This one covers the full range of World War II weirdness: battlefield heroics, secret operations, absurd propaganda, grim human stories, and the kind of wartime details that sound made up until you realize they actually happened.
Canada’s Massive Wartime Force
1. By the conclusion of World War 2, 1.6 million Canadians, out of a total population of 11 million, had served in the military. Canada also possessed the world’s fourth-largest air force and fifth-largest naval surface fleet.
2. Audie Murphy, the most highly decorated soldier of WW2, stood on a burning tank destroyer and fired a machine gun at German soldiers and tanks that were attacking. After being wounded and running out of ammunition, Murphy got off the tank, declined medical care, and then led his men in a successful counterattack.
3. In WW2, one American P-51 fighter kept 30 German fighters from attacking a squadron of B-17 bombers for more than half an hour.
4. In WW2, the V-2 rocket caused more deaths during manufacturing than it did as a weapon. 12,000 forced workers died producing them, while 9,000 people died from the attacks.
5. During World War II, when the Netherlands was invaded, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard fled to Canada. After Princess Juliana’s child was born, the Governor General of Canada made the Princess’ quarters extraterritorial so the newborn would be eligible for the line of succession.
6. During World War II, Kyoto was initially at the top of the atomic bomb target list, but U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson personally removed it. He had earlier visited Kyoto on his honeymoon.
7. The Japanese pilot who bombed a town in Oregon during World War II later came back years afterward to offer his family’s 400-year-old sword as an apology.
8. Russia and Japan still have not signed a peace treaty to formally end World War II.
9. James Doohan, known as Scotty from Star Trek, served as a Canadian soldier in World War II and landed on Juno Beach, where he killed two snipers and cleared a minefield before he had even left the beachhead.
10. In 1947, the British used 6,800 tons of surplus World War II explosives to demolish military infrastructure on the small island of Heligoland. Losing the island was considered acceptable. The blast produced one of the largest single non-nuclear detonations ever recorded.
Poster Boy With Hidden Roots
11. During World War 2, a German soldier named Werner Goldberg became the German recruitment poster boy and was promoted as “The Ideal German Soldier” because of how he looked. Ironically, he was half Jewish.
12. In World War 2, Britain sent its gold reserves and foreign securities to Canada in crates marked “Fish.” They remained for years in an office building in downtown Montreal, where 5000 people worked during the war without knowing what was concealed in the basement.
13. During World War 2, the Japanese officer Otōemon Hiroeda took his own life instead of ordering his 2000 subordinates to carry out a kamikaze attack.
14. In World War 2, the American navy used 180-proof grain alcohol as torpedo fuel. Sailors blended it with pineapple juice and named the drink torpedo juice. Navy authorities added different poisonous substances to the fuel alcohol to make it impossible to drink, and U.S. sailors used different techniques to separate the alcohol from the poison.
15. During World War 2, allied forces accidentally sank three ships that were carrying concentration camp survivors, killing about 10,000 survivors.
16. On 11 November 1918, after World War 1 when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, French marshal Ferdinand Foch said, “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Twenty years and 65 days later, World War 2 broke out.
17. During WW2, penicillin was reused and extracted from the urine of soldiers who had already taken the antibiotics.
18. Judy, a purebred English pointer, would often jump in to protect prisoners from beatings in a POW camp during WW2. A British Naval pilot negotiated to have her officially regarded as a POW so the guards could not kill her.
19. During World War 2, British soldiers were rationed three sheets of toilet paper each day. Americans received 22.
20. German writer Ernst Jünger ran away at 18, served in both WW1 and WW2, received the iron cross, spent time with Picasso and Cocteau, disliked the nazis, used many drugs, and died at 102 years old.
Cargo Seen as Divine Gifts
21. Some indigenous islanders in Melanesia, which is made up of islands in the Pacific, thought that the cargo airdropped to American soldiers during World War 2 was a gift from the gods. Once the American soldiers departed at the end of World War 2, these islanders constructed ceremonial runways and ports so God would send them cargo, and they performed military drills in religious rituals. They are called cargo cults.
22. In World War 2, two Polish physicians protected the lives of 8,000 Jews in the town of Rozwadow by pretending there was a typhus outbreak, which kept the Nazis from entering their town.
23. During the Battle of Hurtgen Forest in WW2, the woods were so thick, dark, and difficult to move through that the German and Allied medics used the same aid station in the only building either side could readily locate.
24. The Grand Mosque in Paris, led by cleric Si Kaddour Benghabrit, saved hundreds of Jews during World War 2 by issuing them false documents and letting them hide in the catacombs under the mosque.
25. Lewis Lee Millett deserted the US Army when he believed it would not enter WW2 and enlisted in the Canadian Army to fight. After the US Army entered WW2, he moved back. During the Korean War, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the last major bayonet charge in American history.
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