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The Fart That Killed 10,000 People, and Other Weird Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 18, 2020 34 min

Wheel - Panjandrum — The Great Panjandrum. War History Online

3. Armed With an Umbrella

Men of the 1st Airborne Division during Operation Market Garden. Wikimedia

Upon joining the paratroopers, Tatham-Warter was put in charge of a company in the 1^st Airborne Division. It did not take long before he built a reputation, such as by procuring a Dakota airplane to fly his fellow officers to a posh party in London’s Ritz Hotel. However, although Tatham-Warter partied hard, he also worked hard, and his company was chosen to spearhead the attempt to seize the Arnhem Bridge in Operation Market Garden on September 17^th, 1944.

Tatham-Warter was worried about radios’ unreliability, so he trained his men to respond to Napoleonic era bugle calls. He also had trouble remembering passwords and came up with an innovative and weird solution: carry an umbrella. He reasoned that even if he forgot a password, any paratrooper who saw him would immediately realize that “only a bloody fool of an Englishman” would carry an umbrella into battle.

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.