August 22, 2025 • 48 mins
Brace yourself for a shocking journey through history's most controversial military deceptions and cover-ups. This explosive episode rips away the propaganda veil to expose the elaborate lies that have dragged nations into conflict and kept the war machine turning. From false flag operations to manufactured enemies, we dissect the most compelling evidence behind war-time conspiracy theories that refuse to die. Through declassified documents, whistleblower testimonies, and expert analysis, discover how governments have manipulated public opinion, fabricated threats, and hidden the true motives behind major conflicts. From World War II to modern military engagements, we reveal the dark web of deception that's kept hidden from history books. Warning: This episode contains information that challenges official narratives and exposes uncomfortable truths about military industrial complex.
🌀 Thanks for listening to WTF Conspiracy? Operation: Disclosure – uncovering the secrets they don’t want you to know.
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🌀 Thanks for listening to WTF Conspiracy? Operation: Disclosure – uncovering the secrets they don’t want you to know.
📲 Stay connected: Facebook Mk-Ultra CAST | X @MkUltracast
💬 Share your theories, discoveries, and hidden truths with us online.
🎙️ Because every mystery deserves disclosure.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
War and conflict has reshaped nations and devastated entire generations,
and with a duty to protect and provide for their citizens,
many nation states down the ages have fallen short.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
One of the features of the nation state. One of
the justifications for the nation state was that it was
always there to protect its citizens from external invaders from enemies.
But of course, one of the tragic features of the
twentieth century is that we learned that governments can't be
trusted with their own people.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Conflicts dominate history, and yet wars, why they started and
how they were fought are constantly disputed. Wars and myth
building go hand in hand. Even when the winner is clear,
what led to victory is not. These are the myths
of histories, wars, and conflicts. On the seventh of December
(01:04):
nineteen forty one, an event occurred that rocked the lives
of all Americans, led to the US's entry into World
War II, and inspired a myth that would cast the
US president as a traitor and a liar. At six am,
Japanese fighter planes took off from an aircraft carrier in
the Pacific Ocean. At seven fifty five am, they reached
(01:27):
Hawaii and bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Almost two and a half thousand Americans were killed. It
prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that the United States,
after keeping out of World War II for over two years,
was now at war with Japan. December seventh, nineteen forty
(01:52):
one is a date, the US President said which will
live in infamy.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
The United States of America was only and deliberately attacked
by naval and layer forces of the Empire of Japan.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
The United States suffered a severe shock when the Japanese
attacked at Pearl Harbor. The public, the government, the military, though,
got shocked, stunned to a degree of disbelief, and angered
as well.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise offensive, Roosevelt said,
unprovoked and without warning. But was that true. For decades
since the attack, a conspiracy theory developed, ebbing and flowing
but never fully disappearing. That the President knew in advance
(02:46):
about the Japanese attack and did nothing to prevent it.
That Roosevelt knew of or even provoked the attack is
called the back door to war theory.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I think one of the reasons that perpetuite this myth
is the fact that there's a couple of respectable historians
that have argued for this position. They're vastly outnumbered by
historians where the consensus Roosevelt did not know that this
attack was coming.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
The back door to war theory takes certain facts and
draws big conclusions from them. One fact was that Roosevelt
was personally supportive of the United States joining the war,
a fact that became a key issue during the nineteen
forty presidential election campaign.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Roosevelt wanted America to be involved in the war. The
American public was very reticent to get involved in this
war after their experience of their involvement in the First
World War.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Blocked by political and public opinion from sending troops to
aid Britain and France in the fight against Nazi Germany,
Roosevelt sought other ways of helping. From nineteen thirty nine,
the President authorized sending the weapons and equipment to Britain, France,
and later the Soviet Union in the famous lend lease program.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
In late nineteen forty one, the United States was officially
still neutral in the Second World War, although they were
assisting the Allies supplying war materials and supplies to the
Allied nations, and they were already involved in some low
level fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic against the
German U boats.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Lend Lease and the destroyers for bases deal helped the
Allies immeasurably and was likened by Roosevelt to lending a
garden hose to a neighbor to help put out a
fire that could burn down your house as well as his.
But the back door to war theory goes a big
step further. This theory argues that what Roosevelt really wanted
(04:53):
was something that would swing public opinion in favor of
actually committing American troops to the fight. Perhaps this idea
was stoked by the fact that FDR had frozen Japanese
assets in the US in July nineteen forty one, and
by August I established an embargo on oil and gas
exports to Japan, crippling their access to much needed natural resources.
(05:26):
Throughout nineteen forty one, the US had deciphered some of
the coded messages that Japan sent its diplomats, but the
US had not cracked the military code. This diplomatic intelligence
gave the US some hints, but critically not the when
or where of a Japanese attack. Hawaii seemed an unlikely target.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
The Americans suspected that there was going to be an
attack by the Japanese, they didn't know where that might arrive.
The consensus van is they certainly didn't think that a
fleet would saile four thousand miles and try to destroy
the whole navy almost in dock.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It was only at eleven twenty five am in Washington,
two hours before Pearl Harbor was bombed, that the US
decoded and read diplomatic messages which implied an attack could
happen that very day, and the rest is history. Eighteen
ships were damaged or destroyed, more than three hundred airplanes,
(06:42):
and over two thousand lives.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Last no one in America's political military establishment had any
idea that Pearl Harbor was a target for Japanese aggression
in nineteen forty one. Even if America had broken all
the Japanese codes and translated all intercepts, not one message
that indicated pe Harbor of the attacked. That is the
(07:05):
extent of the secrecy at which this mission was launched.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The US formally received Japan's declaration of war from the
Japanese ambassador at around three pm, two hours after the attack.
The following day, Roosevelt sought Congress's agreement to declare war
on Japan.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
Since the unprovoked and dastar lay attack by Japan, a
state of war has existed between the United States and
the Japanese campire.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Within an hour, Congress agreed. Britain, as the US is ally,
had also declared war on Japan. Yet the question of
what Roosevelt knew and when did he know it arose
almost immediately. In the following years, the US government made
(08:07):
ten inquiries into Pearl Harbor. What they found was that
the US had badly underestimated Japan's capabilities and that the
warnings of an attack were not taken sufficiently seriously. The
base at Pearl Harbor was overly relaxed and didn't defend
itself quickly enough when the attack came. The inquiries did
(08:29):
not find hard evidence that Roosevelt knew or encouraged the attack.
This is also the opinion of most historians. But what
factors led to such an outrageous myth about the President
(08:49):
of the US and why does it perpetuate decades later?
Just weeks earlier, the US had held a fiercely contested
presidential election during which Republican presidential candidate Wendel Wilkie had
openly accused Roosevelt of secret planning to enter the US
into the war.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Wilkie was saying, if you elect Roosevelt, your sons will
be killed. So at the time there was this sense
that Roosevelt was going to push them towards war.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
The idea comes in part because how could America not
have known America is the greatest power in the world.
How could they have been surprised by an enemy that
many saw as racially inferior.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
This myth about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor is an example
of how divisive politics, distrusting government, and a disregard for
evidence and fact can lead to damaging myths of history
that linger for years after the events that spawned them.
Roosevelt's reputation has been poorly served by this myth. But
(09:58):
there is another figure of this period whose legend and
legacy was cemented by various propaganda machines of World War II.
Erwin Rommel was a German field marshal in the Wehrmarked
or Armed Forces. A firm and capable general. His reputation
(10:23):
as one of the greatest military commanders of World War
II survives to this day. The so called Rommel legend
began in nineteen forty when Rommel directed the seventh Panzer
Tank Division advance into France. He seemed the quintessential frontline commander, energetic, brave,
(10:43):
a clever strategist, burning houses to provide smoky cover for
his advance. He faked out the French defenders by pretending
that flares were armor piercing shells.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Rommel had performed very well on the Battle of Translating
his hands. The division. The seventh had taken a lot
of terror tory and made some very bold and daring
maneuvers which really caught the attention, certainly of Hitler and Goebels.
So it was initially the German media and propaganda machine
that shot him to fame and became almost a household
(11:17):
name in Germany.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It helped too that Rommel was media friendly. He looked
handsome and laughed easily. He was close to his men, chatting,
telling jokes, and got into the thick of fighting, often
being seen in or on tanks or other vehicles in
the main column.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
And he became almost overnight a very famous figure in Germany.
The most highly touted generals. Rommel is best known for
his exploits in leading the Africa Corps and later of
the Italian German Army in North Africa against the British
and Commonwealth forces.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Primarily for his cunning in this most difficult terrain, he
earned the nickname the Desert Fox. It wasn't just the
(12:15):
Germans who brought into the myth of Rommel's battlefield prowess.
The British put their own shine on Rommel's reputation, a
useful excuse for the Allies struggle in Africa.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
The Allies did help to cultivate the reputation of Rommel
as a great general, and in part to some degree,
that was by way of explaining why their own generals
were often failing against him being beaten by.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
But the myth about Rommel was not confined to the battlefield.
He was also portrayed as a type of honorable warrior,
an enemy to the Allies but one who could be respected.
Rommel was peripherally connected to the officers and aristocrats who
attempted to kill Hitler at his military headquarters of Wolfschanzer
(13:04):
and was subsequently forced to commit suicide by the Germans.
The Allies then depicted him as our friend Rommel, a
good German, not really a committed Nazi. Yet, how much
of this Romel myth is actually true.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
Well, there's no doubt that Rommel was a great operational commander.
He was a bold, daring offensive commander who was excellent
at maneuver warfare. But he was no better strategist than
any of the other senior German leaders. He was a
poor logistician. He was not particularly inclined towards joint warfare.
(13:42):
He rarely cooperated with the German Air Force OFFWAFFA or
the German Navy the Creeks Marina.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
The early successes of the Axis troops in North Africa
were as much due to ineffective Allied planning and preparation
as they were to Rommel's leadership. The failed Allied campaign
was hampered by insufficient troops and equipment, strained supply lines,
and frequent changes of leadership. Rommel was not ever a
(14:16):
member of the Nazi Party, but the idea that he
did not support the Rice's ambitions is a fallacy.
Speaker 7 (14:23):
Probably the most popular myth about Owen Rommel is that
he was an apolitical officer and that he was actively
involved in the anti Hitler resistance. Rommel was in fact
a traditional German nationalist and militarist. He was anti Communist.
He was a loyal German officer who believed that he
(14:44):
was morally wrong for a German officer to try and
cure his sovereign head of state that he had swore
a personal oath of allegiance.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
To Whilst the depiction of Rommel as an Allied sympathizer
was unfounded. In nineteen forty four, he was implicated in
the July twenty plot to assassinate Hitler, a renowned war hero.
At this point, he was given the choice of facing
a messy public trial and disgrace or a cyanide pill
(15:14):
with his reputation and legacy intact, he chose the latter.
Rommel seems to have been a competent commander, a cunning opponent,
and an inspiring leader for his men, but romanticizing him
as one of history's greatest military commanders and a less
than committed Nazi keeps the propaganda myth alive. It also
(15:39):
serves as a cautionary tale, a reminder of the power
and manipulation of wartime propaganda, and how difficult it can
be to separate the truth from the myth once they
have become intertwined. Many thousands of years ago, stories from
ancient Greece tell us of another of history's greatest military myths,
(16:03):
one that also warns us about the dangers of misunderstanding
an enemy and their intentions. Deception and misdirection have been
important elements of warfare since ancient times. Probably the most
famous example of deceptive tactics is that of the fabled
(16:26):
Trojan Horse, a myth that lives on to the present day.
Paris of Troy had kidnapped the beautiful Helen after the
goddess Aphrodite had promised him the most beautiful mortal woman.
Speaker 8 (16:39):
In the world.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
To get Helen back, her husband Menelaeus and his brother
Agamemnon raised an army of Greek warriors. They lay siege
to Troy over many years, with neither side getting the
upper hand. The Greeks then came up with a sneaky plan.
They build a horse of mountainous size and weave planks
(17:02):
of fur over its ribs. They pretend it's a votive
offering and they secretly filled the insides with armed warriors.
Speaker 9 (17:11):
They build this horse. It's massive, it's full of Greek soldiers.
They leave it at the battlements of Troy, and they
tell the Trojans that it is a gift to them
from the Greek, some sort of peace offering.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
The myth of the Trojan War survives to us today
in epic poems that were probably written in the late
eighth century BC.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
The story of the Trojan War as Homer records it
in the Iliad, the first time it is actually recorded
in writing by a poet we assume to be this
person called Homer. That is where we get all of
the beautiful myths and legends about the Trojan War. So
he tells the stories of Paris and Helen, he tells
(17:56):
the story about King Agamemnon, and these began as oral traditions,
probably sometime in the late Bronze Age, where people began
to sing these stories, and eventually these stories were put
down by poets we generically call Homer in the Archaic Age,
(18:17):
and they're committed to writing.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
The Iliad describes events towards the end of a ten
year long war between the ancient Greeks and the Trojans.
The tale of the Trojan Horse comes to us from
another of Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey, which tells us
of the end of the Trojan War and introduces the
Greek hero Odysseus.
Speaker 10 (18:41):
So while the Odysseus comes up with this idea, I
know what, let's do. We're going to make a giant
wooden horse, because the Trojans revered horses, and we're going
to leave it like it's a gift, and we're going
to go away. But in reality, the bulk of the
army is just going to hide out of sight, and
few of us are going to go into the belly
(19:02):
of the wooden beast and hide there quietly until they
wheel us into the city. And then we'll come out
after they've all gone to sleep, and will put the
city to the torch and let the rest of the
Greek army in. And that is precisely what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Most scholars think there may be a grain of historical
truth to the story, a battle centuries before Homer's Iliad,
that is the historical source.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
What is fascinating about the Trojan War is that we
have lots of archaeological evidence that a war did take
place between the Mycenae and Greeks and the Trojans. You
can physically go to the site of the Trojan War
at Troy now and stand in the remains. Whether there
was a Helen and a real menilayust possibly not. They
(19:52):
may be a mixture of historical figures that eventually got
swept up in the romantic stories of the Trojan.
Speaker 10 (19:59):
War, or.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
While a war did take place. Most scholars also agree
that the famous Trojan horse is most likely fable and myth.
Speaker 10 (20:13):
I think the story of the wooden horse outside the
walls of Troy seems to me a mythic sort of
way of describing how the cleverness of a great general
could breach the defenses of mighty city.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
One theory is that the wooden horse may refer to
a siege tower, a tall structure which soldiers would climb
up to launch arrows or spears over a city's walls.
Or another theory goes the wooden horse was actually a ship.
Homer uses the word seahorse to describe ships in the Odyssey.
(20:51):
Archaeological finds show that the prows of ancient ships were
sometimes carved into the shape of a horse's head more
than three thousand years later. We'll probably never know the
truth about the Trojan Horse, but as with most good stories,
perhaps that doesn't matter.
Speaker 9 (21:12):
It captures our imagination because what it shows is the
Greeks as inventors, the Greeks as really early pioneers in technology.
If you go to the site of Troy today, you
can see a reconstruction of the Trojan Horse on the site.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And while the myth of the Trojan Horse seems improbable,
the Trojan War lives on to reinforce a cautionary tale.
Speaker 10 (21:42):
I think the myth of the Trojan War it's remembered
through the Greek world for all sorts of reasons, and
in this case, it's all about the fact that Harris
chooses to have the most beautiful woman in the world,
and so, like a lot of young men, makes bad
choice is based on fundamentally lust and chaos ensues. So
(22:06):
it's one of those cultural truths that doesn't have to
have a basis and actual fact for people to understand
what it's trying to tell you.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
The universal themes of love, fate, honor, and glory have
meant that the myth of the Trojan Horse has continued,
and so has the famous saying born of this myth,
beware of Greeks bearing gifts, or, more broadly, in war,
don't trust your enemy, a sentiment that continues to ring
(22:37):
true even thousands of years later. The myth of the
Trojan Horse describes how deception strategy was used to end
a war. In more recent history, was a story that
involved deception and myth making used to justify starting a war.
(23:01):
February fifth, two thousand and three, U s Secretary of
State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations. The US, he said,
had evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or WMDs,
biological weapons chemical weapons. Iraq's president, Sadam Hussein, had used
(23:22):
these terrible weapons in the past, even against his own citizens.
After Hussain invaded Kuwait in nineteen ninety and was defeated
in the Gulf War, the UN required Iraq to get
rid of its WMDs and allow inspectors to confirm they
had been destroyed. But Powell said Iraq had lied and
(23:44):
deceived the inspectors. Hussain still had WMDs. Iraq's neighbours and
even the US were not safe. Hussain could use these
weapons against them. Powell brought Win him a tiny vial
of white powder, which he said, if it had been anthrax,
(24:06):
was enough to threaten the lives of several hundred people.
And Hussein had power, alleged much more than a tiny
vial of anthrax.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's amazing, you think your column power turning up to
the UN with his little vial. You know, this dramatic thing.
It's almost like a pantomime. He turned up there with
I don't know what. It's probably why talcum powder. That
there was this dramatic presentation of evidence that nobody bought,
of course, but it was one of the great theatrical
moments in UN history.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This claim would lead the US and their allies to
invade Iraq, overthrow Hussein's government, and start a war that
would last for over eight years. But the foundations for
the war in Iraq goes back many years earlier, to
another war fought in the Gulf region. US President George
Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair regretted not removing
(25:02):
Sadam Hussin after the First Gulf War and wanted to
install a new friendly government. They wanted a regime change
and with the Iraq War, they gave themselves another chance.
Speaker 11 (25:14):
The threat from sadamascene and weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological,
potentially nuclear weapons capability, That threat is real.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
The term was used to justify the intervention in Iraq
as a wave describing what was believed or half believed,
that the Iraqis had the capacity and the wheel to
build nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. So it was
(25:43):
invoked as a warning and supposed to strike terror in
the world community that there was going to be some
very nasty repercussions unless the country was invaded in this
weapons program was halted.
Speaker 12 (25:58):
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt
that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some
of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Words that fed right into the myth of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction.
Speaker 11 (26:17):
Tonight's British servicemen and women are engaged from air land
and sea. Their mission removes Sata Mussain from power and
disarmed Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The US, along with a coalition of the willing, launched
a shock and awe bombing campaign against Iraq on the
twentieth of March two thousand and three. This said the
UN Secretary General Kofi Nan was an illegal act.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
What was made public, and what was made even known
to politicians at the time American politicians, was a heavily
redacted report from the intelligence community, in which footnotes which
related to skepticism about some of the claims being made
were redacted. The reaction from the public to the claim
(27:24):
by the Bush administration at the time, both to the
American public, the world public, and the UN was general
skepticism and people did not buy it. In fact, there
were huge protests all around the world to argue against
the intervention and Iraq.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Once UK and US troops were on the ground, hundreds
of intelligence analysts and military personnels scoured the country looking
for the WMDs. They failed to find any, and very publicly,
the myth began to fall apart.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
It's very hard to know what was going on in
the heads of particular members of the administration, but what
had become operative, What made I think it persuasive to
a number of people in the administration, of course, in
other members of the international community, was this idea of
(28:20):
a precautionary intervention.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Over one hundred thousand Iraqis died and over forty seven
hundred US and Allied troops were killed during the eight
year war. The concocted myth had had dire consequences.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
There's a very strong argument to be made that isis
as we know them would not exist without the interventions
that foreign powers made into the destabilization of regimes. The
re emergence of various forms of ethnic conflict and bordering
on civil war that had swept through the region since
(29:01):
can in many ways be attributed to that particular misadventure.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Sadam Hussein was captured by US troops in December two
thousand and three. The interim Iraqi government found him guilty
of crimes against humanity, and he was hanged on the
thirtieth of December two thousand and six. The regime was changed,
but a considerable cost to the US and UK's international credibility.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Whether it plays more generally into skepticism about governments is
a much more complex question, because, of course, when the
Americans turned up, they didn't find those weapons, and they
told everyone that they didn't find those weapons. So it's
a strange in some senses if they were really to
(29:48):
be distrusted. They may have just invented the fact that
they'd found them.
Speaker 12 (29:55):
Based on all the information we had today, I believe
we were right to take action.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
The myth of the weapons of mass destruction had us
question our trust in governments and revealed the ways in
which those in authority could seek to justify a violent
conflict to the public. But this was not always the case.
In ancient Rome. Violence did not need to be justified
(30:22):
by those in power. It was an everyday reality. Ancient
Rome conjures up images of storied emperors, the vast Roman army,
and gladiators. Fighting was one of the most popular forms
(30:42):
of entertainment in ancient Rome, with gladiators regaling spectators in
the Circus Maximus, the Forum, and the Colosseum. Just how
much of what we understand about these brutal events is
fact and how much is myth.
Speaker 10 (30:59):
Gladiatorial combat actually goes back very early in Rome and
might in fact have been a ritual borrowed from the Etruscans.
Before the Romans, there seems to have been some sort
of idea about the ritual spilling of blood in funeral rites,
and up and through the time of Julius Caesar. Certainly
we see those sorts of rights. It becomes this kind
(31:19):
of elaborate blood sport.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
At the height of gladiatorial combats between the first century
BC and the second century CE, thousands of gladiators would
be pitted against each other in a whole day spectacular.
Speaker 13 (31:39):
Although they started as exhibitions in honor of the dead
as part of the funeral game ceremony, they become over
time gradually part of the general display and spectacle and
entertainment at rome, up until the point where they're regularly
part of religious festivals and magistrates.
Speaker 10 (31:59):
Will put them off.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
We think of gladiators as oppressed slaves thrown into the
arena to provide bloody entertainment with their deaths. But is
this long held myth based on fact or fiction.
Speaker 13 (32:15):
Certainly lots of gladiators were enslaved, but it was also
possible to become a gladiator as a free person. If
you volunteered as a gladiator, you signed up to it
until you were released from your contract.
Speaker 10 (32:27):
There were people who, for various reasons, chose to participate.
Part of it's because the gladiators become sort of these
rock star, big time wrestler figures. I mean they're immensely popular.
It actually becomes an opportunity for fame, for fortune, for
sex appeal, so you have sometimes people from the upper
(32:48):
classes joining in.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Another popular myth is that gladiators always fought to the death,
So why would anyone choose to become a gladiator if
they were likely to be killed. Contrary to the popularly
held myth, gladiators were trained to subdue their opponents, not
kill them. Gladiators were matched with opponents whose complementary fighting
(33:12):
style would make a good spectacle. The retarius, for example,
fought with a trident and net to tangle his opponent,
while the secutor used a shield and a long knife.
Gladiators were professionals with honed specialist skills, and fight organizers
wanted to keep them alive to appear another day. Deaths
(33:34):
did occur, but it was not a fight to the
death in every match, and deaths often did not occur
in front of the audience. It's estimated that a gladiator
faced a one in nine chance of death each fight.
Speaker 10 (33:49):
I will say that there is a lot of graveyard
evidence that gladiators who were mortally wounded. They were often
dispatched with a single hammer below to the head, and
I think that probably took place back in the locker room,
as it were, if they were not going to be
able to be saved.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Even the mythical thumbs down gesture is more likely to
have meant sheath your weapon than kill him. One of
the reasons that myths surrounding gladiators persist centuries later is
that we are still entertained by it. Gladiatorial combat is
frequently portrayed in popular culture, and often inaccurately. This was
(34:32):
fighting a spectacle, orchestrated, prepared, choreographed, an engineered conflict for
social and political purposes and to satisfy a bloodlust transposed
from the battlefield. Nearly two thousand years later, a myth
was orchestrated and engineered, in this instance by a single
(34:54):
violent act against an individual who happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. World War One
was a conflict like no other. It was the first
truly global war and left an estimated seven million civilians
(35:15):
and ten million armed forces dead. Centuries old empires crumbled,
and the map of the world was redrawn. One popular
myth is that the complex global confrontation that was World
War one began in Sarajevo by a lone gunman. On
(35:37):
the morning of the twenty eighth of June nineteen fourteen,
Gavrillo Princip was at Schiller's Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Princip was
a student and a Bosnian sir. He had just finished
eating a sandwich when an automobile carrying a smartly dressed
man and woman turned into the street right near the cafe.
(35:58):
Princip pulled out a pistol and shot the couple, inflicting
fatal wounds. They were the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the Austro Hungarian throne, and his wife, the arch Duchess Sophie.
It was this single act of brutality, it's claimed, which
prompted Austria and Germany to declare war on Serbia, only
(36:19):
for Russia to come to Serbia's aid and bring Europe's
great powers into conflict. Or so the story goes. The
reality was that World War One started due to a
complex set of circumstances in which the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand was one piece of a larger puzzle. On
(36:41):
that morning in nineteen fourteen, Europe looked a lot different
from today. Sarajevo was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire
and it was ruled by the Habsburg family.
Speaker 8 (36:54):
The Habsburgs were one of the dominant royal families in
Europe in the late nineteenth and early twenty century. They
had accumulated a patchwork of territories, partly through war, but
largely through very carefully arranged marriages.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
While the Habsburgs were attempting to secure strategic alliances around Europe,
their own empire was floundering. Many ethnic groups within it
started calling for their independence.
Speaker 8 (37:22):
Particularly of concern to the Habsburgs was Serbia, which lay
just across the border to the south of the Habsburg Empire.
Serbia was a major client state of Russia.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Serbia had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in eighteen
seventy eight, but many Serbs lived in Bosnia, which was
still part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and thus they
were still not free from foreign rule. To force the
Habsburgs into granting independence to Bosnia and unify Serbs, nationalists
(37:57):
plotted to assassinate a member of the ruling family and
shine a light on their dissatisfaction, and they settled upon
Franz Ferdinand.
Speaker 8 (38:07):
The Archduke. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Habsburg
throw he was the nephew of franciosof the Emperor, King
of the Habsburg Empire, and he was the presumed ale.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Franz Ferdinand was to undertake a royal visit to Sarajevo
to attempt to reinforce ties between Bosnia and the Austro
Hungarian Empire. And thus it was that on the twenty
eighth of June nineteen fourteen, the Gavrilo princip and the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand would meet. Princip, an ardent nationalist, had
(38:47):
been chosen by a Serbian secret society to be part
of a six man assassination team.
Speaker 14 (38:54):
The assassins didn't really have a long term strategy. In
the short term, they hoped to attract attention to their
cause by killing the Archduke, the heir to the Austrian throne.
They also hoped to demonstrate the outside world that there
was a continued tradition of resistance to Austra Hungarian rule.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
But the assassins did have a plan on that day,
they were to stake out the motiicate route and when
the Duke drove past, several assassins would have an opportunity
to bomb the car carrying Franz Ferdinand. Unfortunately, for the
hit squad, the plan was a failure. Only one assassin
even threw his bomb, missing Franz Ferdinand but wounding a
(39:34):
police officer in the crowd. Surprisingly, despite this attempt on
their lives, the Archduke and Duchess decided to continue their
visit to Sarajevo's town hall, and the failed assassins scattered
with Gavrilo Prinsip looking for a spot of lunch. Subsequently,
the Archduke cut short his reception at the town hall
(39:56):
and decided to visit the policeman who had been injured
in the bomb attack on his car earlier that day.
During the journey, his car took a wrong turn and
stalled outside Schiller's cafe, where Prinship was now eating his sandwich,
a pistol handly tucked in his belt. The sandwich story
(40:16):
is a memorable detail, but it's likely a fiction. The
first mention of a sandwich eating assassin originated in a
two thousand and one novel Twelve Fingers by Joe Sorz.
From there it spread and has now moved into the
myth of that fateful day. Not only is the sandwich
(40:40):
detailer myth, but so is the idea that the origins
of World War I are the result of a single
person's actions outside a deli in Sarajevo. There were far
more complex factors.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
At work.
Speaker 14 (41:06):
After the assassination. Was not immediately clear to participants what
the broader significance was. They certainly didn't realize immediately that
a cataclysmic global conflict was about to ensue.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
After Franz Ferdinand's assassination, the Habsburgs and thus Austria Hungary
issued demands to Serbia called the July Ultimatum. Relations between
the two soured, and Serbia mobilized for war.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
The way in which this developed from a localized war
into a world war was not due to the Habsburgs themselves.
It was only possible because Europe was divided into a
series of grand alliances.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
The European alliances were complex and interconnected, so when Austria
Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilized in support of
it's ally Serbia But on the other side, Germany was
allied with Austria Hungary, so when Russia came to the table,
the Germans too mobilized for war. Add into the mix
(42:16):
the historical conflicts between many European powers, the global competition
for colonies, and the Anglo German naval arms race, and
one sees how this assassination pulled a small thread of
this complicated web and the world tumble towards war.
Speaker 14 (42:34):
The timing of the assassination was critical in a few respects,
because the international order was changing at that time. It
came at the most dangerous time in European politics.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
By November two, opposing alliances had solidified. The Ottomans, Germany,
and Austria Hungary formed the Central Powers. They were opposed
by the allied or Entente powers France and Russia, later
joined by Italy and Japan. Soon the conflict stretched across
(43:07):
the globe. The triggers for World War I were far
more complex than the embroidered tale of a hungry man
serendipitously stumbling across his assassination target. But sometimes myths endure
because they're a convenient and memorable shorthand for the more
(43:29):
complicated details of history. In fact, the First World War
in general proved fertile ground for myth making. Take our
picture of trench warfare soldiers spending months knee deep in
mud and being shelled or sniped at before making a
(43:51):
deadly rush across no man's land. Some of that picture
is correct, but the idea that troops spent long periods
of time in the trenches is another oversimplification. A soldier
might spend five days in a front line trench, then
fifteen or so days in a rear or support trench.
(44:12):
The rest of the month, about half the time would
be spent in the reserve, well back from the front,
training and resting up. If a soldier had served for
long enough, they might even get to go home on leave.
Long stints at the front were in fact a rarity.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Generally, what would happen would be troops would rotate in
and out of the front line trenches, and then the
rear trenches, and then well back. What they found out
early on in trench warfare was that the mental and
physical strain and the losses sustained by units if they
were left in the trenches too long, was too much
(44:51):
to bear. Units would typically spend a little bit that
less than fifty percent of their time in the trenches.
You know, it's a little bit more than fifty percent,
just depending on where they were.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
This is not to say that time at the front
was easy. The opposite is true. It was short because
it was difficult.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Trench warfare during the First World War was not a
pretty picture. It was a pretty awful place to be
a lot of the time. I guess picture of subterranean
world where men are living in trenches roughly eight feet deep.
Men are huddled in there trying to stay out of
the way of the bombs and the bullets. During the
(45:40):
wet season, it could be absolutely appalling. The places were
just turned to a morass and the trenches would be
just full of mud.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
About ten percent of soldiers were killed and another fifteen
percent wounded, Although it is hard to be precise. The
violence and sheer length of the war was rise to
the Empires who had started it. Both sides had thought
the war would be quick and decisive. Their miscalculation is
(46:08):
one of history's greatest tragedies.
Speaker 4 (46:11):
Other Germans were unable to win the war, and the
projected six weeks British, the French the Belgians combined to
block their moves, and when that style mate said in,
both sides couldn't advance without taking really heavy casualties, so
both sides dug in.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
The result was four years of brutal conflict. The war
only came to a close when the Allied Powers, assisted
by the US entering the war in nineteen seventeen, gradually
gained the upper hand. Realizing they had lost, the Central
Powers agreed to an armistice. On June the twenty eighth,
(46:52):
nineteen nineteen, exactly five years after Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, Germany
and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles. The
other Central Powers signed separate treaties. The peace settlements broke
up the last of the Great European Empires. Histories, great
(47:19):
wars and conflicts have changed the world. They've redrawn the map,
invented new technologies and ever more devastating ways of killing
one another. Sometimes individual figures become larger than life heroes
or villains on the world stage, and stories of epic
(47:40):
battles become legends told and retold throughout the ages.
Speaker 10 (47:44):
All of these stories they continue to be powerful because
they tell us important things, not just about the world
around us, but about ourselves, about who we want to be,
about who we know, in our heart of hearts we
really are, about that which we want and that which
we fear. All of these stories help us to understand
(48:05):
our place in the world.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
While the oversimplification of world events can make things easier
to comprehend, it remains one of the great tragedies of
humanity that we don't appear to be able to resolve
our differences without resorting to conflict, reminding us that the
myths and legends of war echo throughout millennia.
War and conflict has reshaped nations and devastated entire generations,
and with a duty to protect and provide for their citizens,
many nation states down the ages have fallen short.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
One of the features of the nation state. One of
the justifications for the nation state was that it was
always there to protect its citizens from external invaders from enemies.
But of course, one of the tragic features of the
twentieth century is that we learned that governments can't be
trusted with their own people.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Conflicts dominate history, and yet wars, why they started and
how they were fought are constantly disputed. Wars and myth
building go hand in hand. Even when the winner is clear,
what led to victory is not. These are the myths
of histories, wars, and conflicts. On the seventh of December
(01:04):
nineteen forty one, an event occurred that rocked the lives
of all Americans, led to the US's entry into World
War II, and inspired a myth that would cast the
US president as a traitor and a liar. At six am,
Japanese fighter planes took off from an aircraft carrier in
the Pacific Ocean. At seven fifty five am, they reached
(01:27):
Hawaii and bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Almost two and a half thousand Americans were killed. It
prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that the United States,
after keeping out of World War II for over two years,
was now at war with Japan. December seventh, nineteen forty
(01:52):
one is a date, the US President said which will
live in infamy.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
The United States of America was only and deliberately attacked
by naval and layer forces of the Empire of Japan.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
The United States suffered a severe shock when the Japanese
attacked at Pearl Harbor. The public, the government, the military, though,
got shocked, stunned to a degree of disbelief, and angered
as well.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise offensive, Roosevelt said,
unprovoked and without warning. But was that true. For decades
since the attack, a conspiracy theory developed, ebbing and flowing
but never fully disappearing. That the President knew in advance
(02:46):
about the Japanese attack and did nothing to prevent it.
That Roosevelt knew of or even provoked the attack is
called the back door to war theory.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I think one of the reasons that perpetuite this myth
is the fact that there's a couple of respectable historians
that have argued for this position. They're vastly outnumbered by
historians where the consensus Roosevelt did not know that this
attack was coming.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
The back door to war theory takes certain facts and
draws big conclusions from them. One fact was that Roosevelt
was personally supportive of the United States joining the war,
a fact that became a key issue during the nineteen
forty presidential election campaign.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Roosevelt wanted America to be involved in the war. The
American public was very reticent to get involved in this
war after their experience of their involvement in the First
World War.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Blocked by political and public opinion from sending troops to
aid Britain and France in the fight against Nazi Germany,
Roosevelt sought other ways of helping. From nineteen thirty nine,
the President authorized sending the weapons and equipment to Britain, France,
and later the Soviet Union in the famous lend lease program.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
In late nineteen forty one, the United States was officially
still neutral in the Second World War, although they were
assisting the Allies supplying war materials and supplies to the
Allied nations, and they were already involved in some low
level fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic against the
German U boats.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Lend Lease and the destroyers for bases deal helped the
Allies immeasurably and was likened by Roosevelt to lending a
garden hose to a neighbor to help put out a
fire that could burn down your house as well as his.
But the back door to war theory goes a big
step further. This theory argues that what Roosevelt really wanted
(04:53):
was something that would swing public opinion in favor of
actually committing American troops to the fight. Perhaps this idea
was stoked by the fact that FDR had frozen Japanese
assets in the US in July nineteen forty one, and
by August I established an embargo on oil and gas
exports to Japan, crippling their access to much needed natural resources.
(05:26):
Throughout nineteen forty one, the US had deciphered some of
the coded messages that Japan sent its diplomats, but the
US had not cracked the military code. This diplomatic intelligence
gave the US some hints, but critically not the when
or where of a Japanese attack. Hawaii seemed an unlikely target.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
The Americans suspected that there was going to be an
attack by the Japanese, they didn't know where that might arrive.
The consensus van is they certainly didn't think that a
fleet would saile four thousand miles and try to destroy
the whole navy almost in dock.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It was only at eleven twenty five am in Washington,
two hours before Pearl Harbor was bombed, that the US
decoded and read diplomatic messages which implied an attack could
happen that very day, and the rest is history. Eighteen
ships were damaged or destroyed, more than three hundred airplanes,
(06:42):
and over two thousand lives.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Last no one in America's political military establishment had any
idea that Pearl Harbor was a target for Japanese aggression
in nineteen forty one. Even if America had broken all
the Japanese codes and translated all intercepts, not one message
that indicated pe Harbor of the attacked. That is the
(07:05):
extent of the secrecy at which this mission was launched.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The US formally received Japan's declaration of war from the
Japanese ambassador at around three pm, two hours after the attack.
The following day, Roosevelt sought Congress's agreement to declare war
on Japan.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
Since the unprovoked and dastar lay attack by Japan, a
state of war has existed between the United States and
the Japanese campire.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Within an hour, Congress agreed. Britain, as the US is ally,
had also declared war on Japan. Yet the question of
what Roosevelt knew and when did he know it arose
almost immediately. In the following years, the US government made
(08:07):
ten inquiries into Pearl Harbor. What they found was that
the US had badly underestimated Japan's capabilities and that the
warnings of an attack were not taken sufficiently seriously. The
base at Pearl Harbor was overly relaxed and didn't defend
itself quickly enough when the attack came. The inquiries did
(08:29):
not find hard evidence that Roosevelt knew or encouraged the attack.
This is also the opinion of most historians. But what
factors led to such an outrageous myth about the President
(08:49):
of the US and why does it perpetuate decades later?
Just weeks earlier, the US had held a fiercely contested
presidential election during which Republican presidential candidate Wendel Wilkie had
openly accused Roosevelt of secret planning to enter the US
into the war.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Wilkie was saying, if you elect Roosevelt, your sons will
be killed. So at the time there was this sense
that Roosevelt was going to push them towards war.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
The idea comes in part because how could America not
have known America is the greatest power in the world.
How could they have been surprised by an enemy that
many saw as racially inferior.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
This myth about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor is an example
of how divisive politics, distrusting government, and a disregard for
evidence and fact can lead to damaging myths of history
that linger for years after the events that spawned them.
Roosevelt's reputation has been poorly served by this myth. But
(09:58):
there is another figure of this period whose legend and
legacy was cemented by various propaganda machines of World War II.
Erwin Rommel was a German field marshal in the Wehrmarked
or Armed Forces. A firm and capable general. His reputation
(10:23):
as one of the greatest military commanders of World War
II survives to this day. The so called Rommel legend
began in nineteen forty when Rommel directed the seventh Panzer
Tank Division advance into France. He seemed the quintessential frontline commander, energetic, brave,
(10:43):
a clever strategist, burning houses to provide smoky cover for
his advance. He faked out the French defenders by pretending
that flares were armor piercing shells.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Rommel had performed very well on the Battle of Translating
his hands. The division. The seventh had taken a lot
of terror tory and made some very bold and daring
maneuvers which really caught the attention, certainly of Hitler and Goebels.
So it was initially the German media and propaganda machine
that shot him to fame and became almost a household
(11:17):
name in Germany.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It helped too that Rommel was media friendly. He looked
handsome and laughed easily. He was close to his men, chatting,
telling jokes, and got into the thick of fighting, often
being seen in or on tanks or other vehicles in
the main column.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
And he became almost overnight a very famous figure in Germany.
The most highly touted generals. Rommel is best known for
his exploits in leading the Africa Corps and later of
the Italian German Army in North Africa against the British
and Commonwealth forces.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Primarily for his cunning in this most difficult terrain, he
earned the nickname the Desert Fox. It wasn't just the
(12:15):
Germans who brought into the myth of Rommel's battlefield prowess.
The British put their own shine on Rommel's reputation, a
useful excuse for the Allies struggle in Africa.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
The Allies did help to cultivate the reputation of Rommel
as a great general, and in part to some degree,
that was by way of explaining why their own generals
were often failing against him being beaten by.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
But the myth about Rommel was not confined to the battlefield.
He was also portrayed as a type of honorable warrior,
an enemy to the Allies but one who could be respected.
Rommel was peripherally connected to the officers and aristocrats who
attempted to kill Hitler at his military headquarters of Wolfschanzer
(13:04):
and was subsequently forced to commit suicide by the Germans.
The Allies then depicted him as our friend Rommel, a
good German, not really a committed Nazi. Yet, how much
of this Romel myth is actually true.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
Well, there's no doubt that Rommel was a great operational commander.
He was a bold, daring offensive commander who was excellent
at maneuver warfare. But he was no better strategist than
any of the other senior German leaders. He was a
poor logistician. He was not particularly inclined towards joint warfare.
(13:42):
He rarely cooperated with the German Air Force OFFWAFFA or
the German Navy the Creeks Marina.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
The early successes of the Axis troops in North Africa
were as much due to ineffective Allied planning and preparation
as they were to Rommel's leadership. The failed Allied campaign
was hampered by insufficient troops and equipment, strained supply lines,
and frequent changes of leadership. Rommel was not ever a
(14:16):
member of the Nazi Party, but the idea that he
did not support the Rice's ambitions is a fallacy.
Speaker 7 (14:23):
Probably the most popular myth about Owen Rommel is that
he was an apolitical officer and that he was actively
involved in the anti Hitler resistance. Rommel was in fact
a traditional German nationalist and militarist. He was anti Communist.
He was a loyal German officer who believed that he
(14:44):
was morally wrong for a German officer to try and
cure his sovereign head of state that he had swore
a personal oath of allegiance.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
To Whilst the depiction of Rommel as an Allied sympathizer
was unfounded. In nineteen forty four, he was implicated in
the July twenty plot to assassinate Hitler, a renowned war hero.
At this point, he was given the choice of facing
a messy public trial and disgrace or a cyanide pill
(15:14):
with his reputation and legacy intact, he chose the latter.
Rommel seems to have been a competent commander, a cunning opponent,
and an inspiring leader for his men, but romanticizing him
as one of history's greatest military commanders and a less
than committed Nazi keeps the propaganda myth alive. It also
(15:39):
serves as a cautionary tale, a reminder of the power
and manipulation of wartime propaganda, and how difficult it can
be to separate the truth from the myth once they
have become intertwined. Many thousands of years ago, stories from
ancient Greece tell us of another of history's greatest military myths,
(16:03):
one that also warns us about the dangers of misunderstanding
an enemy and their intentions. Deception and misdirection have been
important elements of warfare since ancient times. Probably the most
famous example of deceptive tactics is that of the fabled
(16:26):
Trojan Horse, a myth that lives on to the present day.
Paris of Troy had kidnapped the beautiful Helen after the
goddess Aphrodite had promised him the most beautiful mortal woman.
Speaker 8 (16:39):
In the world.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
To get Helen back, her husband Menelaeus and his brother
Agamemnon raised an army of Greek warriors. They lay siege
to Troy over many years, with neither side getting the
upper hand. The Greeks then came up with a sneaky plan.
They build a horse of mountainous size and weave planks
(17:02):
of fur over its ribs. They pretend it's a votive
offering and they secretly filled the insides with armed warriors.
Speaker 9 (17:11):
They build this horse. It's massive, it's full of Greek soldiers.
They leave it at the battlements of Troy, and they
tell the Trojans that it is a gift to them
from the Greek, some sort of peace offering.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
The myth of the Trojan War survives to us today
in epic poems that were probably written in the late
eighth century BC.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
The story of the Trojan War as Homer records it
in the Iliad, the first time it is actually recorded
in writing by a poet we assume to be this
person called Homer. That is where we get all of
the beautiful myths and legends about the Trojan War. So
he tells the stories of Paris and Helen, he tells
(17:56):
the story about King Agamemnon, and these began as oral traditions,
probably sometime in the late Bronze Age, where people began
to sing these stories, and eventually these stories were put
down by poets we generically call Homer in the Archaic Age,
(18:17):
and they're committed to writing.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
The Iliad describes events towards the end of a ten
year long war between the ancient Greeks and the Trojans.
The tale of the Trojan Horse comes to us from
another of Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey, which tells us
of the end of the Trojan War and introduces the
Greek hero Odysseus.
Speaker 10 (18:41):
So while the Odysseus comes up with this idea, I
know what, let's do. We're going to make a giant
wooden horse, because the Trojans revered horses, and we're going
to leave it like it's a gift, and we're going
to go away. But in reality, the bulk of the
army is just going to hide out of sight, and
few of us are going to go into the belly
(19:02):
of the wooden beast and hide there quietly until they
wheel us into the city. And then we'll come out
after they've all gone to sleep, and will put the
city to the torch and let the rest of the
Greek army in. And that is precisely what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Most scholars think there may be a grain of historical
truth to the story, a battle centuries before Homer's Iliad,
that is the historical source.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
What is fascinating about the Trojan War is that we
have lots of archaeological evidence that a war did take
place between the Mycenae and Greeks and the Trojans. You
can physically go to the site of the Trojan War
at Troy now and stand in the remains. Whether there
was a Helen and a real menilayust possibly not. They
(19:52):
may be a mixture of historical figures that eventually got
swept up in the romantic stories of the Trojan.
Speaker 10 (19:59):
War, or.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
While a war did take place. Most scholars also agree
that the famous Trojan horse is most likely fable and myth.
Speaker 10 (20:13):
I think the story of the wooden horse outside the
walls of Troy seems to me a mythic sort of
way of describing how the cleverness of a great general
could breach the defenses of mighty city.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
One theory is that the wooden horse may refer to
a siege tower, a tall structure which soldiers would climb
up to launch arrows or spears over a city's walls.
Or another theory goes the wooden horse was actually a ship.
Homer uses the word seahorse to describe ships in the Odyssey.
(20:51):
Archaeological finds show that the prows of ancient ships were
sometimes carved into the shape of a horse's head more
than three thousand years later. We'll probably never know the
truth about the Trojan Horse, but as with most good stories,
perhaps that doesn't matter.
Speaker 9 (21:12):
It captures our imagination because what it shows is the
Greeks as inventors, the Greeks as really early pioneers in technology.
If you go to the site of Troy today, you
can see a reconstruction of the Trojan Horse on the site.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And while the myth of the Trojan Horse seems improbable,
the Trojan War lives on to reinforce a cautionary tale.
Speaker 10 (21:42):
I think the myth of the Trojan War it's remembered
through the Greek world for all sorts of reasons, and
in this case, it's all about the fact that Harris
chooses to have the most beautiful woman in the world,
and so, like a lot of young men, makes bad
choice is based on fundamentally lust and chaos ensues. So
(22:06):
it's one of those cultural truths that doesn't have to
have a basis and actual fact for people to understand
what it's trying to tell you.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
The universal themes of love, fate, honor, and glory have
meant that the myth of the Trojan Horse has continued,
and so has the famous saying born of this myth,
beware of Greeks bearing gifts, or, more broadly, in war,
don't trust your enemy, a sentiment that continues to ring
(22:37):
true even thousands of years later. The myth of the
Trojan Horse describes how deception strategy was used to end
a war. In more recent history, was a story that
involved deception and myth making used to justify starting a war.
(23:01):
February fifth, two thousand and three, U s Secretary of
State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations. The US, he said,
had evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or WMDs,
biological weapons chemical weapons. Iraq's president, Sadam Hussein, had used
(23:22):
these terrible weapons in the past, even against his own citizens.
After Hussain invaded Kuwait in nineteen ninety and was defeated
in the Gulf War, the UN required Iraq to get
rid of its WMDs and allow inspectors to confirm they
had been destroyed. But Powell said Iraq had lied and
(23:44):
deceived the inspectors. Hussain still had WMDs. Iraq's neighbours and
even the US were not safe. Hussain could use these
weapons against them. Powell brought Win him a tiny vial
of white powder, which he said, if it had been anthrax,
(24:06):
was enough to threaten the lives of several hundred people.
And Hussein had power, alleged much more than a tiny
vial of anthrax.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's amazing, you think your column power turning up to
the UN with his little vial. You know, this dramatic thing.
It's almost like a pantomime. He turned up there with
I don't know what. It's probably why talcum powder. That
there was this dramatic presentation of evidence that nobody bought,
of course, but it was one of the great theatrical
moments in UN history.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This claim would lead the US and their allies to
invade Iraq, overthrow Hussein's government, and start a war that
would last for over eight years. But the foundations for
the war in Iraq goes back many years earlier, to
another war fought in the Gulf region. US President George
Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair regretted not removing
(25:02):
Sadam Hussin after the First Gulf War and wanted to
install a new friendly government. They wanted a regime change
and with the Iraq War, they gave themselves another chance.
Speaker 11 (25:14):
The threat from sadamascene and weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological,
potentially nuclear weapons capability, That threat is real.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
The term was used to justify the intervention in Iraq
as a wave describing what was believed or half believed,
that the Iraqis had the capacity and the wheel to
build nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. So it was
(25:43):
invoked as a warning and supposed to strike terror in
the world community that there was going to be some
very nasty repercussions unless the country was invaded in this
weapons program was halted.
Speaker 12 (25:58):
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt
that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some
of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Words that fed right into the myth of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction.
Speaker 11 (26:17):
Tonight's British servicemen and women are engaged from air land
and sea. Their mission removes Sata Mussain from power and
disarmed Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The US, along with a coalition of the willing, launched
a shock and awe bombing campaign against Iraq on the
twentieth of March two thousand and three. This said the
UN Secretary General Kofi Nan was an illegal act.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
What was made public, and what was made even known
to politicians at the time American politicians, was a heavily
redacted report from the intelligence community, in which footnotes which
related to skepticism about some of the claims being made
were redacted. The reaction from the public to the claim
(27:24):
by the Bush administration at the time, both to the
American public, the world public, and the UN was general
skepticism and people did not buy it. In fact, there
were huge protests all around the world to argue against
the intervention and Iraq.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Once UK and US troops were on the ground, hundreds
of intelligence analysts and military personnels scoured the country looking
for the WMDs. They failed to find any, and very publicly,
the myth began to fall apart.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
It's very hard to know what was going on in
the heads of particular members of the administration, but what
had become operative, What made I think it persuasive to
a number of people in the administration, of course, in
other members of the international community, was this idea of
(28:20):
a precautionary intervention.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Over one hundred thousand Iraqis died and over forty seven
hundred US and Allied troops were killed during the eight
year war. The concocted myth had had dire consequences.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
There's a very strong argument to be made that isis
as we know them would not exist without the interventions
that foreign powers made into the destabilization of regimes. The
re emergence of various forms of ethnic conflict and bordering
on civil war that had swept through the region since
(29:01):
can in many ways be attributed to that particular misadventure.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Sadam Hussein was captured by US troops in December two
thousand and three. The interim Iraqi government found him guilty
of crimes against humanity, and he was hanged on the
thirtieth of December two thousand and six. The regime was changed,
but a considerable cost to the US and UK's international credibility.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Whether it plays more generally into skepticism about governments is
a much more complex question, because, of course, when the
Americans turned up, they didn't find those weapons, and they
told everyone that they didn't find those weapons. So it's
a strange in some senses if they were really to
(29:48):
be distrusted. They may have just invented the fact that
they'd found them.
Speaker 12 (29:55):
Based on all the information we had today, I believe
we were right to take action.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
The myth of the weapons of mass destruction had us
question our trust in governments and revealed the ways in
which those in authority could seek to justify a violent
conflict to the public. But this was not always the case.
In ancient Rome. Violence did not need to be justified
(30:22):
by those in power. It was an everyday reality. Ancient
Rome conjures up images of storied emperors, the vast Roman army,
and gladiators. Fighting was one of the most popular forms
(30:42):
of entertainment in ancient Rome, with gladiators regaling spectators in
the Circus Maximus, the Forum, and the Colosseum. Just how
much of what we understand about these brutal events is
fact and how much is myth.
Speaker 10 (30:59):
Gladiatorial combat actually goes back very early in Rome and
might in fact have been a ritual borrowed from the Etruscans.
Before the Romans, there seems to have been some sort
of idea about the ritual spilling of blood in funeral rites,
and up and through the time of Julius Caesar. Certainly
we see those sorts of rights. It becomes this kind
(31:19):
of elaborate blood sport.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
At the height of gladiatorial combats between the first century
BC and the second century CE, thousands of gladiators would
be pitted against each other in a whole day spectacular.
Speaker 13 (31:39):
Although they started as exhibitions in honor of the dead
as part of the funeral game ceremony, they become over
time gradually part of the general display and spectacle and
entertainment at rome, up until the point where they're regularly
part of religious festivals and magistrates.
Speaker 10 (31:59):
Will put them off.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
We think of gladiators as oppressed slaves thrown into the
arena to provide bloody entertainment with their deaths. But is
this long held myth based on fact or fiction.
Speaker 13 (32:15):
Certainly lots of gladiators were enslaved, but it was also
possible to become a gladiator as a free person. If
you volunteered as a gladiator, you signed up to it
until you were released from your contract.
Speaker 10 (32:27):
There were people who, for various reasons, chose to participate.
Part of it's because the gladiators become sort of these
rock star, big time wrestler figures. I mean they're immensely popular.
It actually becomes an opportunity for fame, for fortune, for
sex appeal, so you have sometimes people from the upper
(32:48):
classes joining in.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Another popular myth is that gladiators always fought to the death,
So why would anyone choose to become a gladiator if
they were likely to be killed. Contrary to the popularly
held myth, gladiators were trained to subdue their opponents, not
kill them. Gladiators were matched with opponents whose complementary fighting
(33:12):
style would make a good spectacle. The retarius, for example,
fought with a trident and net to tangle his opponent,
while the secutor used a shield and a long knife.
Gladiators were professionals with honed specialist skills, and fight organizers
wanted to keep them alive to appear another day. Deaths
(33:34):
did occur, but it was not a fight to the
death in every match, and deaths often did not occur
in front of the audience. It's estimated that a gladiator
faced a one in nine chance of death each fight.
Speaker 10 (33:49):
I will say that there is a lot of graveyard
evidence that gladiators who were mortally wounded. They were often
dispatched with a single hammer below to the head, and
I think that probably took place back in the locker room,
as it were, if they were not going to be
able to be saved.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Even the mythical thumbs down gesture is more likely to
have meant sheath your weapon than kill him. One of
the reasons that myths surrounding gladiators persist centuries later is
that we are still entertained by it. Gladiatorial combat is
frequently portrayed in popular culture, and often inaccurately. This was
(34:32):
fighting a spectacle, orchestrated, prepared, choreographed, an engineered conflict for
social and political purposes and to satisfy a bloodlust transposed
from the battlefield. Nearly two thousand years later, a myth
was orchestrated and engineered, in this instance by a single
(34:54):
violent act against an individual who happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. World War One
was a conflict like no other. It was the first
truly global war and left an estimated seven million civilians
(35:15):
and ten million armed forces dead. Centuries old empires crumbled,
and the map of the world was redrawn. One popular
myth is that the complex global confrontation that was World
War one began in Sarajevo by a lone gunman. On
(35:37):
the morning of the twenty eighth of June nineteen fourteen,
Gavrillo Princip was at Schiller's Delicatessen in Sarajevo. Princip was
a student and a Bosnian sir. He had just finished
eating a sandwich when an automobile carrying a smartly dressed
man and woman turned into the street right near the cafe.
(35:58):
Princip pulled out a pistol and shot the couple, inflicting
fatal wounds. They were the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the Austro Hungarian throne, and his wife, the arch Duchess Sophie.
It was this single act of brutality, it's claimed, which
prompted Austria and Germany to declare war on Serbia, only
(36:19):
for Russia to come to Serbia's aid and bring Europe's
great powers into conflict. Or so the story goes. The
reality was that World War One started due to a
complex set of circumstances in which the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand was one piece of a larger puzzle. On
(36:41):
that morning in nineteen fourteen, Europe looked a lot different
from today. Sarajevo was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire
and it was ruled by the Habsburg family.
Speaker 8 (36:54):
The Habsburgs were one of the dominant royal families in
Europe in the late nineteenth and early twenty century. They
had accumulated a patchwork of territories, partly through war, but
largely through very carefully arranged marriages.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
While the Habsburgs were attempting to secure strategic alliances around Europe,
their own empire was floundering. Many ethnic groups within it
started calling for their independence.
Speaker 8 (37:22):
Particularly of concern to the Habsburgs was Serbia, which lay
just across the border to the south of the Habsburg Empire.
Serbia was a major client state of Russia.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Serbia had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in eighteen
seventy eight, but many Serbs lived in Bosnia, which was
still part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and thus they
were still not free from foreign rule. To force the
Habsburgs into granting independence to Bosnia and unify Serbs, nationalists
(37:57):
plotted to assassinate a member of the ruling family and
shine a light on their dissatisfaction, and they settled upon
Franz Ferdinand.
Speaker 8 (38:07):
The Archduke. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Habsburg
throw he was the nephew of franciosof the Emperor, King
of the Habsburg Empire, and he was the presumed ale.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Franz Ferdinand was to undertake a royal visit to Sarajevo
to attempt to reinforce ties between Bosnia and the Austro
Hungarian Empire. And thus it was that on the twenty
eighth of June nineteen fourteen, the Gavrilo princip and the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand would meet. Princip, an ardent nationalist, had
(38:47):
been chosen by a Serbian secret society to be part
of a six man assassination team.
Speaker 14 (38:54):
The assassins didn't really have a long term strategy. In
the short term, they hoped to attract attention to their
cause by killing the Archduke, the heir to the Austrian throne.
They also hoped to demonstrate the outside world that there
was a continued tradition of resistance to Austra Hungarian rule.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
But the assassins did have a plan on that day,
they were to stake out the motiicate route and when
the Duke drove past, several assassins would have an opportunity
to bomb the car carrying Franz Ferdinand. Unfortunately, for the
hit squad, the plan was a failure. Only one assassin
even threw his bomb, missing Franz Ferdinand but wounding a
(39:34):
police officer in the crowd. Surprisingly, despite this attempt on
their lives, the Archduke and Duchess decided to continue their
visit to Sarajevo's town hall, and the failed assassins scattered
with Gavrilo Prinsip looking for a spot of lunch. Subsequently,
the Archduke cut short his reception at the town hall
(39:56):
and decided to visit the policeman who had been injured
in the bomb attack on his car earlier that day.
During the journey, his car took a wrong turn and
stalled outside Schiller's cafe, where Prinship was now eating his sandwich,
a pistol handly tucked in his belt. The sandwich story
(40:16):
is a memorable detail, but it's likely a fiction. The
first mention of a sandwich eating assassin originated in a
two thousand and one novel Twelve Fingers by Joe Sorz.
From there it spread and has now moved into the
myth of that fateful day. Not only is the sandwich
(40:40):
detailer myth, but so is the idea that the origins
of World War I are the result of a single
person's actions outside a deli in Sarajevo. There were far
more complex factors.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
At work.
Speaker 14 (41:06):
After the assassination. Was not immediately clear to participants what
the broader significance was. They certainly didn't realize immediately that
a cataclysmic global conflict was about to ensue.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
After Franz Ferdinand's assassination, the Habsburgs and thus Austria Hungary
issued demands to Serbia called the July Ultimatum. Relations between
the two soured, and Serbia mobilized for war.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
The way in which this developed from a localized war
into a world war was not due to the Habsburgs themselves.
It was only possible because Europe was divided into a
series of grand alliances.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
The European alliances were complex and interconnected, so when Austria
Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilized in support of
it's ally Serbia But on the other side, Germany was
allied with Austria Hungary, so when Russia came to the table,
the Germans too mobilized for war. Add into the mix
(42:16):
the historical conflicts between many European powers, the global competition
for colonies, and the Anglo German naval arms race, and
one sees how this assassination pulled a small thread of
this complicated web and the world tumble towards war.
Speaker 14 (42:34):
The timing of the assassination was critical in a few respects,
because the international order was changing at that time. It
came at the most dangerous time in European politics.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
By November two, opposing alliances had solidified. The Ottomans, Germany,
and Austria Hungary formed the Central Powers. They were opposed
by the allied or Entente powers France and Russia, later
joined by Italy and Japan. Soon the conflict stretched across
(43:07):
the globe. The triggers for World War I were far
more complex than the embroidered tale of a hungry man
serendipitously stumbling across his assassination target. But sometimes myths endure
because they're a convenient and memorable shorthand for the more
(43:29):
complicated details of history. In fact, the First World War
in general proved fertile ground for myth making. Take our
picture of trench warfare soldiers spending months knee deep in
mud and being shelled or sniped at before making a
(43:51):
deadly rush across no man's land. Some of that picture
is correct, but the idea that troops spent long periods
of time in the trenches is another oversimplification. A soldier
might spend five days in a front line trench, then
fifteen or so days in a rear or support trench.
(44:12):
The rest of the month, about half the time would
be spent in the reserve, well back from the front,
training and resting up. If a soldier had served for
long enough, they might even get to go home on leave.
Long stints at the front were in fact a rarity.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Generally, what would happen would be troops would rotate in
and out of the front line trenches, and then the
rear trenches, and then well back. What they found out
early on in trench warfare was that the mental and
physical strain and the losses sustained by units if they
were left in the trenches too long, was too much
(44:51):
to bear. Units would typically spend a little bit that
less than fifty percent of their time in the trenches.
You know, it's a little bit more than fifty percent,
just depending on where they were.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
This is not to say that time at the front
was easy. The opposite is true. It was short because
it was difficult.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Trench warfare during the First World War was not a
pretty picture. It was a pretty awful place to be
a lot of the time. I guess picture of subterranean
world where men are living in trenches roughly eight feet deep.
Men are huddled in there trying to stay out of
the way of the bombs and the bullets. During the
(45:40):
wet season, it could be absolutely appalling. The places were
just turned to a morass and the trenches would be
just full of mud.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
About ten percent of soldiers were killed and another fifteen
percent wounded, Although it is hard to be precise. The
violence and sheer length of the war was rise to
the Empires who had started it. Both sides had thought
the war would be quick and decisive. Their miscalculation is
(46:08):
one of history's greatest tragedies.
Speaker 4 (46:11):
Other Germans were unable to win the war, and the
projected six weeks British, the French the Belgians combined to
block their moves, and when that style mate said in,
both sides couldn't advance without taking really heavy casualties, so
both sides dug in.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
The result was four years of brutal conflict. The war
only came to a close when the Allied Powers, assisted
by the US entering the war in nineteen seventeen, gradually
gained the upper hand. Realizing they had lost, the Central
Powers agreed to an armistice. On June the twenty eighth,
(46:52):
nineteen nineteen, exactly five years after Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, Germany
and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles. The
other Central Powers signed separate treaties. The peace settlements broke
up the last of the Great European Empires. Histories, great
(47:19):
wars and conflicts have changed the world. They've redrawn the map,
invented new technologies and ever more devastating ways of killing
one another. Sometimes individual figures become larger than life heroes
or villains on the world stage, and stories of epic
(47:40):
battles become legends told and retold throughout the ages.
Speaker 10 (47:44):
All of these stories they continue to be powerful because
they tell us important things, not just about the world
around us, but about ourselves, about who we want to be,
about who we know, in our heart of hearts we
really are, about that which we want and that which
we fear. All of these stories help us to understand
(48:05):
our place in the world.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
While the oversimplification of world events can make things easier
to comprehend, it remains one of the great tragedies of
humanity that we don't appear to be able to resolve
our differences without resorting to conflict, reminding us that the
myths and legends of war echo throughout millennia.
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