boy hits puberty at 2!

In 1917, when he was 11, Great-grandpa Raymond “Bud” Burleigh ran away from home in Omaha, Nebraska, to join the Army and fight the Germans. He claimed he was 20 years old. Army recruiters believed him, but his mother discovered where he’d gone and rushed down with proof that he was only 11. Bud was undeterred. He eventually eluded his mother, claiming to recruiters that he was 20-year-old Fred De Reaux — a name he came up with after seeing a car called the De Reaux on the way to the recruitment office. He was nearly six feet tall and had a full beard and the musculature of a young man.

Though he was still years from legal driving age, the Army assigned Bud to chauffeur generals and colonels on the front lines at Château-Thierry, France. Ferrying top brass up and down the front soon grew boring, however, so he went AWOL to Paris, where he frequented the city’s brothels and embarked on a weeks-long bender until the Army caught up with him and threw him in prison. Upon his release, Bud was reassigned to a battalion in the Argonne Forest, where he hijacked an airplane equipped with machine guns and set out to single-handedly kill German soldiers loitering in no-man’s-land. Bud was later quoted in a newspaper as saying, “They told me when I got back that I looped the loop three times, but if I did, I didn’t know anything about it.” When the plane landed, he was arrested again. This time he was sent to fight in the trenches as punishment, where he served for six months before suffering mustard-gas poisoning and being hospitalized. Only then did the authorities discover his true age.

They sent him home, where he became a minor celebrity after the newspapers picked up his story, dubbing him “The Youngest Yank” because he was indeed the youngest American soldier to fight in WWI. One of these news stories describes him as “six feet of closely knit bone and sinew, a face full 21 years old, and an eye keen and steady.” He was barely 14.