Desertion Set A Sole Example
51. More than 20,000 American service members deserted in World War 2. Pvt Eddie Slovik was executed to set an example for others, and he remains the only service member executed for desertion since the Civil War to the present day.
52. Once World War 2 ended, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, which were still broadly regarded as secure, to developing countries. Those countries were unaware that the Enigma code had already been broken. Their supposedly secure communications were then routinely read by major Western intelligence agencies.
53. During World War 2, the Russians changed their R2 rocket fuel from ethyl alcohol to methyl alcohol so launch troops would not drink the rocket fuel.
54. In World War 2, a German soldier called Fritz Christen held his position for three straight days and, on his own, disabled 13 Soviet tanks and killed almost 100 enemy soldiers.
55. After Berlin fell in World War 2, Soviet soldiers raped millions of German women. More than 100,000 births in the city were thought to have resulted from rape.
56. Havildar Lachhiman Gurung, a Gurkha soldier in World War II, lost his right hand when he tried to throw back a grenade from his trench after successfully tossing back two earlier grenades, and it detonated in his hand. He then defended his position alone for more than four hours against 200 enemy soldiers, killing 31 Japanese with only his left hand.
57. In World War II, Sergeant Leonard A. Funk was faced by 90 German soldiers who had taken his squad prisoner, and he started laughing uncontrollably at the situation. Many of the enemy troops laughed with him, until Funk drew his machine gun and killed 21, then captured the others.
58. In World War II, the US Army called the 603rd unit Camouflage Engineers. Most of the members were artists, architects, actors, set designers, and engineers. Their aim was not only to teach camouflage but also to mislead the enemy. They came to be known as the Ghost Army.
59. Simeon II, who was Tsar of Bulgaria during World War II, later became elected republican Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005. He is the only living person to have been called Tsar.
60. In 1943, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles combined into a single team called the “Steagles” because their rosters were depleted during World War II.
Factory Output Beat Axis
61. In World War 2, American factory workers made more than twice as much as their German equivalents and produced four times as much as Japanese workers, leading industrialist Donald Douglas to say, “Here’s proof that free men can out-produce slaves.”
62. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin has an anti-graffiti coating. It was made by the same company that produced the Zyklon B gas used in concentration camp gas chambers during WW2.
63. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful female sniper in history, was unable to fire her first kill until she watched a German shoot a young Russian soldier. “He was such a nice, happy boy…” “After that, nothing could stop me.” She then amassed 309 confirmed kills in WWII.
64. During World War 2, British prisoners of war were a major drain on German morale. They often caused their captors to be arrested by submitting false complaints about their conditions in the camps.
65. London did not return to its pre-World War 2 population until January 2015.
66. Hiroo Onoda, an intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who served in World War II, did not surrender in 1945. He remained in the Philippines for nearly 30 years, until 1974. That year, his former commander came from Japan in person to order him out of duty.
67. During World War II, the US government asked the press not to mention “polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium”. Uranium alone was classified for the Manhattan Project, but it was grouped with the other elements to conceal its significance.
68. About 20 million Chinese civilians died in World War 2.
69. In World War II, the Allies used statistical analysis of German tank serial numbers to estimate Germany’s average monthly tank output. Their estimate was off by one.
70. After World War 2, cuttings from the cherry trees in Washington DC, which had originally been a gift from Japan, were sent back to Japan to help restore the cherry trees in Tokyo, which were devastated by US bombings during the war.
Thierville’s Unbroken War Record
71. The township of Thierville, France did not lose anyone in the country’s five most recent wars: World War I, the Franco-Prussian War, World War II, the First Indochina War, and the Algerian War. Every soldier who served in those conflicts came back home.
72. During World War II, German prisoners in American POW camps were occasionally permitted to go out without guards under the honor system and visit nearby towns. Black American guards observed that German prisoners could go to segregated restaurants that were off-limits to them.
73. After liberation and the end of World War II, some homosexual concentration camp prisoners were made to complete the rest of their prison terms.
74. Brazil took part in World War II, making it the only independent South American nation to do so. Its 25,000-soldier Brazilian Expeditionary Force fought with the Allies and captured 20,573 Axis prisoners, including two generals, 892 officers, and 19,679 other ranks.
75. The makers of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory struggled to find enough little people to play the Oompa Loompas because so many of them had been killed by the Nazis in World War II.
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