Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Six Impossible Episodes: The Dickin Medal About this episode Maria Dickin wanted to raise the status of animals in society and bring more awareness to the work they were doing during World War II. The Dickin Medal was created to honor military working animals. This episode covers six of those recipients.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Holly Frey? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:10 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
1:42 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. While I was working on our episode on Buck versus Belle that came out recently, and I was feeling kind of just progressively angrier with every sentence of that, I caught up with Rosemary Moscow, who asked me if I had ever heard about a pigeon named Winky. If you don't know who Rosemary is, she's a science writer and a naturalist, and she wrote A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching and The Birding Dictionary and a number of other books. Several of our bird-centric episodes ultimately trace back to Rosemary in one way or another.
3:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, Winky was awarded the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals Dickens Medal for helping to save the crew of a ditched aircraft during World War II. And so, her question about Winky led to a whole conversation about the Dickens Medal and its founder, Maria Dickens. And I thought, man, this sounds like what I really should be working on after this infuriating upsetness that is Buck versus Belle. It's also been a while since we have had an installment of six impossible episodes, so something that would lend itself to that felt kind of like perfect timing. There is some controversy around the Dickens Medal and other honors that are awarded to military working animals.
3:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Maria Dickens wanted to raise the status of animals in society and to bring more awareness of the work that they were doing during World War II. But there are also discussions of whether awards like these anthropomorphize animals or glorify war, and whether it's ethical to have military working animals at all. That is really not what this episode is about, but I did want to just acknowledge it. All of these animals were in some kind of peril, but I tried to keep the animal harm to a minimum in this episode. None of these animals were killed while they were earning these medals.
4:27 Tracy V. Wilson? There will be some mentions of animal deaths in this episode, though, but I tried to keep it pretty basic, not a ton of detail on deaths or injuries.
4:39 Holly Frey? Six Impossible Episodes is where Tracy rounds up six topics that, for one reason or another, aren't workable as individual episodes. And the first one we're going to do today is actually Maria Dickens herself. Because while her life sounds fascinating, and she did a lot, we just don't have the kind of detail about her that would make a full-length episode. She did publish a memoir called The Cry of the Animal in 1950, but according to WorldCat, there are only three copies of it in libraries anywhere in the world today, and it was only about 90 pages long. So not comprehensive, impossible to get a hold of.
5:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I did not even try to put in an interlibrary loan request.
5:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Because number one, something that rare might not be circulating at all. And number two, at only 90 pages long, I did not think it was going to yield information that would make that time delay worth it.
5:35 Holly Frey? There is also the other thing that sometimes happens in libraries with older, rare, but not noteworthy books, where if you, and I don't want to slag any libraries, because all libraries, or many libraries, have this problem. You put in the ILL and they go, uh-oh, we don't know where that book is.
5:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
5:55 Holly Frey? It happens all the time.
5:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I was kind of surprised not to find a scan of it anywhere, but I did not, so I just moved on. Maria Elizabeth Dickens, known as Mia, was born on September 22nd, 1870, in South Hackney, London. Her father was William George Dickens and her mother was Ellen Maria XL Dickens. This family really did not have a lot of money. Mia's father was a minister and Mia was the oldest of eight children. As she entered her adult life, Mia contributed to the family's income by starting her own voice production studio and teaching singing.
6:35 Holly Frey? On September 1st, 1899, when she was 28, Mia married her first cousin, Arnold Francis Dickens. Marriages between cousins were not unheard of in England in the late 19th century, but they were definitely becoming less common than they had been. And this marriage would have made Mia financially more comfortable since Arnold was a successful chartered accountant. And it was just the two of them with no children to support. Unless there were two chartered accountants named Arnold Francis Dickens in London. According to a death notice in the Daily Telegraph, he died in 1928. And we really don't know much at all about their relationship.
7:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, um, there's a page for him on, I think, findagrave.com that says that he died in, uh, if I'm remembering correctly, 1978, at the age of more than 100. And I'm like, I think somebody might be misreading that two as a seven on a weathered tombstone. Oh, yeah, entirely possible. Uh, Mia liked music and literature. In 1905, she published Suggestive Thoughts from the Temple: Being Striking Passages From the Teaching of R.J. Campbell, something else I couldn't find a scan of. Reginald John Campbell was the Congregational Minister of the City Temple, and he had a
7:59 Tracy V. Wilson? reputation for kind of eccentric nonconformity. He was simultaneously very popular and very controversial. And it's not fully clear what Dickens' relationship with him and to the church was. This book, though, was basically a collection of quotes from him.
8:17 Holly Frey? According to her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dickens also became part of the spiritualist movement. And it also says she was connected to James Moore Hickson, founder of the Society of Emmanuel, later called the Divine Healing Mission. This was a healing ministry focused on intercessory prayer and the laying on of hands.
8:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Dickens gave up her voice studio after she got married and she started volunteering in some of the poorest neighborhoods of London. At first, her focus was on people, but over time, she noticed how many pets and working animals needed care in these neighborhoods and nobody was providing that care. Then one night, her own dog became very ill and ultimately had to be euthanized. And as she was trying to comfort her dog in her last hours, Dickens realized that she was witnessing the same kind of pain and weariness that she would be seeing if she were sitting up with a dying human.
9:19 Holly Frey? So she decided she would try to help. A clergyman loaned Dickens some basement space in Whitechapel and she opened the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals on November 17, 1917. She was 47 at this point. The sign out front read, quote, "Bring your sick animals. Do not let them suffer. All animals treated, all treatment free."
9:44 Tracy V. Wilson? The People's Dispensary for Sick Animals grew very quickly and it became both popular and beloved in the neighborhoods that it served, but it also faced some controversy. Veterinary medicine was relatively new as a discipline. The first veterinary schools in the UK had been established at the end of the 18th century. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was established in 1844 and the 1881 Veterinary Surgeons Act had been passed to regulate the field. Overall, veterinary surgeons, which include what we in the US would just call veterinarians, were focused on large animals, especially horses.
10:28 Tracy V. Wilson? There was not much focus on small companion animals and a lot of vets in the UK had pretty disparaging attitudes about their colleagues who did treat dogs and other small animals.
10:42 Holly Frey? We talked about some of that in our episode about the history of veterinary medicine.
10:45 Tracy V. Wilson? We sure did.
10:47 Holly Frey? Uh, the PDSA treated all animals, not- Just pets, but they treated a lot of pets. And while the PDSA had some connections to veterinary surgeons, the people providing this care overwhelmingly were not veterinary surgeons themselves. They were volunteers and a lot of them were women. There was a stereotype of philanthropically minded, middle and upper class women focusing on the plight of dogs. British law didn't ban anyone from providing care for animals just from calling themselves veterinary surgeons or RCVS members if they were not. And the PDSA was not doing any of that, so they weren't doing anything illegal. But they did face criticism from the RCVS and other organizations for staffing their
11:32 Holly Frey? clinics with laypeople without the supervision of a veterinary surgeon. Simultaneously, the RCVS bylaws banned, quote, "quack covering" or veterinary surgeons providing legitimacy to phony practitioners. So there weren't many veterinary surgeons who even wanted to work with the PDSA. We're not saying that these volunteers were quacks, but the word quacks was interpreted broadly enough to include anyone who was not a trained veterinary surgeon but was providing animal care. Basically, no one wanted to risk their reputation endorsing people that didn't have training. These two sides did not start to move toward working together until the late 1930s.
12:16 Tracy V. Wilson? The PDSA incorporated in 1923 and it received a bequest of 50,000 pounds from the estate of Sarah Martha Grove Hardy in 1926. This allowed Dickens to open a large treatment and training facility. So while these volunteers who worked with the PDSA were not veterinary surgeons, many of them were going through an in-depth, hands-on training program. And it was a program that was way more focused on companion animals than what people would typically get at a college of veterinary surgery.
12:50 Holly Frey? Within a decade of its 1917 establishment, the PDSA had almost 60 clinics around the UK, as well as three horse-drawn caravans that worked as mobile clinics. It had also started establishing clinics internationally. Dickens had also started a magazine for the dispensary called The Animals Advocate, as well as the Busy Bees Club to teach children how to care for their pets. In 1929, Dickens was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
13:21 Tracy V. Wilson? When World War II started and the UK was hit with bombing raids, the PDSA established an animal rescue squad to look for and care for affected animals. And in 1948, Maria Dickens was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
13:38 Holly Frey? Maria Dickens died of bronchopneumonia caused by influenza at her home on March 1st, 1951, at the age of 80. A blue historical plaque was placed at her birthplace in 2015.
13:51 Tracy V. Wilson? The PDSA still exists today as a charity for pets in need. There are 48 pet hospitals run by them across the UK, and they treat thousands of animals every year. Thousands of people also volunteer for the organization. Today, though, it is fully interconnected with the greater world of veterinary medicine in the UK. That's a process that, like we said, started in the late 1930s before World War II started. There was kind of a break in moving together during World War II, and then after the war was over, they started kind of building some bridges there.
14:29 Holly Frey? Maria Dickens established the Dickens Medal for Animal Gallantry or Devotion to Duty in War or Conflict during World War II. And after we take a break, we're going to talk about some of the animals who earned that award.
14:44 Speaker 02 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
14:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
15:08 Speaker 02 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
15:15 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
15:22 Speaker 03 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
15:28 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
15:31 Speaker 03 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
15:35 Speaker 02 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
15:39 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T. So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors.
16:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:52 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
17:34 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
18:40 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:00 Tracy V. Wilson? The first Dickin Medal we're going to talk about is really three medals. They were the first three Dickin Medals ever to be awarded, and they were all awarded to pigeons on the same day, which was December 2nd, 1943. The pigeons were named Winky, White Vision, and Tyke. Tyke was also called George. These were not at all the only pigeons to be awarded the Dickin Medal. In the first stretch of this award's existence, which was from 1943 to 1949, it was awarded to more pigeons than any other animal.
19:37 Holly Frey? The pigeons who were awarded the Dickin Medal were a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the pigeons that the British used in the war. The National Pigeon Service was formed in February of 1939, and membership was open to anyone who had at least 20 trained homing pigeons. Thousands of pigeon fanciers participated in this service, and more than 200,000 pigeons were used across all branches of the British military, as well as some parts of the civil service. Many of these pigeons rode aboard aircraft in watertight baskets so that if the pilot had to ditch the plane or was forced to land and didn't have radio contact, they could still send a message about where they were.
20:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Winky was the board of Beaufort Bomber from the Number 42 Squadron on February 23rd, 1942. This bomber was damaged by anti-aircraft fire while flying over Norway, and while they were trying to get back to Scotland, they had to ditch into the North Sea. The four-man crew did not have time to radio their position before ditching, and once they were in the water, they did not have a way to write a message about where they were. So they opened Winky's basket and Winky flew home 120 miles away through some very terrible winter weather.
20:56 Holly Frey? When she got there, her owner, George Ross, contacted the Royal Air Force. The RAF calculated where the plane must have gone down based on how fast a pigeon could fly, adjusted for the wind speed and direction and the fact that Winky was covered in oil from the crash. About 15 minutes after her arrival at home, the RAF dispatched a search team and they successfully found and rescued all four of the plane's crew.
21:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Winky's Dick and Medal Citation read, quote, "for delivering a message under exceptionally difficult conditions and so contributing to the rescue of an aircrew while serving with the RAF in February 1942."
21:38 Holly Frey? The two other pigeons who were awarded the Dick and Medal on the same day had the same basic citation, but with different dates. One was White Vision, who was one of two pigeons aboard a Catalina flying boat with a human crew of 11. They had to ditch into the ocean near the Hebrides in Scotland in October of 1942. The amphibious aircraft was able to remain afloat for a while, so the crew was able to take refuge on it and attach notes before releasing the birds.
22:08 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the pigeons didn't arrive back home, but White Vision did, flying for nine hours against heavy headwinds and arriving safely. Based on the note she carried, a rescue operation was mounted and the aircraft's entire crew was rescued just before that aircraft sank.
22:26 Holly Frey? Tyke's home was in Libya, and he was raised to be part of the Middle East Pigeon Service, which had been established in 1942 to serve the British military in northern Africa. Tyke had been assigned to a US aircrew, which had to ditch into the Mediterranean in June of 1943. He made a similar long-distance flight of about 100 miles through poor visibility, leading to a successful rescue of all four of the crew.
22:55 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of the other pigeon, dicken medals are very similar to those three. And as we said earlier, pigeons received more dicken medals than any other animal in the 1940s. The next most honored animals were dogs, and one of them was Rip, the 27th animal to be awarded the dicken medal.
23:15 Holly Frey? Rip was not bred to be a military dog. He was a mixed breed terrier who had presumably been someone's pet, or possibly even a stray. A lot of British write-ups describe Rip as a mongrel, and in pictures, he is both adorable and a little bit scruffy looking. If he was someone's pet, though, we do not know who that person was. In 1940, an air raid warden named Mr. E. King found him among the rubble after a strike on the Poplar District of London. King started feeding the dog, who was obviously hungry, and while King wasn't really intending to keep him, Rip just stayed around.
23:54 Holly Frey? Soon, Rip had become something of a mascot to the Southall Street Air Raid Patrol, which was King's Civil Defense Squad.
24:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Rip had no formal training in search and rescue, but he turned out to really have a knack for finding survivors after German air raids on London. King described this dog as, quote, "never in the way, but always eager to do his bit." Rip is credited with finding and helping to rescue more than 100 people during the Blitz, which lasted from September of 1940 to May of 1941. He was awarded the dicken medal in 1945, quote, "for locating many air raid victims during the Blitz of 1940."
24:37 Holly Frey? Rip continued to accompany King until the end of the war, and his success at finding people has been credited with encouraging British authorities to formally train search and rescue dogs later on in the war. He lived until after the war was over, and after his death, which seems to have been natural and age-related, he was buried at the PDSA Animal Cemetery in Ilford.
25:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Rip was a very good boy, and our next dicken medal recipient was a very good girl named Judy, a purebred Liver and White Pointer born in Shanghai in February of 1936.
25:13 Tracy V. Wilson? If you're like me and you're not really up on dog color terms, a liver is a shade of deep brown. I had imagined it as kind of reddish. It's not. I guess it could maybe have a red tint, but it's more of a deep shade of brown. Her name was originally Judy, but it was anglicized while she was still a puppy. And I don't really know what the story is around that, if there is one. She was born in a kennel to a dog that belonged to a British couple. And that kennel was primarily used by Europeans who were living in Shanghai.
25:47 Holly Frey? At the end of 1936, the HMS Gnat was looking for a ship's dog and they purchased Judy. They tried to train her as a gundog, so to retrieve game during hunting parties on land. This is a pretty natural thing you would train a pointer of all dogs to do. But she kept jumping overboard, so she kind of became more of a mascot. She did, however, learn to alert the crew when she heard incoming ships and aircraft. And at one point, that included giving them an advance warning of pirates nearby.
26:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Judy was transferred to the HMS Grasshopper, along with some of the Gnat's human crew in 1939. After Japan bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the HMS Grasshopper served in the war in the Pacific.
26:36 Holly Frey? The Grasshopper helped support the Allied retreat from Malaysia in 1942 and then was hit by a Japanese bomber on its way to Indonesia. The crew, including Judy, were forced to abandon ship and wound up on the apparently uninhabited island of Sing Kep, along with survivors of another ship, the HMS Dragonfly. They had no food or water and most of the survivors were covered with oil. Judy led them to a freshwater spring while they awaited rescue.
27:08 Tracy V. Wilson? They were able to flag down a passing Chinese ship and get onto it and leave the island, but the survivors did not make it all the way to safety. They arrived in Sumatra and made an overland trek to what they thought would be an allied outpost, but the Allies had already evacuated from there, so the crew, including Judy, were taken prisoner by the Japanese. When they arrived at the Glogor POW camp in Sumatra, the sailors smuggled her in and then tried to keep her hidden from the guards.
27:42 Holly Frey? Eventually, leading aircraftman Frank Williams of the Royal Air Force started sharing his food rations with Judy, and he convinced the guards to register her as a prisoner of war. According to some accounts, at this point Judy was pregnant, and this agreement came about after the camp commandant was offered one of her puppies. She was assigned prisoner number 81A Glogor Medan and was the only dog to be officially registered as a POW during World War II.
28:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Judy spent more than two years at this camp, bolstering the morale of the POWs, helping manage the population of rodents, and warning the prisoners of nearby scorpions and snakes. She also developed a reputation for trying to intervene. When the guards were punishing the prisoners, she would bark and snap at them. During this time, Williams and other prisoners also trained her to do things like hide and follow signals like low whistles so that they could keep her hidden and move her discreetly when they needed to.
28:44 Holly Frey? When the camp's internees were moved to Singapore in 1944, Williams smuggled Judy onto the ship, the Harugiku Maru, in a rice sack. At the start of the voyage, Williams kept her hidden, but while they were en route, the Harugiku Maru was struck by torpedoes that were fired by the HMS Truculent and started to sink.
29:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Williams pushed Judy out through a porthole, and once in the water, she started trying to pull the men who couldn't swim very well to safety, and she pulled pieces of floating debris for survivors to hold on to. She and Frank Williams both survived this. But at first, William did not know that Judy had made it. They were reunited sometime later at another POW camp. Judy stayed with Williams and the rest of the POWs as they were forced to clear land through the Sumatran jungle to build a new railway. During this hard labor, Williams credited Judy with giving him and the other men the will to live.
29:43 Holly Frey? After the war ended in 1945, Williams, Judy, and the other POWs were liberated from the camp, and Judy once again had to be smuggled onboard a ship, this one bound for the UK. Once in the UK, she was kept in quarantine for six months. That was part of the effort to keep the United Kingdom free of rabies. And then she was reunited with Frank Williams. She was enrolled as a member of the Return to British Prisoners of War Association, and in April of 1946, she was awarded the Dickens Medal, quote, "for magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners, and also for saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness."
30:26 Holly Frey? The PDSA also awarded Williams the White Cross of St. Giles, its highest human honor, for the care that he gave Judy during the war.
30:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Judy died on February 17, 1950, at the age of 14. She and Williams were living in Tanzania at the time, and she was buried there along with an RAF jacket.
30:46 Holly Frey? We're going to take a little sponsor break, and then we will talk about some other types of animals to be awarded the Dickens Medal.
30:56 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science Communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends.
31:38 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Help Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
31:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
32:44 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Three horses were awarded the Dickin Medal in the 1940s. Those were Olga, Upstart, and Regal. They were all police horses and they all received the award on April 11, 1947. Olga and Upstart were both on duty when flying bombs struck the neighborhoods where they were working, and they helped control traffic and assist rescuers in the aftermath. One of them did kind of run off for a minute but came back. Regal remained calm when his stable was struck by an incendiary bomb on two different occasions. Their stories are all pretty straightforward, so we are really going to focus on a horse who was
35:50 Tracy V. Wilson? awarded the Dickin Medal for her actions during the Korean War. Her name was Sergeant Reckless, and she was also an episode request from listener Chantel many, many years ago.
36:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Chantel, if you still listen to this,
36:09 Tracy V. Wilson? we finally got to this.
36:11 Holly Frey? Finally. Unlike the other animals that we've talked about so far, Sergeant Reckless was working with the United States military, specifically the US Marine Corps. She was a small mare born in South Korea in 1948. Most sources describe her as a Mongolian, but according to the US Marine Corps Museum, she was a halahorse, which is a Korean cross between a thoroughbred and a Jeju, which is a South Korean breed.
36:39 Tracy V. Wilson? She was bred to be a racehorse, but on June 25, 1950, the North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea, which marked the beginning of the Korean War. A couple of years later, Lieutenant Eric Peterson of the 5th Marine Regiment purchased her for use as a pack animal, using $250 of his own money. He bought her from a stable boy at the racetrack who reportedly was trying to raise money to buy an artificial limb for his sister. She had lost a leg after stepping on a landmine.
37:14 Holly Frey? At first, the Marines just called this horse Reckless, possibly because she was trained to carry recoilless rifles, which sounds kind of similar to the word reckless. She would carry these rifles, along with ammunition and other supplies, from a supply point to the front lines. Over time, she started doing at least part of this trip alone, and eventually she would do the entire round trip by herself. The Marines thought of her as one of their own, and they started to refer to her as Private Reckless. They were also pretty entertained by her antics, because apparently she liked to make herself at home in their tents, and she was fond of eating things like pickles, eggs, and poker chips, and drinking Coca-Cola and beer.
37:58 Holly Frey? Obviously, not a good diet for a horse.
38:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, please don't feed these to horses. In fact, don't feed them things if they're not your horse.
38:08 Tracy V. Wilson? You don't know what they may or may not want or need.
38:10 Holly Frey? And really, no one should eat a poker chip.
38:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. Apparently, it was a significant number of poker chips, and I don't know if she had any ill effects afterward. Reckless's most dramatic moments were in March of 1953 during the Battle for Outpost Vegas. This took place during the peace talks that ultimately led to an armistice in the war, and Chinese forces were trying to secure more territory for North Korea by attacking multiple outposts in this area. During this battle, Reckless made 51 round trips to the front lines over a single day, carrying ammunition supplies there and returning with wounded men and the bodies of men who had been killed.
38:58 Tracy V. Wilson? She received two different shrapnel wounds, but she carried on. She delivered an estimated 9,000 pounds of ammunition supplies. Her other duties during the Korean War included helping to string telephone wire, and she also became the first horse known to participate in an amphibious landing with the Marine Corps.
39:19 Holly Frey? An armistice ended the fighting in the Korean War in July of 1953, and Reckless was retired from the Marine Corps in 1960. By that point, she had been promoted to Staff Sergeant. She gave birth to three surviving foals after arriving in the US after the war, named Fearless, Dauntless, and Chesty. After her retirement, she continued to live with the Marine Corps until her death after a fall in May of 1968.
39:48 Tracy V. Wilson? According to the US Marine Corps, during her lifetime, Reckless was awarded two Purple Hearts, a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, a Presidential Unit Citation with Bronze Star, the National Defense Service Medal, a Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Korea Medal, a Navy Unit Commendation, and a Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation. There are multiple statues of her, including at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California and the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia.
40:21 Holly Frey? The PDSA stopped awarding the Dick and Medal in 1949, but revived it in 2000. Sergeant Reckless was posthumously awarded the Dick and Medal on July 27, 2016, quote, "for attention to duty, devotion and loyalty to the United States Marine Corps." She was the 68th animal to be awarded the Dick and Medal, and in 2019, she also became the first animal to be awarded the Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery, which was established as an American equivalent of the Dick and Medal.
40:53 Tracy V. Wilson? And our last impossible episode and Dick and Medal recipient is the only cat ever to be awarded this medal. And I have to admit, when Rosemary and I were talking about this and we read Simon the Cat's award citation, it felt to me a little bit like a participation trophy. Simon, quote, "served on the HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident, disposing of many rats, though wounded by a shell blast. Throughout the incident, his behavior was of the highest order, although the blast was capable of making a hole over a foot in diameter in steel plate." So with just that pair of sentences to go on, this sounded to me just kind of like
41:33 Tracy V. Wilson? a cat doing cat stuff on a damaged ship. Of course, there is more to it than that, and I rescind my original judgment.
41:42 Holly Frey? The Yangtze Incident, also called the Amethyst Incident, took place during the Chinese Civil War. This was between the nationalists, or Kuomintang, under Shanghai Shaq, and the communists, or People's Liberation Army, under Mao Zedong. The conflict stretched back into the 1920s, and the two sides had united to try to fight Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which is marked as the beginning of World War II in Asia. But as World War II ended, this alliance broke down, and the resulting war became interconnected with the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. The US supported the nationalists,
42:22 Holly Frey? and the USSR supported the communists. The US also made repeated attempts to negotiate between the two sides.
42:30 Tracy V. Wilson? While the UK was not directly involved in this civil war, it did have a very long history of involvement in China, including the Opium Wars of the 19th century and a series of unequal treaties that favored British and other Western interests over those of China. At this point, British presence in China included an embassy at Nanjing. And in April of 1949, the HMS Amethyst was ordered up the Yangtze River to relieve the ship that was guarding that embassy.
43:04 Holly Frey? On April 20th, about 60 miles or 96 kilometers from its destination, the Amethyst came under fire from the People's Liberation Army, the crew having apparently misinterpreted warning shots as the sounds of combat. The Amethyst was badly damaged, including having an enormous hole blown into one side, and it ran aground while trying to evade the attack. At least 19 men were killed, including the captain Lieutenant Commander Bernard M. Skinner. More than 20 others were wounded, some of whom later died.
43:40 Tracy V. Wilson? The Amethyst's officers tried to evacuate as many people as possible to the nationalist side of the river, but that left about 60 people still on board, and some of them were too badly injured to be moved. Attempts to refloat the ship were unsuccessful, and while they were able to move it a little bit, the Amethyst wound up trapped in the crossfire. The People's Liberation Army also fired on the ship anytime sailors were visible on deck, and there were additional injuries and deaths among the crew.
44:14 Holly Frey? Several other ships tried to come to Amethyst's aid, but had to turn back after also coming under fire, with injuries and deaths on some of those other ships as well. So the Amethyst was essentially trapped. It sat there in the river for about three months, with the crew facing hot weather, continual danger, and dwindling supplies.
44:37 Tracy V. Wilson? That brings us to Simon, who was a tuxedo cat who had been smuggled aboard the ship in 1948 by a 17-year-old sailor, ordinary seaman George Hickenbottom, who had found this cat hungry on the docks. While some of the crew did not really like Simon's habits of leaving them dead rodents or sleeping in their hats, he did become a favorite of many of the men on board. He was injured in the initial shelling of the ship, and like a lot of cats would do, when he got hurt, he hid. Once he was found, one of the ship's medics treated his injuries, and afterward, while he was still recovering, he went back to something he was already known for doing, which was hunting rats.
45:22 Holly Frey? Rat control was one of the reasons that ships often had cats on board, and it was particularly important while the amethyst was stuck on the Yangtze River. While the amethyst had occasional contact with other British ships, their opportunities for resupply were almost nonexistent. The weather was very hot, the generators had been damaged, and the boilers often had to be shut down to conserve fuel, which meant that the ship often had to go without ventilation or refrigeration. Perishable food spoiled quickly, and anything that was eaten or destroyed by rodents just compounded this problem.
46:01 Tracy V. Wilson? There was also a morale boost aspect to Simon's rat hunting, especially when he killed an enormous rat that the crew had come to really despise. They had named that huge rat after Mao Zedong. Afterward, after he killed this rat, they promoted Simon to able seaman, or in some accounts, able sea cat. Simon also started accompanying the ship's maintenance officer on daily rounds and was credited with lifting the crew's spirits when they saw him. The ship's dog, who was a terrier named Peggy, helped with this, too.
46:38 Holly Frey? With its rations nearly exhausted, the amethyst managed to make an escape on July 30th, 1949, slipping its anchor chain and heading downstream toward Shanghai under cover of night. They successfully made it to the open sea 101 days after becoming stranded on the river.
46:58 Tracy V. Wilson? In addition to being awarded the Dickin Medal in 1949, in August of that year, Simon was awarded an Amethyst Campaign ribbon for distinguished and meritorious service. The citation noted Simon's killing of the rat known as Mao Zedong on April 26, and that between April 22 and August 4, he quote, "did rid the HMS Amethyst of pestilence and vermin with unrelenting faithfulness."
47:25 Holly Frey? While Simon survived his initial injuries and the time the amethyst was trapped on the river, he sadly died of an infection on November 28, 1949, while in quarantine to enter the United Kingdom. About 1,000 people, including the crew of the Amethyst, attended his funeral. Like Rip the Dog, he was buried at the PDSA's Animal Cemetery. In addition to Rip and Simon, there are 10 other Dickin Medal winners buried there.
47:54 Tracy V. Wilson? And that is a number of brave and resourceful animals.
47:59 Holly Frey? Do you have listener mail, brave and resourceful?
48:01 Tracy V. Wilson? I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from Shay, and it is about ballpoint pens. Shay wrote, "Howdy, Tracy and Holly. I've enjoyed listening to your podcast over the years and have always wanted to add my two cents to one of your episodes, and now I can because of ballpoint pens. I've been in the military for over 21 years and will be retiring next year. In the Navy, the most known ballpoint pen is the standard Skillcraft ballpoint pen. Personally, I'm not a fan of how they feel when writing, so I always wondered why Skillcraft. So away I went." Skillcraft is a brand under the National Industries for the Blind through a program administered by the U.S. Ability One Commission. The program
48:46 Tracy V. Wilson? came about due to the 1938 Wagner-ODA Act, requiring the federal government to buy products made by blind workers, and later amended in 1971 to expand to nonprofits employing persons with other disabilities. This bill was championed by Senator Jacob Javits, who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS. While the Armed Forces has used a number of companies for ballpoint pens in the past, just as the Australian pilots you spoke of did to include the Ballerina Pen Company during Vietnam, Skillcraft became a staple in the Navy. I can't speak for the other branches with certainty due to pen requirements and Navy policy.
49:27 Tracy V. Wilson? The GSA policy requiring federal specifications was written and released in 1965 after they, GSA, received a shipment of 13 million ballpoint pens that were defective. The standard included being able to write over 5,000 feet at a pressure of 125 grams, must be able to write in temperatures between minus 40 degrees and 160 degrees, dry within five seconds, can't smear, and ink must still remain even after two chemical bleaching applications, to name a few. Additionally, the OPNAV Instruction 3107C states that we must, quote, "make all manual entries in ship's deck log with a black ballpoint pen
50:10 Tracy V. Wilson? or type written printed on letter quality printer processed by electronic means." Which is why they're commonly seen with someone standing, uh, what we call a deck watch. I hope that was interesting or new information for someone. It was new and interesting information for me. I've attached an old photo of a dog I used to own. Sadly, he had to be rehomed because I was advised she wasn't allowed in the country of one of my duty stations. And I later learned my son has an allergy to dogs, although he always wanted another dog, regardless of the allergic reaction. Her name was Asia, born in 2005. She was a very loving, playful, sweet, American pit bull terrier. And I know her new family loved and took care of her very well. And our family missed her very much.
50:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks for listening, Shay. What a cute dog.
50:59 Holly Frey? Oh, I love a goofy pity. They're so sweet.
51:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. Um, I did not know any of this pen information about the Navy, and I did find it interesting. Um, there are honestly multiple various tidbits in there that I all found interesting. So, thank you so much, Shay, for this email that was a good companion to an episode that was about both animals and the military. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
51:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
51:55 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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