Truman Fooled the Eye Chart
76. Harry S. Truman was so nearsighted that he cheated by memorizing the army’s eye chart so he could be enlisted in WWI.
77. In WW1, New Zealand had one of the highest casualty rates per capita, including wounded and dead, at 58%.
78. During WWI, a single Portuguese soldier named Aníbal Milhais made German troops believe they were fighting an entire unit for three days without food or water.
79. Henry Johnson, a WWI veteran, rescued his friend from more than 20 German soldiers alone by using his rifle as a club and then attacking the others with his bolo knife.
80. In WWI, the British armed merchant cruiser RMS Carmania fought and sank the German merchant cruiser SMS Cap Trafalgar. Ironically, the two ships had been disguised as one another.
81. Because steel was in short supply during WW1, concrete ships were constructed. Only ten remain afloat today, and all of them are located in a small coastal town in British Columbia.
82. In America until the early 1900s, it was entirely ordinary for children of both sexes to wear dresses until they were about 6 or 7 years old. Clothing divided by gender did not appear until just before WWI, when pink was suggested for boys and the more delicate and dainty blue was suggested for girls.
83. Henry Allingham, the oldest Briton in history, said his long life was due to cigarettes, whiskey and wild, wild women, along with a good sense of humor. He served in WWI, worked as an engineer in WWII, and died at 113.
84. The immediate cause of World War 1 was the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand. What many people do not know is that the first attempt failed when the bomb exploded behind Ferdinand’s car. He was only assassinated because one of the terrorists, Gavrilo Princip, who belonged to a Serbian group called the Black Hand, stopped to buy a sandwich and saw Ferdinand in the store.
85. During WWI, although the officers knew a cease-fire was set for 11 am, they continued sending troops into no man’s land and shelling enemy positions until 10:59 am. Roughly 2,000 people died with only hours remaining before the fighting stopped.
Houdini Trained Wartime Soldiers
86. During World War 1, magician Harry Houdini took a year away from performing so he could help sell war bonds and teach American soldiers how to get out of German handcuffs.
87. In 1914, British WWI soldier Thomas Hughes threw a beer bottle containing a letter to his wife into the English Channel. He was killed two days later. In 1999, a fisherman recovered the bottle from the River Thames. Even though Hughes’ wife had died in 1979, it was delivered to his 86-year old daughter.
88. The earliest mention of “cooties” was as a name for lice in WWI trenches, where they were also called “arithmetic bugs” because “they added to our troubles, subtracted from our pleasures, divided our attention, and multiplied like hell.”
89. At the beginning of WWI, Italy created the Villar Perosa Double Machine Gun, which could fire 1200 to 1500 rounds each minute, but they could not determine a practical use for it until the war ended.
90. Ormer Locklear, a WW1 pilot, climbed out of his plane, found the problem, and fixed it while the plane was still in flight, and he did this many times afterward.
91. In 1917, during World War 1, the Germans constructed a 25-foot-tall, armor-plated fake tree with a soldier inside it to observe Allied forces. At night, they waited until dark, cut down one of the real trees, and replaced it with the fake one, while firing artillery so the British forces would not hear the axes.
92. Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Ted, received the Medal of Honor for commanding the first wave of US soldiers attacking Utah Beach on D-Day. He had volunteered for the mission and needed a cane because of WWI injuries and a heart condition. At age 56, he was the oldest man in the first wave.
93. German POWs in WWI introduced Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to Japan by performing it for them, and it is now a national custom to play it every New Year’s.
94. When WWI began, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, tried to join the military at age 55, saying, “I am 55, but I am very strong and hardy and can make my voice audible at great distances.”
95. During World War I, Romania chose to send its huge treasure collection to Russia for safekeeping. In 1918, the new Soviet government ended diplomatic relations and refused to give the treasure back. Russia still possesses the treasure, which is worth more than $1.5 billion, and it has no plan to return it.
Tower’s Wartime Lifeline
96. The Eiffel Tower was scheduled to be torn down in 1909 when its lease expired, but it proved useful in WW1 because of its antenna.
97. During World War I, Dominic “Fats” McCarthy received the Victoria Cross after, almost by himself, he killed 22 Germans, took 5 machine guns, captured 50 prisoners, and seized half a kilometer of the German front. After it was over, even the prisoners he had taken patted him on the back for what he had done.
98. In the United States, being clean shaven became fashionable after soldiers returned from World War I as heroes because they had been required to shave so gas masks would fit tightly.
99. Germany finally finished paying off its World War I debt in 2010.
100. During World War I, a British recruiting method known as the “Pals Battalion” let men from the same town join the military together. Although it boosted enlistment numbers, it also ruined entire areas of the UK whenever a battalion suffered severe losses. By World War II, the idea had been dropped.
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