Transcript

10.8.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine, dated September-October 2026.
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Speaker 1: As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading service intended
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Speaker 1: for people who are blind or have other disabilities that
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Speaker 1: make it difficult to read printed material. Please join me
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Speaker 1: now for Part 2 of Some of the Earliest Automobile
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Speaker 1: Enthusiasts Signed Up to Help the Allies in World War I.
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Speaker 1: They Also Ushered in the Mechanization of War. by Joshua Hammer.
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Speaker 1: Part 1 tells the story of the Royal Automobile Club
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Speaker 1: Volunteer Force, or RAC, a group of 25 wealthy British
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Speaker 1: motoring enthusiasts who brought their own cars to France at
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Speaker 1: the start of World War I. Led informally by Toby Rawlinson,
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Speaker 1: the volunteers served as chauffeurs, couriers, scouts, ambulance drivers, and
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Speaker 1: improvised support personnel during the war's fast-moving early months. Their
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Speaker 1: experiences placed them close to pivotal events, such as the
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Speaker 1: retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Marne, Antwerp, and Ypres,
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Speaker 1: where they witnessed both the chaos of battle and the
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Speaker 1: growing importance of speed, mobility, and motor transport. Here now
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Speaker 1: is Part 2. While the Allies also employed horses and
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Speaker 1: military trucks, the RAC members' cars were designed for speed,
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Speaker 1: and could navigate broken roads and bypass congestion far faster
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Speaker 1: than heavily loaded military vehicles. Communication between command structures was
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Speaker 1: critical during the early phase of the war, says Christopher Phillips,
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Speaker 1: a lecturer in the history of warfare at Aberystwyth University
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Speaker 1: in Wales and an expert in civilian-military cooperation on the
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Speaker 1: Western Front in World War I. French generals feared that
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Speaker 1: their British allies would might veer off to protect ports
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Speaker 1: along the English Channel, leaving the French army to defend
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Speaker 1: Paris on its own. There was a sense that if
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Speaker 1: the British fell back, the two forces would be disconnected,
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Speaker 1: he said. In the end, the British expeditionary force fought
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Speaker 1: beside the French, and the drivers, especially the French-speaking Rawlinson,
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Speaker 1: solidified the relationship between the two partners. Still, Rawlinson at
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Speaker 1: first dismissed some of his duties as those of a, quote,
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Speaker 1: London policemen at Piccadilly Circus. But with shifting lines and
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Speaker 1: ubiquitous German patrols, the danger was all around them. In
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Speaker 1: his first days, Frederick Abernathy Coleman, the London-based American representative
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Speaker 1: of Cleveland's White Motor Car Company, who volunteered with his
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Speaker 1: White Model 30, a gasoline-powered successor to the firm's now-obsolete
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Speaker 1: steam vehicles, watched a blood-drenched, bullet-riddled French limousine limp into Demartine.
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Speaker 1: A German cavalry patrol had ambushed it, killing a passenger
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Speaker 1: and mortally wounding the driver. The threat from their own
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Speaker 1: side was just as real. French and British sentries, awash
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Speaker 1: in rumors of infiltrators and unnerved by automobiles, often panicked
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Speaker 1: at checkpoints. One night, Christopher Darcy Bloomfield Saltern Baker Carr,
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Speaker 1: a 36-year-old retired infantry officer from Cornwall, was escorting an officer,
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Speaker 1: Major James Shea, to a rendezvous when he pulled up
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Speaker 1: to a checkpoint before a bridge. As the sentry examined
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Speaker 1: their documents, a British officer stepped into the glare of
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Speaker 1: the Mercedes headlights and, apparently panicking, fired two shots at
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Speaker 1: close range. The first bullet went between their heads, Baker
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Speaker 1: Carr wrote. The second smashed one of the lights. Shea
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Speaker 1: berated the shooter, then calmly turned to Baker Carr, his chauffeur.
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Speaker 1: All right, old boy, he said, we must get on.
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Speaker 1: The roads themselves posed constant hazards. Often narrow and unpaved,
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Speaker 1: they were clogged with infantry, horses, cattle, supply carts, and
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Speaker 1: cassins filled with wounded troops. Baker Carr was driving a
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Speaker 1: general through La Cateau, as hard as God will let you,
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Speaker 1: he recalled, when a line of horse-drawn wagons suddenly emerged
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Speaker 1: from a side street. He jammed on the brakes of
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Speaker 1: his Mercedes and twisted the wheels, hitting onto the pavement.
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Speaker 1: The car grazed a lamppost and stopped. Baker Carr, quote,
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Speaker 1: finally emerged onto the roadway safe and sound, not a
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Speaker 1: little pleased with, as I thought, rather a pretty piece
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Speaker 1: of fancy driving, he recalled. But the general stepped out,
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Speaker 1: shaking with rage. My God, my God, he repeated, Baker
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Speaker 1: Carr recalled, as he gave me one parting look of loathing.
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Speaker 1: Not every officer reacted to his driving mishaps that way.
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Speaker 1: Cruising through the countryside late one night, with the same
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Speaker 1: Major Shea snoring in the seat beside him, Baker Carr
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Speaker 1: began to doze off. Moments later he struck a cow broadside,
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Speaker 1: sending the animal flying into the air. Then came the
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Speaker 1: violent jolts as the wheels passed over its body, shaking
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Speaker 1: the colonel awake.' What was that, old boy?' he asked,
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Speaker 1: sitting up with a start.' A cow,' Baker Carr replied.'
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Speaker 1: Did you kill it?'' I think so.' Well done, old boy,
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Speaker 1: Shea exclaimed, then fell back to sleep with his head
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Speaker 1: on Baker Carr's shoulder. As the Germans continued their relentless advance,
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Speaker 1: the war grew louder and closer. German and British biplane
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Speaker 1: pilots dueled overhead in crude dogfights, sometimes shooting at each
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Speaker 1: other with pistols. The British rearguard, under constant attack from
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Speaker 1: German artillery, marched down roads with tottering gait and bleeding feet,
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Speaker 1: their eyes glazing from exhaustion, Their spirit still unbroken, Rawlinson wrote.
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Speaker 1: The volunteers were called on repeatedly to evacuate British officers
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Speaker 1: from command headquarters and establish new bases at a safer
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Speaker 1: remove from the enemy. Rumors of thousands of German cavalry
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Speaker 1: in the woods nearby arrived every moment, Baker Carr wrote
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Speaker 1: of a last-minute escape from Danmartin. Typewriters and office equipment
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Speaker 1: were flung into the waiting lorries, which were drawn up
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Speaker 1: in serried ranks in front of the chateau, he said.
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Speaker 1: Always on the move, the volunteers lived better than the infantry,
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Speaker 1: though far from their usual luxury. Coleman slept in a
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Speaker 1: stable or in his car or in deserted houses. He
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Speaker 1: ate cold soup, bread, and jam ransacked from abandoned pantries, and,
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Speaker 1: one memorable morning, tinned corned beef, sardines, and rum brought
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Speaker 1: by a villager to the shelter of a haystack. Rollinson
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Speaker 1: foraged for chickens and eggs in deserted farms and curled
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Speaker 1: up many nights in his Hudson. though he also enjoyed
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Speaker 1: an incongruously comfortable night at the Chateau de Ferrières of
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Speaker 1: Baron Edouard de Rothschild, with whom he'd hunted and played
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Speaker 1: polo before the war. One day, Coleman watched British troops
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Speaker 1: escort a captured German soldier past a mob of French villagers.
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Speaker 1: A mere lad in grey, smooth-shaven, with downcast eyes and
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Speaker 1: pale face, he observed in a memoir from Mont-Ypres with French.
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Speaker 1: He seemed absolutely overwhelmed by the threatening cries of the rabble.
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Speaker 1: The prisoner's fear reminded Coleman of his own precarious situation.
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Speaker 1: Coleman knew that, as an American citizen in an unmarked uniform,
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Speaker 1: he would probably be viewed as a mercenary or spy
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Speaker 1: if captured. Baker Carr agreed. The Germans, he wrote, would
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Speaker 1: have been fully entitled to shoot Coleman on sight. The
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Speaker 1: plain khakis worn by the volunteers raised a red flag
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Speaker 1: for many British officers as well. H. Stanley Westcott, a
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Speaker 1: rare automobile connoisseur, had brought a four-cylinder racer built by
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Speaker 1: the Diato Company of Turin, Italy. But he had to
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Speaker 1: abandon his prized Diato racer during the battle in Landresise,
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Speaker 1: so he approached a British officer at headquarters for permission
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Speaker 1: to retrieve it. The officer immediately suspected me for a spy,
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Speaker 1: and I was placed under arrest, he recalled in a
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Speaker 1: story for the RAC Journal later that year. It was
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Speaker 1: only after great difficulty that my identity was accepted. In
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Speaker 1: those first weeks, with the threat to Paris growing by
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Speaker 1: the day, displaced civilians flooded the roads alongside retreating armies.
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Speaker 1: To Rawlinson's friend, James Armand de Rothschild, Baron Edward's cousin,
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Speaker 1: the whole nation seemed to be on the move. Refugees
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Speaker 1: flying everywhere barefoot, half-clothed and starving, children and women old
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Speaker 1: and young. It is a pitiable thing. a Paris-born heir
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Speaker 1: to the European banking fortune, Rothschild, known as Jimmy, had
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Speaker 1: returned from his home in London in July and been
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Speaker 1: drafted into the French army as a clerk. Restless and
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Speaker 1: humiliated by his back-office posting, he persuaded Rawlinson to arrange
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Speaker 1: his transfer to the British Expeditionary Force as a driver-translator,
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Speaker 1: though he had been dependent on chauffeurs his whole life
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Speaker 1: and scarcely knew how to drive. His lack of experience showed.
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Speaker 1: After taking lessons in his Rolls-Royce, he confused the accelerator
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Speaker 1: for the brake and ran over a curb in reverse,
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Speaker 1: infuriating the colonel he was chauffeuring. In Amiens, he skidded
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Speaker 1: into a telegraph pole and destroyed the axle, but he
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Speaker 1: was back behind the wheel before long. I have got
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Speaker 1: a splendid little Peugeot car, very fast and specially built
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Speaker 1: for campaigning, he wrote to his wife. Soon afterward, he
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Speaker 1: swerved to avoid a truck and flipped the vehicle which
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Speaker 1: landed on top of him crushing his pelvis i spent
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Speaker 1: one night in hospital thoroughly ashamed his days as a
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Speaker 1: driver were over by early september 1914, the Germans had
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Speaker 1: advanced to within 25 miles or so of Paris. As
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Speaker 1: citizens dug trenches and unspooled barbed wire around the city's perimeter,
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson drove a staff officer to the Hotel des Invalides
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Speaker 1: for a meeting with the city's military governor, General Joseph
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Speaker 1: Simon Gallieni. The stream of refugees fleeing ahead of the
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Speaker 1: enemy was the greatest I ever saw, he recalled. The
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Speaker 1: French civilian government had fled to Bordeaux the day before.
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Speaker 1: Any Parisians who could afford a train ticket followed, crowding
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Speaker 1: the Gare d'Arastelitz and the Gare de Lyon in panic,
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Speaker 1: and abandoning their baggage as conductors squeezed ever more passengers
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Speaker 1: aboard the railcars. To Rothschild, who drove his Rolls-Royce into
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Speaker 1: Paris twice to scavenge food for his mess— the capital
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Speaker 1: felt like a dead city. Baker Carr, delivering a message
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Speaker 1: from Field Marshal John French to the British ambassador, saw
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Speaker 1: not a single vehicle on the Champs-Élysées. Hotels and shops
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Speaker 1: were shuttered, and a deathly silence prevailed. The capitulation of
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Speaker 1: the French capital seemed to most of us to be
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Speaker 1: a foregone conclusion, Coleman wrote. Along a 160-mile front north
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Speaker 1: of the Marne River, One million German soldiers faced around 100,000
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Speaker 1: British and more than one million French troops, preparing for
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Speaker 1: what would be one of the war's bloodiest and most
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Speaker 1: consequential battles. The Royal Automobile Club's most experienced drivers, including
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson and Radley, spent days and nights racing along back
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Speaker 1: roads outside Paris, tracking German movements, evading patrols, and delivering
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Speaker 1: intelligence to British and French commanders. One evening, Rawlinson strayed
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Speaker 1: into a no-man's land thick with German troops and drove
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Speaker 1: 13 miles with his headlights off, the road illuminated only
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Speaker 1: by moonlight. Later, while attempting to cross the Marne River,
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Speaker 1: he nearly plunged off a bridge that had been destroyed,
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Speaker 1: looking down on the wreckage of half a dozen vehicles
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Speaker 1: that had failed to break in time. The war was
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Speaker 1: already shifting toward industrial-scale slaughter, yet Rawlinson and Coleman also
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Speaker 1: witnessed the last flickers of a dying era, a cavalry charge. Oh,
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Speaker 1: the fascination of it, Coleman rhapsodized, watching from a hillside.
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Speaker 1: The glory of a galloping regiment, flowing over a green
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Speaker 1: field in line of squadrons. The rolling thunder of many
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Speaker 1: thousand hoofs stirred Rawlinson's nostalgia for his days as a
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Speaker 1: lancer in India. Here the violence remained shockingly intimate. One
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Speaker 1: trooper drove his lance through a German, Coleman noted. till
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Speaker 1: his hand touched the doomed man's breast. Amid the fighting,
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Speaker 1: Coleman and his white roadster were pressed into service, ferrying
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Speaker 1: injured soldiers to a field hospital. The wounded were tossed
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Speaker 1: into the tonneau, into the front seats, on the folded
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Speaker 1: hood at the rear, wherever space could be found, he recalled.
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Speaker 1: Bullets sang all about. Someone hanging on one of the
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Speaker 1: steps was hit and cried out as he dropped off.
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Speaker 1: Elsewhere along the marne, artillery and machine-gun fire cut down
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Speaker 1: tens of thousands of exposed soldiers on both sides. The
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Speaker 1: French line appeared close to collapse until the night of
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Speaker 1: September 6, when Gallini dispatched 3,000 reservists and 600 Parisian
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Speaker 1: taxis to reinforce the depleted army. The arrival of the
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Speaker 1: taxi brigade lifted morale. Much like the Royal Automobile Club
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Speaker 1: volunteers working closely with the British Expeditionary Force, says Phillips,
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Speaker 1: This was a demonstration that we're all in this together,
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Speaker 1: the civilians and the army. It was a turning point.
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Speaker 1: Soon afterward, French aviators and RAC drivers observed a 30-mile
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Speaker 1: gap opening between two overstretched German divisions. Allied forces poured
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Speaker 1: into the gap, threatening encirclement and forcing a German retreat
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Speaker 1: north to the Asner River, where both sides dug in.
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Speaker 1: The Great War's character was changing from a rapid invasion
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Speaker 1: to into a long, attritional struggle of trenches and fortifications.
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Speaker 1: James Rothschild took somber stock of the ruined countryside and
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Speaker 1: the stacks of corpses, reflecting on the transformation of conflict.
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Speaker 1: Modern warfare has become largely a question of machinery and chemistry,
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Speaker 1: he wrote to his wife. Explosives, airplanes, wireless and motor transport.
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Speaker 1: After six days of fighting and as many as 500,000 casualties,
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson declared, the fierce and long-planned thrust of the German
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Speaker 1: army on Paris was completely defeated. With the collapse of
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Speaker 1: the Schlieffen plan, the Germans became locked into fighting a
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Speaker 1: two-front war, says Phillips. From the German perspective, the war
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Speaker 1: was lost at the Battle of the Marne. In late September,
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson traveled briefly to London, where he bought some excellent
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Speaker 1: machine guns and mounted one on the Hudson. The purchase
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Speaker 1: proved prescient. He was about to be dispatched on his
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Speaker 1: most dangerous mission as a volunteer. With hundreds of thousands
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Speaker 1: of German troops bogged down along the Esna, the German
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Speaker 1: command initiated a new offensive at Antwerp, hoping to use
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Speaker 1: the Belgian fortress city as a springboard to seize ports
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Speaker 1: along the English Channel. The Germans had realized the incalculable
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Speaker 1: value of the coast and were making frantic efforts to
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Speaker 1: possess themselves of it, Baker Carr noted. we too had
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Speaker 1: awakened to the danger and were desperately endeavoring to avert
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Speaker 1: this catastrophe. The British expeditionary force quietly withdrew from France
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Speaker 1: in stages to face the German threat. Rawlinson joined a
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Speaker 1: convoy of drivers escorting his brother, General Henry Rawlinson, on
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Speaker 1: a 300-mile journey from France to take over the defense
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Speaker 1: of the besieged city. He brought 250 rounds of ammunition,
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Speaker 1: for the benefit of any German cavalry who might offer
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Speaker 1: themselves as a target. But when he left his Hudson
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Speaker 1: briefly unattended in Bruges, curious civilians commandeered his gun and
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Speaker 1: accidentally sprayed the town with bullets. Luckily, the weapon had
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Speaker 1: been tilted upward, and the rounds safely cleared the heads
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Speaker 1: of the crowds in the street. Winston Churchill, the civilian
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Speaker 1: head of the Royal Navy, arrived by special train in
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Speaker 1: Antwerp on October 3rd, followed by a small naval brigade
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Speaker 1: under his command, but German artillery fire forced the defenders
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Speaker 1: to abandon the city, and Churchill and Henry Rawlinson withdrew
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Speaker 1: alongside them. On long and especially hazardous journeys, the volunteers
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Speaker 1: sometimes traveled in pairs. For the next week, Toby Rawlinson
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Speaker 1: and his traveling companion, a fellow RAC volunteer known only
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Speaker 1: as Borrett, carried top-secret messages between commanders in Belgium and
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Speaker 1: in France, helping coordinate the deployment of British troops along
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Speaker 1: a new front line near the Belgian city of Ypres,
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Speaker 1: a critical geographical barrier protecting Allied ports at Calais and Dunkirk.
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Speaker 1: Villages along the coastal route lay eerily deserted. German patrols
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Speaker 1: were rumored to be lurking in the marshes. Rawlinson also
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Speaker 1: spent part of the journey with his longtime friend Hugh Grosvenor,
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Speaker 1: who always seemed to procure the best food and accommodations
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Speaker 1: on the front lines. They scoured the Belgian countryside looking
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Speaker 1: for a suitable headquarters for the general staff, eventually finding
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Speaker 1: a chateau near Ostend. Once, when Rawlinson spotted an enemy
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Speaker 1: barricade near Ypres, he concealed the Hudson behind a hedge
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Speaker 1: and opened fire with his machine gun on a German
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Speaker 1: officer and a motorcycle courier, killing both men. He took
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Speaker 1: the overcoat of one of the dead as a souvenir.
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Speaker 1: His transformation from chauffeur to courier to combatant was complete.
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Speaker 1: I had no compunction whatever in killing any number of Germans,
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Speaker 1: he wrote. In November 1914, the Allies made a stand
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Speaker 1: around Ypres that cemented the reality of brutal trench warfare.
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Speaker 1: Day after day, the German infantry was hurled against the
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Speaker 1: British front line and repulsed with massive casualties. Shells rained
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Speaker 1: down on British troops, sheltering in shallow scratches in the
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Speaker 1: ground that in those days answered to the name of trenches,
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Speaker 1: wrote Baker Carr. Thousands more shells fell on the medieval town. Gradually,
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Speaker 1: Ypres was deserted, Baker Carr wrote. An oppressive silence reigned
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Speaker 1: as one drove through the square, accentuated by the ear-splitting
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Speaker 1: burst of heavy shells. The Allies held Ypres at a
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Speaker 1: fearsome cost. roughly 130,000 soldiers on each side killed or injured.
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Speaker 1: Soon after the horror of Ypres, the men of the
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Speaker 1: Royal Automobile Club went their separate ways. In the new
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Speaker 1: immobilized war of mud and parapets, the unit became obsolete.
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson drove his Hudson, pocked with bullet holes, still flying
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Speaker 1: a frayed Union Jack and bearing two spiked German helmets
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Speaker 1: mounted on the grill, to Bologna, drawing cheering crowds all
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Speaker 1: along the way before putting it on a ferry back
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Speaker 1: to England. He soon returned to France and fought with
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Speaker 1: the British Expeditionary Force until he was wounded at the
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Speaker 1: Battle of Obers Ridge in May 1915. Back in England,
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Speaker 1: he organized London's air defenses against Zeppelin attacks. Months before
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Speaker 1: the armistice, now promoted to colonel, he gathered intelligence in
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Speaker 1: the Caucasus. Then, following the Allied victory, he oversaw the
19:57
Speaker 1: disarmament of Turkish forces in Anatolia, where the Ottoman government
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Speaker 1: imprisoned him for 20 months as a suspected spy. His
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Speaker 1: machine gun, Rawlinson wrote, traveled with me everywhere until it
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Speaker 1: was finally taken from me by the Turks at Erzurum
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Speaker 1: in March 1919. Rawlinson's friend, James Rothschild, whose stint as
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Speaker 1: a chauffeur had been disastrous, received a second chance at glory.
20:25
Speaker 1: He served as a major in the British Army's Jewish
20:28
Speaker 1: Legion in Palestine in 1917 to 1918, earned the Distinguished
20:33
Speaker 1: Conduct Medal for recruiting volunteers there, and later became a
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Speaker 1: member of parliament, philanthropist, and prominent figure in the Zionist movement.
20:43
Speaker 1: Hugh Grosvenor, known as Bender, after one of his grandfather's racehorses,
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Speaker 1: followed a darker path. He became a Nazi sympathizer, notorious
20:54
Speaker 1: for his anti-Semitic rants and membership in far-right pro-German clubs,
20:59
Speaker 1: and is best known today for his long affair with
21:02
Speaker 1: famed French fashion designer Coco Chanel. who had a pro-Nazi
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Speaker 1: streak herself. Frederick Coleman, the American businessman and journalist, wrote
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Speaker 1: two vivid memoirs based on his experience in the Corps,
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Speaker 1: but he soon disappeared from history. Baker Carr, like Rawlinson,
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Speaker 1: parlayed his service in the RAC volunteer force into a
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Speaker 1: return to military life and into the mechanization of war itself.
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Speaker 1: He successfully lobbied the Secretary of State for War, Herbert Kitchener,
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Speaker 1: to create the Machine Gun Corps, helped develop some of
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Speaker 1: the first tanks deployed on the Western Front in 1916,
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Speaker 1: and rose to Brigadier General. He often thought back to
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Speaker 1: his days as an RAC chauffeur, speeding through the idyllic
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Speaker 1: French countryside in his Mercedes, still holding out hope for
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Speaker 1: a swift victory. Little did we dream, he wrote, that
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Speaker 1: we had before us more than four years of misery, mud,
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Speaker 1: and slaughter— In Britain, the Royal Automobile Club is still
22:06
Speaker 1: regarded as one of the country's most prestigious private members' clubs,
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Speaker 1: with its Pall Mall mansion and a 350-acre country estate
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Speaker 1: in Surrey. The volunteer force it sponsored has long since
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Speaker 1: slipped from public memory, but traces of its efforts can
22:23
Speaker 1: be found within the personal recollections, photographs, and memorabilia of
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Speaker 1: its members' families. One December day, I traveled to Norfolk
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Speaker 1: in East Anglia to meet descendants of Toby Rawlinson, who
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Speaker 1: died suddenly in June 1934 after a brief illness at
22:41
Speaker 1: the age of 67. At Hayden Hall, a 16th century estate,
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Speaker 1: I met Sarah Jane Bulwer-Long, Rawlinson's 87-year-old granddaughter. Oliver Cromwell
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Speaker 1: climbed a tree here as a boy, she told me,
22:55
Speaker 1: pointing out 400-year-old portraits of Cromwell and his mortal foe,
22:59
Speaker 1: Charles I. that hang on the manor's drawing-room walls. Traces
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Speaker 1: of her own family lie interspersed among older relics. From
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Speaker 1: a chest of drawers, Bulwer-Long extracted a booklet with a
23:12
Speaker 1: black cover, her grandfather's 1910 International Aviator's Certificate, adorned with
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Speaker 1: the faded photograph of Toby in his crisp RAC uniform.
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Speaker 1: Bulwer-Long's younger brother, Andrew Rawlinson, known to everyone as Putty,
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Speaker 1: lives in a cottage in nearby Gunthorpe where he serves
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Speaker 1: as the unofficial keeper of the Rawlinson family flame. He
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Speaker 1: worked on two documentaries about the Battle of the Somme,
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Speaker 1: the 1916 cataclysm in which his great-uncle, Lieutenant General Henry Rawlinson,
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Speaker 1: and General Douglas Haig sent tens of thousands of young
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Speaker 1: men to their deaths on the bloodiest day in British history.
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Speaker 1: Framed photographs of Henry Creswick Rawlinson the cuneiform decipherer, and
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Speaker 1: a young, dashing Toby in his 1886 cavalry uniform hang
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Speaker 1: in the hall. The library is stocked with World War
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Speaker 1: I histories, including Toby's three memoirs and an out-of-print biography, Toby,
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Speaker 1: a Real Life Ripping Yarn, by A.J. Smithers, a British
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Speaker 1: World War II veteran and military historian. A balding man
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Speaker 1: with a rosy-weathered face and blue-gray eyes Putty Rawlinson never
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Speaker 1: knew his grandfather, who died six years before he was born.
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Speaker 1: Putty's father, Frederick, said little about Toby's exploits. I was fascinated,
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Speaker 1: but my father was a bad tutor, Putty told me
24:41
Speaker 1: as we sipped tea in his study. Frederick had been
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Speaker 1: closer to his father's older brother, Henry, Putty said, even
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Speaker 1: joining him on big-game safaris in the 1920s when the
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Speaker 1: elder Rawlinson was serving as commander-in-chief of the British Army
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Speaker 1: in India. Few other family members gave much thought to
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Speaker 1: preserving the trophies from Toby's service. Putty remembers seeing his
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Speaker 1: grandfather's tattered Union Jack at the home of Putty's older brother, Tony,
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Speaker 1: mounted on the same wooden cricket stump that had once
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Speaker 1: been fastened to the front of the Hudson. But it
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Speaker 1: disappeared decades ago, and Putty suspects it was thrown out.
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Speaker 1: In those days, memorabilia wasn't really thought about, he told me.
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Speaker 1: The two spiked German helmets, or Pickelheuben, also vanished. Some
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Speaker 1: time ago, Putty began searching for the ultimate prize, the
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Speaker 1: Hudson race car. He asked the Royal Automobile Club for help,
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Speaker 1: but to no avail. He sent the editors of Motorsport
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Speaker 1: magazine a letter seeking information from the public. They published it,
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Speaker 1: he told me, but no one replied. Today, the only
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Speaker 1: trace of the Hudson is an image in the family's hands.
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Speaker 1: a sepia photo of Toby Rawlinson just after the Battle
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Speaker 1: of Ypres, clad in his leather jacket, a cigarette in
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Speaker 1: his gloved left hand, poised confidently at the wheel of
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Speaker 1: the motor car that served him so well. And accompanying
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Speaker 1: this article, Did You Know? World War I by the
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Speaker 1: Numbers By the end of the war, more than 8.5
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Speaker 1: million troops had died from battle wounds or disease, and
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Speaker 1: more than 21 million suffered injuries. Civilian deaths are best
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Speaker 1: estimated at about 13 million. Sixty percent of battlefield deaths
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Speaker 1: were caused by exploding artillery shells, according to the National
26:38
Speaker 1: World War I Museum of the U.S. Once trenches solidified
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Speaker 1: in late 1914, the front lines moved little through the
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Speaker 1: war's end, barely six miles, for example, during the historically
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Speaker 1: deadly Battle of the Somme. And according to the Imperial
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Speaker 1: War Museum, more than two billion letters were delivered by
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Speaker 1: the British Army Postal Service. Finally, ask Smithsonian. You've got questions,
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Speaker 1: we've got experts. Why did insects shrink in size over
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Speaker 1: the past 300 million years? The scientific consensus involves several factors.
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Speaker 1: The largest terrestrial arthropods arose during the Carboniferous and Permian periods,
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Speaker 1: roughly 250 million to 350 million years ago. During this time,
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Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere was up to 35% oxygen, compared with around
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Speaker 1: 21% oxygen today. Insects with larger bodies could more easily
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Speaker 1: and efficiently deliver oxygen to all their tissues because more
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Speaker 1: oxygen was available in the air. These large insects also
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Speaker 1: had fewer predators, more plentiful food supplies, and many more
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Speaker 1: ecological niches to occupy than later insects. This was from
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Speaker 1: Floyd Shockley, Collections Manager of Entomology from the National Museum
27:58
Speaker 1: of Natural History. This concludes readings from Smithsonian Magazine for today.
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Speaker 1: Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening
28:07
Speaker 1: and have a great day.