Stuff You Should Know - What was Camp X?

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

In the early days of World War II, there was a secret training program in Canada that taught Allied saboteurs everything from espionage and bridge blowing to karate chops to the neck of an enemy. It was called Camp X and was so secret that not even the Canadian prime minister was aware of it prior to its formation. Learn all about this super cool camp in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Josh, my friend, if you are a listener of ours and you live in Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Austin, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Kansas, or right here in Atlanta, you can come see us on tour starting in August and finishing up in November.

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Not really. But you can find out all the information and all the deets at sysklive.com, our Squarespace live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rollins, Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. That's right, and, buddy, I am happy to be doing another Grabster article. Getting him back in the fold has been a true boon for this organization.

You should be doing it. You should be doing it. You should be doing it. You should be doing it. You should be doing it. You should be doing it for this organization. So much so, Chuck, I think that we should see if Noel can whip us up a little Grabster-themed music.

Oh, wow. So play when we do a Grabster article. What do you think? Yeah. Okay, we'll see. Grabster's in the metal. Maybe it can be metal-themed. Yeah, but Noel's into the Moog, so he'll just...

Yeah, maybe he'll be a weird mash-up of that. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this, and this is one, for those of you who don't know, we're talking about Ed Grabinowski, our favorite writers here, who hadn't been doing a lot of writing for us, and we specifically petitioned to get Ed writing again, and not even just that,

can we send Ed ideas specifically for this show that we think are great, because we know he will do right by them, and this is one of those, because someone wrote in, I wish I had the email, but someone wrote in suggesting Camp X, and I had never heard of it.

Yeah. Did a little research, and I was like, oh man, this is a Grabster article if I've ever heard one. I was gonna ask you where you heard of this, because I hadn't heard of it either. Listener mail or Facebook. It's pretty awesome. Whoever sent that suggestion and hats off to you,

thanks for it. Yes. So, Camp X, for those of you who haven't heard of it, hopefully we're not the only ones, right? Only ones who haven't heard of it? Right. It's pretty little known, I think, among general circles.

I think enthusiasts and war historians probably know more about it. Maybe reenactors. Yeah, sure, why not? Well, aside from those people, if you haven't heard of Camp X, don't feel bad, because it was meant to be that way. It was a secret camp.

It was basically a camp to train good guy terrorists in World War II. Good guy terrorists. Saboteurs. Saboteur, I like that word. Propagandists. Morse code operators, assassins. Basically the guys who went over as secret agents

and just messed up stuff in Europe and I believe Africa as well, North Africa, for the Allies during World War II. Yeah, and if there's one thing I learned through this article is even though I'm a liberal peacenik, if I would have been alive during that generation and had to go to war, I would totally have wanted to have been a saboteur.

Oh yeah. Like all the movie, like The Great Escape and Victory and all these great World War II movies I watched growing up, I was never about the frontline battles and some of those movies are okay, but man, you show me a movie about dudes sneaking around in the dead of night to blow up a bridge and I'm all over that.

Have you seen Fox Fire? The Clint Eastwood movie where it has to go steal a plane? Was it Firefox or Fox Fire? Fox Fire? Was it Firefox? I think it was Fox Fire and we're just being misled by the- The web browser?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do too. You either one. I saw that, it was a special plane, wasn't it? Yeah, and he had to go steal it. Yeah, and just bridge over the River Kwai, like I watched all dirty dozen, all those movies that were about small groups of soldiers

infiltrating quietly and wreaking havoc from the inside. Man, I love that. Big Red One? Oh yeah, that was my first R-rated movie. The Guns and Everone? Yes. Remember poor Mark Hamill's testicles get blown off in Big Red One by a grenade?

Well, I thought you were gonna say Mark Hamill's poor testicles, either way. They got blown off and Lee Marvin was like, you don't need these anymore and just tosses them away. Yeah, I remember, like I said, it was my first R-rated movie. I remember being in the movie theater at Toko Hills here in Atlanta and seeing those testicles being tossed out to him and I was horrified.

So anyway- Yeah, that got weird. Camp usually does. Camp X was a place where those people and those movies that you love may have been trained. It was quite literally a secret agent training camp. In World War II. And like the kind where, you know, now you look back

and you're like, yeah, that sounds like something from a James Bond novel or something like that. It actually is kind of the thing that inspired later fiction like James Bond. Sure. Like this is where it really happened. And it was in this little place in the middle of nowhere along Lake Ontario in Ontario, Canada,

about 30 miles over the lake from the United States. Should we get back in the wayback machine? Oh, we're going to go to Camp X? Maybe. Well, keep your head down because they use live fire. All right, here we go. All right, here we are. It's 1941 and the war is raging,

but the United States is not yet involved officially because, well, because we were the United States, we're kind of way over where we sit and positioned on the planet Earth and all the fighting was going on over there. So we were sort of isolated from that. And although President Roosevelt was like, man, we technically should be going over there

and helping out Britain battle the Nazis because they're not good guys. And we should probably join up, but there is pressure for us to remain over here and not get involved just yet. Yeah, well, there's a huge isolationist movement that joined with the peace movement that was basically like, no,

we remember World War I and how horrible that was. We need to stay out of this. Let that be a European war. That's right. Did you know there were actually elements from friendly countries? They're like Rawl Dahl, the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

And Ian Flaming, the guy who went on to write the James Bond novels. They were working as agents for the British government here in the US working to kind of propagandize against that isolationist movement to get the US to enter the war and help Britain out. Yeah, and in fact, you mentioned Bond earlier, we might as well go ahead and say that there were rumors

that Ian Flaming did actually go to Camp X to train even though those were, I think, completely unsubstantiated. Is that right? He probably visited and said hi because he was friends with one of the people in charge there. But he, and he definitely was in America at the time it was operating. So he probably went by there,

but he didn't train there as far as anyone knows. All right. So World War II was going on, even though they didn't call it that at the time. And which is something that got right in the New Wonder Woman movie, by the way. Man, that was one of the best superhero movies I've seen in a long time.

It was great. Yep. In pretty much every way. Yep. So World War II was raging. Roosevelt wants to get involved, but can't really officially do it. But he does know that, hey,

even though we're not officially involved, we probably need to kind of get unofficially involved and at least start gathering intelligence and start getting information going and kind of just do our pre-war due diligence, I guess you could say. Yeah. Like at the very least,

there were probably a lot of agents, not just from friendly nations working in the United States. So we should at least have an intelligence service that can battle those guys, if not assist with the war. Right, but that's a tough thing to get going from scratch, as Ed points out.

But there was a country, Great Britain, who was very experienced in this field from all their years, traveling the world is one way you could say it. But the friendliest way you can say it. Yeah, and they were really, really experienced with this and they had great intelligence operations. And they said, you know what, we'll come in

and we'll help you out, we'll get you going. Yeah, they did. And the US said, okay, but don't tell anybody because we're neutral, right? And they went, sure. Sure, so to facilitate this, I think at the time, they weren't necessarily sure where this was going,

but they wanted to form a partnership. So the British Security Coordination, which was an office of the Special Operations Executive, which is itself a branch of MI6, right? They set up an office, a secret office, at Rockefeller Center in New York. How awesome is that? It is, even on the plaque on the wall said

that it was British passport control, completely undercover British office that was meant to act as the liaison between the British secret operations and America's super secret operations that was so super secret, it shouldn't have even existed. And that office would later become Lorne Michael's office. Right.

At least in my mind. Do you Lorne Michael's impression? No. That's pretty good. So you've got 30 rock, you've got an outpost setup. They were kind of getting things going. And it was headed up at that time. Did you say William Stevenson?

No, not yet. He was a Canadian who actually served Britain as a fighter pilot in World War I, and he was the head of the BSC at the time. And he is roundly considered to have been the inspiration for James Bond. That guy was, he was the real deal. He drank martinis at lunch.

Yeah. And killed people with his bare hands. And like he was, he was the real deal. So he was the one who set up originally Camp X. And I think he had his fingers and a lot of other pots. And Ian Fleming actually did work directly beneath him, as did Raul Dahl. Oh, well, there you have it.

Aren't you just fascinated by the fact that the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a secret agent working in America in the 40s? It's great. And you know what? He wrote those children's books, but he also had an entire bookshelf full of kind of body, raunchy adult books that he had written.

It was great. Everyone just thinks of him as a kid's author, but he was much, much more. Well, it's like with Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange, also wrote children's books too. Yeah, well, that's disturbing. So Canada at this time,

well, and it still is, as Ed points out, it's Commonwealth and, or part of the Commonwealth. And they wanted to support Britain, but they also wanted to go to war as Canada and assert themselves and say, but we're Canada. We're going as Canada. So the Brits are like, all right, all right. Everybody calm down.

Fine, whatever. Let's just, let's just chill out here, right? How about we set up a secret camp in Canada to facilitate the training of Canadian and American secret agents? How about that? Yeah, and they said, how secret? And they said, so secret,

that Prime Minister McKinsey King is not aware. And then they just dropped their T and said, you've got us. And his monocle popped out. So yeah, the Prime Minister didn't even know about this thing until it was well underway because I think they were afraid he would say no, right? Yeah, but do you know how mad I would be as Prime Minister finding out after the fact?

Sure. I'd be like, guys, come on, it's me, McKinsey. You know me. Big Mac, don't you know me? So Stevenson said, let's pull the trigger on this. They got a businessman from Vancouver named A.J. Taylor. I love this. To buy 260 acres, they call them 105 hectares.

Yeah, in Canada. In Canada. Buy this land near Oshawa, Ontario for 12 grand under the name the Rural Realty Company comma LTD period. Yeah, which is British for ink. Oh, is it? Yeah, okay. It means the same thing.

Yeah, that's what I figured. So this land, one of the reasons it was selected was it was extremely remote. There were towns around it, but you could barely consider them towns. They were so small and sparsely populated. Then this place was in the middle of nowhere and near these middle and nowhere towns,

but it also had varied terrain. Like there's a swamp. The part that butted up against Lake Ontario was cliff-like and it actually kind of resembled some of the cliffs of France that would later be scaled during D-Day. Sure. There was open plains and fields.

There were woods. Basically everything you would need to train somebody to do some damage in Europe. Yeah, there was a pretty simple farmhouse. There was some storage facilities and then they added of course barracks, built some classrooms, and eventually we'll talk about the radio station there,

but they built a building to house this radio equipment that would be pretty key. KISS-104 FM. The sound of Oshawa. All right, so they get this place up and going, right? And again, the whole reason it's in Canada is because America is officially neutral and it's not supposed to be training secret agents

under the guidance of the British. That's just not supposed to be happening. And irony of ironies is that Camp X, which is not its official name, it had a number of different official names, which really kind of gets across just what a secret installation it was. It didn't have one official name.

But Camp X opened on December 6th, 1941. Wow. The next day, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941. That's nice. And right after that, the U.S. entered the war. And this guy who runs this website and has written a couple of books on Camp X,

I think it's the campxofficialsite.com, maybe. He points out that had the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier, Camp X never would have existed because they would have just built it in the U.S. Exactly. Because the U.S. entered the war. And in fact, there were plenty of other secret agent camps

that were built in the U.S., but they kept Camp X going, not just to train Americans, but also to train Canadians as well. Yeah, and so the people, like you said, no one officially called it Camp X. That name came from the local, what few local people were near there, just because it was so mysterious.

They called it Camp X, or they called it, quote, the secret military camp. Right. The people that were actually there, training called it the farm because of kind of the fields and the orchards everywhere. And the official designation was STS 103, Special Training School 103.

Right. And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had their own name for it too, which was S25-1-1. Man, this is getting good. The Canadian military called it Project J. Really? Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah, but don't you think that kind of like gets across that this was so secret that no one really knew what to call it? Yeah, it shall not be named. It's like, what's his face? Lovecraftian camp. Right.

Should we take a break? I think so. All right, we'll be back and we'll talk about what training was like, and I'll give you a hint. Rigorous. Many stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts all right Chuck so the training there if you went there and there's actually a discrepancy here between the Camp X site and what Ed is saying uh-oh what the Camp X official site is saying is that when you go there you're basically going into what amounts to basic secret agent training sure and you are you're trained in all these different ways and then if you don't wash out which is supposedly a tremendous percentage a very high percentage of the people who went in didn't make it through but if you if you made it through this training which is between three and ten weeks depending on who you ask um you would then go on to Britain to different finishing

schools depending on what you excel at during this generalized basic secret agent training right and then once you finished finishing school the British secret services would um design a secret mission based exclusively for you around your talents and then drop you behind enemy lines and you go do some crazy stuff it's pretty amazing right yeah so like they would say chap you've got a real neck for the bang bang so they would send them to bridge blowing up school exactly and then then you go blow up the bridge over the river quay man all right so regardless everyone went through some of the same basic things or maybe everyone at Camp X maybe it's so secret nobody knows for sure it's kind of the way it is uh but everyone would learn things like

kind of some basic i guess what i call it basic training but some basic things of saboteur 101 like how to read a map in a foreign language how to draw a map to lead someone to where you need to be um how to take a guy out with your bare hands how to fire a gun in the dark how to put together a gun in the dark and fire it in the dark using something that i'd never heard of called instinctive gun fighting yeah so that's where rather than saying like freeze bad guy and getting down on one knee and closing one eye and looking down the sights and shooting the guy pretty much yeah like the streets of san francisco or something right yeah you just you're running and shooting you're not even using the sights you just are are using

basically your hand as your guide yeah um and you're shooting people at a distance of at least 20 feet and like you said oftentimes in the dark and this may all come as part of the training after you've been dropped off in an abandoned farmhouse and told to find a bag of gun parts and put it together in the dark and come out shooting what was that deal and like 70s cop shows where they would hold their wrist to study their gun hand you wanted to steady your your shooting hand i know but i don't think that was i mean you steady it i kind of had to shoot a pistol it's i don't know if it was ever like that officially uh maybe it's to keep the recoil from throwing your aim off well i mean i think it's for all that but i don't know if that was

ever the proper way is what i'm saying oh i see it sounds like a specifically a tv thing yeah like erin spelling was like try this hold your hold your wrist that looks cool yeah do that from now on carl malden was like uh some of the other i mean this training there by all accounts you sent an article from a guy who was actually there it sounded like some of the most hardcore training you could go through yeah this guy named um andrew andy durovitch durovitch he was a canadian hungarian um guy who was actually in his 30s when he went through camp x training and he uh wrote a book about his experience and he he was a great source of a lot of um this information of what it was like to go train there but he was the guy who was saying that

you would um you would there were there was not only like daytime maneuvers there were nighttime maneuvers as well and while you were there you were basically training the entire time like you didn't if you had you know a class on um where to kick somebody in the testicles in one building and then you had another building an outbuilding where you went to go learn how to mess with plastic explosives you didn't walk from one building to the next building they gave you an assignment to get to the other building without being seen right uh by you know this guy who was trying to find you i think it was it was immersive yeah it was very very well put chuck fully immersive and apparently the whole thing started off the moment you got there with a welcome reception

yeah so they these guys uh this particular group that andy he went by andy daniels that he was with uh like you said were hungarians so they kind of had a little hungarian spread of food and they made him feel welcome had hungarian wine and they all got kind of drunk and they all just thought this was just like a nice thing they were doing but that was even part of the training because you had to be trained to be able to go undercover and drink with the the the enemy and still keep your wits right because and i read actually another account by andy durovich that after he went through camp x and was trained on a secret mission he was approached by some of the uh like a german intelligence officer who was working undercover i think in kyro and they were trying to drink

each other under the table to get them one another to reveal information and he said he ended up winning that battle he started some of the uh some of the um german intelligence officers comrades came and got him because he drank him literally under the table uh what are some of the things they would do they would say oh i don't know um go to the edge of a cliff and say all right you have to jump off of that into the water uh swim back to shore and climb back up from a rope and they get through doing all this and they get to the top and then they say do it again right like when they're at their most exhausted they would push these men and that they were only men uh being trained women did play a part which will get to but um yeah they

they would push them to their breaking point and then keep pushing them because they were doing they were doing things so important so covert there it was survival training yeah and i think the the impression i have also is that they were basically going on the concept of muscle memory where if you do something enough times it becomes second nature to you so they were drilling them and everything they taught them so that you you just did it automatically in any condition yeah you said they always use live ammo they also requested a very large see-through bullet proof um screen so they could just stand there and like fire bullets at these dudes i didn't get the point of this other than it was probably cool oh no i think the point is to to desensitize

you to having a gun pointed and shot at your face oh okay so you know what that feels like right but do you need to know what that feels like because if if you're standing there and somebody shoots you in the face you're probably going to be desensitized forever by that no no you know no i think of the point i think of the point is uh i don't know where that came from was it's just uh yeah just to like i mean have you ever had a gun pointed in your face well sure plenty of times but it was never fired i think i think the point is just to make them steely their nerves like a made of steel now i got it and the dude who uh who wrote the camp x official site book he basically said the reason why they were using live fire was like you you knew

that they weren't going to shoot you but there was a possibility that you could still try by accident and that you know it lent itself to the seriousness of your training but it also kind of made you mad oh yeah and and you were you were they were trying to push your buttons and seeing how much you would keep your head that was kind of along the lines also getting you super drunk to see if you would talk how how how boastful you were when you were super drunk or something like that so they were messing with you psychologically as much as training you physically too yeah and it wasn't just training and like how to how to karate chop the dude or how to sneak up behind someone and just gingerly strangle them to the ground although that for sure yeah um they also

did uh fake well kind of barely fake um expeditions they would go out and steal a train and this is not set up like they would steal a train in canada right and in one case they stole the train got on board everyone's like do you know how to drive this thing and everyone said no they said well let's get it going anyway they got it going we're going down the track realized it didn't know how to switch it saw an oncoming train and all bailed off the train luckily they did not collide they just kind of slowly came to a stop and kind of bumped one another which is yeah that was just pure providence but it really could have gone another way you know yeah but they would do like uh they wouldn't blow up a bridge but they would set it up with

fake explosives as if they were going to blow it up right uh and occasionally doing all this stuff they would run afoul of the law and get arrested and then you know it's sort of like uh exactly what you would think like mission impossible or something pretty soon someone comes along behind you that says to the officer they're part of the war effort you don't need to ask any questions they're coming with me just forget forget everything that happened tonight yeah do you want your family survive well then you didn't see any of this well they even that was where they used their special insider code is that correct well there was one guy who was arrested um he was caught by police i'm not quite sure what he was doing um but he had basically undertaken a self-appointed mission

and had been caught by the real cops and he said just get in touch with the royal canadian mounted police and tell them i said s25-1-1 you remember that was the the mounties code for that camp for camp x and apparently within a very short time a mounty official showed up whisked the guy off and said this didn't happen to the to the local police yeah and this well we also got to keep in mind this was a local cop in ontario in the 1940s right so he was probably like oh no problem yeah he wanted no trouble right so there were um some pretty interesting people that came through camp x both as trainees and instructors yeah one guy lieutenant colonel bill brooker he served as a commandant of camp x he wasn't the first one but apparently he was the one who had the

the largest legacy there yeah and he he was a strict military disciplinarian but he also was totally cool with unorthodox training methods yeah like breaking into a classroom shooting guns right and then well not him you know himself maybe he did maybe played along right sending dudes in there with guns to to shoot bullets live rounds and then dash out and then come back in and say all right well describe all of these guys what they look like what were they wearing where they smell like yeah not just survive but now you need to learn how to keep your head during a shootout yeah and then they he would leave and they would get back to learning how to kick a man in the testicles well speaking of such major dan fair baron uh

jerry thought that was funny he did actually um this because jerry didn't have testicles nothing funny about it no i can't kick her in the testicles and i got wracked the other day for the first time in oh man i don't know 30 years it's the worst feeling there's nothing else like it either i know i was trying to tell emily i was like it's such a specific pain that you can't describe it it's uh it's indescribable it well yeah it's definitely a unique thing that you just you have to experience it yourself yeah oh man luckily for her that'll never happen well i'm sorry that happened to you that's okay blame my daughter um i was gonna ask yeah that's how it happens so uh fair baron was um he was a policeman in shanghai which that probably means in the 1940s

you're a tough dude i would say yeah uh and he was in charge not too long uh at camp x of close combat training but apparently he kind of set the standard for um brutality in battle because his his uh i guess what do you want to call it his credo or whatever was the sure nothing is out of bounds kick a guy in the testicles throw a chair at him hot coffee in his face um whatever you have to do to disable and kill this guy as quickly as possible is what you should do and quietly if you can like maybe throwing a chair was not your first step yeah like don't kill him with a tambourine yeah if you can right and apparently this guy's thing was again kicking him in the testicles and then you go for like an orifice right you jam your fingers in their ears

their eyes or something like that or up their nose to just further distract them on top of the pain of being kicked in the testicles and then you you just had them where you wanted them which was by the throat yeah there was no uh he'd never heard of the words fighting dirty you know reading this reading that part about fair burn though in particular really drove home to me that like these guys were like like these were they were killing people like people were dying they were being trained to kill people and you know with the hindsight of history and just being 70 years removed from this stuff and the fact that it's just so fascinating i mean i don't care like you said you're a huge peacenik it's still super fascinating to learn about

but you realize every once in a while just how removed from reality you are when you're reading about it today and that yeah these guys are being trained to kill and then went on to kill other people yeah it was nazi so really you know but they were still killing human beings and it really that part drove it home to me yeah i mean it sounds like i think this is the coolest thing ever so i know what you're talking about but um they were nazi so i don't feel too bad right um another guy was um bill donovan he was uh he was a guy who he led a lot of efforts to create the espionage organization in the us and helped establish camp x to begin with and even though he never worked for the cia he was one of the the biggest voices kind of lobbying

to establish it right this is his work he worked for the os s the office of strategic services which i believe came it grew out of the office of the coordinator of information which was set up to liaise with the british security coordinator right yeah um but once they once the us entered the war they set up the office of strategic services and then that became the cia and while bill donovan is just a legend like even though he didn't work for the cia he's he's very much considered the father of the cia yeah he was america's first spook yeah and you know a lot of actually uh a lot of the graduates they either went on to further train people or a lot of them did go on to work for the cia afterward yeah um but gustav billa was i think my favorite dude um i read up on him

and he supposedly was the best that they ever had at camp x yeah he was french canadian as as grabster puts it he was an exemplary student of sabotage and resistance coordination that's a good way to put it yeah which means he was a tough guy right so yeah he parachuted behind german lines in france landed on a rock and injured his spine and was like i just gotta walk it off and continued on i think that was one of the first things that happened to him yeah he would uh and this is all always covert you know like you said be behind enemy lines and he would recruit locals and kind of assemble his own little forced in from navarone um and like or organize the french resistance and like take these farmers and all of a sudden they're blowing up bridges under his command

right do you remember um in the db cooper episode barbara datan yes who was who was born robert datan during world war two that's what robert datan was doing but i think in like berma oh really yeah he was like parachuting behind enemy lines and finding out who was mad at the the japanese and assembling guerrilla armies training them this is that's what this dude was doing but i think he was doing it in europe in france yeah well sadly he was captured and um he was such a tough guy he never broke uh he was tortured for years uh sent to a concentration camp he never broke never talked for years yeah and the nazis were so uh i mean they wanted to keep him alive because they knew he had the information and finally the nazis gave up and executed him uh which is very sad into his

story but he unusually was executed by firing squad which apparently the nazis didn't really do much they used piano wire and gas um and apparently the firing squad was a a sign of their respect for him um oh really as a soldier to you know to take him out quickly i guess so he um that was another thing that jarred me too i was like oh wow this guy did that he blew up railroad to assemble guerrilla armies and then he was captured and executed and i was like oh yeah that really happened too but you had about a 50-50 shot i think if you went from camp x to the theater of war to to die well yeah there were there was apparently there was one guy was reading about i'm not sure if he was trained at camp x or not but he was a radar specialist and he was sent behind uh german lines i think in

france again as well to basically to try to infiltrate a radar station and check out what radar information then the germans had and the the special operations guys who went in with him were under orders to kill that guy rather than allow him to be captured yeah kill their own guy and supposedly this guy was aware of it and had a cyanide pill and everything but if this is just one guy yeah i guess if you were at camp x like when you went on your mission they told you you're probably not going to come back yeah you want to take a break yeah all right let's do it and we'll uh finish up with a little bit on hydra radio and the eventual uh fate of camp x on the podcast pay dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult

classic show hey dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're going to use hey dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it it's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever do you remember going to blockbuster do you remember nintendo 64 do you remember getting frosted tips was that a cereal no it was hair do you remember aol instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist so leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the

cartridge from your gameboy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s listen to hey dude the 90s called on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm lance bass host of the new i heart podcast frosted tips with lance bass the hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road uh okay i see what you're doing do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help this i promise you oh god seriously i swear and you won't have to send an sos because i'll be there for you oh man and so my husband michael um hey that's me yep we know

that michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step oh not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with lance bass on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts all right charles you ready to round this out yeah earlier we kind of teased that uh there were some women that did play a part in camp x and while they were not trained as sabbaturas they were a part of the war effort specifically these canadian women who

ran well at least helped run a radio station housed at camp x i wonder if they would be considered sabbatuses rather than saboteurs you know like a masseur and a masseuse i'll bet i'll bet i'm right man you know we had someone write in and tell us masseuses offensive oh really yeah massage therapists or nothing okay sorry massage therapists we certainly weren't trying to degrade the profession in any way i should go ahead and apologize to the sabbatuses out there as well so as we mentioned there was a radio station hydra radio um and communications were gathering intelligence sending intelligence was a big big part of the war um uh for the allies well for both sides obviously right but you couldn't just

build a radio station because equipment was scarce uh everything was scarce during the war so they kind of cobbled together uh from private companies and citizens themselves uh a radio station right so and apparently some of the canadians that they they requisitioned parts to create this radio station which was codenamed hydra because of all the antenna that came out the top of it they nicknamed it hydra and i guess that became its codename um it was a serious state-of-the-art radio station that they put together um but they actually had the people whose radio equipment they requisitioned come work at camp x at the at the project hydra radio station you know there's some hams in there for sure for sure you know they kept it clean

they did uh but this is where the women played a part these canadian women uh basically helped operate hydra and i think kind of headed it up and they could not stay there because the barracks weren't equipped uh for for men and women to both stay there so they stayed with local families nearby they were picked up and dropped off for work each day and weren't really a part of the rest of the camp but really provided a valuable service for communications for camp x during the war it kind of reminded me of like um the hidden figure story yeah for sure you know uh they operated the rockets machine yeah i looked at that did you see the picture of that thing yeah it was it was basically should have been like danger will robinson yeah it was huge and clunky but

it encoded and decoded automatically transmissions that were coming in and out of the the hydra radio station and they weren't they weren't decoding like captured or intercepted um axis radio transmissions but they could take them and bounce them over to bletchley paul or betchley park man that's tough to say is it betchley or bletchley bletchley park um i got that part right yeah uh for decoding and apparently they would also relay transmissions from washington from roosevelt for um winston churchill to read there was a unknown secret bedroom at bletchley park where winston churchill would sleep and he would read transmissions in real time from from uh from roosevelt and they were basically strategizing the war through this and they were these transmissions

were going through the hydra radio station so it played a huge hugely important role in world war two that's awesome so the war finished and actually before the war was even finished camp x closed it didn't even see through to the end of the war closed in april 1944 uh basically because they as ed puts it their work was done it kind of satisfied its mission um those people were needed elsewhere so they closed up shop um they don't know how many people uh how many men went through there uh it says because it was also secret you know and they kind of destroyed a lot of the records uh but you know it varies from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on who you're going to ask apparently it was kind of invoked to um to lie about having having trained there

how are you going to disprove that sucker yeah can't uh the buildings were still there though like camp x remained um and over the years it was used for various things uh it was used in the cold war they tried to kind of repurpose it um which not a bad idea no then actually they used it to interrogate a defector in the cold war apparently right after world war two there was a uh a cypher clerk a cryptologist named igor gozenko gozenko added an extra syllable i think yeah and he left the soviet union and headed to canada he had a lot of info with him so the canadiens and the americans both interrogated him at uh camp x the abandoned camp x building because it was so secure yeah they went on uh the canadian military took over hydra and they continued to use that during

the cold war uh well continued through world war two um as japan kind of hung in there and then eventually in the cold war but then by 1969 of course all that advanced uh equipment was no longer advanced uh and so was decommissioned and sold off yeah kind of a ignore ignoble yeah and to this thing that had played such a huge role did you say that they bulldozed it well no that was just uh the hydra station in the end they bulldozed what was left of the buildings because they uh rightly said you know there might be some unexploded munitions there right uh and that's dangerous so let's just bulldoze it into lake ontario right is this the 1970s can you see some dude in the hardhat just walking away like dusting off his hands like job well done yeah can't see it anymore

so it's fine there's a saying in the construction business uh can't see it from my house oh yeah yeah like if you mess something up oh that's hilarious can't see it from my house that is so construction guy isn't it yeah they also have another saying which is uh i'm not going to show up when i say i'm going to and i'm going to charge way more than i said i would that one's a little clumsy but accurate can you imagine though i mean this stuff i guess in theory is still sitting at the bottom of lake ontario somewhere yeah we kind of need to go explore that i'm really surprised no one has you know i bet you someone has yeah maybe uh there's a park there now there's a plaque that commemorates it's called intrepid park so william stevens and the guy who probably inspired james

bond apparently after the war he got into ham radio himself and he he used the self uh proclaimed codename intrepid so it's called intrepid park after him and um there's a plaque it says some crazy stuff went on here especially like the boulder they show at the end of red dawn yeah yeah you know that except this is in canada and red dawn was apparently in michigan or not michigan was in colorado i always thought it was michigan because of the wolverines thing oh i think i always thought it was like oregon or something no i'm pretty sure it was colorado yeah there you have it they got jed's dad's car but wait it wasn't jed who was the other who's the guy who who betrayed them all oh darryl darryl they're in darryl's dad's car man i was so mad at darryl i know

but didn't she just feel for him too at the same time it's just i was torn and it was really horrible yeah well if you want to know more about darryl from red dawn or camp x or anything like that you should type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com since i said search bar it's time for listener mail i'm gonna call this the subject line that the author himself called it wild inaccuracies in champagne episode but i love you anyways um dearest josh and chock hi guys i love your show and all that stuff it's a champagne professional though and former sommelier you can just imagine my thrill about the champagne episode in fact the house i work for uh renaught was the very first established champagne house to ever sell the stuff in 1729 um yeah i knew that

the champagne like experts would find some faults it wasn't as bad as i thought it would be though no not too bad no he even said that we got most of it right i think this was a sheet oh was it i think so oh yeah lacy so sorry lacy lacy um i guess lacy could be a guy could be a strange name for a guy though maybe so i know that chuck because i responded to lacy and said so you call us out on all this and you're the brand ambassador for ruin art and you don't offer us free champagne you probably have some coming right yep we got some coming i got us some some champagne coming well you can have it all buddy awesome um so first and foremost guys you got a lot of it correct chuck your accent is pretty good you basically nailed uh reams josh i'm so glad you love the

bubbly as much as i do that counts for a lot chuck serious disappointment here because you have always been my favorite best laugh ever guess it's josh now it is it is true chuck you have a pretty great laugh this was an emotional roller coaster i gotta tell you the most glaring and hilarious of all mistakes though is the whole champagne grapes by the way there's seven not three must get crushed by feet champagne does not get pressed by feet not at all and actually she's wrong there that is not true because i looked it up and there are still some houses that crush some champagne by feet that's what i'm saying i i was spending my time focused on getting free champagne rather than correcting her but i i remember seeing that too it's not

like we just made that up right uh she said she double checked with her chef de kaw and he said that's so ridiculous press machine is mandatory i don't know what accent that was that was not right it's like balkan uh below is a link from the official champagne website for more inch info uh you can also look up press coca on youtube also essentially no one riddles by hand these days talk about carpal tunnel syndrome most houses large and small use a gyro palette only a few tiny producers hand real a few cuvées or large formats um finally i doubt you can find a decent champagne for under 20 or sorry for 20 or under i'd say it starts at 40 whatever otherwise it was a pretty darn good and entertaining episode as always thanks for spreading mostly accurate

information about my favorite subject xoxo lacey well thanks for that lacey and we're looking forward to this champagne aren't we chuck yeah that's lacey burke and um she's in uh new york and like you said is a brand ambassador for meson ruinard and also heard back i forgot i shouted out my buddy robbie mm-hmm in his uh lounge van and pierce and mire wines he was like did you shout me out because i'm getting some orders oh that's awesome i was like oh yeah i'd love to hear that and he said we did a pretty good job too so for these very specific uh very complex industries if we get 90 right i feel like we've done our jobs um i want to say somebody else combine the champagne episode in the food fads episode and wrote in to say you guys should try

champagne jello shots ah now that's a jello shot i might try okay there now we've got it where this is going to start you on the champagne train great uh if you want to get in touch with us especially if you want to send us free champagne free wine something like that you can tweet to us we're at sysk podcast you can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know you can send us an email to stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuffy should know.com for more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com on the podcast hey dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show hey dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're going

to use hey dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it listen to hey dude the 90s called on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm lance bass host of the new i heart podcast frosted tips with lance bass do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted

tips with the lance bass on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts