Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Ritchie Boys

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Who were the Ritchie Boys? Listen in to find out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and this is Short Stuff, the greatest generation of podcasts. Caught me a mid-laugh from a pre-recording joke from Josh. Thanks. For mine ears. Yep, and Jerry's too. That's right, but she's not laughing. No, she's not.

She's sulking. All right, shall we talk about the Richie Boys? Yeah, that was a great way to put it because this is a World War II era story about a generally overlooked group that I was like, I've heard of these guys before and then 60 Minutes was mentioned and I was like, that's what it was. I saw a really cool segment on the Richie Boys. There were 20,000, roughly, intelligence officers who were trained in the United States, who

may or may not have been born in the United States, and were trained in counterintelligence, aerial photo analysis, all sorts of stuff that you would need to basically run an intelligence operation, which the U.S. badly needed at the outset of World War II, because we didn't really have a good amount of that. Yeah, that's true. You mentioned some American-born. About 60% were American-born, which did include some Native American soldiers. The rest were – it's a pretty incredible story. They

were refugees a lot of times. A lot of times they were Jewish people from Germany, refugees, I think about 2,800 of which were of that 20,000 that, 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 internment camps and they signed up for the U.S. Army to help defeat those Nazis. Yeah. They were in American internment camps and still volunteered for the Army. That's really something, you know? Also Richie Girls, right?

Yeah. They were WACs, Women's Auxiliary Corps is what they, what WACs stood for, but they were called WACs. 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 was probably recruited to do the eight week program at Camp Richey, 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 hasn't been. I'm sure it's in the works somewhere. I believe so. It's Guy Ritchie's The Ritchie Boys, a film by Guy Ritchie, coming soon. So, like a film by Guy Ritchie. Coming soon. So, like you said, it was an eight-week program.

After that eight-week program at Ritchie, they were sent to England to get some more advanced intelligence training going, basically. And you know, they were in supposedly every battle, every branch, and every unit that we had in World War II, they spread them out. None other than J.D. Salinger was a 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 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. 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 J.D.

Salinger, because some of them could really spot a phony a mile away. Yeah. So they could suss out spies 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're a pilot or if you were in touch with pilots and wanted to tell pilots what to go bomb or how to find things that were camouflaged pretty well, like how to spot like a, I don't know, a plane that was under some of that cool, like a 3D camouflage netting. You would learn that at Camp Richie. If you wanted to learn how to kill a person with your bare hands.

There was a former wrestler who trained people to do that at Camp Richey. Like they learned, again, anything that you can imagine in a World War II training movie montage, this actually went on at Camp Richey. Yeah, it seems like intelligence was one of the big focuses. I think in the end they got about 60% of all actionable battlefield intelligence came from the richie boys and girls, and that's what they were called by the way. The Red Book, aka the Order of Battle of the German Army, was a very big deal, and it was basically just an ongoing list of like everything they

could learn about the German army. Anytime they would get documents or any kind of plans or anything that would go into the Red Book or 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. Right. I say we take a break, come back, and talk some more about the Ritchie Boys.

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Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spaine on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 you talked about where they were able to speak in a local dialect and kind of commiserate with the prisoner to interrogate them, I saw another thing that they would use, they would dress up as like Soviet officers,

impose 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, Richie Boys would show up, dress as Soviet officers, saying, like, I'm gonna take this prisoner into custody, and the Americans would be like, Richie Boys would show up dressed as 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 interrogator wanted to know. Pretty slick. Yeah. They learned that at Camp Richie. That's a new T-shirt.

I learned it at Camp Richie. Where did the name Camp, or where did the name Richie Boys That's a new t-shirt. I learned it at Camp Richie. Where did the name Camp, or where did the name Richie boys come from? I mean, obviously it came from Camp Richie, but did they call themselves that? No, I think once they got to England, it was like, Oh, what are the Richie boys has come over for more training, that kind of thing. Does that sound about right? It does. And there were like specific, I mean, specific stories that emerged from this.

Some of the ones that like really stand out are, were like you said, they 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 Cambritchie and then went back to Europe to fight the Nazis. Yeah. One of those guys' name was Ernst Kramer. He was 18 years old and he was at Buchenwald or Buchenwald, excuse me, and got out, was very lucky. Got an affidavit for release to go to the United States, got here and was like, sign me up, and was a very valuable richie boy, I guess. He would write these pamphlets in German urging German soldiers to surrender.

And I believe he even set up a couple of newspapers that, you know, in these German cities that had been just wiped out and bombed out after the war was over. Yeah, that was a big part of liberation was denazification and to get the German people behind the process of denazification, you basically had to, I mean, one of the ways you did that was through the media. So they would set up independent newspapers in different towns that would be run by,

some of the richie boys. That was a really important part of it. There was another one, a guy named David Akira Itami. He's one of those people who himself, along with his family, was interned in a Japanese internment camp here in the United States, who volunteered to fight for the army. And he ended up going on to become the lead interpreter at the Japanese war crimes trials in Tokyo.

Yeah, which was a really big deal. Uh, another big deal, you know, we mentioned the Richie girls were about 200 of those that were from the, you mentioned the, the whack, the women's auxiliary corps. Um, there were also 22, uh, women who are instructors at Camp Richie. Um, and a couple of them, you know, were really, really notable. Um, one's name was Sally Davis. Uh, 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 Ritchie Boys were largely, I don't know if it's secret. They were certainly secret during the war, but they weren't really well known until the mid 2000s. I think there was a German documentary in 2005 that really started to get people talking

about them. So it's only fairly recently that they've started to kind of get commendations. In 2022, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum presented Richie Boys that collectively, with the Eli Wiesel Award, which is their highest honor. And I think in Congress there's a law. No, what's the word, a bill. I had to really dig back to my schoolhouse rock. Schoolhouse rock. Yeah.

I was sitting on Capitol Hill that honors the Richie boys and awards all of them the Congressional Gold Medal. And it hasn't passed yet, strangely. Yeah, well, 65 of them got silver stars, many, many bronze stars. But again, at the time it 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 60 minute segment somewhere. It's definitely worth watching on the Richie Boys. 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. Okay. He sounds like whatever you want him to sound like. That guy can do some pretty good dialects and accents. Yeah. Although, I don't, his American accent and the Dr. Strange stuff is a little wacky. I like his movies, but...

Oh, yeah? No, no, no, no. Okay. Well, since we started going way off script and talking about Benedict Cumberbatch, and since there's not even a script in the first place, they think short stuff is out. ["The Big Bang"] Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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