This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the movie The Sound of Music.  Even though it is based on the real von Trapp family, many details of this dearly-loved classic are not accurate.  The end of the move shows them walking over the mountains to escape the Nazis.  But that never happened.  The truth is that when the von Trapp family left Austria they were not in any danger.  They openly took a train to Italy, traveled to London, and soon boarded a ship to America where they began a singing tour.   

     While the von Trapp family did not walk over the mountains to flee the Nazis, many people really did.  In the late 1930s Adolf Hitler took control over some European countries.  Jewish people, and anyone who opposed the Nazis, were in danger and became refugees (ones who leave their homes to seek safety in another country.)  Most refugees went to Paris, France.  Then in 1940, Germany defeated France and occupied Paris.  Hundreds of thousands of people left the city and traveled south to get away from the Nazis.  When they arrived in Marseilles they were trapped with nowhere else to go.  

     In the United States, concerned citizens formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to rescue famous writers, artists, musicians and scientists who were in danger.  Varian Fry, an American journalist, volunteered to go to France for the ERC to rescue as many refugees as possible.    In August of 1940, he arrived in Marseilles and began making plans to get refugees out of Europe.  

     Refugees needed to get out of France by crossing through Spain and into Lisbon, Portugal, where they could board a ship.   Fry helped some of them get needed documents to legally cross the borders of Spain and Portugal.  But for other refugees, these papers were impossible to obtain.  In these cases, Fry arranged for guides that would lead them over the Pyrenees Mountains so they could enter Spain unnoticed by border guards.  With the help of Varian Fry, many refugees climbed over the mountains and escaped the Nazis.     

     For thirteen months Varian Fry lived a double life as he worked in France.  Publicly he ran a relief organization (legal)—but secretly he organized rescues (illegal).  During that time, he ultimately rescued more than 2000 refugees.  

​To find additional information about the real von Trapp family, see photographs, ship passenger lists, and U.S. naturalization papers see Movie vs. Reality: The Real Story of the von Trapp Family by By Joan Gearin, Prologue Magazine Winter 2005, Vol. 37, No. 4.

Varian Fry was a Harvard educated journalist who went to Marseilles, France in 1940 and rescued more than 2000 predominatly Jewish refugees before they were arrested by the Nazis. He helped many famous people out of Europe including Marc Chagal, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann.  You can learn more about this book here.

Carla McClafferty is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.
__________________________________________________________________
Perhaps the most moving story to capture the horrors of WWII was written by a young Jewish girl.  Tomorrow, Jim Whiting will tell you about Anne Frank and her famous diary.

     This April, the trial of former German concentration camp guard Oskar Gröning provided a stark reminder of the World War II horrors that claimed the lives of more than 6,000,000 people, most of whom were Jews.  

     Perhaps the most famous victim was teenager Anne Frank.

     She was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Soon after Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Anne’s family moved to Amsterdam, Holland. In 1940, German forces invaded Holland, though the Franks managed to eke out a meager existence. For her 13th birthday, Anne’s presents included a diary. 

     Shortly afterward, the Franks were forced to go into hiding in “the Annex,” a hidden apartment. During the walk from their home to the Annex, they had worn all the clothing they could in the summer heat. Carrying a suitcase would have tipped off the Germans. Soon four other people joined the Franks. Several friends risked execution by supplying the fugitives with food and other necessities. 

     Anne’s diary reflected what they did during the long months of concealment. Many passages dealt with things she didn’t want to share—her feelings, her belief in God, and her desire to be an author. She made her final entry on August 1, 1944. A few days later, someone betrayed them.  They were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. While many Jews were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived, the Franks were put to work as slave laborers and provided with the most meager and unappetizing food.

     Later they were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Early in 1945, a typhus epidemic killed thousands of prisoners. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15 that year.But it was too late for Anne. She died, probably of typhus, in February or March. Her body was dumped into a mass grave. 

     When he returned to Amsterdam, Anne’s father Otto discovered that Anne’s diary had been saved.  Reading it moved him profoundly. He decided to honor his daughter’s desire to be an author by publishing it. 

     Since then, millions of copies of The Diary of Anne Frank have been sold. In 1999, Time magazine honored Anne by putting her on the list of The Most Important People of the Century:  “With a diary kept in a secret attic, she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity.”

__________________________________________________________________


​
After WWII, the State of Israel was founded and became a haven for Jews from around the world.  Jim Whiting has written a book about this momentous event and you can read more about it here.


__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Percy Julian is an American hero immortalized on a postage stamp.  Tomorrow Kerrie Hollihan will tell you why.

​     Among the fiercest foes the United States ever fought were its Native Americans. Our Indian Wars blazed over the West after the Civil War and lasted 45 years. It was a bitter struggle on both sides. The U.S. enforced a harsh peace on the warring tribes and didn’t grant Native Americans citizenship until 1924. They weren’t allowed to vote until after WW II. Native American children were often boarded in harsh schools where they were forbidden to speak their own language. But those nearly-lost languages were to save American lives.

     Even after shoddy treatment from the government in Washington for more than a century, American Natives quickly volunteered to defend “their country” against enemies in World War I France. A group of Choctaw Natives were hurried to the trenches to send critical messages in a language wire-tapping Germans couldn’t possibly understand.

     In World War II, Comanche Code Talkers waded ashore with our troops on D-Day, June 6, 1944, in Normandy. Our technically advanced enemies in Europe and the Pacific were listening to our radio messages. Mechanically coding and decoding orders could take hours when seconds meant lives. The Code Talkers’ messages in their undecipherable language were quickly delivered, and replies came back immediately. Their tongue was taught orally, never written down, and the Talkers made it even harder by using a shorthand code within a code: a tank was a “turtle,” chay da galli; a fighter plane was a “hummingbird,” da he toh hi.

     United States Marines in the bloody battles of the Pacific hopped from one Japanese-held island to another with Navajo Code Talkers. The Navajo tongue was even more difficult than the Comanche’s because one word could mean many things when paired with other words, and subtle pronunciation changed meaning. Neither the Comanche nor the Navajo codes were ever broken.

     The Code Talkers were so successful that their service was kept secret until 1968, when heroic Code Talkers could finally tell their families about their part in winning the war and saving hundreds of thousands of lives. 

     In 2014 Chester Nez, the last of the Navajo Code Talkers, died at 93. Three years earlier he and all 29 of the original Navajo Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for distinguished service to a country that finally recognized a debt to its Native Americans, and to their language.

For us “Doodlebug”  is a name for a “roly-poly” or “pill bug.” During World War II, however, it meant a flying bomb. Putting a silly name on such a wicked object was characteristic of Britain’s plucky humor during a devastating war.  

     Adolph Hitler gave it an official name: Vergeltungwaffe 1 or the V1, “first vengeance weapon.” It was also called the buzz bomb, because it was powered by a pulse jet with metal shutters that opened and closed over its intake fifty times a second to direct the force of its jet-fuel combustion to the rear. This noisy but simple jet engine made a loud, stuttering buzz. You could hear a buzz bomb 10 miles away, and you hoped to keep hearing that buzz as it passed overhead. Attached to the nose of the buzz bomb’s body was a propeller that measured the miles it had traveled. Once the mile counter reached a preset distance, the engine stopped. That was the worst sound: sudden silence. It meant that the doodlebug was plunging to earth near you carrying almost a ton of high explosive.

     A doodle bug was only about 26 feet long. The body and engine were metal, the stubby wings were mostly plywood. They were cheap to build; they didn’t put a German pilot at risk. In war terms, they were a bargain.

     Doodlebugs were also fast, about 400 miles an hour. Most airplanes couldn’t catch them. Even when the fastest fighters closed in on a buzz bomb, bringing it down wasn’t easy. Machine gun slugs bounced off the sleek metal body. Fighters with cannons were effective but the ton of explosive in the doodlebug could destroy the fighter if it got too close.

     Intrepid fighter pilots found another way. They flew right beside the flying bomb and slipped the tip of their wing under the doodlebug’s wing. Airflow over the fighter’s wing flipped the V-1 over in a roll from which its autopilot couldn’t recover. Hundreds of doodlebugs crashed into fields far short of London.

     With Britain’s improved anti-aircraft shells and enormous lines of anti-aircraft cannon, most of the doodlebugs launched from the European coast were shot down but they still kept coming. Before Allied forces stopped the bombs in late 1944, more than 8,000 had hurtled toward England, damaging more than 1,125,000 buildings in London, and killing almost 23,000 Britons.

_________________________________________________________________

Jan Adkins is excited by things tiny and by enormous concepts. He’s published about forty-five books but they seem to be only excuses to find new stories and learn new facts. He’s been called “The Explainer General” because most of his work unsnarls complicated knots of confusion and re-builds them as simple paths to understanding. He explains bright bits of the world in pictures and words, often to young people. He’s written about sandcastles, bridges, pirates, knights, cowboys, maps, sailing, knots, coal, oil and gold. He’s got a long list of things he still wants to figure out and explain. Adkins (this is what his grandsons call him) believes real history and real science are ten or twelve times cooler than fairy tales and magic.
Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.


__________________________________________________________________

There are still some mysteries to be solved in this world, and one of them sits right in front of the CIA headquarters in Virginia.  No one has solved it yet, but in tomorrow's Minute, Carla McClafferty is not only going to tell you what the puzzle is about, but she is going to offer you an opportunity to solve it.  Good luck!

Amy Nathan
Stories About Regular Folks Doing Remarkable Things

I learned about the Caterpillar Club when I interviewed some flying WASPs—not the kind that buzz around on tiny wings. These WASPs were airplane pilots, the first women to fly for the United States military. They served during World War II: the Women Airforce Service Pilots (or WASP, for short). 

      The Caterpillar Club they told me about was named for silkworm caterpillars that helped save pilots’ lives. If a plane developed engine trouble in midair, pilots could float to safety by using a parachute made from silk, a lightweight cloth that silkworm caterpillars help create. These caterpillars use a spit-like substance in their mouths to spin a long silk thread that they wrap around themselves, forming a cocoon that they live in for several weeks until they become moths. Those long silk threads can then be unwound from the cocoons and woven together to make silk cloth. 

      About twenty years before World War II, a parachute company started the Caterpillar Club for people whose lives were saved by using a parachute to escape from a disabled plane. People could write to the company about their parachute rescue, pay a membership fee, and the company would send them a little caterpillar pin.

      However, the WASP pilots I spoke with said that some pilots liked to feel they were part of the Caterpillar Club even if it wasn’t an aircraft’s fault that led them to use a parachute. During World War II, pilots—both men and women—trained to fly military aircraft for the Army in small open planes. The planes didn’t have a roof. If a nervous pilot-in-training forgot to buckle the seat belt and the plane tipped over, the pilot could fall out! Fortunately, they always wore a parachute. Landing safely—thanks to the parachute—not only let them feel part of the Caterpillar Club, but also helped the students remember to never, ever forget to buckle up again. 

      However, by World War II, many parachutes used by U.S. pilots weren’t made of silk. The silk-producing areas of the world were controlled then by Japan, which the U.S. was fighting in this war. Because U.S. companies could no longer get silk cloth, they began making parachutes from a new material scientists had just invented—nylon. Most parachutes are made of nylon today. Even so, the Caterpillar Club lives on.


Click here for source notes on this article.

________________________________________________________________
If you are interested in finding out more about the WASPs, Amy Nathan has written a book on the subject. Through firsthand accounts, she tells how these early pilots they test-flew newly repaired aircraft, dragged banners behind their planes so male trainees could practice shooting moving targets with live ammunition (!), and ferried all kinds of aircraft from factories to military bases. 

Yankee Doodle Gals will give you a new look at World War II and show you just how dramatically society has changed since then. Click here for more information. 


________________________________________________________________

​Ants may be even busier than they look.  Tomorrow Sarah Albee will tell us how they're helping scientists figure out some complicated problems.


​