Futility Closet - 117-The Road to En-dor

Episode Date: August 15, 2016

In 1917 a pair of Allied officers combined a homemade Ouija board, audacity, and imagination to hoax their way out of a remote prison camp in the mountains of Turkey. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the remarkable escape of Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, which one observer called “the most colossal fake of modern times.” We'll also consider a cactus' role in World War II and puzzle over a cigar-smoking butler. Intro: A 1962 writer to the London Times contends that all thrushes "sooner or later sing the tune of the first subject of Mozart's G minor Symphony." The U.S. Senate maintains a tradition of hiding candy in a desk on the chamber floor. Sources for our feature on the Yozgad escape: E.H. Jones, The Road to En-dor, 1919. Tony Craven Walker's En-dor Unveiled (2014) (PDF) is a valuable source of background information, with descriptions of Harry Jones' early life; the siege of Kut-el-Amara, where he was captured; his punishing trek across Syria; the prison camp; and his life after the war. It includes many letters and postcards, including some hinting at his efforts toward an escape. S.P. MacKenzie, "The Ethics of Escape: British Officer POWs in the First World War," War in History 15:1 (January 2008), 1-16. "A Note for Spiritualists," The Field, March 27, 1920, 457. "Jones, Elias Henry," Dictionary of Welsh Biography (accessed 07/30/2016). "En-dor," in Rudyard Kipling's Verse, 1919. Listener mail: Associated Press, "Japanese Submarine Attack in California Unnerved U.S.," Feb. 23, 1992. William Scheck, "Japanese Submarine Commander Kozo Nishino Gained Personal Satisfaction From Shelling the California Coast," World War II 13:2 (July 1998), 16. Wikipedia, "Bombardment of Ellwood" (accessed Aug. 12, 2016). California Military Museum, "The Shelling of Ellwood" (accessed Aug. 12, 2016). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was adapted from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1998 book Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from thrushes singing Mozart to candy in the Senate. This is episode 117. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1917, a pair of allied officers combined a homemade Ouija board, audacity, and imagination to hoax their way out of a remote prison camp in the mountains of Turkey. In today's show, we'll describe the

remarkable escape of Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, which one observer called the most colossal fake of modern times. We'll also consider a cactus's role in World War II and puzzle over a cigar-smoking butler. Just a note, I've been trying to make this show accessible on as many platforms as I can. You can now find us on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn Radio, and YouTube, on our own website and on Boing Boing, and I'm posting each new episode to Facebook and Twitter, hopefully now with streaming players. If I've left out any platforms that you prefer, please let me know at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Thanks. Okay, this is a good one. Harry Jones was a Welshman, born in 1883. He was posted to Burma as a soldier

originally, but when World War I broke out, he worked his way western and was eventually captured in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq, and marched 2,000 miles across Syria to a POW camp in Turkey called Yazgad, which is extremely remote, where he was kept for about two years with a lot of other British POWs. In February 1917, he received a rather innocent postcard from his aunt back in Wales, suggesting that they maybe use a Ouija board to entertain themselves and while away the time. And not having much else to do, they decided to try this. They didn't have a proper Ouija board, but they cut out squares of paper and wrote letters on them

and placed them around the edge of a table and put a tumbler in the middle. At first, nothing at all happened or nothing that seemed to make any sense, and finally, out of boredom and, I think, a sense of mischief, Jones started surreptitiously taking control of the tumbler and spelling out messages by a spirit that he called Sally, and was shocked to find out how easily he could persuade other people that something was really going on here. So he did this just to amuse himself for a while, but eventually the camp interpreter, a man named Moyse, started asking about this. He just expressed an interest in these seances they were holding. Everyone hated Moyse. He was apparently, by Jones' description, a kind of small, grasping, craven man. They hated him mostly because he robbed their parcels that they got from the outside world.

But he'd heard of these seances and expressed some interest in it. So Jones, just mostly just to mess with this guy, invited him to tea and told his friends, look, I won't even attend the tea, I won't be there, but just tell him that I'm really strong in the occult when he gets there. And this they did. They told him that Jones had once been taken prisoner by headhunters who had tortured him, but he'd been saved by a witch doctor who had recognized in him a brother craftsman in these dark arts, and the two of them had taught one another. When the witch doctor died, Jones became chief of the tribe, and then eventually he returned to civilization. Moyes, who was apparently incredibly gullible, accepted all of this and left a list of questions

that he hoped that the spirit world could answer for him. When they looked at the questions, they were basically about these civilian women who were kept in another part of the camp. Apparently, he was just trying to get information so he could hit on these women. So they came up with some plausible answers for him to these questions, and he seemed to accept these. He wasn't a strong believer at the time, but he just got more and more interested in these seances, and they strung him along as best they could. And they found that he would just tend to carelessly give things away at the time. So it just became increasingly intriguing to Jones that this might lead somewhere. They might be able to

turn this to some account. On May 6th, 1917, to everyone's surprise, an order was posted in the camp forbidding prisoners to communicate in their letters to England, quote, news obtained by officers in a spiritistic state, which meant that the Turks, not just Moyes, but the commandant of the whole camp was a believer and was worried that if they were actually communing with the spirit world, this might lead to some trouble. In fact, Moyes told Jones later that he didn't think it could. He told the commandant that these experiments were only of scientific value, but the commandant was actually worried enough to post a message saying that they shouldn't, you know, use this to cause harm or just interfere with the rules there.

While they were puzzling over this, the prisoners found buried on the grounds of the camp an old revolver that had evidently been left by an Armenian prisoner. This region of Turkey was inhabited originally by Armenians, and when the war broke out, Armenia sided with Russia and Turkey with Germany, so they became enemies. And in fact, eventually the Armenians were all massacred there. And occasionally they would just find remnants that the Armenians had left behind in the camp. The revolver was in terrible shape and was no use as a weapon, but they just kept it as a curiosity. And shortly after this happened, Moyse, the interpreter, asked Jones one day whether the spirit could find a buried treasure.

Jones had no idea what to make of this and said yes immediately, of course. And so they decided to use this to mess some more with Moyse. So they reburied this revolver surreptitiously and then arranged for a seance with Moyse and purported to reveal the location of some buried treasure and just pointed to where they buried the revolver. When they turned with the revolver, Jones

was, pretended to be so thunderstruck at this that he fainted, and the Turks dug and found nothing more, and Jones explained to them afterwards that they were not to dig, that that wasn't for them to do. They'd now spoiled everything and they wouldn't find the rest of the treasure that had been there. And Moyes said, we shall dig no more without orders. So increasingly it seemed like there ought to be some way to use this perhaps to engineer some escape from the camp,

although they couldn't see yet how that might be done. This would be an extraordinarily difficult camp to escape from. It was said that escape from any prison camp in Turkey was difficult, but from Yozgat, this camp, it was regarded as practically impossible. It wasn't that it was closely guarded. It was that if you got out of the camp, you were facing 350 miles of mountain, rock, and desert in every direction that was uninhabited except by the occasional brigand, so it would just be almost impossible to get out of there. Also, if you did manage to escape, the custom was that they would punish the prisoners who remained behind in the camp, and he didn't want that to happen. So Jones wrote, my plan was to make the Turkish authorities at Yazgad my unconscious accomplices. I intended to implicate

the highest Turkish authority in the place in my escape to obtain clear and convincing proof that he was implicated and to leave that proof in the hands of my fellow prisoners before I disappeared. So if he did manage to escape and the commandant started to punish the remaining prisoners, they could produce this proof that he was implicated somehow and he would leave them alone. That's what he hoped to accomplish. Jones was still puzzling over what had happened, why Moyes had been interested in whether the spirit world could help them find buried treasure when he got an answer. The commandant summoned him and told him that there had been a story abroad that one of these massacred Armenians who had formerly lived there had been wealthy and had buried all his gold when he realized that a massacre was coming. And they'd always been looking for some way to find

out where this gold was buried. And now he realized, being a believer now, that they might be able to enlist the spirit world to help them finally discover it. And Jones thought, this is it. This is how maybe we can find a way out of here, although we still couldn't see quite how to do it. He knew he couldn't do it himself. He wanted a companion, and he chose C.W. Hill, who was an Australian flying officer, for a companion. Hill was an Australian pilot in the very early days of military aviation. And they ginned up the reputation that he was an expert in telepathy. They said he'd learned this in Australia, or apparently they know telepathy. Which is common. They teach it in school, right? Yeah. And they performed this at a prisoner's entertainment just to sort of show that he did have these magic powers. And at a seance,

Moyse read a description of this purported Armenian treasure and asked for the spirit world's help in finding it. And the spirit they were talking to, which became known as the spook, indicated Hill as the best medium in the camp. And Hill pretended to drag his feet and not be interested in doing it, but they gradually talked him into it, and he agreed. So now we have Jones, who's an expert in the occult, and Hill, who's apparently also telepathic, and together they can use their powers to help the Turks find this hidden treasure. The first step was to get themselves isolated from the other prisoners, they said, so they could just work full-time on this treasure-finding project. So they got themselves arrested on charges of obtaining and sending military information by

means of telepathy and were sentenced to solitary confinement just in a separate house in the camp. What they did there was not at all work on finding the treasure, but studying the Armenian language and burying two documents in little tins, four-inch long tins. Into each of them, they put a document with Armenian writing on it and a Turkish gold sovereign in a small teen case, and then Hill went out skiing. They would let you go out, because this was in such a wilderness, on snowy weather, they would let you just go out skiing sometimes. And Hill, on one of these trips, buried two of these tins a few miles apart outside the camp at just arbitrarily chosen points.

Now, at a seance, they were still holding these regular seances with the Ouija board, and Moise would attend these. And one of these, they introduced the spirit of this dead Armenian, the wealthy one who had buried his gold. They never did reveal his name. The Ouija board called him O-O-O, but they called him the one whose wealth you seek. And the spook told Moise, before Turkey declared war, O-O-O began to bury his gold. So the story about the buried Armenian gold, it said, was true. And it told the following story.

The Armenian knew that a massacre was coming and wanted to protect his gold, so he buried it. But he didn't—if he were just killed himself, the gold would be lost forever. So the question was how to preserve the location of the gold. He didn't want to tell his own relations for fear that they would be captured and tortured into giving up the location. So what he did, the spook said, was this. He prepared three tins into each of which he put a Turkish gold sovereign and a written clue in Armenian. And these were buried at three different locations around the camp. And then he told the location of one of these tins to each of three people. So he said, if I'm killed, find the, to each of them, he said, the three of you get together,

each of you dig up the tin that you know about, and that'll give you these three clues that you can put together to look up the location, to uncover the location of the actual gold that I've buried all in one place. Does that make sense? Yes. It's all very dramatic. I get it. This was so dramatic, in fact, that as the spook was telling this over the Ouija board, Moise kept saying, Mon Dieu, over and over again.

And so Jones told him, Now you've ruined it. Now they can't, because you've invoked the name of the deity, they can't tell us the actual names of these people who have the three clues. But they were able to go ahead any way with it. The spook said that their best chance of finding the treasure had been to win the actual support

of this purported dead Armenian man who had buried the gold. But the spook said that Moyes had spoiled that by his ignorance of Armenian, and so now OOO was in active opposition trying to prevent them from finding the gold. They used the Ouija board left and right just to roundly abuse Moyes at every opportunity just for fun. It sounds like he was just willing to believe just about anything they said to him. Apparently, he was just incredibly gullible, just credulous. So basically, what the Turks want to do, they're out to find this gold, and that means they need to find these three people, each of whom has the location of one of these buried tins. Right.

It turns out, the spook says, that two of these three were dead, but that's not a problem because the spook could go out in the other world and find these spirits who would be willing to help them find the locations of those two. The third, it said, was still alive, and because they didn't know the name, they just had the murky information that it was probably a businessman living somewhere in Constantinople, and they would just have to address that later on.

But the first task was to enlist the two that they knew of that were dead and in the spirit world, which they did. They held a seance and purported to find the first of these spirits who knew the location of one of the three buried tins. And so on March 31st, after one of these seances, Jones pretended to go into a trance and wandered out of the camp to the location of one of these tins that Hill had buried earlier on, and pointed to the ground and the Turks started digging up to see if they could find this tin.

While they were digging, Hill, who was there, was just standing idly by and surreptitiously took a photograph of them digging, which gave them what they needed as the sort of insurance. So now if they did, Hill and Jones did manage to escape. They could leave the negatives of the Turks digging with their friends. So if the Turks, angry at the escape, came after the prisoners and wanted to punish them as a reprisal, they could say, look, we have a picture of you colluding with prisoners to enrich yourself instead of properly running the prison camp. Leave us alone. So that's what they wanted to sort of protect their friends from any

consequence of their escaping. Anyway, the Turks, after digging for a while, turned up a tin can about four inches long, which was somewhat rusted, and when they opened it excitedly, they found that it contained a Turkish gold sovereign and a note in Armenian characters, which they couldn't read, but it was obviously the first clue. purported to find the second spirit who told them yet another location jones went into a trance this was four miles away this one but just walked to the location of the second tin that hill had buried dug that up and that was largely the same another written clue so two of the three written clues were now found and the turks were mad with greed they were just one clue away from finding this treasure which the spirit promised them was 28 000000 pounds. It's a lot of gold. Jones wrote, the Turks were now entirely in our hands. They managed to get the negative of the Turks digging to the other prisoners, so that part of the plan is all in place. They still don't

quite know how they're going to cash all this into an actual escape, but their plan is that they can use all the accumulated progress so far to find some way to get out of the camp and possibly fake madness in hopes of being exchanged or getting a compassionate release. Normally, they couldn't probably pull that off. But with the help of the commandant and with Moyes and the Turks in general, they think they could probably convince Turkey officially to just, if they could just prove themselves to be just wretchedly insane, they would just finally be exchanged out and allowed to go home. That was what they hoped to pull off. So now they're having seances night and day trying to find the location

of this third clue. The spook helped the Turks to translate the first two messages that they discovered. The first clue included the words south and west, and the second was somewhat indistinct and said that they'd require a compass, which the Turks agreed to get, but it basically wasn't enough. They had the two clues together weren't nearly enough to find the clue. They had to find the third one. Hill, who was supposed to be telepathic, tried to get in touch with this third man who was living in Constantinople, but whose name they didn't know. But it turns out that telepathy is based on distance, and it's very hard to connect with someone who's all the way over in Constantinople. Plus, 000, the angry Armenian whose gold they were trying to steal,

was actively trying to block his efforts, and in fact had enlisted the aid of the ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte, which made it even harder. So Hill said, I'm sorry, I can't make a connection here. I can't read this man's mind at this great distance. I'm afraid we're just going to have to stop here. And the Turks said, no, no, we must find a way to transfer you into Constantinople and come up with some pretext to get you there. And Hill and Jones said, no, no, we can't do that. It's far too risky. We belong here with our friends. It would just look too strange to get out of here.

The spook through the Ouija board actively pressed them to actually transfer him to Constantinople. In fact, eventually they let themselves be persuaded to do this. The way they arranged, the pretext they arranged to get themselves transferred to Constantinople was to feign madness. They were still in solitary confinement, but one of their friends' fellow prisoners was a doctor who gave them coaching on how to fake a nervous breakdown. They starved themselves.

They let their hair grow out. They stopped shaving and just generally looked terrible. The thinking here was that they both, everyone wanted to get them to Constantinople,

but for different reasons. They wanted to get there in hopes of just getting it admitted to a hospital and diagnosed as insane so they could be just shipped back to England. The Turks wanted them to get to Constantinople so they could read the mind of this Constantinople businessman and get the third clue that they needed to find the treasure. The spook suggested that they go to a quiet place on the Mediterranean

coast, basically near Constantinople, where they could read this businessman's mind. They never found his name. The Ouija board just called him AAA. The spook proposed that once they got there, they could use this special magic, extremely powerful psychic technique called the four cardinal point receiver, which is better even than telepathy or Ouija boards because it could receive any thought, not just those of people whom one knows exists.

So it said, not only this treasure, but all treasures and all knowledge will be revealed. In other words, they won't just get the 28,000 pounds in gold, but they'll get all the undiscovered treasure from the Greek, Roman, and Persian civilization. So the Turks are just beside themselves with greed now. It seems all they have to do is just convince the camp doctors to diagnose Jones and Hill as being mad enough to deserve being sent to Constantinople. And in fact, it turns out that that's what happened. They were able, with everyone's efforts, to get those doctors to agree that they were in bad enough shape that they should be sent to a hospital there. And that's

what was ordered. On April 26th, they departed and traveled 120 miles to Ankara. Moyes accompanied them, hoping to read the mind of the third man in Constantinople. The journey took three days, during which they were feigning madness all the time. In fact, they feigned hanging at one point on the second day. And Moyes dutifully recorded all the evidences of their lunacy, which were edited by the spook. They were making the best record they could, the most convincing case that they were actually insane, so they could convince a hospital in Constantinople to accept them when they arrived. As the train neared Constantinople, Jones and Hill started to fall into a trance, and Moyse realized they were reading the minds of AAA, this Constantinople businessman who had the third clue. And they learned finally that the third clue

was buried in the rich Armenian's old garden back in Yazgat, the prison camp, five paces from the southern corner and two paces out from the wall. Moyse got very excited at this. He expected to eventually inherit even more treasure, but this was still 28,000 pounds that he'd get immediately, and it was this third clue that they'd been struggling to find all this time. Further, the spook, in the same seance, gave a long speech preparing him to run the world. It said you have the judgment and temperament and intelligence to basically run the whole planet now. So in addition to being unthinkably wealthy, you'll also be unthinkably powerful.

It said, the details will be revealed to you in time. In the meantime, he must walk humbly, do justly, live a righteous and austere life. And he's profoundly moved at this, as anyone would be, I guess. They finally arrived at the Constantinople Hospital where they were deemed insane with all this strong evidence. And the task for Jones and Hill was now just to keep

up the pretense of being insane until the exchange steamer could come and they would just be sent off to England. The Turks weren't thinking about this. They were just thinking about gold and hadn't apparently realized that this was even a possibility, that they might just be sent away. And they spent actually Hill and Jones six months in the mad wards of Hyder Pasha Hotel in Constantinople, which was pure hell by Jones' telling. It's very hard to keep up the consistent pretense that you're crazy for six months. Jones feigned just sort of a general florid craziness.

Hill feigned religious melancholia. In those six months, he read the Bible seven times over and lost five stone. They said it was just awful moise while they were being crazy returned to the camp and returned with some bad news it turned out he he discovered that one of the other prisoners had dug up the tin before he could get there and lost the third clue in fact this was a man named price another prisoner that they had just coached they said oh i see if moise comes back tell him you dug it up and lost it and so moise turned the camp upside down looking for it

and never found the third clue. So they never did find this purported Armenian treasure, which actually didn't exist. But the last development here was just fell right into the laps and was perfect. Shortly after they had left, the prisoners had staged another big escape from Yazgad and were caught.

But in defending themselves, they followed the plan and revealed one of the negatives of the Turks digging for the gold and gave that to But in defending themselves, they followed the plan and revealed one of the negatives of the Turks digging for the gold and gave that to the Commandant Superior who court-martialed him. So with that now, the case, the whole treasure hunt project has to be shelved

because he's in too deep trouble even to pursue it. And so between that and the fact that the mediums say they're just exhausted, Jones and Hill, they say they'll leave. They're going to spend a holiday in England and then return afterward to fulfill all these promises. And until then, Moyse must be honest, live austerely, and do his duty. This was his training for the glorious future that awaited him.

And the spook told him not to come back to the hospital, just live a good life until we can come back and fulfill all these promises. And that's the last Jones ever saw of him. They just watched him walk out of the hospital expecting to be ruler of the world. In October 1918, Jones and Hill left Smyrna on a Red Cross exchange ship where they recovered miraculously from their madness as soon as the ship left Turkish waters. They arrived in England on December 8, 1918, three and a half years after Jones had joined up in Burma. And ironically, the armistice with Turkey had just been signed, so after all

of this drama, they only gained an extra two weeks of freedom from it. If they had just stayed back in the camp and just waited for events to transpire, they would have been released at almost the same time anyway, but they couldn't have known then. Jones never went back to Turkey. He received three sad and rather unfortunate letters from Moyse

in the subsequent years, just asking him, hey, remember me? I was going to be ruler of the world when were you going to pick that up again Jones and Hill remained close friends ever afterward though they went

separate ways Jones went back to Burma and Hill to the Royal Air Force Jones wrote a book about all this called The Road to Endor

in 1919 while he was recovering on military sick leave after the war it was an instant bestseller he said his aim in writing the book was both just to tell

the entertaining story but also to deplore spiritualism, which had risen up in the cataclysm of the Great War. A lot of people lost loved ones and were preyed upon by people who pretended to have spiritual talents. And he wanted to speak out against that, having sort of experienced that himself. It's based on a poem by, the title comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, who had lost a son of his own in the war. In the preface, Jones wrote, the book is simply an account of how Lieutenant Hill and I got back to England. The events described took place between February 1917 and October 1918. The incidents may seem strange or even preposterous to the reader, but I venture to remind him that

they are known to many of our fellow prisoners of war whose names are given in the text and at whose friendly instigation this book has been written. And in fact, Hill himself wrote another book corroborating a lot of this later on, and other people, other prisoners involved said that all that actually really did happen, amazing as it sounds. The book has since gone down in the annals as one of the best prison, wartime prison escape stories in history. In fact, the 1955 edition carried a foreword by Eric Williams, who was the architect of the Adventure of the Wooden Horse that we talked about in episode 54. Williams wrote in that foreword, for sheer ingenuity, persistence, and skill, the account you are about to read is second to none. If you've been enjoying Futility Closet and learning clever ways to break out of foreign prisons, and really, in how many places are you going to learn that,

then please consider becoming a patron to help support our show. We put a lot of work into each episode, and we just wouldn't be able to keep doing it without the support of our wonderful listeners. If you'd like to make a one-time donation to help us out, Thank you. and learn what's going on behind the scenes of the show, including what Sasha, our show mascot, likes to do besides trying to interrupt our recording. You can check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link at the website. And thanks again to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. We really wouldn't be able to keep doing this without you. So now we go from World War I to World War II. We had covered some attempted

attacks on the US mainland by Japan during the Second World War in episodes 111 and 114. Peter O'Malley wrote and said, I'm sure the War Balloons episode brought out all the World War II buffs in your audience, and I apologize for adding to the clamor, but now that I finally caught up with all the podcasts, I feel compelled to add one more example of an attack on the American mainland. Apparently, at some point during the war, a Japanese submarine shelled the oil fields or refinery at Elwood Beach, California, which is just north of Santa Barbara. I went to grad school at UC Santa Barbara and stumbled across this fact, but didn't realize there were more, albeit different, Japanese attacks on the continental

U.S. until you covered it. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Peter. And this did indeed happen. On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine under the command of Commander Kozo Nishino shelled an oil field on Elwood Beach in California. A number of shells were fired, with the apparent target being the oil refinery there, but the Japanese weren't able to score any direct hits on it. A few shells landed in the vicinity, causing some minor damage, and others landed some distance away, landing on ranches or disrupting dinner at an inn that was suddenly subjected to nearby mysterious explosions. That would take some investigating. Many of the shells actually just simply landed in the ocean. But still, this was the first enemy attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812. And coming just a couple of months after the

attack on Pearl Harbor, it helped fuel the fears that Japan might wage war along the western coast of the U.S. Just four days prior to this attack, President Roosevelt had authorized forcibly relocating over 100,000 Japanese Americans who had been living on the Pacific coast to internment camps in the interior of the country. And various sources suggest that the shelling at Elwood hastened that program being carried out. Pretty much it just unnerved everybody more than anything else. Yeah, I would think.

One of the most amusing pieces of trivia about the event was the apparent motivation for the specific target that Nishino chose for his attack. In the late 1930s, Nishino had been commander of a Japanese tanker that had been contracted to buy oil from a refinery at Elwood. Nishino had gone ashore accompanied by his officers for a welcoming ceremony and had lost his footing on a slippery path. He fell into a patch of cactus and by at least some accounts had had to have cactus spines plucked from his behind. at least some accounts had had to have cactus spines plucked from his behind. Nisino was a very formal man and had felt mortified by the mishap, especially by the loud laughter of the oil workers who had witnessed it. And so he was apparently trying to get his revenge a few years later in 1942 by bombing the site of where he had felt so embarrassed.

The website for the California State Military Museum has a quote from a 1982 issue of Parade magazine that says, the first Japanese attack on the U.S. mainland in 1942 was triggered by cactus spines in the rear end of a Japanese naval captain. I wonder how he felt about that afterward, if he felt like he got his revenge. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I don't know.

I don't know. You know, he probably didn't know what how much damage he had or hadn't done. So I suppose I'm sure he went back and, you know, told everybody it had been a great success. He bombed them all. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. And if you have any questions or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if your name isn't pronounced exactly like it looks, please let me know that. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I am going to give him an interesting sounding situation, and he has to try to figure out what's actually going on by asking only yes or no questions.

he has to try to figure out what's actually going on by asking only yes or no questions. I adapted this puzzle from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1998 Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Why did Winston Churchill have his butler answer the door smoking one of Churchill's best cigars? Wow, is this true? They present it as though it's true, but I was unable to confirm it. So if anybody else can verify it, I'd love to hear it. I like the setup.

Okay, was the intent that whoever was at the door would mistake the butler for Churchill? No. No. Really? Okay, did this really happen? You don't know. Does it matter where this happened? No, at Churchill's house. Does it matter where this happened? No. Does it matter? At Winston Churchill's house.

I mean. Does it matter specifically who was at the door, obviously? Specifically who was at the door? Yeah. I mean, is there some backstory I need to unearth about how the situation came about and what significance the cigar would have? I don't need to know that. I'm not sure what you're asking.

I'm sorry. Do you know specifically who was at the door, the identity of the person? The specific identity? No, no, no. Okay. So there's just someone at the you know specifically who is at the door, the identity of the person? The specific identity? No, no, no. Okay, so there's just someone at the door. There's someone at the door. And he asked the butler to answer the door smoking one of his cigars. Yes.

But not to deceive the person into thinking that he's Churchill. Do I need to know what Churchill himself is doing at this time? Not really. Okay, so the butler does answer the door smoking the cigar? Yes. And someone is there who sees him smoking the cigar? Yes. And that has some effect?

I'll say yes, I suppose. That Churchill intended? Yes. So this all went off sort of as he expected? Yes. Are there other people involved besides the person at the door, the butler, and Churchill? No. I like this puzzle um

okay how do you even solve something like this do we need to know what happened after this uh not really so i must need to know what happens why would you answer the door smoking a cigar yeah why would churchill want to have the butler answer the door smoking a cigar? Yeah, why would Churchill want to have the butler answer the door smoking one of Churchill's cigars? Does it matter that it's one of Churchill's cigars? Yes. It's not just that the butler was smoking a cigar. Correct. Smoking one of Churchill's best cigars.

Wow. Okay. Okay. Did he mean to incriminate the butler somehow to make it seem as though he was illicitly smoking Churchill's cigars? I'll say possibly yes, if I understand you on that one. Well, that he wanted the person who was there at the door to think the butler was doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Yes. Yes. That is true. Was this meant to deceive the person into thinking that Churchill wasn't at home?

Yes. I hope this is true. I hope it's true too. But yeah, that's the answer is that there was a notorious boar at the door and Churchill wanted the butler to say that Churchill wasn't home and have the person believe him. So he figured if the butler was smoking one of Churchill's best cigars, the guy would think, well, he's not going to do that if Churchill's home.

That's clever. And it sort of sounds like something Churchill might do. Yes. So if anybody does know if that's true, please let us know. And if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's it for today's show. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon, or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample more

than 9,000 frappant bagatelles. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, either with a one-time donation or through an ongoing pledge, please see the Support Us page of the website. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review on iTunes or other podcast directories. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.