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. Is that right? Yeah, that's right man. It's our two thousand and seventeen North America Monsters of Podcasting Tour. That's what I like the sounds of that. Eddie van Halen is opening, Yeah he is, but not really, no, not really.
But you can find out all the information and all the deats at s y s K live dot com are Squarespace Live touring home on the web, and we hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rolls. Stuff you should know the podcast. That's right, And Buddy, I am happy to be doing another grabst article. Getting him back in the fold has
been a true boon for this organization. You so much so, Chuck. I think that we should see if Noel can whip us up a little Grabster theme music to play when we do a grab star article. What do you think? Yeah, okay, well we'll see Grabsters in the metal maybe it can be metal themed. Yeah, but Noel's into the mogue, so he'll maybe he'll be a weird mashup of that. Yeah.
I'm pretty excited about this. And this is one, uh for those of you don't know, we're talking about Ed Grabanowski, one of our favorite writers here who hadn't been doing a lot of writing for us, and we specifically petitioned to get Ed right and 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 wish I had the email, but someone wrote in suggesting camp X and I had never heard of it the little research and I was like, oh man, this is a grab Stoar article if I've ever heard one. I was gonna ask you where 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 that suggestion, and hats off to you, thanks for it. So camp
X for those of you who haven't heard of it. Um, 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 uh. Historians probably no more about it. Maybe re enactors, sure, why not? Um? 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 treat to train good
guy terrorists in World War Two. Good guy terrorists saboteurs, saboteur, I like that word. Propagandists, uh, 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, uh for the Allies during World
War Two. Yeah. And if there's one thing I learned through this article is, even though I'm a liberal peacenick, if I would have been alive during that generation and had to go to war, I would totally have wanted to have been a sabbateur. Oh yeah, like all the movies like The Great Escape and Victory and all these
great World War Two movies I watched growing up. I was never about like the front line battles, and you mean some of those movies are okay, But man, you show me a movie about dude sneaking around 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 he had to go steal a plane? Was it Firefox or fox Fire? Fox Fire? Was it Firefox? I think we're I think it was fox Fire and we're just being misled by the web browser. Yeah, yeah,
I do too. 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 quiet like I watched all Dirty Dozen, all those movies that were about small groups of soldiers infiltrating quietly and breaking havoc from the inside. Man, I love that Big Red One. Oh yeah, that's my first R rated movie, the guns and Avron. Yes, remember poor Mark Hamil's testicles get blown off in Big Red One by grenade. I thought you were gonna say Mark
Camil's port testicles. Anyway, they they they got blown off, and Lee Marvin was like, you don't need these anymore and just like tosses them away. I remember, like I said, it was my first R rated movie. I remember being in the movie theater at Toco Hills here in Atlanta and seeing those test skills being tossed down to him and I was horrified. So anyway that got weird. Can't camp it 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 Two, 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, Like this is where it really happened. And it was in this little place in the middle of nowhere along Lake Ontario uh in Ontario, Canada, about thirty miles over the lake from
the United States. Should we get back in the way back machine. Oh, we're gonna go to Camp X. Maybe we'll keep your head down because they use live fire. All right, here we go, all right, here we are, and the wars raging, but the United States is not yet involved. Officially because um, well, because we were the United States, we were kind of way over where we where we sit and on 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, uh, 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 One and
how horrible that was. We need to stay out of this. Let that be a European war. Did you know? Um, there were actually elements from friendly countries. They're like Roald Dahl, the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Ian Flaming, the guy who went on to write, um, the James Bond novels. They were working as agents for the British government here in the US, working to kind of propagandized 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 and did actually go to Campex 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 um, and he definitely was in America at the time it was operating. Um, So he probably went by there, but
he didn't train there. As far as anyone knows, the World War two is going on, even though they didn't call it that at the time. And um, which is something that got right in the new Wonder One Woman movie. By the way, man, that was one of the best superhero movies I've seen in a long time. It was great. Yeah, in pretty much every way. Yea, uh so, World War
two is raging. Roosevelts 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 are probably a lot of agents, and 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 the war. Right. But that's a tough thing to get going from scratch,
as that points out. But there was a country, uh, great Britain, who was very experienced in this field from all their years um traveling the world is one way you could say it, uh, but the friendliest way you can say it, yeah, um, 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 we'll we'll help you out, we'll get you going. Yeah
they did. In the U 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 a an office of the Special Operations Executive, which is itself a branch of m I six right. Um, 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 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 Lauren Michael's office, right at least in my mind, to you Lauren Michael's impression. Uh no, that's pretty good. So you've got thirty Rock, you've got
an outpost set up. They were kind of getting things going, um and it was headed up at that time. Did you say William Stevenson, No not Yeah. He was a Canadian who actually served Britain as a fighter pilot in World War One, and he was the head of the BSc at the time, and he is roundly considered to have been the inspiration for James Bond. 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 Rawl Dahl. Well they have it, aren't you? Just fascinated by the fact that the guy wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a a secret agent working in America in the authorities.
It's great, and you know what, he wrote those children's books, but he also had a an entire bookshelf full of kind of body raunchy adult books that he had written, right, it was great. Everyone just thinks 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. Well, that's disturbing. So uh, Canada at this time,
um well, and it still is. His head points out Commonwealth and are 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 so the Brits are like, alright, alright, everybody call him out, find 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 yet? And they said how secret? And they said so secret that Prime Minister Mackenzie King is not a way And then they just dropped their tea and said you've got us and his monocle popped out. So yeah that 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. I'd be like, guys,
come on, it's me Mackenzie. You know me, Big Mac. Don't you know me? So? Uh, Stevenson said, let's pull the trigger on this. They got a businessman from Vancouver named A. J. Taylor I love this to buy two hundred and sixty acres they called them a hundred and five hectares in Canada and Canada by this land near um Oshawa, Ontario, for twelve grand under the name the Rural Realty Company Comma Ltd. Period, which is British for ink. Oh is it? Yeah? Okay, it means the same thing. Yeah,
that's what I figured so um this this land. It was one of the reasons they 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 of nowhere towns. But it also had very 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 scale during D Day. Um there was open planes and fields, there were woods, basically everything you would need to train somebody to do some damage in Europe. Yeah, that was pretty simple. Far house, farmhouse, there was some storage facilities, and then they added, of course barracks, built some classrooms and eventually we'll we'll talk about the radio station there. But they built a building to house this radio equipment that would be pretty key
kiss one of four f M sound of Oshawa. All right, So they get this place up and going right. And again, the whole reason it's in Canada's because America is officially neutral and it's not supposed to be training secret agents under the guy 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. Um. They had a number of different official names, which really kind gets across just what a secret installation it was that didn't have one official name. Um. But Camp X opened on December six. The next day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor Summer seventh, nineteen forty one, and right after that the US 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 camp ex official
site dot com maybe. Um. 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 US because the US centered the war, and in fact, there were plenty of other secret agent camps that were built in the US. But they kept Camp X going not just to train Americans but also
to train Canadians as well. Yeah, and so that the people, um, like you said, no one officially called it Camp X, that that name came from the local Uh, what few local people were near there, just because it was so mysterious. They called it Camp up X, or they called it, quote the secret military camp. Right. The people that were actually their training called it the farm because of kind
of you know, the fields and the orchards everywhere. Uh. And the official designation wash STS one oh three Special Training School one oh three, Right, and then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had their own name for it too, which was S two five dash one dash one man, This is getting good. The Canadian military called it Project JA really yeah, interesting, Yeah, But don't you think that kind of like gets across that this is so secret that that no one really knew what to call it.
It shall not be named. It's like what's his face? Love craft Ian 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 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.
What 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, 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 of 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 was between three and ten weeks depending on who you ask UM, you would then go on to Britain two different finishing schools depending on what you excel at during this generalized basic secret agent training. And then once you finished finishing school, the British Secrets 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. What's pretty amazing, right, Yeah, So like they would say, Chap, you've got the real neck for the bang bang. So they would send them to bridge blowing up school exactly, and then then you go below up the bridge over the river Quai Man Alright. 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, that's kind of the way
it is. But everyone would learn things like um kind of some basic I guess what I call it basic training, but some basic things of sad but were one oh one, 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've 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 pretty much yeah, like the streets of San Francisco or something, right, you just you're running and shooting. You're not even using the sites.
You just are are using basically your hand as your guide. Um, and you're shooting people at a distance of at least twenty ft 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 told to find a bag of gun parts and put it together in the dark and come out shooting. What was that deal in that? Like seventies 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 study it. I gotta how to shoot a pistol. I don't know if it was ever like that officially. 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. It seems like it's like specifically a TV thing. Yeah, Like Aaron Spelling was like, try this, hold your hold
your wrist, yeah, do that from now on. Karl Malden was like, uh, some of the other I mean this training there by all accounts, you send 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 Durovich UM. He was
a Canadian Hungarian UM guy. He was actually in his thirties when he went through Camp X training and he wrote a book about his experience and he he was a great source of a lot of UM this information of of what it was like to go train there. But he was the guy who was saying that you would UM 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 and 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 by you know, this guy who was
trying to find you, I think it was. It was. Yeah, it was very very well put Chuckfoli. 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, we're Hungarian.
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 enemy and still keep your wits right because and I read actually another account by Andy Darovitch that after he went through Camp X and was trained on a secret mission, he was approached by some of the like a German intelligence officer who was working undercover I think in Cairo, 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 some of the uh, some of the 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 there were only men being trained. Women did play a part, which we'll get to, but um, yeah, they would push them to their breaking point. And then keep pushing them because they were doing things so important
and so convert 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 mm. Oh. They also requested, uh, a very large see through bullet proof 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 too, having a gun pointed and shot at your face, 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 gonna be desensitized forever by that, you know, now, I think at the point, I think at 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 it was never fired. I think, Um, I think the point is just to make them steally
their nerves like native steel. Now I got it. And the the dude who 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 dry by accident, and that, you know, it lent itself to the seriousness of your training, but it also kind of made you mad, and and you were you were they were trying to push your buttons
and seeing how much you would keep your head and 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 they did all that for sure, Um, they also did uh fake well kind of barely fake um expeditions. They would go out and steal a train and it's not set
up like they would steal a train in Canada. Uh. And in one case, they stole the train, got on board, everyone was 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
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. Uh. And occasionally doing all this stuff, they would running foul of the law and get arrested. And then you know, it's 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 survived? 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, s T dash one dash one. Remember that was the Mounties code for that camp, Camp X. And apparently within a very short time a Mountie official showed up, whisked the guy off and said this didn't have into 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 nineteen forties, right, so
he was probably like, oh, no problem, he wanted no trouble. Right. So there were um some pretty interesting people that came through Camp X, both as trainees and instructors. 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 largest legacy there, and he he was a strict military disciplinarian, but he also was totally cool with unorthodox training methods. Yeah, like breaking
into a classroom, uh, shooting guns? Right, and then well, not him, you know himself. Maybe he did. Maybe he played along 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, what do they smell like? Yeah, not just survive, but now you need to learn how to keep your head
during a shootout. Yeah, And then that he would leave and they would get back to learning how to kick a man in the testicles. Well, speaking of such, Major Dan Fairbaron Uh, Terry thought that was funny. Actually, um, because Jerry didn't have testicles. Nothing funny about it. No, I can't kick her in the testicles. And I got wrecked the other day for the first time, and I don't know, thirty 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. Well, yeah, it's definitely a unique thing that you just you have to experience it yourself. But luckily for her that will never happen. Oh, I'm sorry that happened to you. That's okay, blame my daughter. Um, I was gonna ask that's how it happens. So fair Bairn was Um. He was a policeman in Shanghai, which that probably means in the nineteen
forties you're a tough dude, I would say. Uh. And he was in charge not too long 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 nothing is out of bounds, kick a guy and 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,
that's what you should do. And and quietly if you can, Like maybe throwing a chair was not your first step, Like, don't kill him with a tambourine 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 and 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 Fairburn though, in particular, really drove on me that like these guys were like like these were they were killing people, like people were dying, were being trained to kill people.
And you know, with the hindsight of history and just being seventy years removed from this stuff and the fact that it's just so fascinating, I don't I don't care. Like you said, you're a huge peacenick. 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. Um. Another guy was um Bill Bonnaman. He was uh, he was a guy who he 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. He worked for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which I believe came it grew out of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which is set up to Liai's with the British Security Coordinator. Right. Um. But once they, once the US centered the war, they set up the Office of Strategic Services and they and 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. He was America's first spook. Yeah, and you know, a lot of actually 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 Biela 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 he parachuted behind German lines in France, landed on a rock and injured his spine. I 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 end the lines, and he would recruit locals and kind of assemble his own little forced him from Navaron Um and like or organized 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 DV Cooper episode Barbara Dayton yes, who was who was born Robert Dayton during World War Two? That's what Robert
Dayton was doing. But I think in like Burma. Really yeah, he was like parachuting behind enemy lines and finding out who was mad at 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, 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 sign of their respect for him. Um oh 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 railroads, he assembled guerrilla armies, and then he was captured and executed and I was like, oh, yeah, that really happened too. But you had about 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 guards 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 radar station and check out what radar information that the Germans had, and the the special operations guys who went in with him were under orders to kill that guy rather than allow them
to be captured to kill their own guy. And supposedly this guy was aware of it and had a cyanide pill and everything. But 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. You wanna take a break, Yeah, all right, let's do it, and we'll finish up with a little bit on Hydra radio and the eventual uh fate of Camp X. Y. All right, Charles, are you
ready to round this out? Yeah. Earlier we kind of tease that there were some women that did play a part in Camp X and while they were not trained as sabboteurs, they were a part of the war effort. Specifically, Uh, these Canadian women who uh ran well at least helped run a radio station housed at Camp X. I wonder if they would be considered sabbatusas rather than sabboteurs, you know, like a massur in a masseuse. I'll bet I'm right, man. You know, we had someone right in and tell us
masseus is offensive. Oh really yeah, massage therapists or nothing. Okay, sorry, massage therapists. Uh. We certainly weren't trying to degrade the profession in any way to go ahead and apologize to the sabbatosa is out there as well. So uh, 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. 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 from private companies and citizens themselves radio station, right, so, and apparently some of the Canadians that they requisition parts to create this radio station, which was codenamed Hydra because of all the antenna that came out top of it. They nicknamed it Hydra, and I guess that became its code name. 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 requisition 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. But this is where the women played a part. These Canadian women 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 forbid 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 Figures story. Yeah, for sure. You know they operated the rockets machine. Yeah, I looked
at that. Did you see the picture of that thing? Yeah? It was it was It basically should have been like Danger Will Robinson. It was huge and clunky, but UH encoded and decoded automatically transmissions that were coming in and out of the hydro radio station. And they weren't they weren't decoding like captured or intercepted UM access radio transmissions. But they could take them and bounce them over to Bletchley Park, Betchley Park Man, that's tough to say, is
it Betchley or Bletchley Park? Um, I got that part right, UH for decoding, And apparently they would also relay transmissions from Washington from Roosevelt for UM Winston Churchill to read. There's an unknown secret bedroom at 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 hydro radio stations. 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. Close in April, basically because they as ed puts that their work was done. It kind of satisfied its mission. Um, those people needed elsewhere, so they closed up shop. Um. They don't know how many people. 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. UM. But you know, it varies from a few hundred to a few thousand, depending on who you're gonna ask. Apparently it was kind of in vogue to um to lie having trained there, How are you going to disprove that sucker can't? The buildings were still there though, like Camp X remained UM. And over the years it was used for various things. I 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 cipher clerk, a cryptologist named Igor Guezenko. Kuzenko I added an extra syllable, I think, and he left the Soviet Union and headed to Canada, made a lot of info with them. So the Canadians and the Americans both interrogated him at Camp X, the Bannon Camp X building,
because it was so secure. Yeah, they went on. The Canadian military took over hydra and they continued to use that during the Cold War. Uh, we'll continue through World War two, um as Japan kind of hung in there, and then eventually in the Cold War. But then by nine nine, of course, all that advanced equipment was no longer advanced. Uh, and so it was decommissioned and sold off. Yeah. Kind of an ignag 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 the hydro station. In the end, they bulldozed what was left of the buildings because they rightly said, you know, there might be some unexploded munitions there. Uh, and that's dangerous, so let's just bulldoze it into Lake Ontario. Is this the nineteen seventies? Can't you see them doing the hard head just walking away like dusting off his hands, like job well done. You can't see can't see it anymore?
So it's fine that there's a saying in the construction business. I can't see it from my house. Oh yeah, yeah, like if you mess something up from my house. That's so construction guy, isn't it. They also have another saying, which is I'm not gonna show up when I say i'm going to, and I'm gonna charge way more than I said I would. That was a little clumsy. So 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 explore that. I'm really surprised no one has, you know, I bet just someone has. Yeah, maybe there's a park there. Now, there's a plaque that commemorates It's called in Trepid Park.
So William Stevenson, the guy who probably inspired James Bond, apparently after the war, he got into Ham Radio himself and he he used this self proclaimed code name in Trepid, So it's called in Trepid Park after him, and um, there's a plaque it says some crazy stuff went on here, especiically like the boulder they show at the end of Red Dawn, you know, except this is in Canada in Red Dawn because apparently in Michigan or not Michigan is 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 Jet's dead car. Wait, it wasn't it. Who was the other? Who's the guy who who betrayed them all? Darryl? Darryl. They're in Darryll's dad's car. Man. I was so mad at Darryll, I know, but didn't she just feel for him too at the same time. It's just I was
torn and I was really horrible. Yeah. Well, if you want them more about Darryl from Red Dawn or Camp X or anything like that, you should type those words in the search part how stuff works dot Com. Since I said search parts time for a listener, Mayo, I'm gonna call this the subject line that the author himself called it wild inaccuracies in Champagne episode. But I love you anyways, uh dearest Josh and Chuck, Hi, guys, I love your show and all that stuff. As a Champagne professional,
though in former Sam Alia. You can just imagine my thrill about the champagne episode. In fact, the house I worked for, uh ren Not was the very first established cha house to ever sell the stuff in se 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. He even said that we got most of it right. I think this was a she. Oh was it? I think Lacey? So sorry lazy? Um. I
guess Lacey could be a guy. Could be a strange name for a guy though maybe so. I know that, Chuck, because I responded to Lacey 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 some some champagne coming. Well, you can have it all, buddy. Awesome. Um, So, first and foremost, guys, you've got a lot of it, correct, Chuck, Your accent
is pretty good. You basically nailed reams, Josh. I was 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 is an emotional role or 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 crushed some champagne by feet. That's what I'm saying. 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 upright, she said. She double checked with her chef Dekav and he said, that's so ridiculous. Press machine is mandatory. I
don't know what accent that was that was not. Below is a link from the official Champagne website For more info, ah you can also look up press cookar on YouTube. Also, essentially no one riddles by hand these days. Talk about carpal tunnel syndrome. Most houses large and small use a gyro pellette, only a few tiny producers hand real, a few coveys or large formats. Um. Finally, I doubt you can find a decent champagne for under twenty or sorry
for twenty year under. I'd say it starts at forty whatever. Otherwise, it was a pretty darn good and entertaining episode. As always, thanks for spreading mostly accurate information about my favorite subject
XO XO 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, it's a brand ambassador for Maison Runar and also heard back I forgot to shout it out my buddy Robbie and his launch Vine and Pierce and Meer Wines. He was like, did you shout me out because getting some orders that. I was like, oh yeah, I love to hear that. And he said we did
a pretty good job too. So for these very specific, very complex industries, if we get right, I feel like we've done her jobs. Um, I want to say somebody else combined the Champagne episode and the food fads up his Owdan rode in to say, you guys should try champagne jello shots. Ah, that's jellow shot. I might try. Okay, there, now we've got it. Where this is going to start
you on the champagne train. 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 where s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics because at how stuff Works dot com