During the Korean War, American troops in the Chosin Reservoir had it bad. They were outnumbered 8 to 1, supplies were running low, temperatures plummeted to minus 25 degrees, and food was almost impossible to warm up. They were also running low on mortar shells. In ordering mortar shell resupplies, they used a codename established for the munitions: Tootsie Rolls. Somebody took that literally, however, and airdropped the beleaguered troops crates of the candy, instead.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Tootsie Rolls were among the few food items that were actually edible when frozen, and the sugar boost gave the weary fighters a needed jolt. Additionally, the troops soon found innovative uses for the candy. Chewed up Tootsie Rolls became like putty in the mouth, but froze solid when exposed in the frigid conditions of the Chosin Reservoir. So using Tootsie Rolls as improvised epoxy, the troops patched up bullet holes in equipment, and repaired broken tools. Then, on a sugar high and with their equipment fixed, the American forces broke out of the Chosin Reservoir, and fought their way to safety.
1. The Snake Eradication Plan That Disastrously Backfired
British India’s rulers were worried when Delhi became infested with venomous cobras, so they offered a bounty for dead cobras, payable upon delivery of their skin to designated officials. Before long, natives were thronging to the drop off points, whose store rooms were soon bulging with cobra skins. However, the city’s cobra population remained unchanged, no matter how many cobra skins were delivered to the authorities. Officials eventually figured out why: many locals had turned to farming cobras. Since the bounty on the snake skin was greater than the cost of raising a cobra, the British had unintentionally created a new cash crop.
So the authorities cancelled the plan, and stopped paying out bounties for cobra skins. That made things worse. Without the bounties, cobra skins and captive cobras became worthless. So Delhi’s cobra farmers did the economically sensible thing, and released the snakes back into the wild – the “wild” in this case being the city of Delhi. The infestation grew by orders of magnitude, and Delhi wound up with many times more cobras than it had possessed before the authorities launched their ill advised plan.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
