June 15, 2017 • 49 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:21):
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
(00:49):
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.
(01:14):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:56):
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,
(02:16):
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,
(02:39):
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,
(03:06):
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,
(03:28):
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
(03:52):
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
(04:13):
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,
(04:38):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:42):
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.
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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,
(06:47):
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,
(07:12):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:53):
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,
(08:14):
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
(08:35):
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.
(08:57):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:40):
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?
(10:00):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:07):
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,
(11:27):
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,
(11:51):
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
(12:11):
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
(12:35):
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.
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:22):
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
(14:45):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:28):
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,
(15:49):
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.
(16:11):
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
(16:33):
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,
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:01):
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,
(18:25):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:14):
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,
(20:38):
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.
(21:00):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:44):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:27):
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
(22:48):
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
(23:12):
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,
(23:35):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:38):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:42):
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
(26:04):
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?
(26:26):
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
(26:46):
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,
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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.
(27:51):
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.
(28:13):
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
(28:37):
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
(28:57):
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,
(29:23):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:08):
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,
(30:32):
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,
(30:55):
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,
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
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,
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:04):
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
(33:28):
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,
(33:50):
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
(34:13):
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,
(34:36):
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,
(34:56):
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
(35:17):
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.
(35:38):
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
(35:59):
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
(36:21):
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,
(36:42):
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
(37:14):
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
(37:37):
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,
(37:58):
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,
(38:22):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:27):
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
(39:50):
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.
(40:15):
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.
(40:38):
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,
(41:01):
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
(41:24):
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,
(41:47):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:28):
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
(42:51):
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
(43:14):
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.
(43:34):
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
(43:55):
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,
(44:16):
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
(44:39):
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?
(45:01):
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
(45:21):
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,
(45:44):
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,
(46:04):
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
(46:24):
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
(46:46):
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.
(47:06):
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
(47:28):
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,
(47:49):
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,
(48:12):
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
(48:33):
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
(48:54):
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
(49:16):
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
(49:38):
of other topics because at how stuff Works dot com
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
(00:21):
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
(00:49):
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.
(01:14):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:56):
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,
(02:16):
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,
(02:39):
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,
(03:06):
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,
(03:28):
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
(03:52):
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
(04:13):
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,
(04:38):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:42):
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.
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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,
(06:47):
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,
(07:12):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:53):
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,
(08:14):
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
(08:35):
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.
(08:57):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:40):
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?
(10:00):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:07):
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,
(11:27):
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,
(11:51):
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
(12:11):
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
(12:35):
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.
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:22):
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
(14:45):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:28):
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,
(15:49):
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.
(16:11):
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
(16:33):
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,
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:01):
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,
(18:25):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:14):
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,
(20:38):
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.
(21:00):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:44):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:27):
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
(22:48):
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
(23:12):
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,
(23:35):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:38):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:42):
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
(26:04):
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?
(26:26):
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
(26:46):
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,
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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.
(27:51):
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.
(28:13):
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
(28:37):
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
(28:57):
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,
(29:23):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:08):
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,
(30:32):
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,
(30:55):
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,
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
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,
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:04):
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
(33:28):
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,
(33:50):
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
(34:13):
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,
(34:36):
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,
(34:56):
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
(35:17):
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.
(35:38):
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
(35:59):
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
(36:21):
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,
(36:42):
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
(37:14):
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
(37:37):
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,
(37:58):
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,
(38:22):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:04):
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
(39:27):
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
(39:50):
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.
(40:15):
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.
(40:38):
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,
(41:01):
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
(41:24):
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,
(41:47):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:28):
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
(42:51):
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
(43:14):
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.
(43:34):
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
(43:55):
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,
(44:16):
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
(44:39):
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?
(45:01):
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
(45:21):
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,
(45:44):
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,
(46:04):
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
(46:24):
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
(46:46):
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.
(47:06):
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
(47:28):
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,
(47:49):
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,
(48:12):
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
(48:33):
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
(48:54):
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
(49:16):
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
(49:38):
of other topics because at how stuff Works dot com
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