laugh with rhino

It's been a pretty busy week for me as I peruse the National Archives; seems like every record I find turns up about a dozen more, and usually only a few pages of each one are actually worth anything. You would probably be surprised by how much paper an army generates; I found one record that contained twenty-three telegrams sent between four staff officers, debating whether or not they should still use the words "bunker" "foxhole" and "box" when fighting in the jungle. That's about three months worth of telegrams, too. Makes you wonder how we ever won the war...

Anyways, I thought I'd share a few amusing things I dug up in the Archives. People can really be quite funny in these official documents; of course, much of the humor comes from statements like "The African soldiers seem to be angry because they're paid much less than the Europeans, although really we don't see why" which are amusingly ironic.
This is a page of the "Rhino Review", a newspaper written by 13 Field Information Platoon of 11 (East African) Division. It mostly contains pieces of news about the campaign, news from East Africa, some mentions of things going on London, and then, goofily, this joke page - all the poems are mostly written by the editor, I think, and the jokes are pretty stupid, but its cute and based on the letters to the editor, people seem to have liked it. Hopefully you can read it - the best joke is probably that one about Nazis. I found an even better joke in a note included in a report on soldiers' morale: “Said the distinguished lady to the RAF ace:-“and how did you get your DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross]?” “I shot down four Fokkers.” “Really. And were they Messerschmidts?”
Hilarious.

Finally, we have this story I found today in one ofthe 5 Field Security Service's report on security issues in Burma: The 5th FSS found a Burmese villager who blew a horn every night in order to scare away wild pigs from his house; this apparently sounded just like a long-range Morse transmitter so they had previously suspected enemy action in the area, like a spy or something. After discovering this, they recruited him and several of his similarly-talented friends in the hopes of training them to disrupt Japanese signals.

Great stuff, and hopefully there's more of it to come.