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 mine ears yep, and Jerry's too.
That's right, but she's not loving, She's not.
She's so all right. Shall we talk about the Richie Boys?
Yeah, that was a great way to put it, because this is a World War two era story about a generally overlooked group that I was like, I've heard of these guys before, and then sixty minutes was mentioned. I was like, that's what it was. I saw, Oh, a
really cool segment on the Richie Boys. There were twenty thousand, roughly intelligence officers who were trained in the United States who may or may not have been born in the United States, and we're trained in counterintelligence, aerial photo analysis, all sorts of stuff that you would need to basically run an intelligence operation, which the US badly needed at the outset of World War Two because we didn't really have a good amount of that.
Yeah, that's true.
You mentioned some American born About sixty percent were American born, which did include some Native American soldiers. The rest were It's some pretty incredible story. They were refugees a lot of times. A lot of times they were Jewish people from Germany refugees. I think about twenty eight hundred of which were of that twenty thousand that you know, 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, and so they came to the United sometimes Japanese citizens whose family were in tournament camps and they signed up for the US Army to help defeat those Nazis.
Yeah, they were in American internment camps and still volunteered for the army. That's really something you know.
Also Richie girls, right, Yeah, there.
Were WAX Women's Auxiliary Corps is what they what WAX stood for, but they were called Wax and there were I mean just basically anybody you could think of who had any kind of specialty that made them kind of international to some degree. It was probably recruited to do the eight week program at Camp Richie, which was a little it started out, I guess a National Guard camp in Maryland that the Army took over. The National Guard had zero say in that, and they turned it into
this highly secretive intelligence training camp. It sounds I mean, it's exactly the kind of place that a movie is made about.
Yeah, I'm surprised there haven't there hasn't been. I'm sure it's in the works somewhere.
I believe. So it's Guy Ritchie's The Richie Boys, a film by Guy Richie coming soon.
So, like you said, it was an eight week program. After that eight week program at Richie they were sent to England to get some more advanced intelligence training going basically, and you know, they were in supposedly every battle, every branch, and every unit that we had in World War Two. They spread them out. None other than JD. Salinger was a Richie Boy, among some other notable people. But they you know, they got a lot of these people spoke
foreign languages or were even taught foreign languages. And that was one of the big benefits of the Richie Boys is they could they could get in there for an interrogation and they knew the local cultures. They could bond with someone say hey, you know, let's have a cigarette and talk about the local soccer team or football or whatever. They would say m hm, and before you know it, they're getting more information than they would by you know, tying someone to a chair and beating them.
Right. They were also valued, like in the case of JD. Salinger, because some of them could really spot a phony a mile away. Yeah, so they could suss out spot in their own ranks.
Good one.
So 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 were 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 camouflage pretty well, like how to spot like a I don't know, a plane that was under some of that cool like three D camouflage netting.
Huh.
You would learn that at Camp Riccie. 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 Campricchie. Like they learned again, anything that you can imagine in a World War two training movie montage, this actually went on at Camp ricci.
Yeah, it seems like intelligence was one of the big focuses I think in the end they got about sixty percent of all actionable battlefield intelligence came from the richie boys and girl 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 like 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 where they would, you know, counterintelligence wise, they would get this stuff and it was you know, every unit that they had, who the leaders were, where they battles they had fought, how those went. It was just sort of the master book called the Red Book.
I say, we take a break and come back and talk some more about the richie boys.
Let's do it as w s K as good.
Tough you should know, all right, check there was something I wanted to toss in because I opted for a JD. Salinger joke instead of a yes and to yours. That interrogation technique he talked about where like they were able to speak in like a local dialect and kind of commiserate with the prisoner to interrogate them I saw another
thing that they would use. Would they would dress up as like Soviet officers, imposed as a Soviet officer because German POWs were scared to death about being handed over to the Soviets because there were bad, bad things awaiting them in the hands of the Soviets at a pow camp. So the like a Richie Boys would show up dressed the Soviet officers saying like, I'm going to take this prisoner into custody, and the Americans would be like, no, no, we think we can talk to him, you go away.
The German would suddenly be very talkative about whatever the American and prrogator wanted to know.
Pretty sick.
Yeah, they learned that at Camp Richie.
That's a new T shirt. I learned it at Camp Richie.
Where where did the name or where did the name Richie Boys come from? I mean, obviously it came from Camp Richie, But do they call themselves that now?
I think once they got to England it was like, oh, what of the Richie Boys has come over for more training that kind of thing. M hm hm, that's not 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 or 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 Camp Ritchie and then went back to Europe to fight the Nazis.
Yeah.
One of those guys name was Ernst Kramer. He was eighteen years old and he was at Buchenwald or buch and Fald excuse me, and got out, was very lucky, got an affidavit for release to go to the United States. Got here, it 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 denotification, and to get the German people behind the process of denotification, 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 Tommy, he's one of those people who's 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, who are about two hundred of those that were from the You mentioned the whack the women's Auxiliary Corps. There were also twenty two women who are 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 two thousands. I think there's a German documentary five 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 twenty twenty two, 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. Now what's the word of Bill. I had to I had to really dig back to my schoolhouse. Yeah, as 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 sixty five 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, this 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 sixty 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 wanted to sound like. That guy can do some pretty good dialects in accent.
Yeah, although I don't his American accent in the Doctor Strange stuff is.
A little wacky.
I like this movies, but oh yeah.
I don't know.
Okay, Well, since we started going way off script and talking about Benedict cumber Batch, and since there's not even a script in the first place, they think short stuff is out.
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