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Hey and welcome to the short stuff.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is short stuff, the greatest generation of podcasts.
It caught me in mid-laff from a pre-recording joke from Josh.
Thanks. For my nears. Yep.
And Jerry's too. That's right, but she's not.
She's not. She's so cute.
All right. Shall we talk about the Richie Boys?
Yeah. That was a great way to put it because this is a World War II era story about a generally overlooked group that I was like, I've heard of these guys before and then 60 minutes was mentioned.
That's what it was. I saw a really cool segment on the Richie Boys.
There were 20,000 roughly intelligence officers who were trained in the United States, who may or may not have been born in the United States.
And were trained in counterintelligence, aerial photo analysis, all sorts of stuff that you would need to basically run an intelligence operation, which the US badly needed at the outset of World War II because we didn't really have a good amount of that.
Yeah. That's true. You mentioned some American born, about 60% were American born, which did include a native of American soldiers.
The rest were, it's an incredible story.
They were refugees a lot of times.
A lot of times they were Jewish people from Germany, refugees, I think about 2,800 of which were of that 20,000 that they got out just before or maybe they somehow got lucky and were granted the right to leave.
People who may have lost their entire families and not see death camps.
And so they came to the United, sometimes Japanese citizens who were, whose family were in internment camps and they signed up for the US Army to help defeat those Nazis.
Yeah. They were in American internment camps and still volunteered for the army.
That's really something, you know.
Also Richie Girls, right?
Yeah. There were Wax, Women's Auxiliary Corps is what they, what Wax stood for, but they were called Wax and there were, I mean, just basically anybody you could think of who had any kind of specialty that made them kind of international to some degree, it was probably recruited to do the eight-week program at Camp Richie, which was a little, it started out, I guess, a National Guard camp in Maryland that the army took over.
National Guard had zero say in that and they turned it into this highly secretive intelligence training camp.
It sounds, I mean, it's exactly the kind of place that a movie is made about.
Yeah. I'm surprised there hasn't been.
I'm sure it's in the works somewhere.
I believe so. It's Guy Richie's, The Richie Boys.
I have filmed like Guy Richie.
How many soon? So, like you said, it was an eight-week program, after that eight-week program at Richie, they were sent to England to get some more advanced intelligence training going basically.
And you know, they were in supposedly every battle, every branch and every unit that we had in World War II.
They spread them out. Another than JD Salinger was a Richie Boy among some other notable people.
But they got a lot of these people spoke foreign languages or were even taught foreign languages.
And that was one of the big benefits of the Richie Boys is they could get in there for an interrogation and they knew the local cultures they could bond with someone, say, hey, let's have a cigarette and talk about the local soccer team or football or whatever they would say.
And before you know it, they're getting more information than they would by tying someone to a chair and beating them.
Right. They were also valued like in the case of JD Salinger because some of them could really spot a phony a mile away.
Yeah. So they could suss out spies in their own ranks.
Good one. So there are a few other things that they learned a lot of other things actually.
Like I said, aerial photo analysis, which is handy if you're a pilot.
Or if you were in touch with pilots and wanted to tell pilots what to go bomb or how to find things that were camouflage pretty well, like how to spot like a, I don't know a plane that was under some of that school, like 3D camouflage netting.
You would learn that at Camp Richie.
If you wanted to learn how to kill a person with your bare hands, there was a former wrestler who trained people to do that at Camp Richie.
Like they learned, again, anything that you can imagine in a World War II training movie montage, this actually went on at Camp Richie.
Yeah. It seems like intelligence was one of the big focuses.
I think in the end they got about 60% of all actionable battlefield intelligence came from the Richie boys and girls.
And that's what they were called, by the way.
The red book, the AKA the order of battle of the German army was a very big deal.
And it was basically just an ongoing list of like everything they could learn about the German army.
Anytime they would get documents or any kind of plans or anything that would go into the red book, or they would counter intelligence wise, they would get this stuff.
And it was every unit that they had, who the leaders were, where they battles they had fought, how those went.
It was just sort of the master book called the red book.
Right. And I say we take a break and come back and talk some more about the Richie boys.
Let's do it. Hey, everybody.
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All right, check there was something I wanted to toss in because I opted for a JD Salinger joke instead of a yes and two years.
That interrogation technique you talked about where they were able to speak in a local dialect and kind of commiserate with the prisoner to interrogate them.
I saw another thing that they would use would they would dress up as like Soviet officers imposes a Soviet officer because German POWs were scared to death about being handed over to the Soviets because there were bad bad things awaiting them in the hands of the Soviets at a POW camp.
So that like a richy boys would show up dressed to Soviet officers saying like I'm going to take this prisoner into custody and the Americans would be like no, no, we think we can talk to him.
You go away. The German would suddenly be very talkative about whatever the American interrogator wanted it now.
Pretty slick. Yeah. They learned that at Camp Richie.
That's a new t-shirt. I learned it at Camp Richie.
Where did the name came or where did the name Richie boys come from?
I mean, obviously it came from Camp Richie, but did they call themselves that?
No, I think once they got to England, it was like, oh, what are the richy boys has come over for more training, that kind of thing?
That's not about right?
It does. And there were like specific, I mean, specific stories that emerged from this.
Some of the ones that like really stand out are where like you said, they were German Jewish men who fled the Holocaust whose families were killed in the Holocaust who arrived in America as German nationals, volunteered for the army, went to Camp Richie and then went back to Europe to fight the Nazis.
Yeah. One of those guys name was Ernst Kramer.
He was 18 years old and he was at a Buchenwald or Buchenwald, excuse me.
And got out. It was very lucky.
Got an affidavit for release together the United States.
Got here. It was like, sign me up.
And was a very valuable Richie boy, I guess.
He would write these pamphlets in German, urging German soldiers to surrender.
And I believe he even set up a couple of newspapers that, you know, in these German cities that have been just wiped out and bombed out after the war was over.
Yeah, that was a big part of liberation was denotification.
And to get the German people behind the process of denotification, you basically had to, I mean, one of the ways you did that was through the media.
They would set up independent newspapers in different towns that would be run by, you know, some of the Richie boys.
That was a really important part of it.
There's another one, a guy named David Akira Atami.
He's one of those people who, who himself, along with his family, was interned in a Japanese internment camp here in the United States, who volunteered to fight for the army.
And he ended up going on to become the lead interpreter at the Japanese war crimes trials in Tokyo.
Yeah. Yeah, which was a really big deal.
Another big deal, you know, we mentioned the Richie girls who are about 200 of those that were from the, you mentioned the WAC, the Women's Auxiliary Corps.
There were also 22 women who were instructors at Camp Richie.
And a couple of them, you know, were really, really notable.
One's name was Sally Davis.
Yeah.
