Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (77 page)

Had Hitler allowed von Paulus to withdraw to a defensive position when requested, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers would have lived to fight another day, and the war might have dragged on for years. Instead, Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. Who knows? We may have Dr. Morell and his amphetamines to thank for the war ending when it did.

In addition to the psychological side effects of amphetamine abuse, there are physical side effects, among them twitching, tremors, and what are called “stereotypes”: compulsive behaviors, such as repeated picking at or biting of one’s own skin. Hitler was twitchy, his head jerked uncontrollably, and he had tremors in spades—the shaking that began in his left hand soon spread down his left leg and then to his right hand. He also exhibited at least two types of stereotypical behavior: compulsively biting the skin around the fingernails of his thumbs, index fingers, and middle fingers, and picking and scratching at the skin on the back of his neck until it became infected.

The trembling in Hitler’s left leg impaired his ability to walk normally, but there may be another explanation for the slow, foot-dragging shuffle and loss of motor function that he displayed at the end of his life. Chronic amphetamine abuse takes a terrible toll on the cardiovascular system and can cause both heart attacks and strokes. Electrocardiographs taken of Hitler’s heart in July 1941 and again in September 1943 show a deterioration in heart function between the two dates that is consistent with a heart attack. And among Dr. Morell’s surviving medical records is an article torn from a June 1943 medical journal that may provide another clue. Topic of the article: How to treat a heart attack.

Then, in February 1945, the Hestons write, “Hitler suffered at least one small stroke; but he may have had several, and, indeed, his rapid decline from this time onward suggests widespread vascular disease.” The odds of a healthy 56-year-old man suffering both a heart attack
and
one or more strokes are “distinctly improbable,” say the Hestons: “The most parsimonious explanation, given the lack of conclusive evidence, is to attribute both vascular events to the injection of intravenous amphetamine.” By April 1945, Hitler was so close to death that had he not killed himself, it may have been just a matter of time before he dropped dead from amphetamine-induced “natural” causes.

Morell remained by Hitler’s side until almost the very end…but not quite. Ironically, the cause of Hitler’s falling-out with his beloved quack was an
injection
: Hitler had resigned himself to remaining in Berlin and committing suicide before the city fell to the Russians. Many in the Führer’s inner circle wanted him to escape to the mountains of southern Germany, where it might have been possible for remnants of the military, led by Hitler, to hold out indefinitely. Hitler would hear none of it. He was determined to die in his capital, but he feared that his subordinates would drug him and take him out of Berlin against his will. And who better to administer the drugs than Morell? When the doctor came to Hitler on April 21 with yet another syringe filled with who-knows-what (probably just more amphetamines), the raging, paranoid Führer fired him on the spot. Not that Morell minded—by then the bombs were dropping on the führerbunker 24 hours a day, and he was desperate for an excuse to escape.

Morell did make it out of Berlin, and he survived the war, but not by much. A few days after fleeing the city, he checked into a hospital complaining of heart problems. On July 17, 1945, he was arrested by the Americans and imprisoned. After investigators determined he wasn’t guilty of any war crimes, he was released. Morell’s health continued to deteriorate, and by June 1947 he was back in the hospital, where he remained bedridden until May 1948, when he died shortly after suffering a stroke.

It’s a familiar scene in period films: After a party or banquet held in the home of a wealthy person, the ladies retreat into the drawing room, leaving the gentlemen behind to enjoy brandy and cigars. If you’re like Uncle John, you’ve probably wondered why nobody ever
draws
in the drawing room. It turns out the name has nothing to do with drawing: It dates back to the days when large English country houses contained entire suites of rooms set aside for visiting royalty and other important guests, along with the servants and staff that accompanied them on such visits. Included in the suite were one or more “withdrawing rooms,” parlors or living rooms that these guests could withdraw to for more privacy. Over time the name was shortened to
drawing
room.

This term for a remote or unimportant town dates back to the days when towns were further apart than trains could travel without having to stop to take on fresh water for the boilers. When a train low on water came upon a pond or a creek running alongside the track, it stopped and the train crew hauled, or “jerked,” buckets of water back to the train. (In some places water towers were set up and the boil-erman swung a spigot arm over the train’s water tender, then “jerked” on a chain to start the water flowing.) Small settlements often grew up in places where the trains were known to stop. These towns—in the middle of nowhere—came to be know as
jerkwater
towns.

Bears walk on all fours, but rear up on their hind legs when they lunge at other bears; two bears fighting can look like they’re wrestling or even dancing. For centuries, people believed that they killed their prey and each other with giant, crushing hugs. (Hunters unlucky enough to find out how bears really killed their prey probably would have preferred a hug.)

In 2007 a man walked into a 7-Eleven in Monrovia, Maryland, just past midnight and attempted a holdup. The unidentified man didn’t have a gun or any kind of weapon at all—he merely demanded that the clerk give him money. The clerk refused, so the man started picking up items off the counter to use as weapons. After repeatedly hitting the clerk with a banana, the attacker fled (empty-handed) before police arrived.

Police in Ferrol, Spain, charged Antonio Navarro with driving while intoxicated on a highway. He was only going 12 mph, and he wasn’t driving a car. Navarro is a quadriplegic, and police busted him driving his motorized bed on the freeway. Where did he need to go in such a hurry? Navarro was on his way to a local brothel.

Swedish police are trying to bust a ring of thieves who steal valuables from bus travelers’ luggage. Criminal teams work in twos: The first person rides inside the bus; the second, who by the crime’s nature must be a “little person,” hides inside a suitcase. The suitcase is placed in the bus’s baggage compartment… and the weird (but clever) robbery begins. As soon as the baggage compartment door is closed, the little person comes out of his suitcase and begins to rifle through other people’s bags and suitcases, looking for valuables. He pockets whatever he finds, and then returns to his own suitcase before arrival at the destination. Police are looking at crime records to identify “criminals of limited stature.”

In 2007 the Seattle Museum hosted “Bodies…The Exhibition,” an educational display of preserved corpses and internal organs. One of the display kidneys was stolen. Police are still searching for the culprit, but do not fear the kidney will turn up on the black market, because even though the kidney is real, it’s not “usable,” as it’s been filled and covered with plastic resin.

Grand theft auto is a common crime; grand theft tank is not. At about 4:00 one morning in February 2009, an 18-year-old British army soldier stationed in northern Germany decided to steal one of his squadron’s tanks. The unnamed serviceman, who had never driven one before, broke into the eight-ton Scimitar tank and made it about a third of a mile outside of his camp before the vehicle ran off the road and got stuck. So he returned to base and stole
another
tank. This time, British military police followed him. They blocked the soldier’s path, forcing him to swerve and crash into a tree.

Police in Newark, Ohio, arrested 28-year-old Kile Wygle for drunk driving in March 2009. But Wygle wasn’t driving a car—he was driving a motorized bar stool, which he had built himself. (It’s powered by a lawn mower engine.) Adding insult to injury was the fact that Wygle was the one who called police. He was riding his stool—drunk—at 20 mph. He lost control, fell off, and called 911 for medical assistance. Instead of paramedics, police arrived.

In February 2009, a 20-year-old Florida woman named Kelly Hildebrandt did a search on the Internet for anybody with the same name as hers and found just one: a 20-year-old man in Lubbock, Texas. So she wrote him a note, and then he wrote back. After three weeks of increasingly flirtatious e-mails, he went to Coral Springs, Florida, to meet her in person. And in October 2009…Kelly Hildebrandt married Kelly Hildebrandt.

Rivalries within the military can help boost morale. But they can also waste a lot of money as each branch of the service competes for funding to support its own weapons systems, its own airplanes, and its own way of doing things. That was the case in 1972 with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

A Naval Research Laboratory team headed by physicist Roger Easton had been making huge strides toward a satellite-based navigation system that would cover the entire world, making it possible to navigate ships with incredible accuracy, land a missile within a few feet of its target, and, as one engineer put it, “drop five bombs into the same hole.”

Even before the Russians launched
Sputnik
, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, Easton had been working on a system in which dozens of satellites would broadcast time signals to Earth below. By comparing nanosecond differences in the arrival times of the satellites’ signals, a ground receiver could decipher exactly where it was, within a few feet. Combining the words “time” and “navigation,” Easton called his system “Timation.”

Timation’s benefits to the Navy were obvious. Although the military already had 43 different navigation systems, they were largely incompatible. Furthermore, there were entire expanses of ocean worldwide that weren’t covered by
any
of the systems, making it hard for the Navy to accurately navigate, track ships and airplanes, or find lost and shipwrecked sailors. By the early 1970s, the Navy had launched four satellites to test Easton’s ideas.

As far as Air Force commanders were concerned, this would not do. They were, after all, the
Air
Force, and they jealously laid claim to anything that flew, hovered, or orbited. A challenge like this could not be left unanswered.

An Air Force response was already in the making. Months earlier they had convened a team of their own engineers, and then got in touch with a Raytheon engineer named Ivan Getting. For years, Getting had been telling anybody who’d listen about how an array of satellites could be used for navigation. One of the Air Force engineers remembered seeing Getting’s cocktail-napkin sketches of satellites beaming signals to receivers on the ground, so they brought him in to help them beat the Navy. They came up with a navigation concept they called the “621B System,” and in November 1972, the Air Force appointed a reluctant colonel and engineer named Bradford Parkinson to manage the program.

By the following summer, the Air Force had a basic concept that seemed feasible, at least on paper. They had to get their system approved by the Department of Defense to have any hope of moving ahead of the more developed Navy plan. Parkinson managed to arrange a meeting with a key DOD committee to pitch it. The committee, knowing of the Navy’s program, voted no.

After the rejection, Parkinson was given a new task: Come up with a joint proposal
with
the Navy, and get the Army involved as well. He approached the task by first reviewing the plans in great detail over three months. His superiors pressured him to give preference to their 621B system, which made things difficult because it became clear that the Navy’s was a much better plan—it was more accurate, more likely to work over the entire globe, more stable even if a few satellites went bad, less vulnerable to attack, and less expensive. Suddenly, his job had become more political than technical. How was he going to get the Air Force and the Army to accept the Navy plan?