and a more muffled sound than they
had expected, and the men were disappointed that they didn't
get the satisfaction of a massive bang, but the charges
(18:52):
had worked exactly as they were designed to. The men
who had made up the cover party rejoined the explosive
group on the railway tracks and they made their way
back across the ice bridge, and they had a few
near misses as the man hunt began. It actually took
a little while for the guards at the plant to
realize what had happened, because they had been so stealthy
(19:13):
about the whole thing. But then once they realized that
there had been sabotage, everyone scrambled and there were a
couple of instances where Germans passed literally right by the
s o E team as they made their way back
into the woods, but they managed to avoid being seen,
and then they recovered the skis that they had hidden
in the woods and continued their escape, getting as far
(19:34):
away from the plant as possible as quickly as they could.
They actually covered more than ten miles on skis before sunrise,
which was when they first paused to eat and kind
of take a breath. Not a single gun had been
fired during the mission. There were no casualties from there,
the cover party spread out into the wilderness. The explosives
(19:54):
group traveled to Sweden on skis. It was a journey
of more than two hundred miles just three twenty two kilometers.
A tiny band of men had achieved the level of
damage that a group of bombers couldn't have done. They
successfully sabotaged the heavy water production that was being supplied
to the Nazis, and there was no loss of life
in the process. All of the men who participated in
(20:16):
the mission were given awards, either the Military Cross, the
Distinguished Service Order, or the Military Medal. The men who
planned the mission and trained those operatives were also awarded.
As for the German reaction to the attack, it was
a little different than that that followed the other events
that we've talked about. Reports indicated that the commander of
(20:38):
the occupying German forces, General von falcon Horse, actually had
a level of admiration for what the Allies had accomplished.
Some of the local Norwegian citizens had been taken into custody,
but he ordered their release and instead had the guards
that had been on duty arrested. What ultimately happened to
those men is not known. Yeah, probably not good um,
(21:00):
But basically he was so fed up that these people
managed to sneak right past a guard house do all
of this without anyone realizing there was even an intruder
on the property and get out cleanly before it exploded.
Made him very angry at those guards. While the destruction
of the Norse Hydro heavy water production operation was a
huge blow to the Germans, it didn't stop things forever. Then.
(21:23):
Nazis did manage to get the facility online again just
several months later, and at the end of nineteen forty three,
Allied forces took the step that they had abandoned earlier.
The US bombed the plant, as had been predicted by
Life Tronstad. The bombing had little effect on the facility,
and almost two dozen civilians were killed. The bombing did
(21:43):
catalyze a decision on the part of German leadership to
move their heavy water production out of Norway, though, as
a ferry carrying the existing supply of heavy heavy water
product and equipment that would be used to set up
new facilities in Germany made its way along Lake ten
on February, a Norwegian Sabotaur group once again moved into action.
(22:07):
This ferry, the s F hydro sank when explosion went
off on the Bow and Germany lost its last assets
for atomic bomb production, and the actual level of import
of the success of Operation Gunner Side has been debated
in the decades since the war. It actually appears, based
on some documentation, that Germany's fervor for atomic weaponry had
(22:30):
actually cooled by the time the strike at Remark was
carried out. But as the Allies had no way of
knowing the status of Nazi projects involving heavy water and
they had remember ordered a much higher production rate, it
is still considered crucial in having stamped out the possibility
of a German developed atomic bomb. It was, however, still
(22:50):
one of the most successful of all the missions mounted
by the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare due to its successful
execution of mission goals and zero mortalities. And I will
tell you that is also a story that gets told,
as Transtad said, throughout Norway. There um there is actually
a rite up about it on the existing Norse Chydro website,
(23:13):
like they talked about it and how after the war
they were able to rebuild and and once again start
regular production. But it's it's definitely something that is a
part of their history. They are not shy about acknowledging.
Operation gunner Side was the subject of a nineteen sixty
five Kirk Douglas film that was called The Heroes of Telemark,
although has is so often the case that film has
(23:35):
a lot of historical inaccuracies. There's also a mini series
about heavy Water and It's placed in Norway's history that
was produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. More recently, Yeah,
we missed the window. I think that was on Netflix
until just a couple of months ago. Um, and now
it seems to be a lot more difficult to get
a hold of. But uh, I watched a clip of
(23:56):
it and it looked quite good. The four upper sations
that we just talked about, um, if you include the
ones from the first episode, make up only the tiniest
fraction of the actions that were taken during World War
Two by the s OE. And there is a very
real possibility that some or even many of its more
covert actions are still unknown today. By the time the
(24:18):
Battle of Normandy was underway in the summer of nineteen
forty four, the s o E had ties to resistance
fighters throughout Europe. It had become an Allied tool that
could strike quickly without warning. As the tide of war
turned and it looked low as though the Allies would win,
there were a lot of discussions at the highest levels
of government and military about what should happen to the
(24:39):
s o E. And while arguments raged on about whether
the s OE should be rolled under the umbrella of
the Ministry of Defense, or start reporting to the Foreign Secretary,
or a number of other possibilities, the election of nineteen
forty five approached with Winston Churchill up for re election
as Prime minister. Germany had surrendered to the Allies on
(25:00):
May seven, a week after Adolf Hitler committed suicide and
two months before Great Britain's general election on July five.
Although he was an incredibly popular wartime prime minister, the
election went in a landslide to his Labor Party opponent,
Clement Atlee. While Churchill had risen to the task of
leading the country through war, voters bet on Atlee and
(25:22):
the Labor Party to leave the country's rebuilding, and so
with Churchill no longer in office, the s OE lost
its champion. There had been some hopes that Winston Churchill
would have put protections in place for the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare before leaving office, but instead, in the months
that followed the election, locations were slowly closed one after another. Finally,
(25:44):
on January fifty six, the Special Operations Executive was permanently disbanded.
When at Lee signed the dissolution order. A handful of
staff from the s OE moved to m I six
and others were transferred to other branches of the military
or government work. Most of them, though, were let go
and return to the jobs that they had done before
the war. Yes, some of those those moves were actually
(26:07):
made before offices were even shut down, kind of an anticipation.
They really didn't. They had seen some writing on the wall.
And while the kind of work, um, I feel like
I should point out that was done by the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare was certainly impressive and it's really easy
to romanticize, it's also telling that even with its great success,
there were plenty of people within Great Britain's government who
(26:29):
felt that the nature of the warfare had engaged in
was dishonorable. Like it's a little bit of an outdated notion,
but they really thought like this kind of weird, sneaky
trickery is not what we're about. And at the end
of the day, it's all still warfare, even if it
is fought with cool cutting into technology and great style.
So it's one of those things of like warfare in
and of itself, it is not necessarily something that uh,
(26:51):
you know, should be hoped for. Perhaps one of the
most point insights and to the effect of the war
and the work that the s oe had on the
people involved, was written by Trom's dad, the Norwegian chemist,
who wrote in his diary quote war makes the mind
very hard. Becoming a sensitive person again will not be easy. Yeah,
(27:11):
he was keenly aware that, you know, sort of cheering
for the death of your opponent take something away from
your humanity. There is currently a film about the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare in development, but there aren't many details
about it. I think that was optioned two years ago
and I don't know what its status is. It is
based on one of the recent books on the subject,
which was written by Damian Lewis titled Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
(27:33):
How Churchill's Secret Warriors set Europe ablaze and gave birth
to modern black Ops that came out in and I
read that in another book called Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly
Warfare The Mavericks who Plotted Hitler's Defeat, which was written
by Giles Milton in preparation for this episode, as well
as a number of other books in part, all of
which will be listed in our show notes, and any
(27:54):
of them I think would probably make pretty great films because,
as we mentioned at the beginning of the first episode
in a quote that we read, the exploits of this
group were high adventure and high danger and the kind
of things that make movies very exciting to watch. Uh.
And now my list of future episode topics sure doesn't
include a lot of specific people from the s o E,
(28:16):
because there were many, and they were amazing. I would
love to do an episode just on the women of
the s o E because they don't always get mentioned
all that much. But there were a lot of women
from you know, those doing administrative work all the way
to field work that we're doing, some incredibly brave and
amazing things that that would be worth examining in the future.
(28:37):
So it's on the list for those of you who
are thinking I should write and say they should do
an episode of the s O, yes, we should. Do
you have some listener mail for us today? I do.
We kind of have like a mail bag hodgepodge because
there have been a lot. We always get a lot,
and I had for a while been reading lots of
our postcards and thanking people, but we just got behind
(28:59):
on that. We're doing other things for a bit, so
I'm going to read a few. The first one is
from our listener Jess sure Itz. Thank you so much
for your awesome podcast. It keeps me so entertained while
I walked to and from class. I know how much
Holly loves Halloween, so I thought you both appreciate this
postcard from the kirkham At Horror Movie exhibit at the
pbody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks again, and it
(29:20):
is a cool um classic horror and sci fi movie
poster postcard from the Kirkhamut collection of It's Alive. It's awesome.
I think that's an exhibition that was not open yet
the last time I was there, but they were working
on it. It sounds amazing and it is so up.
My alley m Our listener Stephanie also wrote about our
(29:43):
Edward Gory episode r Dear Holly and Tracy, thank you
for the episode on Edward Gory. This illustration is why
I love him so much. To quote Holly, I'm a
longtime listener from Utah and really enjoy your show. Thank
you so much. It's the uh A lovely image of
people at a seance with a ghostly apparition style hand
reaching out from the ether to deliver what looks like mail.
(30:08):
I love Edward Gory. Our last mail bag item is
from our listener Kate, and she is very cute because
she wrote her entire um note and then she wrote
a second draft of it and tucked it in and said,
read the second draft in the car instead of the card.
So I'm doing that, so she writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just wanted to take a moment and express how
(30:30):
much I enjoyed your recent podcast on three Reformation Women.
This year I attained my Master of Divinity, and religious
history has been a soapbox of mine for a long time.
The treatment of women in this field, as in other
areas of history, is often either appalling or non existent,
with a few notable exceptions. As you well know, and
do justice to thank you for bringing to light some
of the women of the Reformation, a period of history
(30:52):
where the men do loom large, but as you have shown,
the women held their ground and contributed in mighty ways. Also,
keep up the great work each new episode. Eagerly yours, Kate,
O Kate. That was lovely. UM, thank you so much.
Like I, I have a massive pile of mail that
we get from people, and I love it so much.
I'm always say this, but I'll be repetitive. I wish
(31:12):
I could read it all on the air. UM, it's
you know, it's sorry, but it's lovely. It's one of
those things that because I'm here at the office when
I'm just having a grouchy day, I can pick up
a piece of mail and it's usually so lovely it
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(31:33):
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For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. This
is a continuation of our episode on the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare. Just like part one, this episode, Part two
(00:25):
is also sponsored by Focus Features. There is a new
movie that is out called Darkest Hour, which features a
very critical point in World War Two as seen through
the lens of watching Winston Churchill deal with all of
that and the pressures and really what he had to
go through. Gary Oldman stars in it. He has gotten
lauded for his amazing performance. It looks absolutely beautiful. I
(00:48):
really think if you're into our show you might enjoy it.
It's not a Winston Churchill biopic. It is literally just
about how he dealt with the pressures of suddenly having
to confront war as a new prime minister. But hey,
if you have not listen to part one of this
two parter, you're probably going to be a little bit
lost if you just jump in right here, So go
back and listen to that first one. And as a
(01:08):
quick recap for those of you who did listen to
part one. We're we covered in that one the founding
of the Special Operations Executive, which is nicknamed the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and we discussed two of its missions,
and today we're going to delve into the stories of
two other missions and then talk about what became of
this super secret war effort after World War Two ended.
(01:30):
So not long after Operation Anthropoid, which was something we
talked about last episode, plans were underway to try to
disable Raml's forces in North Africa. So cutting the supply
lines to the Nazi forces in Africa was the most
efficient way to impact them, and it wasn't long before
the Gorgon Potamos railway viaduct, which was located in central Greece,
(01:52):
was identified as a crucial point on the route that
connected Athens with the port city of Thessaloniki. Two other
had also been considered for destruction. In all of this,
the plan was for a twelve man s o E
team which was made up of British, New Zealander and
Greek operators. There was actually only one Greek operator to
(02:13):
parachute in make contact with the Greek resistance movement that
was already in Greece, sabotage the bridge and then evacuate.
The twelve men were parted out into three groups, each
of its own leader, interpreter, combat engineer, and radio operator.
They had a bit of a false start on the
initial drop attempt, which was on the night of September
(02:35):
to the they were supposed to be signal fires to
guide them, but no fires had been lit in the
three aircraft, each of them carrying a team, all returned
to Cairo with the crews still on board. The drop
was rescheduled for the next night, and this time it
was a success, although the third group never saw their
signal fire and ended up jumping close to an area
(02:56):
that was occupied by Italian troops. Yeah, after the first
night they were like, okay, even without the fires, we
were just going to aim for where we think it
is and we're going anyway. So even though they didn't
have the fire, they were like, well, let's drop. And
it was only after the s O S men were
on the ground in Greece that the Gorgopotamus Viaduct was
selected as the best possible target. It had fewer Italian
(03:17):
troops guarding it and better cover surrounding it than the
other two bridges that had been looked at, and the
sabotage of the bridge was finally scheduled almost two months
after the drop into grease on November. The combined forces
were separated into the groups with specific tasks. The railway
and telephone lines had to be cut on each end
of the bridge had to be covered. A hundred men
(03:39):
from the Greek guerrilla forces were ready to neutralize the
access forces that were stationed at either end of the bridge,
and then the demolitions teams had to travel into the
gorge with mules to attach the explosives to the bridges
girders underneath. After the team split up, it initially seemed
as though something was wrong. The expected gunfire that would
(04:00):
have started at either end of the bridge didn't begin
on schedule, but it did finally start at each end
after a short delay, but things went very differently on
the two ends. The south end of the viaduct was
quickly won by the guerrillas and the Italian soldiers that
were stationed there ran for their lives, but the Italian
garrison on the north end was not so easily dispatched
(04:23):
uh and after more than an hour of gunfire, the
mission commander, Colonel Eddie Meyers, the Royal Engineers, was given
word that the Italians actually had the upper hand. Even
though this had been a sneak attack, Myers wisely had
kept a small fighting force in reserve, and he sent
those men to reinforce the guerrillas, and after a short
but intense second wave of gunfire, the north end of
(04:46):
the bridge was taken by the s OE forces. It
was only after the garrisons on either end of the
bridge had been dealt with the explosives team could move
into position without any worry that they'd be fired upon.
They paid place to their explosives, struck the fuse caps,
lit them, and then ran to get the safety. The
blast was intense and it destroyed the viaduct, and then
(05:06):
a second round of charges was set to just really
destroy it beyond all possible recovery. There were injuries to
some of the attacking forces from the shrapnel, but no
one was killed, and once again, unfortunately, the Germans retaliated
against the locals. Six team villagers were taken into custody
and they were brought to the ruins of this bridge
(05:28):
and shot. After the mission, plans changed for Colonel Myers
and his team. Instead of being evacuated, they were tasked
with staying in Greece and organizing the guerrilla forces into
a unified army. This was no small feat. There was
a lot of infighting and rivalry among the various Greek
resistance groups, but Myers was able to bring a five
(05:48):
thousand man army together, and that army continued to perform
acts of sabotage all around Greece. The last se operation
that we're going to cover in this episode is credit
did with putting a stop to the Nazi development of
an atomic bomb. Germany had occupied Norway in nineteen forty
and had captured the Norse hydro heavy water factory called
(06:10):
the Mark just outside Kruken in Norway, and the location
of this plant was and continues to be roughly one
hundred miles to the west of Oslo. The Nazis had
ordered an increase in the production of deuterium oxide, which
is more commonly known as heavy water, which was an
indicator that they were working on an atomic bomb. The
Germans had actually had an atomic bomb in nuclear research
(06:33):
program since nineteen thirty nine. Business Kurt Deepner led the
project called Uranium Club and it included Werner Heisenberg among
its scientists. The Nazis had made that increase request almost
immediately after taking the plant, and the Allies at that
point had no idea how far along a Nazi project
(06:54):
in atomic bombs might be. But in ninety two, the
Nazis increased production heavy water from the Vermorgue plant again,
this time from a production rate of three hundred pounds
a year, which had been the level after the first increase,
to ten thousand pounds a year. So clearly this was
perceived as a massive threat and thus became a target
of the s o S efforts. Churchill's friend and science advisor,
(07:18):
the British physicist Frederick Lindemann, informed Churchill that the Germans
were stockpiling heavy water that they had accumulated one and
a half tons. They could potentially create a weapon more
powerful than anything that had been seen before once they
had five tons to work with. So a multi stage
mission was planned to take down the plant. The first stage,
(07:39):
called Operation Grouse, was planned to drop Norwegian guerrillas into Norway,
and this was successfully executed in October of n So
those were people that had fled, and then we're dropped
back in the second stage, which was codenamed Operation Freshman
and intended to land British commandos in Norway to rendezvous
with that initial group. Went terribly awry. The aircraft carrying
(08:04):
the British men into Norway crashed and fifteen people were killed.
The survivors were all captured, some killed immediately, some tortured
before being executed. The failure of Operation Freshman cast doubt
on the entire mission, but the possibility of Nazis creating
an atomic bomb was so great a danger that something
had to be done. So to complete this mission, the
(08:26):
s OE needed Norwegian saboteurs. Yeah, there were actually two
different aircraft and it was a one crashed and those
are the people that were killed immediately, and the other
had a crash landing, and those are the men that
were taken into captivity. Um, we're gonna talk about the
sources of some of the Special Operation executives best information
(08:48):
about the North Chydro plant in just a moment, But
first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. A professor
chemistry at the University of Trondheim, Life Transtad had been
the mastermind behind the work of the Vermorque plant in
the nineteen thirties. Transtad had fought against the Germans when
(09:10):
they invaded Norway, and when his home country was defeated,
he went back to his job, but he also began
feeding the Allies information anonymously about the Vermorgue plant in
Germany's interest in it. Transtad had attempted to foul the
existing stock pile of heavy water at the plant once
the Germans had occupied it by adding cod liver oil.
(09:32):
He fell under some suspicion and he fled Norway, leaving
his family behind, going first to Sweden and then to England.
It was only after he arrived in England that he
went back and revealed himself as the anonymous source who
had been sending intel to the Allies from within the
hydro facility. Transtad convinced Allied forces that bombing Vemork, something
(09:53):
that was considered after the failure of Operation Freshman, was
a really bad idea and that it would lead to
a lot of civilian casualty, and that all that effort
would likely not even touch the key components they were
targeting because those were kept in a highly reinforced underground
part of the facility, so Trum's dad offered up all
of the info that he possibly could to the s
(10:13):
o E to assist in planning an alternate approach. He
described the entire layout of the facility to the s
o E and then another employee from North kidro on
Our skinner Land, also made an escape from Norway aboard
a commandeered steamer with five other men. He had gone
to London to tell the authorities about the latest increase
(10:33):
in heavy water production. Additionally, the man who had replaced
tron Stat at the plant, Yomar Bruin, also wanted to
sabotage the Germans and started taking micro photographs of the
plant and sending them to London in toothpaste tubes. Yeah,
all of these Norwegian physicists were like, we were working
on something really cool and you ruined it, and we're
(10:54):
gonna do at everything we can to fight you, which
I love. The Norwegian team was trained by the s
o E, first in their general training facility in Scotland
and then for mission specific training at a hurt Forshire
mansion called Brigdenbury Manor, and there they practiced their mission
plan in a replica of the heavy water room at
the Vermort plant, which had been built in an outbuilding
(11:15):
on the property. Using the photographs from Bruin and the
descriptions from Transtad for reference. One of the interesting aspects
of the mission was a step taken to try to
protect the locals from violent retribution that the Nazis said
at this point become known for to offset the odds
that Norwegians who were living near the North Chydro plant
would take the blame if the s OE operatives are captured.
(11:38):
They all had on British uniforms under their snowsuits. This
is a good example of how Churchill's Secret Force was
trying to mitigate the collateral damage that was being caused
by their missions. Yeah, that was actually really important to
the people that were working in the ministry, Like they
you recognize that there's collateral damage in war, but they
(11:59):
worked really hard to try to minimize it. The team
rehearsed their plan over and over, even in the dark,
so that they would be able to execute the mission
quietly and efficiently when the time came. So precise was
the information supplied by Transtad, even down to where the
bathroom keys were kept, that the men who had never
been in the building, felt as though they knew it
(12:20):
as well as if they had worked there for years
and years. While the saboteurs chosen for the mission didn't
know exactly what the significance of this plant was, they
understood that it was incredibly important and that the whole
thing was risky. They were given sanide death pills to
take in the event of capture. It was made really
clear to them that there was a high likelihood that
(12:41):
they were not going to survive. Transtad told one of
the men, for the sake of those who have gone
before you and are now dead, I urge you to
make this operation a success. You have no idea how
important this mission is, but what you were going to
do will live in Norway's history for hundreds of years
to come. On February steenth three, the group was finally
(13:02):
dropped into the Norwegian wilderness. They were dropped with so
many supplies to survive the freezing cold that even though
they landed almost perfectly, it took them in four hours
to gather up everything, in part because one of a
dozen containers filled with supplies had been blown off course
by a gust of wind. But after they got everything together,
(13:23):
a blizzard set in, and the men who were attempting
to rendezvous with the group that had been dropped in
October during Operation Grouse were fortunate enough to literally stumble
upon a hut that was normally used by hunters, and
so that accidental discovery of shelter in this blizzard almost
certainly saved their lives and the mission. They sheltered in
the hut until February, and that day they were located
(13:46):
by the Grouse team, who had been surviving the harsh
winter conditions by eating the occasional reindeer, but more consistently
eating moss. After the capture of the survivors of the
Operation Freshman team, the Grouse group had needed to stay
hidden in the wilderness to avoid capture themselves. So after
months of living in these grueling conditions, they were not
in great shape, but they were ready to complete the mission.
(14:09):
That mission, codenamed Operation Gunner Side, was carried out just
five days later on February. The only direct access to
the plant was a suspension bridge, and there was of
course constant surveillance of that bridge because it sat on
the precipice of a cliff. The only other options to
reach the mark were to come at it from above,
(14:32):
which include which involved traversing a very steep slope littered
with mines, or to scale the cliff wall and approach
it from below. And the team that had parachuted in
and surveilled the situation opted to climb the five hundred
foot that's a hundred fifty two cliff in the freezing
cold of winter and in the dead of night, and
(14:52):
that meant that they first had to climb down into
a gorge and then make their way across the river
there via ice bridge, which they could only hope was
going to hold their weight. After they crossed the river,
the men still had to climb the cliff wall so
that they could follow a single track railway onto the
plant property. The group was carrying a lot of gear,
which made this trek and the climb even more of
(15:13):
a challenge. Each man had a pistol, a knife, and grenades,
and they also collectively carried two sniper rifles and five
Tommy guns. On top of that, they had the explosive
that were intended for the plant. Climbing up the face
of a frozen cliff wall that high sounds utterly terrifying
to me, and then to add like full kit to it,
(15:37):
I have so much respect for these people. Briefly, once
they had finished scaling that cliff, the men paused in
the shadow of an outbuilding so that they could rest
and to prepare for the next steps. They ate some
chocolate and they all sat very calm and ready, and
several of the group would later describe feeling very confident
in that moment and thankful for the training that had
(15:58):
readied them for the job ahead. Once they got to
the fence outside the facility, a pair of bolt cutters
were used to cut an opening that the team could
pass through. The British military supplied a hacks off for
these kinds of instances, but the team lead, walk him Runeberg,
had purchased the cutters himself for the trip. He was
afraid that a hack saw would take too long and
(16:19):
attract attention. The centuries on guard at the gates were
completely oblivious, so the bolt cutters seemed to have been
the perfect choice. And before we jump into the final
phase of this incredibly daring mission, we're going to catch
our breath with a short little sponsor break. There were
(16:40):
two squads that split apart. Once they were inside, four
men to handle the explosives and the rest to provide cover.
The cover party headed into the plant into an upper
platform where they can watch the guards. The explosives group
then sort of accidentally, it seems like, subdivided into team
into two teams. So the pair that was led by
Roneberg made their way to a door that was supposed
(17:03):
to have been unlocked, but it was not. It turned
out that one of their accomplices that was supposed to
prepare that door and make sure it was unlocked had
gotten sick and did not get into work that day.
And this is actually when all of that time familiarizing
themselves with the floor plans of the facility really paid off,
because Ronneberg knew that there was an alternate route, an
access tunnel. It was like a cable passed through that
(17:25):
was large enough for a man to crawl through, which
led straight to the target area. They got through their crawl,
still carrying their explosives, and made their way to a
high concentration room and subdued the guard there, who had
no idea they were there until they had a gun
to his head. As the explosive charges are being placed
on metal cylinder water production cells. The second two man group,
(17:47):
which also had to improvise their entry into the room,
got there. Ronaberg had expected the second pair to follow
his lead through this tunnel, but they had missed it
and had come in an alternate way from above and
through a w indo. The group checked all of their
charges once they were placed, and they felt so confident,
and they were so worried that their otherwise perfect mission
(18:08):
to be ruined if the time delays on the explosives
took too long, that they actually reset them from the
planned two minutes to thirty seconds, and in an odd
moment of levity that's described in their accounts, the guard
that they had captured actually asked if he could please
retrieve his glasses before the charges were blown, because apparently
they weren't kind he loved and they were going to
(18:29):
be hard to replace. And Runeberg's team obliged, and then
they told him that he needed to take cover the
team with the fuses, and they made their way out
of the building, clearing it by about twenty yards, which
is about eighteen meters. Before they heard the explosion, it
was a quieter and a more muffled sound than they
had expected, and the men were disappointed that they didn't
get the satisfaction of a massive bang, but the charges
(18:52):
had worked exactly as they were designed to. The men
who had made up the cover party rejoined the explosive
group on the railway tracks and they made their way
back across the ice bridge, and they had a few
near misses as the man hunt began. It actually took
a little while for the guards at the plant to
realize what had happened, because they had been so stealthy
(19:13):
about the whole thing. But then once they realized that
there had been sabotage, everyone scrambled and there were a
couple of instances where Germans passed literally right by the
s o E team as they made their way back
into the woods, but they managed to avoid being seen,
and then they recovered the skis that they had hidden
in the woods and continued their escape, getting as far
(19:34):
away from the plant as possible as quickly as they could.
They actually covered more than ten miles on skis before sunrise,
which was when they first paused to eat and kind
of take a breath. Not a single gun had been
fired during the mission. There were no casualties from there,
the cover party spread out into the wilderness. The explosives
(19:54):
group traveled to Sweden on skis. It was a journey
of more than two hundred miles just three twenty two kilometers.
A tiny band of men had achieved the level of
damage that a group of bombers couldn't have done. They
successfully sabotaged the heavy water production that was being supplied
to the Nazis, and there was no loss of life
in the process. All of the men who participated in
(20:16):
the mission were given awards, either the Military Cross, the
Distinguished Service Order, or the Military Medal. The men who
planned the mission and trained those operatives were also awarded.
As for the German reaction to the attack, it was
a little different than that that followed the other events
that we've talked about. Reports indicated that the commander of
(20:38):
the occupying German forces, General von falcon Horse, actually had
a level of admiration for what the Allies had accomplished.
Some of the local Norwegian citizens had been taken into custody,
but he ordered their release and instead had the guards
that had been on duty arrested. What ultimately happened to
those men is not known. Yeah, probably not good um,
(21:00):
But basically he was so fed up that these people
managed to sneak right past a guard house do all
of this without anyone realizing there was even an intruder
on the property and get out cleanly before it exploded.
Made him very angry at those guards. While the destruction
of the Norse Hydro heavy water production operation was a
huge blow to the Germans, it didn't stop things forever. Then.
(21:23):
Nazis did manage to get the facility online again just
several months later, and at the end of nineteen forty three,
Allied forces took the step that they had abandoned earlier.
The US bombed the plant, as had been predicted by
Life Tronstad. The bombing had little effect on the facility,
and almost two dozen civilians were killed. The bombing did
(21:43):
catalyze a decision on the part of German leadership to
move their heavy water production out of Norway, though, as
a ferry carrying the existing supply of heavy heavy water
product and equipment that would be used to set up
new facilities in Germany made its way along Lake ten
on February, a Norwegian Sabotaur group once again moved into action.
(22:07):
This ferry, the s F hydro sank when explosion went
off on the Bow and Germany lost its last assets
for atomic bomb production, and the actual level of import
of the success of Operation Gunner Side has been debated
in the decades since the war. It actually appears, based
on some documentation, that Germany's fervor for atomic weaponry had
(22:30):
actually cooled by the time the strike at Remark was
carried out. But as the Allies had no way of
knowing the status of Nazi projects involving heavy water and
they had remember ordered a much higher production rate, it
is still considered crucial in having stamped out the possibility
of a German developed atomic bomb. It was, however, still
(22:50):
one of the most successful of all the missions mounted
by the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare due to its successful
execution of mission goals and zero mortalities. And I will
tell you that is also a story that gets told,
as Transtad said, throughout Norway. There um there is actually
a rite up about it on the existing Norse Chydro website,
(23:13):
like they talked about it and how after the war
they were able to rebuild and and once again start
regular production. But it's it's definitely something that is a
part of their history. They are not shy about acknowledging.
Operation gunner Side was the subject of a nineteen sixty
five Kirk Douglas film that was called The Heroes of Telemark,
although has is so often the case that film has
(23:35):
a lot of historical inaccuracies. There's also a mini series
about heavy Water and It's placed in Norway's history that
was produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. More recently, Yeah,
we missed the window. I think that was on Netflix
until just a couple of months ago. Um, and now
it seems to be a lot more difficult to get
a hold of. But uh, I watched a clip of
(23:56):
it and it looked quite good. The four upper sations
that we just talked about, um, if you include the
ones from the first episode, make up only the tiniest
fraction of the actions that were taken during World War
Two by the s OE. And there is a very
real possibility that some or even many of its more
covert actions are still unknown today. By the time the
(24:18):
Battle of Normandy was underway in the summer of nineteen
forty four, the s o E had ties to resistance
fighters throughout Europe. It had become an Allied tool that
could strike quickly without warning. As the tide of war
turned and it looked low as though the Allies would win,
there were a lot of discussions at the highest levels
of government and military about what should happen to the
(24:39):
s o E. And while arguments raged on about whether
the s OE should be rolled under the umbrella of
the Ministry of Defense, or start reporting to the Foreign Secretary,
or a number of other possibilities, the election of nineteen
forty five approached with Winston Churchill up for re election
as Prime minister. Germany had surrendered to the Allies on
(25:00):
May seven, a week after Adolf Hitler committed suicide and
two months before Great Britain's general election on July five.
Although he was an incredibly popular wartime prime minister, the
election went in a landslide to his Labor Party opponent,
Clement Atlee. While Churchill had risen to the task of
leading the country through war, voters bet on Atlee and
(25:22):
the Labor Party to leave the country's rebuilding, and so
with Churchill no longer in office, the s OE lost
its champion. There had been some hopes that Winston Churchill
would have put protections in place for the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare before leaving office, but instead, in the months
that followed the election, locations were slowly closed one after another. Finally,
(25:44):
on January fifty six, the Special Operations Executive was permanently disbanded.
When at Lee signed the dissolution order. A handful of
staff from the s OE moved to m I six
and others were transferred to other branches of the military
or government work. Most of them, though, were let go
and return to the jobs that they had done before
the war. Yes, some of those those moves were actually
(26:07):
made before offices were even shut down, kind of an anticipation.
They really didn't. They had seen some writing on the wall.
And while the kind of work, um, I feel like
I should point out that was done by the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare was certainly impressive and it's really easy
to romanticize, it's also telling that even with its great success,
there were plenty of people within Great Britain's government who
(26:29):
felt that the nature of the warfare had engaged in
was dishonorable. Like it's a little bit of an outdated notion,
but they really thought like this kind of weird, sneaky
trickery is not what we're about. And at the end
of the day, it's all still warfare, even if it
is fought with cool cutting into technology and great style.
So it's one of those things of like warfare in
and of itself, it is not necessarily something that uh,
(26:51):
you know, should be hoped for. Perhaps one of the
most point insights and to the effect of the war
and the work that the s oe had on the
people involved, was written by Trom's dad, the Norwegian chemist,
who wrote in his diary quote war makes the mind
very hard. Becoming a sensitive person again will not be easy. Yeah,
(27:11):
he was keenly aware that, you know, sort of cheering
for the death of your opponent take something away from
your humanity. There is currently a film about the Ministry
of Ungentlemanly Warfare in development, but there aren't many details
about it. I think that was optioned two years ago
and I don't know what its status is. It is
based on one of the recent books on the subject,
which was written by Damian Lewis titled Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
(27:33):
How Churchill's Secret Warriors set Europe ablaze and gave birth
to modern black Ops that came out in and I
read that in another book called Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly
Warfare The Mavericks who Plotted Hitler's Defeat, which was written
by Giles Milton in preparation for this episode, as well
as a number of other books in part, all of
which will be listed in our show notes, and any
(27:54):
of them I think would probably make pretty great films because,
as we mentioned at the beginning of the first episode
in a quote that we read, the exploits of this
group were high adventure and high danger and the kind
of things that make movies very exciting to watch. Uh.
And now my list of future episode topics sure doesn't
include a lot of specific people from the s o E,
(28:16):
because there were many, and they were amazing. I would
love to do an episode just on the women of
the s o E because they don't always get mentioned
all that much. But there were a lot of women
from you know, those doing administrative work all the way
to field work that we're doing, some incredibly brave and
amazing things that that would be worth examining in the future.
(28:37):
So it's on the list for those of you who
are thinking I should write and say they should do
an episode of the s O, yes, we should. Do
you have some listener mail for us today? I do.
We kind of have like a mail bag hodgepodge because
there have been a lot. We always get a lot,
and I had for a while been reading lots of
our postcards and thanking people, but we just got behind
(28:59):
on that. We're doing other things for a bit, so
I'm going to read a few. The first one is
from our listener Jess sure Itz. Thank you so much
for your awesome podcast. It keeps me so entertained while
I walked to and from class. I know how much
Holly loves Halloween, so I thought you both appreciate this
postcard from the kirkham At Horror Movie exhibit at the
pbody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks again, and it
(29:20):
is a cool um classic horror and sci fi movie
poster postcard from the Kirkhamut collection of It's Alive. It's awesome.
I think that's an exhibition that was not open yet
the last time I was there, but they were working
on it. It sounds amazing and it is so up.
My alley m Our listener Stephanie also wrote about our
(29:43):
Edward Gory episode r Dear Holly and Tracy, thank you
for the episode on Edward Gory. This illustration is why
I love him so much. To quote Holly, I'm a
longtime listener from Utah and really enjoy your show. Thank
you so much. It's the uh A lovely image of
people at a seance with a ghostly apparition style hand
reaching out from the ether to deliver what looks like mail.
(30:08):
I love Edward Gory. Our last mail bag item is
from our listener Kate, and she is very cute because
she wrote her entire um note and then she wrote
a second draft of it and tucked it in and said,
read the second draft in the car instead of the card.
So I'm doing that, so she writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just wanted to take a moment and express how
(30:30):
much I enjoyed your recent podcast on three Reformation Women.
This year I attained my Master of Divinity, and religious
history has been a soapbox of mine for a long time.
The treatment of women in this field, as in other
areas of history, is often either appalling or non existent,
with a few notable exceptions. As you well know, and
do justice to thank you for bringing to light some
of the women of the Reformation, a period of history
(30:52):
where the men do loom large, but as you have shown,
the women held their ground and contributed in mighty ways. Also,
keep up the great work each new episode. Eagerly yours, Kate,
O Kate. That was lovely. UM, thank you so much.
Like I, I have a massive pile of mail that
we get from people, and I love it so much.
I'm always say this, but I'll be repetitive. I wish
(31:12):
I could read it all on the air. UM, it's
you know, it's sorry, but it's lovely. It's one of
those things that because I'm here at the office when
I'm just having a grouchy day, I can pick up
a piece of mail and it's usually so lovely it
makes me smile and fixes my grousiness. Um. If you
would like to write to us, you can do that.
We are at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com.
(31:33):
You can also find us across all of the bands
of social media as Missed in History. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler.
I might have left something off, but we're missed in
History pretty much everywhere. You can also go to missed
in History dot com, which is our website. You can
find every episode of the show ever of all time,
including those that were way before Tracy and I were involved,
(31:55):
and you can find uh show notes for the shows
that Tracy and I have worked on. So hope you're
going to visit us that miss in history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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