Unknown facts -Second World War

Unknown facts -Second World War

The Russians partied so hard once WWII ended, that the entire city of Moscow ran out of Vodka

• during WWII Canada gave out buttons to people who tried to enlist but were refused due to medical conditions to show their willingness to fight with the military forces of Canada
• since the end of the WWII Canada has been naming its 1000's of unnamed lakes after fallen soldiers.
• the guy who played Scotty in Star Trek shot two snipers on D-Day and was shot seven times in WWII
• Luz Long, a German athlete, gave Jesse Owens advice during the long jump. Long won the silver medal, Owens won the gold. Long was killed in WWII, but Owens befriended Long's son and served as the best man at his wedding.
• a German lieutenant, Friedrich Lengfeld, was killed by a land mine while attempting to rescue a wounded American soldier during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest in WWII. The Americans erected a monument in his honor; the only American monument placed in any German military cemetery.
• During WWII, India produced the largest volunteer Army in world history, over 2.5 million men. Winston Churchill called their bravery 'Unsurpassed', with at least 38 Indians awarded the Victoria Cross or the George Cross.
• explorers on Greenland found a P-38 aircraft used during WWII buried under 264 ft of ice. They dug it out and restored it to flying condition.
• the first time the Japanese people heard the Emperors voice on radio was when he announced Japan's surrender in WWII.
• a Japanese pilot who attacked a town in Oregon during WWII returned 20 years later to present his family's 400-year-old sword as a symbol of regret. His daughter later said, if he had received a hostile reaction, he would’ve used the sword to perform a ritual suicide by disembowelment instead.
• the U.S. government spent years holding fake arrival ceremonies honoring the return of American soldiers killed in WWII, Vietnam, and Korea to American soil, but the planes were actually empty. The ceremonies were known by staff as 'The Big Lie.'
• The Navajo code is the only spoken military code never to have been deciphered. During WWII, since only 30 non-Navajo people could understand Navajo, the US used Navajos as code talkers. They could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line message in 20 seconds, versus 30 minutes for machines.
• Henry Allingham, the oldest Briton in history, credited his longevity to 'cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women – and a good sense of humour'. He fought in WWI, worked as a engineer in WWII, and died at the age of 113.
• pizza wasn't popular in the U.S. unafter WWII, when U.S. troops (including Dwight Eisenhower) returned home from occupied Italy with an appreciation for Italian pizza.
• Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry served in WWII with a pilot named Kim Noonien Singh and lost contact with him following the war's end. Roddenberry named the villain Khan Noonien Singh after his comrade in hopes that Singh would notice and contact him.

• during WWII, the Gestapo's most wanted person was New Zealand born Allied agent Nancy Wake. Among her numerous exploits, she killed an SS soldier with her bare hands, to prevent him from raising the alarm during an undercover raid.
• the alternative history novel 'The Man in the High Castle' features a 'novel within a novel'. While the actual book is about Nazis winning WWII, the in-book novel is about an alternate universe in which the Nazis lose the war.
• In WWII the Allies used the price of oranges in Paris as an indicator of whether railroad bridges had been bombed successfully.

 

How Alan Turing Helped Win WWII

During World War II, Turing served the Allied forces by breaking German military codes, particularly those used by the German navy.

 Germany’s naval prowess was well known and rightfully feared. German U-boats didn’t only strike terror throughout Europe, but U.S. shores were also well within the German submarines’ attack range.  During the first three months of 1942, German U-boats sank more than 100 ships off the east coast of North America, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean Sea. Many of those ships were within site of land.

A German U-boat.

Turing was in charge of Hut 8, a section at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station) tasked with solving encoded German naval messages. He devised a range of code-breaking tools for cracking German ciphers, including an electromagnetic device called the Bombe, which countered the infamous German Enigma machine.

Enigma machine.

The Enigma machine was developed in Germany shortly after World War I to encode and decode messages, and for the next 20 years the German military refined the technology until it became the Nazis’ primary means of ciphering messages during WWII.  Enigma technology was continuously altered throughout the war, making the challenge of breaking German ciphers extremely difficult.

Enigma machine

Without Turing’s efforts and those of his Hut 8 team, the Allies would have continued to face a severe disadvantage against the German military’s superior ciphering technology.  Though it’s impossible to quantify the exact impact of Turing’s contributions, some military historians estimate that the war would have continued for at least another two years, and two million more lives would have been lost.

The Bombe was especially crucial to the Allies’ victory in what Winston
Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, in which German U-boats laid siege to Allied naval forces in an effort to cut off supply lines to Great Britain.  Without the ability to break German codes to determine the locations of U-boats, the Allies may very well have lost the Battle of the Atlantic, and quite possibly the war.

Prophetic propaganda.

During the Second World War both belligerent parties used the Nostradamic prophecies to discourage the opponent. In order to weaken the French morale, the Nazi planes dropped leaflets with false quatrains ascribed to Nostradamus in which the defeat of France was predicted. The operation was initiated by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s private secretary and a fan of the occult and paranormal.

Later, the allies returned the favor and dropped leaflets in which Hitler’s defeat was prophesied, and America produced propagandistic movies.[1]

Answer taken from the chapter of this book: History of the Apocalypse - 1. The Ideological Chaos of the 20th Century

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[1]. On November 9, 1944, the movie Nostradamus IV was released in the United States of America, with a length of 11 minutes. The main theme of the movie was the name “Fossan,” which, allegedly, is connected to the rise and fall of Hitler. The name “Fossan” appears in quatrains I.58 (Fossen), III.96 (Fossan) and VII.30 (Foussan) (T. W. M. van Berkel, “Substudy World War II. American Nostradamus-movies,” Nostradamus, Astrology and The Bible, accessed December 23, 2010, World War II: American Nostradamus-movies 1938-1955).

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Major William Martin, Royal Marine...

aka

The man who never was!

(The story of how Germans were fooled into a trick where they believed they had a big lottery of secrete documents)

Operation Mincemeat was a successful British disinformation plan during World War II.

As part of Operation Barclay, the widespread deception intended to cover the invasion of Italy from North Africa, Mincemeat helped to convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943 instead of Sicily, the actual objective.

This was accomplished by persuading the Germans that they had, by accident, intercepted "top secret" documents giving details of Allied war plans. The documents were attached to a corpse deliberately left to wash up on a beach in Punta Umbría in Spain.

And they did cover up the whole story precisely taking care of even minute details like official declaration in local news papers too!

The success of the planting of false documents was confirmed through Ultra decrypts of German messages.

Gunner – Australia’s Alarm

During World War II a dog named ‘Gunner’ could warn Australian Air Force personnel of approaching enemy aircraft – 20 minutes before they arrived!

On 19 February 1942 Air Force personnel of Australia's Darwin Air Force base found a six month old puppy with a broken front leg under a destroyed mess hut.

The hut was destroyed in the first wave of Japanese bombings of Darwin. The doctor at the field hospital said he could not fix a "man" with a broken leg if he does not know his name and his serial number.

The male kelpie was immediately named 'Gunner' and his serial number, 0000, was assigned to him on the spot.

Gunner entered the Air Force that day and his leg was fixed and plastered. Leading Aircraftman Percy Westcott, one of the two men who found Gunner, adopted him and became his handler.

Gunner became agitated, whining and jumping every time he heard enemy aircraft approaching. What was most remarkable is that he would display this behavior 20 minutes before enemy aircraft arrived!

He was so accurate that permission was granted to sound a portable air raid siren whenever Gunner started whining and jumping.

As if that is not impressive enough, Gunner could tell the difference between enemy and allied planes and would not perform at all when allied aircraft approached for landing.