Now I Know (2 page)

The
Oxford English Dictionary
has long been the standard-bearer of what belongs in the English language and what does not. Unlike other dictionaries, which stay faithful to a long-established vocabulary of words, the OED tries to adapt to the lexicon of the day. So when words and similar terms enter our collective parlance, the OED’s editors may end up adding them to their dictionary. In March 2011, “OMG” was one of the added terms, along with “muffin top” (“a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers”) and “LOL,” meaning “laugh out loud.”

But the OED doesn’t simply define the word. It also attempts to track down the term’s origins. Sometimes, it fails, of course; take for example the term “rubber game,” which is the deciding game in a bridge match or baseball series. The term has been in use for decades, if not centuries, but no one—at least no one the OED can find—knows where it comes from.

OMG, on the other hand, has a known first use. It isn’t from the mid-1990s, when the Internet started on its path to ubiquity, or even from the 1980s, when services such as Prodigy and Compuserve dominated the early digital communications space. The term OMG dates back to 1917 and, strangely, involves Winston Churchill, at the time a British Member of Parliament, and, of course, the future Prime Minister of that nation. That year, the recently retired Admiral of the British Navy, John Arbuthnot Fisher, wrote Churchill about rumors of new honorifics potentially coming down from the crown. Specifically, per the OED, he wrote: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!”

The OED doesn’t mention Churchill’s reply, if any, and does not explain why Admiral Fisher needed to both use the acronym and immediately write out its full meaning. The OED does, however, provide the next earliest known use—1994, in an online newsgroup about soap operas. The author asked the rest of the group, simply, “OMG, what did I say?”

During World War II, the British government tightly controlled information about casualties. Providing such details—who died, when, and where—could provide the Nazis and the other Axis powers with information they’d not otherwise have, and risk British and Allied efforts around the globe. At the same time, the government felt obligated to communicate the war’s events to its citizenry. These two desires were in obvious tension, and the government found a happy medium by releasing death notices to the newspapers.

Although these death notices came with the risks noted above, they also offered opportunity. On June 4, 1943, the
Times
published the announcements of the death of three officers and that of actor Leslie Howard. One of the officers was a member of the Royal Marines, a Major William Martin, who drowned in late April of that year.

Kind of. Major Martin hadn’t actually died. He couldn’t have—because he never actually existed.

With the war in full swing at the end of 1942, seizing control of the Mediterranean was high on the Allies’ list of military objectives, and the eventual success in North Africa would make that even more likely. But capturing other locations could be an even larger boon. Sicily, for example, served as a key island; as Winston Churchill reportedly commented, “Everyone but a bloody fool would know” that Sicily had to be next on the Allies’ punch list.

So the UK decided to try and play Hitler for a bloody fool. The plan, called “Operation Mincemeat,” was developed in part from a memo written by future
James Bond
author Ian Fleming. Operation Mincemeat involved leveraging the Nazi intelligence department’s cozy relationship with Spain by planting some disinformation on the Spanish shore. The disinformation came in the form of a pair of dossiers outlining, among other things, the Allies’ plans to invade Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica, all while feigning an attack on Sicily. To deliver these dossiers into the hands of the Spanish and, ultimately, the Germans, British intelligence’s MI5 unit called the fictitious Major Martin into duty. Or, more accurately, they threw a corpse wearing his clothes—and holding the dossiers—into the sea.

In January 1943, a thirty-four-year-old homeless Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael died of liver failure caused, indirectly, by ingesting rat poison. Michael’s death was difficult to determine and his parents had already died, making him—his dead body, that is—a solid stand-in for the Royal Marine that British intelligence was about to create. Michael’s body was dressed in a manner suitable for Martin’s rank and stature, even down to the high-quality underwear. (Quality underwear was rationed at the time and difficult to obtain, but a major in the Royal Marines would certainly be wearing some.)

Intelligence created a backstory for him, including a fiancée named Pam, and gave him love letters, a receipt for an engagement ring from a London establishment (dated April 19, 1943), and a picture of her (really of a clerk in MI5). To finish the ruse, Major Martin was given ticket stubs to a London theater, dated April 24, and—to make him appear careless—an ID card marked “replacement.” All these items were placed in a briefcase, along with two copies of the Mediterranean war plans, one for British troops and one to be forwarded to U.S. commanders. The second copy was created simply to justify the use of a briefcase in the operation.

The body was taken aboard a British submarine, which surfaced on April 30. That day, the corpse was tossed into the waters, the briefcase tied around the loop of the fallen major’s trench coat. It washed up on shore as planned. The official cause of death by the Spanish medical inspector was “drowning” and, because Martin’s belongings suggested that he was a Roman Catholic, the examiner declined to perform an autopsy. The documents, after a few days, made their way into German hands—despite British “efforts” to recover them. On May 13, the Spanish returned the body to the British so that it could properly buried, and it was clear that the briefcase had been opened and its content analyzed.

The Germans bought into Martin’s persona, “determining” that he was on a flight from Britain to Gibraltar to deliver the sensitive documents—a belief strengthened by the June 4 death notice in the
Times
. German leadership shuffled their defenses to buttress their positions in Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica, leaving Sicily mostly unguarded. When Allied forces invaded Sicily on July 9, the Nazis thought it was a feint, as the documents suggested; by the time the Germans reinforced the island on July 12, it was too late. Roughly two weeks later, the Axis began their retreat from the island.

During the final days of World War II, the United States, apparently believing that Japan was unlikely to surrender otherwise, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll from these two bombs numbered as high as 250,000 when one factors in those people who died up to four months later due to burns and radiation sickness. Research into the creation of an atomic bomb began in 1939, and the Manhattan Project, which developed the science behind the weapons in earnest, began in June 1942. But in March 1943, the United States was developing another weapon that would have spared many thousands of lives.

Unless, that is, you count the lives of the millions of bats that would have died in the process.

In the mid-1940s, many Japanese buildings were still constructed out of wood and paper, which, of course, were flammable. If the United States Army could figure out a way to start fires in a large number of buildings spread out over a wide area, the Japanese infrastructure and economy would suffer but the direct loss of life would be relatively small. But that seemed impossible. Napalm strikes could start fires everywhere, but they wouldn’t spread. Carpet-bombing with many small warheads would increase the area of the strike but most likely wouldn’t cause many fires. And of course, the death toll from either of those routes could still be large.

But a few months before the Manhattan Project got underway, a dental surgeon named Lytle Adams came up with the idea to use bats—those nocturnal flying mammals—as part of the strategy. As he would later tell
Air Force Magazine
, after seeing millions of bats flying around caves in Carlsbad Canyon in New Mexico, he immediately thought that they could be used as a way to spread firebombs throughout Japan. He collected a few of them himself, did a little research, and found that even tiny bats weighing well under a pound could carry three times their weight in explosives. He pitched his plan to the military (a procedure that was apparently not uncommon at the time) and the brass agreed that this was something to look into.

Adams’s theory was straightforward. Collect a million bats and strap timed incendiary devices to their backs while they hibernate. Stick a thousand of them each into a thousand bombs designed to open at high altitudes. Fly over Japan at night, drop the bombs, and then let the bats fly around. When daybreak comes, the theory went, the bats will hide in dark places—and given where they are, the most common hiding place will be attics. The timer ticks down and shortly after, without obvious explanations, hundreds of thousands of Japanese buildings start to burn to the ground.

The idea soon became more than a theory. By March 1943, the U.S. military had identified a suitable population of bats, having located a series of caves in Texas that were home to millions of the flying critters. For the next year or so, at the expense of $2 million ($25 million in today’s dollars), they tested Adams’s theory. Except for one major problem—at one point, some bats got loose resulting in a major fire at the base—the military believed that the bat bombs could actually work. One report placed their effectiveness at ten to thirty times more effective (measured by the number of fires they would start) than conventional incendiary devices.

But the final report on the bat bombs issued in mid-1944, though positive, noted that they would not be ready for combat for another year. Due to the slow timetable, the military canceled the project before it could be fully developed.

Twenty-nine-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima, Japan, about to return home from a business trip, when he realized that he’d left his
hanko
—a personal seal used for endorsing documents—back at the office. His return trip was interrupted by history. The U.S. bomber
Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; its center of impact was fewer than two miles from where Yamaguchi’s walk took him. Nearly 140,000 people died in the explosion but Yamaguchi survived. The force of the blast knocked him to the ground, permanently destroyed his left eardrum, temporarily blinded him, and caused severe burns across part of his body. Nevertheless, after seeking shelter, he managed to return to his hometown for treatment the next day.

Two days later, Yamaguchi—still bandaged and deaf in his left ear—returned to work. He was recounting the events of the Hiroshima bombing with a supervisor when the images he saw just a few days earlier began to appear before him again. But Yamaguchi was not suffering from a flashback. He worked in Nagasaki, and he was, again, fewer than two miles from the point of impact of an atomic bomb.

And again, he survived. This time, he did so with no new injuries, although the explosion ruined his bandages from the first blast and caused him to run a fever.

Yamaguchi is the only person recognized by the Japanese government to be a double
hibakusha
, the term given to survivors of the atomic bomb drops.
(Hibakushas
are entitled to a specific kind of government support.) Probably, in total, between 100 and 300 people survived both blasts, but only Yamaguchi has thus far earned the distinction.

His health, after the blasts and radiation exposures, was decidedly mixed. He wore bandages for most of his young adult life, lost hearing in his left ear (as noted above), and went bald. His children all believe that they, too, inherited health problems caused by the radiation. However, Yamaguchi was (after a long recovery) able to return to work and live a relatively normal life—and a long one at that. He passed away in January 2013 at age ninety-three.