Odd WW2 factoids.

@Tall:

––Thanks again, Wheatbeer as I’m sure I’ll get quite a lot of enjoyment reading about Wojtek, the Polish War Hero. There’s several pics of him in the book including one of him talking/entertaining several army women in a truck,….and another of Wojtek boarding a ship with his comrades while several astonished dock workers look on, haha!� :-D

"Tall Paul"� �

You’re very welcome sir  :-D

I need to check out this book too.

In the Pacific theatre, some understanding US Navy ship captains found a clever way to bend the rules which prohibited the consumption of alcohol on board.  US Navy vessels in that vast theatre were sometimes issued – quite legitimately – a certain quantity of beer for consumption “off the ship.”  The ration was, I think, two cans per man, and it was officially intended to be used when a ship had anchored somewhere and the crew had gotten shore leave.  Opportunities for such leave, however, could be few and far between…so some skippers who were floating around in an operational area far from shore occasionally got creative when things were quiet.  They’d let groups of men get into the ship’s boats, which were stocked with the appropriate beer allocation, and allow them to row a couple of hundred yards away.  Once they were far enough to be considered “off the ship,” the men would each consume their two cans of brew, then row back to the ship to let the next batch of thirsty sailors do the same thing.  A fine example of good old-fashioned “can do” ingenuity.

Fans of “The Longest Day” will recall that Lord Lovat’s commandos were accompanied by a piper called Bill Millin when they landed at Sword Beach.  Millin (a Scottish Canadian) played his bagpipes both during the landing and as Lovat’s troops marched inland to reinforce the British glider troops who had seized Pegasus Bridge.  Several decades later, in a documentary on the D-Day landings, Millin told a funny story about what happened when Lovat got to the bridge.  Major John Howard’s troops were holding their position, but there were still German forces on the opposite shore.  Lovat’s reinforcements charged across the bridge and managed to overcome the Germans.  During the battle, Millin walked calmly back and forth in the area, skirling away on his pipes to encourage the men.  Once the fight was over, the Germans who’d been captured (including one or two snipers) were interrogated according to routine procedure.  Once the initial questionning was over, one British officer gave in to curiosity and pointed out to the German sniper that Millin – walking around out in the open and making quite a racket on his pipes – had been just about the most obvious target in the whole area.  “Why didn’t you shoot him?” he asked the German sniper.  The sniper answered in broken English, “We thought he was…um…what is English word?..” then tapped the side of his head with his fingertip and said “Dummkopf.”  In other words, they thought he was nuts!

Although the US military’s famous K ration was scientifically developed through a process which included tests on troops to determine if it could sustain them adequately, it proved inadequate in terms of the calories and vitamins it provided to fighting men.  The error arose from the fact that some of these tests were only conducted for a short amount of time (three days), and that the soldiers who were used in these experiments were only required to march relatively short distances over relatively flat ground.  These tests underestimated the caloric expenditure of troops who were engaged in actual combat or operating in rough terrain.  Field commanders compounded the problem by relying too much on K rations to feed their troops, even though the ration wasn’t supposed to be used for extended periods of time.  The fact that the ration lacked variety also helped to make it unpopular among the men.  One widely-despised item it contained was lemon powder, which was intended to provide vitamin C; troops tended to throw it away, but some of the guys serving in France after D-Day found more inventive ways of putting it to use, for example by mixing it with liberated booze.

Another odd fact of WWII, was Japan’s balloon bomb program intended to bomb the U.S by use of the jet stream. The plan was to cause wide spread panic and wildfires across the U.S.

A Sunday School class was the only casualties to these light bombs.

During World War II, airplane factories in the US were made to look like small towns so they wouldn’t be bombing targets!

-Volcano Bombing-
In the January 1944 issue of Popular Science, the piece titled “Can We Blast Japan From Below?” presents the argument. The author, Professor Harold O. Whitnall of Colgate University, said that “[the Japanese] have made gods of [volcanoes],” and “fear of volcanoes is thoroughly ingrained in the minds of the Japanese.”

He went on to say that fear of volcanoes is so great that the act of bombing them would cause “cataclysmic terror.” The point was to not only use psychological warfare, but to turn the volcanoes into weapons of war by inducing eruptions.

Whitnall said that after Pearl Harbor, an all out attack on the Japanese homeland should have been accompanied by bombing raids on Japan’s volcanoes to hasten surrender. Obviously, it never materialized. But was it possible? Theoretically, yes.

In short, if a volcano is near its time to erupt, a bomb can be enough force to set it off. The proposal reached President Roosevelt, but was never seriously considered. Perhaps it was a good thing, because had such measures been taken, the tragic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not have been the only ones.

-12 Year old in the Navy-
His name was Calvin Graham, and he enlisted in the Navy on May 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The kid had an active role in the battle of Guadalcanal, serving aboard the USS South Dakota. He helped in the fire control efforts aboard the ship, something that earned him the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

His mom revealed his age, and was put in a brig for three months. He was released when his sister threatened to tell the newspapers. He was released and dishonorably discharged for lying about his age. His medals were taken from him.

He joined the marines when he was 17 but broke his back 3 years later. He spent the rest of his life fighting for medical benefits and a clean record.  Finally, in 1988, after years of trying, he wrote to Congress telling them his story, and he was reinstated of all his medals, except for the Purple Heart.

BAMS
Nickname given to woman in the U.S. Marine Corps. While the other sevices had names for the woman in their organization, WAC for Woman’s Army Corps, WAF for Woman’s Air Force, the Marine Corps preferred to call them Woman Marines. BAMS was soon coined as a slang term and stood for Broad-Assed Marines.

Operation Thunderbolt
German breakout of the battle cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the Prinz Eugen from Brest on Feb 12, 1942

@Zooey72:

@ABWorsham:

Another odd fact of WWII, was Japan’s balloon bomb program intended to bomb the U.S by use of the jet stream. The plan was to cause wide spread panic and wildfires across the U.S.

A Sunday School class was the only casualties to these light bombs.

To add to this, one of the balloon bombs to make small contribution to the war.  One of them made its way to Oakridge TN where we were developing the A-Bombs.  It fell and hit a telephone pole and knocked out power for a couple of hours to some of the facilities where people were working.

wow, thanks for the addition information.

The Red Army experimented with “sobaki-istrebiteli tankov” units, or anti-tank dogs, which were trained to run under the chassis of enemy tanks and blow them up with explosives strapped to their backs.  The dogs appear to have ended up inflicting more damage to the Russians (by running back towards the Soviet lines) than to the Germans.

On the German side, a robotic equivalent of the same concept was the Goliath remote-control tracked mine.  It looked like a miniature WWI British Mark IV rhomboid-shaped tank.  It was designed to be driven under enemy tanks (or among enemy troops) by remote-control wires, then detonated.  The Goliath weighed between 75 and 100 kilograms, and was probably the smallest functional tank-like weapon built during WWII – completely at the opposite end of the scale of the largest one, the German 188-tonne Maus tank.  It would have been interesting to take a picture of these two weapons side-by-side.

From 1940 to 1942, the Nazi Party’s SD intelligence agency ran a covert surveillance operation inside a Berlin brothel, the purpose of which was to monitor (using hidden microphones) the conversations of prominent clients to pick up possible evidence of dissent against the regime.  This salacious espionnage scheme later inspired several postwar Nazi exploitation films, each more tasteless than the previous one, the earliest and best-known of which was the movie Salon Kitty by Italian director Tinto Brass (who went on to make the notorious film Caligula a couple of years later).

@CWO:

On the German side, a robotic equivalent of the same concept was the Goliath remote-control tracked mine.  It looked like a miniature WWI British Mark IV rhomboid-shaped tank.  It was designed to be driven under enemy tanks (or among enemy troops) by remote-control wires, then detonated.  The Goliath weighed between 75 and 100 kilograms, and was probably the smallest functional tank-like weapon built during WWII – completely at the opposite end of the scale of the largest one, the German 188-tonne Maus tank.  It would have been interesting to take a picture of these two weapons side-by-side.

Royal Engineers found 'em.
8-)

@aequitas:

Royal Engineers found 'em.

And an odd thing about both weapons is that the smallest one had the biggest-sounding name (Goliath) while the biggest one had the smallest-sounding name (Maus).  Though if I’m not mistaken the Maus was originally intended to be called the Mammuth, possibly as the next logical name progression upward from the Elefant tank destroyer.

@Zooey72:

A sad story that I had heard when I was in college taking a WW2 class.  As the war continued to go badly for Japan food shortages because a big deal (obviously).  There was a show elephant at the Tokyo Zoo that the government decided would not be fed any more.  They did not want to spare the large round (or chemicals) to kill it.  They just let the thing sit there and starve to death.  The trainer was an older man who couldn’t fight (hence he didn’t find himself at Iwo Jima or some other such place).  Every day he would pass the Elephant and it would start to do tricks on its own, begging for food.  Eventualy the trainer killed himself because he couldn’t stand the sight of what was happening to his Elephant.

This story will haunt me from now on whenever I see an elephant.

@ABWorsham:

Another odd fact of WWII, was Japan’s balloon bomb program intended to bomb the U.S by use of the jet stream. The plan was to cause wide spread panic and wildfires across the U.S.

A Sunday School class was the only casualties to these light bombs.

To stop the bombs, the army took a sample of the sand in the ballast. Then they matched it with an earlier scientific study that catagorized sand. (I feel sorry for the scientist in charge of that) They matched the sand to beach in Japan and sent in some bombers to blow up the factory nearby.
Geology- saving lives since 1944

I don’t know if this counts, but Chungking, the wartime capitol of China was the most heavily bombed city during WW2.

The 460mm (18.1-inch) main guns of the Japanese superbattleships Yamato and Musashi were the largest-caliber guns ever used as anti-aircraft weapons.  In addition to firing the two conventional types of heavy naval gun ammunition – armour-piercing rounds and high-explosive shells – these weapons could also fire a third type of 460mm round called San-Shiki, which was designed to bring down enemy aircraft.  Sometimes inaccurately described as a a giant shotgun shell, the San-Shiki round was time-fuzed to burst a certain number of seconds after firing; when it exploded, it sprayed a cone-shaped pattern of incendiary tubes and steel fragments into the air along its flight path.  Yamato used these rounds in combat against the US carrier planes which attacked (and ultimately sank) it during its suicidal attempt to reach the American task forces engaged in the invasion of Okinawa.

Berlin’s huge Flak Tower G, intended to help defend the city against air attack, was incongruously located next to the Berlin Zoo’s bird sanctuary.

@CWO:

Berlin’s huge Flak Tower G, intended to help defend the city against air attack, was incongruously located next to the Berlin Zoo’s bird sanctuary.

I think you mixed afew things up CWO Marc.  :-)