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A Sports Dispute Started the Cuban Missile Crisis and Other Odd Facts

Khalid Elhassan October 28, 2019 31 min

Boer raid on a British position during the Siege of Mafeking. Pintrest

17. Baden-Powell’s Mystery Boxes

When hostilities commenced, Robert Baden-Powell found himself besieged by a Boer force five times bigger than his own. To discourage his enemy from launching a direct attack, he began burying mysterious boxes around the town’s periphery. When asked, he responded that they were powerful new landmines, the latest in British technology.

To demonstrate, he had a couple blown up within sight of Boer sympathizers, whom he then allowed to slip out of town, knowing that they would make a beeline for the enemy, to inform them of the new British weapon. In reality, the boxes blown up had been stuffed with the town’s entire stores of dynamite, while the other boxes buried around the defensive perimeter contained nothing but sand.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.