Short Stuff: The Ritchie Boys
2024-07-24 00:14:49
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Well, Bowen, the Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing. that's happening in the future, when it's happening in the present. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings, is a phenomenon. Two Guys, Five Rings, Matt Bowen and the Olympics.
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Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and this is Short Stuff,
the greatest generation of podcasts. Caught me a mid-laugh from a pre-recording joke from Josh. Thanks. For my nears. Yep.
And Jerry's too. That's right. But she's not laughing. No, she's not. She's sulking.
All right. Shall we talk about the Ritchie Boys? Yeah, that.
was a great way to put it, because this is a World War II era story about a generally overlooked group that I was like, I've heard of these guys before. And then 60 Minutes was mentioned. I was like, that's what it was. I saw a really cool segment on the Ritchie Boys. There were 20,000, roughly, intelligence officers who were trained in the United States, who may or may not have been born in the United States and were trained in counterintelligence, aerial photo analysis, all sorts of stuff that you would need to basically run an intelligence operation, which the U.S.
badly needed at the outset of World War II because we didn't really.
have a good amount of that. Yeah, that's true. You mentioned some American born. About 60% were American born, which did include some Native American soldiers. The rest were,
it's a pretty incredible story. They were refugees a lot of times. A lot of times they were Jewish people from Germany, refugees. I think about 2,800 of which were, of that, 20,000 that they got out just before. or maybe they somehow got lucky and were granted the right to leave.
People who may have lost their entire families in Nazi death camps. They came to the United, sometimes Japanese citizens whose family were in internment camps. They signed up for the U.S. Army.
to help defeat those Nazis. Yeah, they were in American internment camps and still volunteered for the Army. That's really something. Also, Ritchie girls, right? Yeah, there were WACs, Women's Auxiliary Corps is what WAC stood for, but they were called WACs.
Just. basically, anybody you could think of who had any kind of specialty that made them kind of international to some degree was probably recruited to do the eight-week program at Camp Ritchie, which was a little, it started out, I guess, a National Guard camp in Maryland that the Army took over. National Guard had zero say in that. They turned it into this highly secretive intelligence training camp. It's exactly the kind of place that a movie is made about.
Yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't been. I'm sure it's in the works somewhere.
I believe so. It's Guy Ritchie's, The Ritchie Boys, a film by Guy Ritchie, coming soon.
Like you said, it was an eight-week program. After that eight-week program at Ritchie, they were sent to England to get some more advanced intelligence training going, basically. They were in supposedly every battle, every branch, and every unit that we had in World War II. They spread them out. None other than J.D.
Salinger was a Ritchie boy, among some other notable people. A lot of these people spoke foreign languages or were even taught foreign languages, and that was one of the big benefits of the Ritchie boys, is they could get in there for an interrogation. They knew the local cultures. They could bond with someone, say, hey, let's have a cigarette and talk about the local soccer team, or football, or whatever they would say. Before you know it, they're getting more information than they would.
by tying someone to a chair and beating them. Right. They were also valued, like in the case of J.D. Salinger, because some of them could really spot a phony a mile away, so they could suss out spies in their own ranks. Good one.
There are a few other things that they learned, a lot of other things, actually. Like I said, aerial photo analysis, which is handy if you're a pilot, or if you were in touch with pilots and wanted to tell pilots what to go bomb, or how to find things that were camouflaged pretty well, like how to spot, I don't know, a plane that was under some of that cool 3D camouflage netting. You would learn that at Camp Ritchie. if you wanted to learn how to kill a person with your bare hands. There was a former wrestler who trained people to do that.
at Camp Ritchie. They learned, again, anything that you can imagine in a World War II training movie montage, this actually went on at Camp Ritchie.
Yeah. It seems like intelligence was one of the big focuses. I think in the end, they got about 60% of all actionable battlefield intelligence came from the Ritchie boys and girls, and that's what they were called, by the way. The Red Book, aka the Order of Battle of the German Army, was a very big deal, and it was basically just an ongoing list of everything they could learn about the German Army. Anytime.
they would get documents or any kind of plans or anything, it would go into the Red Book, or they would, counterintelligence-wise, they would get this stuff. It was every unit that they had, who the leaders were, battles they had fought, how those went. It was just the master book called the Red Book.
I say we take a break, come back, and talk some more about the Ritchie boys.
Let's do it.
Well, Bowen, the Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing. that's happening in the future, when it's happening in the present. It's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings, is a phenomenon.
And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two Guys, Five Rings, Matt Bowen, and the Olympics. Who are we watching this? Olympic Games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles.
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It was like, oh, one of the Richie boys has come over for more training, that kind of thing.
Does that sound about right?
It does. And there were like specific, I mean, specific stories that emerged from this. Some of the ones that, like, really stand out are where, like you said, there were German Jewish men who fled the Holocaust, whose families were killed in the Holocaust, who arrived in America as German nationals, volunteered for the army, went to Cambridgeshire, and then went back to Europe to fight the Nazis.
Yeah, one of those guys' name was Ernst Kramer. He was 18 years old, and he was at Buchenwald, or Buchenwald, excuse me, and got out, was very lucky, got an affidavit for release to go to the United States, got here, and was like, sign me up, and was a very, you know, valuable Richie boy, I guess. He would write these pamphlets in German, urging German soldiers to surrender. And I believe he even set up a couple of newspapers that, you know, in these German cities that had been just wiped out and bombed out after the war was over.
Yeah, that was a big part of liberation was denazification. And to get the German people behind the process of denazification, you basically had to, I mean, one of the ways you did that was through the media. So they would set up independent newspapers in different towns that would be run by, you know, some of the Richie boys. That was a really important part of it. There was another one, a guy named David Akira Itami.
He's one of those people who himself, along with his family, was interned in a Japanese internment camp here in the United States, who volunteered to fight for the army. And he ended up going on to become the lead interpreter at the Japanese war crimes trials in Tokyo. Yeah, which was a really big deal.
Another big deal, you know, we mentioned the Richie girls, there were about 200 of those that were from the, you mentioned the WAC, the Women's Auxiliary Corps. There were also 22 women who were instructors at Camp Richie. And a couple of them, you know, were really, really notable. One's name was Sally Davis. She trained in the order of the battle, served with MacArthur.
And then a woman named Lillian Tombacker in Europe, was Eisenhower's Polish interpreter, his personal interpreter, and got a bronze star. Oh, yeah, that's pretty great. Yeah. Oh, bronze star.
The thing is, the Richie boys were largely, I don't know if it's secret, they were certainly secret during the war. But they weren't really well known until the mid 2000s. I think there was a German documentary in 2005, that really started to get people talking about them. So it's only fairly recently that they've started to kind of get commendations. In 2022, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum presented Richie boys that collectively with the Eli Wiesel award, which is their highest honor.
And I think in Congress, there's a law. No. What's the word? A bill. I had to, I had to really dig back to my schoolhouse.
rock. Yeah. Sitting on Capitol Hill that honors the Richie boys and awards all of them the Congressional Gold Medal. And it hasn't passed.
yet, strangely.
Yeah, well, 65 of them got silver stars, many, many bronze stars. But again, at the time, it was just like, this is just someone else from the unit. They weren't designated, as, you know, the special group. Right.
What else you got? I got nothing else. That's a quickie overview on.
what will surely be a movie. Yeah, for sure. Look for it. And also in the meantime, I'm sure you can find that 60 minute segment somewhere. It's definitely worth watching on the Richie boys.
Yeah. Get ready, Benedict Cumberbatch. You'll be leading the troops in England.
Yeah. Can you do your Benedict Cumberbatch talking about Richie boys coming along to be trained? No, I don't even know what he sounds like. Pretty much what you did earlier. Oh, okay.
He sounds like whatever you want him to sound like. That guy can do some pretty good dialect.
and accent. Yeah. Although I don't, his American accent and the Dr. Strange stuff is a little.
wacky. I like his movies, but. Oh yeah? No, no, no, no. Okay.
Well, since we started going way off script and talking about Benedict Cumberbatch, and since there's not even a script in the first.
place, I think short stuff is out.
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