Transcript
Speaker: You know that thing you love that your friends and family don't want to hear about anymore? Tell it to us, Patty and Charlotte. We want to learn all about your weird and wild obsessions or your perfectly normal hobbies that you've taken just a little too far.
Speaker: We want to dabble in your curious interests. Can we interest you in today's episode?
Speaker: Hi, Charlotte. Hi, Patti. I am so excited for the return of our very first guest, Uncle Jim. of Yay, happy to be here.
Speaker: Jim Hamilton, for those who want to know his actual name, but he's my uncle, so call him Uncle Jim. Welcome back. Yeah.
Speaker: It's great to be here. He was in our episode about Long Falls, if you want to check that out, if you haven't already. But he's back with a new interest. So thank you so much for coming.
Speaker: Glad to be here. And before we get into what the the new interest is, Charlotte, what have you been interested in lately? right. So recently I decided to write a cozy mystery and self publish it. And by recently, I mean yesterday.
Speaker: So very recent hot off the presses. Yep. Yep. already have a lot of the characters, a lot of the plot already started it.
Speaker: I decided I'm tired of waiting for. Well, well i mean for agents for the other types of novels I write, but I can write a cozy mystery and put it out myself because eye watch Murder, She Wrote and Monk like it's my job.
Speaker: So I might as well just make it my job. I did wonder, i was going to ask, because have any of these been inspired by yeah murder she wrote or or similar?
Speaker: Yeah, I love it. I love a mystery of practically any kind. And I think that's like a family trait because my dad, my grandmother, Uncle Jim, do you love a mystery?
Speaker: i do I do like mysteries. Yeah, yeah. And particularly on TV, the two you mentioned, and Columbo I would throw in there as well. Oh, Columbo, classic. Same producers as ah Murder, She Wrote, I believe, or same creators.
Speaker: I just wonder if you've created a setting that is like Blueberry Lake or and whether your protagonist is a a fiction mystery writer.
Speaker: I have created a setting that is remarkably similar to where i currently live. Orchard court.
Speaker: It's going to be called, and believe it's going to be called the orchard lane mysteries. Maybe I could go or there's like a possible series here. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's got to be series, I think. and And then just you follow these characters and,
Speaker: And then the main character is a curmudgeonly 40-ish year old man whose girlfriend is a brilliant but scatterbrained psychologist.
Speaker: um But he's going to be the main character. And it's going to take place in in this little neighborhood.
Speaker: That's awesome. Love it. What did, did any one incident inspire this new interest? That it was yesterday.
Speaker: You know, I'm not sure if there was any one particular thing, but we have been watching that show Widow's Bay. Oh yeah. is like a cozy horror on an Island.
Speaker: And it's pretty funny. Um, and I don't know if that was the exact catalyst, but Yeah, that's funny that it was just yesterday. I'm like, how the hell did this idea get started? But it's like fully formed already. Wow.
Speaker: So your subconscious has been working on it. Also, you're like a little early for the, what was it? The write a novel in November? Yeah. don't know. They still call it NaNoWriMo, but yeah, Novel Writing Month. So i will I do want to write a novel in that month, but...
Speaker: We'll see how far I am on this one by then. I'll keep you all updated. I also just want to point out, i so I listened to a little bit of an interview with, oh no, actually it was a little bit of, wait, wait don't tell me, was on the radio this morning when I was in the car. And um Hernan Diaz, an author, was on. And so he put out his novel, Trust, is the book that initiated Lipa meeting her now husband, which And he was self-published first, and then he did a a contest, which made me think of Tyler's, ah the the place where they work, um South Side. Broadway Press.
Speaker: South Broadway Press, and how they do... contests because this was a small independent publisher in Minnesota, which they have a ton of And they were doing a contest of, hey, on this day, we'll take the first 600 manuscripts that get submitted. And he was ready. He submitted it. They published it. And now he's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Speaker: Isn't that cool? like Yes. But but it just goes to show like and part of why he did that was he was saying I was having such a hard time. I didn't have an agent. I couldn't you know, like it's just so incredibly hard.
Speaker: um And as we know from Marissa, sometimes you just take bite the bullet and do it yourself. You make it happen. And then you make the money yourself. And Uncle Jim, I know you've self-published a bunch of books. And so like, it's definitely, I don't know if it's, you know, you can't rely on it as like your sole source of income at first, but maybe it will pay for the crown I just got my teeth that insurance refuses to cover.
Speaker: ah That's a whole other story. hu What's interesting, you recently, Uncle Jim, I would have to say it's the Denver Summit women's soccer team, because I had the pleasure of going to visit all of my relatives, my brother, my niece, my nephew in in Denver. And actually, this was You were not able to attend this event, but the rest of the family went to their game against, oh, I think it was the Chicago Stars, or something like that. And they creamed them.
Speaker: And it was a very good game. I follow the women's, U.S. women's national team. Lindsay Heaps is a star on that teep team and is a star on the Denver Summit. So getting out to Denver, I'm on the East Coast, so that was that was a treat in itself. But seeing that game and then seeing it with family was was fun.
Speaker: And then we had a chance to visit a series of, um well, breweries, basically. My conclusion really is that Denver is beer after, you know, all of the places that we we visited and went and enjoyed. So that was fun. That was a good interest. But I'm a big soccer fan. And that was that was fun.
Speaker: and It's interesting, actually. I had just bought a book by a cartoonist named, I think it's Dana Jerry Meyer. She does cartoons for The New Yorker. And she has just put out a book that is called Skip to the Fun Parts, Cartoons and Complaints about the Creative Process. It's an excellent book. But in August on Instagram, she said, if you buy your book and show me the receipt, I'll draw fish doing something for you.
Speaker: And so i I did just exactly that. And she came through. and this is my fish right here. You can't see it.
Speaker: But it is pretty darn cute. And it's playing soccer. So ah that is kind of my my obsession there.
Speaker: my recent interest anyway yeah i thought it was really neat and it's been fun because you know come on new yorker cartoonist that's pretty cool yes and you have an original it also looks like like ah either like it could have been a manatee or a dolphin so like an impressive fish too right uh yeah she in the book she uses that in the introduction that's uh And so she likes draw fish and particularly that it's sort of a lumpy fish, I would say, but very appealing one.
Speaker: That's exciting. I just heard recently that, so I live in St. Louis and they'll be having the Olympics in LA this year. And they were saying that they're going to have some of the introductory games. I don't even know what the official term is played here in St. Louis for the Olympics um for soccer, which I thought was really like strange that it would be that far, but um very exciting. So some of my friends who are, ticket holders season ticket holders for the St. Louis City, they were able to purchase tickets for the Olympic trial games or whatever they are.
Speaker: so Yeah, I wonder whether they'll they'll do the preliminaries like they did that for the World Cup in different places and then sort of focus in and maybe do the whatever semifinals and finals in L.A.
Speaker: Just funny to think of people coming from Europe where like you come from a country that's relatively small and then, you know, we're like, oh yeah, seven hours away is where this game will be, you know, like not very close. but You're like St. Louis is the correct place for this.
Speaker: It's yeah Yeah. um Patty, what are you interested in recently? Oh, it's really unfortunate. I am obsessed with this dumb phone game called Bus Traffic Fever. And I have bus traffic fever right now. And it is it's like not really hard. It's kind of hard. And it's so addicting. It also drains my battery really fast. So it's just dumb.
Speaker: But I've gotten to the point where I was like, okay, just indulge. Let yourself play for as long as you need to play because then you'll just wear yourself out of it. And I'm worn out of it. And yet I still am doing it. So now it just kind of like feels like uncomfortable. But so I need to just I need to get it off of my phone. But that's what I've been interested in lately. And it's dumb. It's like a bunch of different colored and buses. You can't even tell their buses and their different sizes. And then you have to like figure out how many people can get on it. And you only have so many, you know, so it's like it.
Speaker: it's a logic game to a very minimal degree. So that's what's been interesting me lately. I can't even start those games because I will be addicted. I already know.
Speaker: Like I have to limit myself. yeah Yeah. I limit myself to the two, the medium and the hard Sudoku on New York times game site.
Speaker: And I can't do any more Sudoku. I cannot. for my own good. So yeah, I hear what you're saying. I do appreciate those like New York, New York times games that you can, know it's like, Nope, you get to do it. One, one a day. Goodbye. You know, I like that.
Speaker: One of our, I'm thinking of a segue here. It would have been best if you went last Charlotte, but you asked uncle Jim if he's interested in mysteries and you really are. You're interested in mysteries in general, but one in particular. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker: Sure. I call it the Wilhelmshaven mystery. Wilhelmshaven being
Speaker: a coastal town in northern Germany that was the site of basically naval operations, submarine base, those kinds of things during World War II. And therefore, the Allies folks wanted to bomb the heck out of Wilhelmshaven.
Speaker: And I came across a particularly amazing story to to me. about two women whose bodies washed up on shore in Wilhelmshaven in the summer of 1943. And they were, um by the sources that I have, in Allied uniforms, one American, one British, like they were part of a flight crew of a bomber that had been shot down.
Speaker: Now, you know, it was not possible for women to be in the military in World War II or in in combat roles that men would normally have taken. And so to me, it's a real mystery how two women could have washed up on shore in what were basically flight uniforms. um I came across this story of right around the year 2000 or so. I had just written a book about a group of...
Speaker: journalist who covered the eighth Air Force in World War II called the writing 69th. And one of those guys was a New York Times reporter named Robert Post. And Robert Post was able to accompany B-24 bomber on a mission over Germany, but it was shot down. And he was killed along with eight out of the 10 of the crew.
Speaker: And so after the war, they weren't really sure what had happened to him. They never heard from a POW camp. They You know, his parents hoped that he had escaped somehow, but that was really not very likely. But they were looking for his body. And they went to a cemetery, a military cemetery in Wilhelmshaven. And a reporter wrote, you know, like a two-inch report in the New York Times saying that,
Speaker: two women's bodies had been discovered or been buried in that cemetery. And so I thought that was a pretty interesting story. And I really sat on it for quite a while, trying to gather additional details and I've gathered some more, but it remains a mystery. Um, I had thought about doing uh, graphic novel on the topic, um, and took a class with the sequential artist workshop to, to get to that point. Um,
Speaker: And then I distilled it down to basically about 12 pages to a short comic, which I completed a few months ago and which you guys have both seen. Yes, it's awesome. And we can put a link to it in our show notes.
Speaker: And it goes through a lot of the different um theories, right? And then just information about like what you know and what you found out, which is very cool.
Speaker: Yeah, anybody who goes to greenharbor.com, which is my website, you'll see on the front page there, there is ultimately a link to the Wilhelm Salven mystery, to the the cartoons that I drew and the details and information that are in there.
Speaker: One of the things that you mentioned in the book was that later, so they were found a couple days apart and buried next to each other, and they just put, like, unknown and then the gender. um But that later they were moved, they think, to the U.S. and to the U.K. respectively. um is that Is that a common practice for most? Like...
Speaker: military who were bombed down there that that they went to their home countries whether they were named or not okay well very much so the um there are multiple military cemeteries in europe with casualties from the american the british and and others who participated in this case the bodies of allied flyers and it was mostly flyers who ended up in that cemetery at wilhelmsthaven Um, they were moved after the war. So grave registration teams showed up and saw the German records and said, okay, well, here's somebody who was identified by name because maybe they had dog tags or whatever. or here's an unidentified person. We didn't, you know, there's a body showed up maybe in a military uniform. Um, and well, here, here they are. And that person would be Unbekannt, which is German for unknown. And, um,
Speaker: After the war, then the the grave registration team would move those bodies typically someplace else. So the the British bodies ended up in what is called the Sage Cemetery, which is actually not very far from Wilhelmshaven. And then the American bodies tended to go to a cemetery.
Speaker: I believe this was in Belgium where, um you know, they were reburied. So, you know, finding those people or identifying those people as part of the grave registration team, it may have been that the Germans said, yeah, here's this person. And they wore these dog tags.
Speaker: But when they start examining the body, they go like, well, hold it. This skeleton would have been somebody who's six feet tall. the person with the dog tags was five, five, how is this possible? And so there, even, even you know, the records and the identities were not always so straightforward, but the two women, because they arrived so close in time, were buried side by side. And I couldn't find any other stories about women who are identified as military personnel who were buried and certainly not in that cemetery. And You know, there are certainly cases of nurses and others who died in in combat, but typically, you know, they they're identified. In this case, they didn't have, ah you know, and dog tags or anything to identify them by.
Speaker: This does seem like the kind of mystery that you could write just a historical novel about, like, just making up the whole background of these women because they're so so little known.
Speaker: And then you do you do talk about a lot of different kinds of possibilities, including time travelers from the future. That's the thing. You know, they're there are different ways you could say, okay, how could a woman in a flight uniform show up in that location? And you might immediately think women um pilots took on transport roles, moving military aircraft around. And okay, well, there's somebody who would be in a military uniform, moving a plane. um
Speaker: But the American version of that transport service only operated in North America. the British one did operate closer to the war zone, but nowhere near Wilhelmshaven. And on top of that, any casualties in that group have been identified. You know, there were women who died serving that role, but we know who they are and we know where their bodies were buried. So, um,
Speaker: You know, you can think of something that seems like it might be a good lead, and then it turns out, now no, probably not that one. And, you know, the same thing with could it have been someone who was in a role as a photographer reporter? like the writing 69th that I talked about, which was exclusively men. um There was a woman, well-known photographer named Margaret Borkwhite, who flew on a B-17 mission. I think this was over Italy. um But, you know, if if a photographer like that was shot down and lost, it would be big, big news, particularly, you know, well, man or woman, but there just weren't women in that role that would disappear in that way. And so...
Speaker: You know, then you start, oh well, you get to some of the outlandish possibilities. You know, could the two women have been together in some fashion? You know, maybe they stole a plane out of England and were flying into Germany because, God knows, they were spies or...
Speaker: whatever but you know there's just not much to go on and to me it's just a fascinating mystery and there's there's even the possibility that the germans misidentified them as women to make the point that the allies were so desperate they were putting women into combat roles and aren't you know aren't the allies doing terribly I don't think that's the case. I think they really did identify them as women. And if they had wanted to make a real big case around, um you know, women being used in combat roles, it would have been all over German press and we would have seen those kinds of articles.
Speaker: I haven't been able to find them.
Speaker: So is there one answer to this mystery that you lean towards having done all this research or that you think is more like most likely i'm i'm really stumped honestly and part of it is that the the movement of those bodies after the war the american uh the the one who the Germans identified as as a female flyer, an American one, that body probably moved to an American military cemetery.
Speaker: But a number of the individuals who are identified by the Germans on either side of those two women where they were buried, those bodies haven't been accurately identified. There's a fair chance that the bodies were mixed up somehow, either by the Germans or by the Allies when they moved those bodies. I have one last sort of Hail Mary question in to the Commonwealth Graves Commission. So that's the the folks who handle the the British, um
Speaker: well, recovery of bodies, because I believe there is a record that the British have identifying this corpse as a woman.
Speaker: And that's not the case in the American one. So all I have to go on is the German identification. Knowing that the British actually did identify this this body as a woman, I think would be pretty amazing.
Speaker: i've you know i To answer your question, Charlotte, I don't necessarily have a preferred theory because all of the ones seem fairly outlandish. Like what if they were Germans who were trying to get out of the country and somehow came across um air airmen's uniforms and were wearing them when they were trying to, whatever, row boats to Sweden or something. um Where would they get those uniforms? you know So maybe there's some chance of that, but someone who disappeared
Speaker: In World War II, either Germans or the story that you could make up about two English women or a single English woman flying a plane towards Germany,
Speaker: it's it's just mind-bogglingly
Speaker: mind-boggling. I don't know. Well, and so that's interesting that you said, at least for the British, they acknowledged or they have this listed as a woman.
Speaker: But for the U.S., they, you said they don't? The body that um they say it was transferred to a, the American military cemetery they couldn't conclusively identify it as a woman. The skull was missing.
Speaker: I don't, you know, that's not something the Germans mentioned mentioned. The thigh bone was long enough that that person should be six feet tall. Not to say it couldn't have been a six foot tall woman, but maybe, maybe less likely. So there's not anything really conclusive on that part. Although, you know, the, the talk about the uniform,
Speaker: fragments of that were found on the British side. It's, you know, like I say, when you do research like this, sometimes you come into a situation where they go like, well, are you family? And I'm going like, no, I'm just, just like interested. And then they get a little suspicious, like, come on you know, so, I, I sometimes run into a little bit of, of a, um,
Speaker: you know, roadblock there. You know, not that people have been really hard on me, but getting information that I'd like to get is is not always so easy. Well, but how do you know that you're not family? I mean, i who is family, right? If these are unknown individuals. And so you mentioned at one point, well, two things. The first being, of course, during war, A, I'm thinking that's not your main um priority, especially for enemies, to be carefully...
Speaker: marking who who was found where and in what condition and all of the details and making sure that they're there. So it makes sense to me, like you said, that the dog tags don't really match up with the identity in the end in some cases. But then the second piece was you mentioned DNA, you know, possibly doing DNA um and excavating the bodies. And it's like even if they were switched, they it would give information, you know, like, especially if you could do, if not you, but somebody could do both DNA on both individuals to get, to gain more information of who were these people, potentially identify them and then figure out from there more of the, the circumstances that, that had them there because someone's also missing them where that could then solve that for them or or they know.
Speaker: the um The DNA piece is interesting the way that it divides up between the American and the British. The British basically say this person has been laid to rest.
Speaker: That's it. You know, we're not going to dig up any remains to see whether there is DNA evidence connecting them to somebody. I i find that interesting that they that that's their theory or that's their what what they stick to. The Americans, on the other hand, are like, we'll pretty much go through any tests that we need to. But I think there, again, getting back to what you're saying, it helps to have a relative who's pushing for that. Yeah, um right. I mean, within within the past couple of years, there have been, you know, American troops from World War II identified multiple times, including people –
Speaker: you know, from the B-24 bomb group that Robert Post, the New York Times reporter flew on. So you know that ongoing investigations are happening like that. One one an American who was buried right next to those two women really fits nicely into that category because he's never been identified. Although the Germans said, this is who it is. And so I, I followed that route a little bit and I suppose I could pursue that a little further.
Speaker: That person, um, that Sergeant has relatives in, i think, uh, central New York area. I reached out to one to say, you know, I've been researching this story and I think that that there's possibility that it could be helpful in identifying the body through some of the things that I found. And I never got a response on that. I do think that if the the U.S. government got a request from one of his relatives in regard to that saying they would be willing to provide DNA, that that could be one step to identifying that person. And if
Speaker: those bones were mixed up with a woman, there could be some resolution to to the mystery that I'm particularly interested in about the two, you know, the American woman there.
Speaker: So DNA could help help in that case. I don't think it's going to provide anything on the British side because of what I said, the American side possibly, but you almost have to have an an advocate from the family to help move that forward.
Speaker: That's my perspective. Again, it's so hard to know if you're the family or not. Like, if we don't know who this person is, it's like, but I definitely see what you're saying. Like, if there were some, yeah, some larger force requiring it, even if it were, you know, a crime or something like that that they're looking into, then that's more of a reason to excavate and and pull dna you know if you specifically had like one family member who you were like i know that they might be this person and i can show that they were in the war or something maybe then they'd be more likely to say okay you could be family versus i might be family let me do the dna yeah
Speaker: um Looking into that one soldier, that American who was buried next to the two women, you know, some of these side lanes that you go down when you're researching something like this are really fascinating. So I saw what this sergeant's enlistment card had. And the odd thing is that it seems like in the enlistment office, they either typed his name wrong or he asked for his name to be slightly changed. Because when he came out of that enlistment office as a soldier, he had a slightly different name.
Speaker: And it's, again, it's mind boggling why you would why you would choose to do that. I don't know, you know, I don't know whether he just said, oh, they typed it wrong. It doesn't matter. I'll go with this slight variant of my name. That's okay.
Speaker: But again, the a way the government works sometimes, you could you could show up at your, you know, your training and go like, you know, they got my name wrong. Can you change that? And they go like, no. We can't. Right. You're Nick now. It doesn't matter that your name is Rick. You're Nick. Yep. You have new name.
Speaker: I was curious. The first page, is yeah what is this an example of that you you wrote? It's definitely an identity ah identification card. And you said, you know, unknown. So is that the card?
Speaker: Well, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, this this was sort of interesting. So Totenschein is a death certificate. So this is the death certificate for the American woman. And, you know, it's signed by a doctor. So for to me, that's a very official sign by the Germans that a doctor was willing to sign his name saying that this was a woman. um You know, i I had not initially intended to put that into the comic, but then I realized I had and inside the front cover, and inside the back cover that I could put things on. So it's more like sort of cover or inside cover art than it is trying to explain it, because it's entirely in German. And I don't expect, you know, an American reader to look at it and be able to figure it out. So it's just almost like artwork. But if you look at it, it does basically say that it's a woman, and it's signed by a doctor. So and the same thing on the back cover, I included that. New York Times article, a drawn version of the New York Times article or the the top piece of it, just almost as as inside cover artwork.
Speaker: Well, and it it plays so nicely into kind of how you got started into this. So then when you read on the back cover about about this mystery and about your connection to it. then you're like, oh yeah, post. I see that. I'm curious when they, um is there any information that they give about either of these women, the condition of their bodies or anything like that? I know you said that now.
Speaker: the skull is missing for one of them. But when they were found, was it, obviously most of them had been shot down, but as we learned in your first time on, the condition of people when they're shot down can be so different depending on so many factors. So was it clear that they had been in a plane crash or does that add to some of the mystery, the condition of them?
Speaker: I think the assumption was that because they were wearing Allied flight uniforms and because they washed up on shore, that must have been the case. But there was nothing in the condition of the bodies that I know of. Now, that death certificate says the probable cause of death is drowning.
Speaker: okay And if the body did not have a head, i would think you might say decapitation might have been the cause of death. So I feel like there was a fairly complete body when it arrived in Wilhelm's Havn.
Speaker: Yeah. I guess I'm curious about, because this is an interesting story, but I'm wondering, like, for you in particular, was there anything, why this mystery for you, Uncle Jim? Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I mean, it presented itself to me and sometimes you feel like something is handed to you on a platter and nobody else is going to care about it. And so this story for me is really a lot like that. And i mean, trying to explain why i care about it is almost part of the story.
Speaker: And I care about it because it's interesting and because it's two women and it's 1943. And how the heck did they get there? i I mean, I i Did this comic with the hope of spreading the word around. and And, you know, the purpose for me of this webcast is also to spread the story around in case somebody knows some detail or has some some piece that could help solve this.
Speaker: So getting that word out. But I did this comic and I submitted it to comics publisher who does short form nonfiction comics. And they they sent me a rejection, which again, is not surprising. You submit a lot of things and you get a lot of rejections. I think you know that feeling, Charlotte. I do know that feeling. but But in this case, I wrote them back and said, okay, i I get it. But can you tell me why? And so they sent me back a little note, which I found interesting. And I'd like to read it to you.
Speaker: They wrote back and they said the editors were intrigued by the beginning of this comic. Your art style and presentation fit well with the story you're telling. So again, they're buttering me up a little bit before the the the bad part of the review here, basically. They said we publish narrative comics and we look for comics that end in a different place from where they began. Either the main characters to the comic change or the comic leads the reader to a new perceptive or deeper understanding of the topic.
Speaker: This particular comic doesn't need to come to a time a tidy end. Not knowing the answer can be an interesting conclusion. But the editors wanted the comic to say more about why this story matters, why we're reading it, and why not knowing matters.
Speaker: And i you know my response is to that. it's I think it's interesting because it's interesting. And I don't have a better explanation really than that. Or or why why not knowing matters matters.
Speaker: That's a more. Philosophical question, you know, people have been fascinated with Amelia Earhart's disappearance for years and years and years and nobody. Well, I mean, she crashed somewhere and died, presumably, although some people think maybe she ended up in China or God knows where.
Speaker: But I don't know what the outcome of this is. i just think it's an interesting mystery to solve. And maybe it doesn't become really interesting until some additional piece of information comes and comes into my hands.
Speaker: It does feel philosophical in that it's like, why why wouldn't it matter? you know like It's a death, it's an experience that led to that death that of course it it matters. And it makes me think ah about you know, why not knowing matters. It feels so, um, of the moment, not to get on a tangent, but just to mention of the moment right now where, you know, there are so many people being detained and deported and, um, the record keeping of that being very, um, difficult to obtain or keep track of, or to trust is accurate. It's like, it does make you question what else is going on during a war that we don't know about and why would countries
Speaker: keep that information from us? um Like what are the bigger potentially nefarious reasons? You know, like one of your hypotheses being about were were they saying, oh my gosh, see, they're they're running out of soldiers. They have to bring in their women.
Speaker: Does that help a narrative that they're trying to sell to keep their their troops and their people feeling engaged and and, you know, ready to fight the war. So, yeah, the the why not knowing, it feels like it both reminds us of the importance of getting people's stories and sharing those stories and also just like, and I guess being witness to and then the the what
Speaker: what else could this not knowing indicate of a larger of a larger picture or other events that are going on?
Speaker: Well, I think that's why i i do need to do some more research into whether there's a possibility that the Germans really wanted to use this for propaganda. Because you can imagine that they could find Allied flight uniforms, they could put um, women into those flight uniforms, kill them and throw them where they know they would be washed up on shore. Um, for that narrative to make sense, they need to then publicize the hell out of it saying yeah the British and the English are, are doing this. Well, coincidentally, two of them showed up, you know, within two days of each other, but I, um,
Speaker: i I would admit I probably need to do a little more work on that. Some of the issue is that you know newspaper archives for Germany during parts of the war are not necessarily fully complete because places were bombed, things were burned up, but somewhere in that record, that could be the case. i I have an intent to do a German version of this story, and I have some contacts in Germany who may be able to... to
Speaker: um get that out and about so that a German language audience would know more about this. I know that World War i historian folks in Wilhelmshaven know about this incident and pointed me towards some details that help from the German side, but nothing in the the press.
Speaker: And i I do think that, like to Patty's point, thats I think that's a really good point, is that part of what's going to make it like, you know, why we want to read it and why it resonates now is because of the other like parallels that we see in what's happening now or what's happened in history. so like you, even if you have like a limited amount of information that you're able to find out that you can still relate it to other things that like really matter. um
Speaker: Cause then also like one thing that, that popped into my mind was how we just like, we hear about the men's stories in history. We don't hear about the women's stories as much practically at all. So, we're really guessing a lot as to what could have possibly been going on. So it's also like what was reported, what was recorded, what was like, what's whose stories were told is like another part of it that that brings up. But I think that all of that is like kind of, you know, interesting ways to, to bring in information in case,
Speaker: Because it's so frustrating when a mystery can't be solved. It can't actually be solved. And that's entirely possible. But there's like other ways to to make it really resonate.
Speaker: And it makes you learn about the time, right? Like having a mystery then makes you question all these things. Like you said, Jim, about going down the, you know, researching then about the person next to them and what was going on and even finding out the, why were so many people going down in this area? okay. So it's like the mystery, even if you can't solve it, requires you to research the time, the place, the event,
Speaker: And to question like your assumptions about that time and place and event because it's like, oh, this doesn't fit. There's other pieces we don't know about. yeah And and the the issue back to trying to identify someone who's unidentified is you don't have some of the key things that you might have like enlistment records and those sorts of things that would point you in a certain direction. If you don't have those, you've got a real blank slate. um Even the grave registration teams that came in knew what other planes had gone down in that area and who these bodies might conceivably be. It wasn't like everybody in the Air Force who died. It was people who were serving in this area and had been on missions in that particular region. But for somebody where you don't have any of that, I mean,
Speaker: Really, i don't know if I mentioned this before, but one of the American contacts I had indicated that the British casualty, the woman, had a full set of dentures.
Speaker: And that's an interesting detail. i mean, it's a detail that implies that their head was still there, right? So, you know, that's that's one thing. But as we were talking about what if these were people who whose bodies had been taken You're familiar with Operation Mincemeat, right? do you guys know about that? No, no you mentioned it here. i would love to hear more about that.
Speaker: so i i So the Allies were looking to do an invasion, I believe, of Sicily into Italy. And at one point they decided, hey, it would be great if we could convince the Germans that we weren't going to go to this one location, that we were really planning on going to another location. And how about if what we do is put a set of secret plans onto a courier-type person, make it look like there was a plane crash, and have his body wash up, Where the Germans will find it and look at it and go, oh, wow, this is where they're going to be. And so they did that and they found a basically ah a homeless person who had died. They kept him on refrigeration so it looked like he had drowned and not been dead for very long. They flew him out there. They did they did all sorts of things. Like they had a photograph of his girlfriend and a letter from his girlfriend. They imagined all of this kind of stuff. there's their There are multiple movies. I think, well, one within the past 10 years or so called Operation Mincemeat. there's one called like The Man Who Never...
Speaker: existed or something like that because they made up this entire story there is now a musical based on operation mincemeat it's traveling to boston and i hope to see it in a few weeks um they've they've taken it and turned it into a comedy musical which is pretty amazing that you could take that topic and make it so but um it it should be very interesting but i bring up operation mincemeat with the idea that well could the germans have put somebody's body into an Allied uniform that they got off of the POW, thrown them into the water and had them wash up. And honestly, someone with a full set of dentures or maybe like no teeth at all might, you know, might be the kind of person that you, you, whose body you might find lying around someplace. I guess what I'm saying is if they're, if these were female pilots, I suppose you could lose all your teeth in a, you know, in a,
Speaker: crash landing, but it it might lend to that one theory about, okay, maybe these were bodies that were surreptitiously put there by someone on the German side.
Speaker: I see what you're saying. Yeah. That like at that time, if you had dentures, it wasn't necessarily like, Ooh, you can afford to get dentures. Cause we all lose our teeth. It was more like you probably were live like, yeah, it's more a commentary on the situation that you might've been living a rougher life if you had lost all your teeth at this point.
Speaker: Right. And if there were details like about age, in that death certificate, that would be interesting too. Cause if this, these turned out to be like 60 year old women. Yeah. That's, that's a different story. Yeah. You'd think you'd be able to tell from the, the bone density or do they of osteoporosis? I don't know.
Speaker: But were they looking that closely, you know, were they doing that much of an investigation? if you have this many individuals dying and they're the enemy. Yeah. And would they care? Right. And you potentially planted them.
Speaker: and As for the actual casualties who did parachute down or the actual POWs who were captured um during that part of the war. So 1943, this is July, August 1943. It was fairly early in the war. And the Germans actually treated those prisoners fairly well. By the end of the war, you start hearing more stories about farmers with pitchforks killing aviators who who came down. But at that point in the war, if the Luftwaffe ah or the you know the German Air Force had control of them, they treated those folks pretty well. I think knowing that they would have their own POWs being shot down over Britain or occupied territory, and they wanted those people to be treated well as well.
Speaker: Do you know what flights went down around that time and have, were there any survivors of any of those flights? ah Plenty of survivors, plenty of people taking POW and one of the bizarre kind of coincidence, right, right around then they were, and that's the thing that to think that these women might've been on a flight crew, There were bombings, multiple bombings of Wilhelmshaven happening right in that time period. And if not in Wilhelmshaven, headed over Wilhelmshaven to targets inland. And in fact, at one point there, I forget whether it's Fold3, there's a database of you know
Speaker: soldiers, all of their information that you can look up. So Fold3 is something you can register for and get access to as a database. And I did a search in there on female casualties and I found an airman who came down near Wilhelmshaven in that time frame.
Speaker: And it was basically just a database tagging error. It was very clear that that the person was not a female, but man, what a weird coincidence. I'm searching a database. I find someone who went down not very far from Wilhelmshaven and they're tagged as a female. And then I reach out to the bomb group and they're like, you're nuts. This is a guy you know, it's like, that's a database error. It's not, you know, but it was, it was just so coincidental.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I'm wondering about what it's like to be reaching out to all these people and doing all this research and, and tracking down this information, but especially like trying to reach out to people and having no idea, like, are they going to be receptive?
Speaker: What's that like for you? Most most folks are pretty good. you know, I've reached out on the American side multiple times and have had, Well, I'd say more success from from certain contacts than from other ones, but they've always been generally helpful. um i've have ah you know i I've worked with, I was a German major in college, so I can speak and write German, and I've communicated with a number of German folks, sometimes in English, honestly, because their English may be better than mine. But for example, The archivist associated with the Wilhelmshaven cemetery, that the city of Wilhelmshaven has been really, really helpful.
Speaker: Because there, in addition to the New York Times article, they have the logbook of the cemetery, which lists these people as female fliers. So it wasn't just the New York Times reporter seeing like a wooden cross in a cemetery and making a note of it.
Speaker: There's also the the cemetery record book, and those record books have who else was buried right around that time. So getting that information has been very easy. The Commonwealth Graves Commission has been a a little harder. it's It's just funny these days.
Speaker: when you When you reach out to folks like that, they may well say, we'll work on your your request, but it could take us six months to a year. And you know I had that response very early on,
Speaker: in doing this kind of research. And yet today, because many of the records are digital, it's sometimes easier to get somewhere really quickly. i haven't had that experience with the Commonwealth Graves Commission.
Speaker: Charlotte, you know, my grandfather was a World War I ambulance driver. And so I did a book about his unit. And he, as a college freshman, had written to the Secretary of State, Secretary of War, um asking whether people like him, you know, college freshmen, 18-year-old kind of people, should sign up for the Army. And, you know, because there's a debate on campus, he'd written that. And the response came back to the the newspaper, the college newspaper.
Speaker: And, you know, so here's a letter from, like, the Secretary of War saying, yes, all, like, you know, hot-blooded American men should should sign up and help with the war effort. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I've got the version of that letter from the newspaper, the college newspaper.
Speaker: But I also know that my grandfather, your great-grandfather, had sent a letter to Washington. And I thought, well, it's got to be in his file someplace too. So one morning, I'm just like,
Speaker: going around the internet and I see that there are a certain number of boxes of this particular Secretary of State War guy's stuff and there's a time period. And so I sent an email to the National Archives saying like, if you were to look in like box 798 folder three, I think you might find a letter from my grandfather that was written, you know, right at this time frame. And like two hours later, i got, ah you know, an image of that letter back. And that was our government at work. You know, it was just amazing to me that something like that could happen so quickly.
Speaker: And on the other hand, there are times where they'll, they say stuff like, um we have your request. um If you write us again, it will take even longer, you know, like shut up and just wait.
Speaker: ah Well, I mean, I sympathize with folks who have stacks of paperwork and, that response I just described was, you know, like 15 or 20 years ago and you were writing letters, you weren't submitting emails or, you know, writing it on a form on a website. It was all by the U S mail.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow. So then this is how you research an unsolved mystery also yeah information. And, and it's, i to you know,
Speaker: For me, that's exciting stuff, right? When I found out that I'd gotten a copy of my grandfather's letter, i mean, that's that's pretty amazing stuff. If I'm able to get this Commonwealth graves site Graves Commission information that confirms that was a woman, that's going to be unbelievable. If I find a newspaper article saying that two women's bodies have been found and that proves that the Germans have been You know, are the American, the allies are are so desperate and that shows up in the German media in 1943. I, you know, i don't i don't know what you guys get excited about, but I get pretty excited about those things.
Speaker: And so you said that there was that other one where they're like, that was just a clerical error. The fact that there are all of these other pieces corroborating that it's that they're both mentioned as women several times is what makes you think, okay, it wasn't just a clerical error here.
Speaker: Like the death certificate saying that and then the crosses and the cemetery um log Right, right. Either somebody at the very beginning had to jump in on this. But there is a German naval commander who identifies them as a woman. The death certificate identifies them as women. The, you know, the cemetery log does the crosses in the cemetery. The New York Times article. It's, you know.
Speaker: Yeah. And and if if I could find then either the American or the British record confirming that the bodies that they dug up were women, that would be that much. you know, more information. I don't think it's going to happen on the American side. Maybe if there was DNA testing around that one soldier I told you about, the one airman.
Speaker: And then if I were able to get that file from the Commonwealth Graves Registration folks. It's very interesting to me because of what what you're saying about, like, I don't know what gets you excited, but this gets me excited. And it's just kind of, it's so interesting to hear like the, that kind of thing, because I think,
Speaker: it would be very, very cool to get that information back. But then for me, I wonder, like, would I have the tenacity and the stamina to be like, I'm gonna like reach out and do all these things. So like to me, it's just pretty amazing that you're like going after it and just really like trying to find these answers.
Speaker: Well, you guys go down rabbit holes in various ways, one way or another. I'm sure. And one of the rabbit holes that I went down, I mean, consider that I've been looking into this for 25 years. um But within the past, let's say five or so databases have popped up that allow you to do different kinds of searches on on what whatever, individuals. And so I could look up and find out find records actually find records online that showed the the british um... graves registration teams and where they had found certain bodies and again the problem there was i knew some names of real people who had died at that time and i could track them very easily but i couldn't necessarily track
Speaker: unknown people, but I knew that there had been bodies that were buried in certain places. And so I really, at one point, just started almost searching the entire database for everything associated with that Wilhelm Zavon Cemetery. And I was able to find some information just by going down that rabbit hole and spending hours looking into that database to find like the one little piece of information that would have been easy to find if I'd had their name, but i don't have their name.
Speaker: So what is what is our assignment? ah I have two thoughts in regard to that. One is that I don't know, ah you know, in in your own lives, whether there is some unsolved mystery in your family background or your whatever stories your parents told you that you may never find an answer to. or or or maybe there is a you know, a fascination that you have with an unsolved mystery. the The one that I think of most is around Amelia Earhart. But, you know,
Speaker: whatever, there are certainly others and unsolved mysteries are, it seems like the staple of podcasts these days. So that would be one thing if you could describe something about an unsolved mystery that you've thought about either in your own life or sort of in the public sphere. And then the other thought would be if you're interested in doing, um,
Speaker: imagining what scenario makes sense to you for these two women. Could you write some fictional solution, you know, fast fiction, 250, 500 words about what you think might've happened. And really it could be time travelers or, you know, people from space or, you know, who who knows what you might come up with. But I'm, I'm wondering if those might work as an assignment for you guys. I know you're, you're really hard at work on making those boxes, those wooden boxes, and that's going to occupy a lot of your time. So let me know if this is, this is, this is okay.
Speaker: I think this is great. Yes, this is, this is delightful. I am sure there's an unsolved mystery or two. are fictional Yes. Okay. Yes. These, these seem great.
Speaker: Well, I don't know if you, if you have another thought, it's not like, um, This is a hobby you're going to take on later on. I know, you know, I know when you talk about these various things, you go like, well, while I start getting involved in the Wilhelm Saab and mystery, I think that's probably less likely. I'd be happy to have your help. But I just, you know. I don't know where that would go, but it's not so much like a hobby you'll pick up, but maybe being obsessed about an unsolved mystery is something you could be.
Speaker: And so sometimes we do become obsessed or very, very into whatever the interest that somebody came to convince us about so that it does happen.
Speaker: And I could see this tying nicely into your new obsession, Charlotte, of a cozy mystery. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That fast fiction could be like a little teaser of what's to come and somehow in the Orchard Lane mysteries. Yeah. Maybe there's bones in Orchard Lane.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. don't know. Or it's their family member. Yeah. No, this is great. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Family. Yeah. Okay. Family mystery adds another dimension to this cozy mystery. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, this is great. Thank you for these ideas. And once again, if you guys want to check out the the piece, you can go to greenharbor.com slash mystery.
Speaker: So thank you so much for coming on. It was my pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. Well, then I hope that you all stay interesting. And stay interested. Bye.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to today's episode. Please subscribe, comment, and like the podcast. Follow us on Blue Sky Social at CanWeInterestYouIn. Send us an email at CanWeInterestYouIn at gmail.com. And join us next time.
