Odd WW2 factoids.

@Gargantua:

Hitler was also known as the “carpet eater” to some of the internal staff/party leaders who secretly despised him…

This sounds like it’s the inspiration for the scene in the 1943 Daffy Duck cartoon “Scrap Happy Daffy” in which (if I recall correctly) an enraged Hitler chews his way across the full length of a carpet like a high-speed lawnmower.

Amid the chaos and carnage of the Battle of Berlin in April 1945, 16-year-old Hitler Youth member Armin Lehmann was saved from almost certain death by the fact that his superiors – who had no reservations about sending kids into combat against the advancing Russians – could not tolerate breaching regulations by putting an underage driver at the wheel of a truck.  Lehmann was one of the youngsters decorated by Hitler on his birthday, April 20th, an event memorably reproduced in the movie Downfall.  Moments after the ceremony, the whole group was piled into trucks to be sent off to the front.  Lehmann was assigned to drive one of the vehicles, but at the last moment an officer discovered that he didn’t have a drivers’s license.  Lehmann was pulled from the group (whose members, as far as he knows, were later all killed in battle) and was reassigned to serve as a messenger between nearby government offices and – of all places – Hitler’s underground bunker.  Over the next ten days, Lehmann got to see or meet various members of Hitler’s entourage, including Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels and Eva Braun.  Lehmann was one of the last people to make it out of the bunker and he lived to the ripe old age of 80.  He passed away in 2008, four years after finally publishing the memoirs he had long hesitated to write.

Project x-ray was a plan that the US came up with to drop bombs filled with bats on Japan. The bats were fitted out with incendiary devices that would set fire to Japanese cities. Fortunately for the bats, the plan deemed too expensive, and the project was dropped. On a side note, escaping bats set fire to an air base in New Mexico.

A 600-foot wharf built during WWII at the Royal Navy base at Lyness, on the edge of Scapa Flow, had a construction cost reputedly so enormous that it came to be known as the “Golden Wharf.”  The sarcasm behind the name wasn’t entirely fair because most of the money involved was actually spent on tunnelling into some nearby hills to build huge underground tanks in which fuel oil for the fleet could stored.  These tanks were meant to supplement the existing above-ground tanks, which were considered too vulnerable to enemy air attacks.  The millions of tons of earth and rock excavated for the project had to be disposed of in some manner, so the Royal Navy decided to put the stuff to good use by dumping it in the water to extend the shoreline and create a deep-water wharf at which ships could unload.  So the Golden Wharf, rather than being a end in itself, was a kind of bonus which the Royal Navy got out of a project whose main purpose was to build secure fuel storage facilities.  The wharf handled about 100,000 tonnes of stores during its first year of operation – coincidentally, a figure identical to the capacity of the underground oil tanks to which it owed its existence.

After the Bismarck had escaped from the Royal Navy cruisers which had been tracking her on radar following the Battle of the Denmark Straight, and after eluding for the next 31 hours the many British vessels and aircraft that were searching for her, the German battleship was finally spotted by a farmer’s son from Lafayette County, Missouri: Ensign Leonard B. “Tuck” Smith, a U.S. Navy officer who was serving as a “special observer” on a Royal Air Force Catalina seaplane, even though the United States was officially not yet at war with Germany.

@Zooey72:

The Sturmgewehr (the first operational assault riffle) was rejected by Hitler for production.  Hitler thought it was a waste of resources (coming from a man who wanted to make the Mause and Ratte tank).  The smarter people in the Reich made it anyway, they just classified it as an uzi.

I don’t think they would have classified it as an Uzi for a number of reasons… first being that the first Uzi was not created until the late 1940s and secondly (and perhaps just as important), the Uzi was created by a Jew: Major Uziel Gal of Israel.

Don’t think Hitler would have been cool with that.

I think what he means is that they classified it as a “sub-machine-gun” as opposed to an “assault-rifle” or “primary-rifle”.

@Gargantua:

I think what he means is that they classified it as a “sub-machine-gun” as opposed to an “assault-rifle” or “primary-rifle”.

That’s what I figured… but it was not a very good choice of moniker for a couple reasons.

Maybe he meant that the German developers/generals called it a machine pistol (during production), as in the MP 40; which is closer to an Uzi anyway. As opposed to calling it Sturmgewhehr, which literally means “assault rifle”. It would have been better to say that they developed it as an Uzi-type weapon, but even that would not be very accurate considering it wasn’t invented yet.

Either way, Uzi was a particularly poor comparison. That was all I was getting at.

@Zooey72:

The Sturmgewehr (the first operational assault riffle) was rejected by Hitler for production.  Hitler thought it was a waste of resources (coming from a man who wanted to make the Mause and Ratte tank).  The smarter people in the Reich made it anyway, they just classified it as an uzi.

Developing weapons under a misleading designation to hide them from disapproving leaders on your own side (or from suspicious foreigners on the other side) is a handy trick that’s been used now and then.  In the inter-war period, American tanks were sometimes billed as “armored cars” to mislead Congress about the use to which its military appropriations were being put.  And in the 20s and early 30s, experimental German tank designs were called “Traktoren” (tractors) because Germany was prohibited from having tanks.

First,the StG- 44 was called a Carbine MKb 42 but in the process of becoming a Sturmgewehr - assault rifle it`s name was changed a couple of time.

The MP-43 was invented and built for a shorter version of the Gewehrpatrone Mauser 7,92 x57 mm.
The Walther company had the first Prototype of MKb-42(W) - Maschinenkarabiner-42. (Karabiner is the german word for Carbine)
Other names are and versions: MK 43, MP-43, MP-44, StG-44P (capable of shooting arround corners),StG-45(M) ,StG-44V,

If the course of events had been different by just three hours, the last battleship-versus-battleship fight in history would have been an engagement between vessels of the two biggest battleship classes ever completed: the Japanese superbattleship Yamato and the American Iowa-class battleships Iowa and New Jersey.  That’s the margin of time by which Admiral Kurita’s Center Force and Admiral Halsey’s Task Group 34.5 missed each other in the closing stages of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in the early hours of October 26, 1944.  The Japanese Center Force – consisting of Yamato and three other battleships, plus several cruisers and destroyers – was sailing north towards San Bernardino Strait following the Battle of Samar.  The American TG 34.5 – consisting of Iowa and New Jersey, and escorted by a few cruisers and destroyers – had been detached by Halsey from Task Force 34 (which was engaged in the Battle of Cape Engaño) and was sailing south towards San Bernardino Strait.  The Americans got there just three hours after Kurita had escaped through the Straight.  So instead of an epic clash between the Yamato and the Iowa / New Jersey pair, the last dreadnought-versus-dreadnought engagement in history actually ended up being the Battle of Surigao Strait, which was fought a few hours before the start of the Battle of Samar.

By adding a couple of extra might-have-beens to this scenario, we get an even more interesting situation.  The brand-new Iowa-class battleship Wisconsin arrived at Ulithi (in the Caroline Islands) on December 9, 1944, and on that date joined Halsey’s 3rd Fleet.  Her equally new sister ship Missouri arrived at Ulithi on January 13, 1945.  Had both vessels reached the western Pacific just a few weeks earlier, they could very well have been operating alongside Iowa and Jew Jersey during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  On the Japanese side, Kurita’s Center Force had originally included both of the Yamato-class battleships: Yamato and Musashi.  The latter ship, however, had been sunk by US carrier planes at the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, one day before the Battle of Samar.  So: if Musashi hadn’t been sunk on the 24th, if Wisconsin and Missouri had joined Halsey a couple of months ahead of schedule, and if TG 34.5 had intercepted Kurita’s Center Force instead of missing it by three hours, the result would have been a slugfest between two Yamato-class battleships and four Iowa-class battleships.

Spectacular Marc. Great research and inferesting read of a “what if”.

The innocent-sounding name “the Twenty Committee” which was given to a British wartime management group was a kind of cryptic joke-within-a-joke, even though its purpose was deadly serious.  The “twenty” part was a misleading reference to “XX”, which is the number 20 expressed in Roman numerals.  The “XX”, however, wasn’t actually a Roman numeral; it was a sly allusion to the phrase “double cross,” which means to betray someone.  The Twenty Committee’s job was to oversee the Double-Cross System (or XX System), an MI5 counterespionage scheme which took control of German agents operating in Britain during WWII and turned them into double agents.  Captured German spies tended to find the prospect of working for MI5 preferable to the alternative of being stood up in front of a brick wall at dawn and summarily executed for espionnage.

You can thank the Greatest generation for Folgers and SPAM, although originally ration for the troops, both continued after the war due in part to returning GI’s conscious or sub-conscious fondness and consumption of both.

Similarly, WWI GIs learned to appreciate doughnuts while consuming them in England thanks to Red Cross workers serving them.

So the next time you have coffee and doughnuts remember to thank two world wars.

I found out something neat at Pearl Harbor.
When Adm. Nimitz took over at Pearl Harbor he was surprised to see that the runway’s and Petrol storage facilities were untouched. He was puzzled .
Later to find out after going threw Japanese documents when the war was over, that Yamamoto’s plans were to capture the Naval and Airbase and to use the fuel that was there.
If the Carriers were in port along with the BB’s  and the landing force was there with them at that time I think they would be speaking Japanese there today.
The Japanese High Command changed Yamamoto’s original attack plan to exclude the landing forces and send them to the Philippines to capture the oil fields there…Hawai’i wasn’t a state until 1959.
Another what if that could have changed the war

During WWII, Germany printed massive quantities of counterfeit British £5, £10, £20, and £50 banknotes as part of a secret plan (Operation Bernhard) to create economic chaos in Britain by flooding it with fake currency so perfectly forged that it was almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

The Canadian WWII corvette HMCS Wetaskiwin (named after a town in Alberta whose own name comes from a Cree word meaning “the hills where peace was made”) had an unofficial badge painted on the gunshield of her 4-inch gun, in the same way that bomber crews were fond of painting nose art on their planes.  Wetaskiwin’s badge was a large queen-of-hearts playing card showing a cartoon picture of a crowned lady falling on her posterior into a puddle of water – a joking reference to the ship’s nickname “Wet-A$$ Queen”.

Radio frequency-hopping, the basis of modern spread-spectrum communications technology (exemplified by Bluetooth), was co-invented during WWII by the famous Austro-American actress Hedy Lamarr, who some years earlier had scandalized movie audiences by appearing in one of the first mainstream films to depict complete female nudity.  She and her co-inventor, composer George Antheil, pitched their 1942 patent to the U.S. Navy as a secret communication method, but the U.S. military didn’t start using the technology until the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, after the patent had expired.

I believe you can read this in the Longest Day, and that’s where I remember it.

Koreans served the Germans and were captured in Normandy when the Allies landed.  In total, they served 3 countries:

Conscripted by Japan
Captured by the Russians and pressed into service.
Captured by the Germans from the Russians and forced to defend the Atlantic Seawall.

http://thomo.coldie.net/wargaming/korean-soldiers-in-ww2-german-army

I think Stephen Ambrose referenced it as well. Although a great author, Ambrose has been known to plagiarize other author’s work from time to time and was factually incorrect on other stuff. So whether he researched this tidbit himself or just saw it in the Longest Day and stuck it in one of his books can be debated.