Odd WW2 factoids.

Here’s a short one: In one of his earliest on-screen roles, actor Robert Mitchum appeared as a bomber ground crew member in the 21-minute 1943 film “To the People of the United States”, a public information movie about the sexually transmitted infections.

@CWO:

A candidate for the “most demoralizing code name chosen for a WWII military operation” award is Operation Gambit, which was devised as part of the naval component (Operation Neptune) of the Overlord D-Day landings.  The plan involved having a British midget submarine surface at each extremity of the beaches in the British sector before the landings, where they would deploy various signalling devices (flashing lights, radio beacons, flags and echo sounders) to guide the invasion fleet towards its objectives. The subs would have to remain in place for several hours, coming into full view of the German defenders once daylight arrived.  Prior to sailing on his mission, an officer who was in command of one of the midget subs looked up the meaning of “gambit” in the dictionary and was appalled to learn that it was a chess term for an opening move in which a piece (usually a pawn, the most minor of the chess pieces) is deliberately sacrified in order to gain a positional advantage.

lol… brutal.

Keep this post going CWO, I love reading this stuff!

The Essex-class carrier Franklin, which suffered a nearly-fatal Japanese attack on 19 March 1945 that killed over 800 of her crew and earned her the dubious distinction of becoming the most heavily damaged United States carrier to survive the war, had the unfortunate designation number “CV 13”.

See I always looked at 13 as a lucky number.

800 souls lost… is better than all souls lost and ship sunk.  Would you not agree?

The principle behind the microwave oven was accidentally discovered in 1945 as an unintended spin-off from British wartime magnetron technology when Percy Spencer, an American engineer employed by the Raytheon company, noticed during the course of some work he was doing on a active radar set that the Mr. Goodbar chocolate bar in his pocket was melting.

The three largest ocean liners in the world at the time of the outbreak of WWII – RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth from Britain, and SS Normandie from France – spent part of 1940 berthed alongside each other in New York City for the first and only time ever.  Normandie, which was in New York when France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, was interned by the American government on that date.  Queen Mary, which had left Southampton for New York on 1 September, arrived soon thereafter and was ordered to remain in port until further notice.  The barely-completed and still-untested Queen Elizabeth sailed from the Clyde on 3 March 1940 under sealed government orders directing her captain to head to New York and instructing him to zig-zag and to maintain a strict radio silence during the voyage; the ship arrived six days later and berthed next to the other two liners.  They sat idle side-by-side until the two British vessels left NYC for use as troop carriers.  Normandie was also slated to serve as a troopship, but she caught fire and capsized during the conversion process.

When Hermann Goering was setting up a secret police force in Prussia in early 1933, an employee of the German postal service was asked to provide a franking stamp for this new organization.  The proposed name, Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning Secret State Police, was too long to fit on the stamp, so the employee shortened it to “Gestapo,” thus unwittingly creating a term that would later terrorize much of Europe.

The 2nd SS Panzer Divison ¨Das Reich¨ captured enough T-34 tanks to equip a whole panzer battalion.

The Second Raider Battallion of the United States Marine Corps (a.k.a. Carlson’s Raiders, one of two battallions regarded as the first U.S. special operations forces formed and sent into combat during in WWII) was trained by Major Evans F. Carlson using principles of egalitarianism, team-building and ethical indoctrination which he had learned in China from observing the Eighth Route Army – the main WWII fighting force of the Chinese Communists, which was commanded by Communist General Zhu De (later considered to be the principal founder of the People’s Liberation Army) and by the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Tse-tung.

Major Evans F Carlson also introduced the ¨gung ho¨ war cry into the marines.

The special bombing techniques required for the atomic strikes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were practiced ahead of time by dropping on Japan non-nuclear versions of the A-bomb that was eventually used at Nagasaki.  These “pumpkin bombs” (so called because of their approximately spherical shape) were nearly identical to the Fat Man plutonium bomb, but did not carry any fissionable materials.  Instead, they had a conventional explosive charge of 6,300 pounds of Composition B, a castable mixture of RDX and TNT.  Forty-nine of these bombs were dropped on Japan in July and August of 1945, all of them near cities which had been selected as the potential targets for the actual A-bomb attacks.

Despite having to import all of its oil (and having to fight Germany’s U-boats to do so), Britain invented a flame-producing contraption called FIDO which consumed fuel at the eye-popping rate of 100,000 to 200,00 gallons per hour.  Deployed along each side of a runway at over a dozen RAF airfields, the “Fog Intense Dispersal Of” apparatus produced two parallel walls of fire which burned away dense fog to help military planes land in what would otherwise have been near-zero visibility conditions.

Hitler once proposed to have Germany’s planned H-class battleships redesigned so that, instead of carrying 406mm (16-inch) main guns, they would instead carry 800mm (31-inch) guns similar to Germany’s Schwerer Gustav and Dora super-heavy railway guns.  Some Kriegsmarine admirals successfully managed – perhaps to their own surprise – to talk him out of the idea.  Hitler wasn’t naval-minded, so his admirals may not have bothered to point out some of the more technical flaws of his concept.  One of those objections would have been that, because the maximum rate of fire of an artillery piece is inversely proportional to its caliber, the time between the salvos fired by 800mm naval guns would be much too long to carry out range corrections against a moving target at sea.  (The Gustav gun used at Sevastopol had a firing rate of 1 round every 30 to 45 minutes.  By contrast, the 16-inch guns of the Iowa-class battleships could fire 1 salvo every 30 seconds – fast enough to shoot the next salvo while the shells from the previous one was still in flight.)  Instead, Hitler was convinced to drop the plan by the more straightforward argument that a battleship big enough to carry 800mm guns would be too big to fit in any existing German harbour.

Among the trickle of supplies which the Luftwaffe managed to deliver to them, the starving and frozen German soldiers besieged at Stalingrad once received a large shipment of ground pepper and twelve cases of condoms.

@CWO:

Among the trickle of supplies which the Luftwaffe managed to deliver to them, the starving and frozen German soldiers besieged at Stalingrad once received a large shipment of ground pepper and twelve cases of condoms.

It’s amazing how you can do without the necessities in life provided you have the little luxuries lol…

The French naval vessel Surcouf was a bizarre hybrid of an 8-inch-gun cruiser, a submarine and a seaplane carrier.

@CWO:

The French naval vessel Surcouf was a bizarre hybrid of an 8-inch-gun cruiser, a submarine and a seaplane carrier.

no doubt one of the weirdest ships if WWII

Surcouf had a checkered social history too…

French ships lying at ports in Britain and Canada were also boarded by armed marines, sailors and soldiers, and the only serious incident took place at Plymouth aboard Surcouf on 3 July, when two Royal Navy officers[4] and French warrant officer mechanic Yves Daniel[5] were fatally wounded, and a British seaman was shot dead by the submarine’s doctor.[6]
The acrimony between the British and French caused by these actions escalated when the British attempted to repatriate the captured French sailors: the British hospital ship that was carrying them back to France was sunk by the Germans, and many of the French blamed the British for the deaths

Because of the British-French tensions with regard to the submarine, accusations were made by each side that the other was spying for Vichy France; the British also claimed that Surcouf was attacking British ships. Later, a British officer and two sailors were put on board for “liaison” purposes. One real drawback of this submarine was that it required a crew of 110–130 men, which represented three crews of more conventional submarines. This led to Royal Navy reluctance to recommission her.

And then there is this! LOL!  Talk about Obscure!

In December 1941, Surcouf carried the Free French Admiral Émile Muselier to Canada, putting in to Quebec City. While the Admiral was in Ottawa, conferring with the Canadian government, Surcouf’s captain was approached by New York Times reporter Ira Wolfert and questioned about the rumours that the submarine would liberate Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (a French archipelago 10 kilometres from Newfoundland) for Free France from Vichy control. Wolfert accompanied the submarine to Halifax, Nova Scotia where, on 20 December, they joined the Free French corvettes Mimosa, Aconit, and Alysse, and on 24 December took control of the islands for Free France without resistance.

United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull had just concluded an agreement with the Vichy government for the neutrality of French possessions in the Western hemisphere, and he threatened to resign unless President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt demanded a restoration of the status quo. Roosevelt did so, but when Charles de Gaulle refused, he dropped the matter. Ira Wolfert’s stories — very favorable to the Free French (and bearing no sign of kidnapping or other duress) — helped swing American popular opinion away from Vichy.

I didn’t know Vichy France extended all the way to Canada!

AND THE SURCOUF IS SURROUNDED IN CONSPIRACY!!!

As there is no conclusive confirmation that Thompson Lykes collided with Surcouf and her wreck has yet to be discovered, there are alternative stories of her fate.

Disregarding the predictable story about her being swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle, one of the most popular is that she was caught in Long Island Sound refuelling a German U-boat, and both submarines were sunk, either by the American submarines USS Mackerel and Marlin,[12] or a United States Coast Guard blimp.

In response to the above theory, retired US Navy Captain Julius Grigore, Jr. has offered a one million dollar prize to anyone who can prove that the Surcouf engaged in activities which were detrimental to the Allied cause. The prize has yet to be claimed.

Many stories add that much of the gold from the French Treasury was in Surcouf’s large cargo compartment, and that the wreck was found and entered in 1967 by Jacques Cousteau.

Diver Lee Prettyman reported finding the Surcouf in the 1960s (1967?) and there was a newspaper article about it with his picture in the Hartford Courant newspaper. It was later retracted after threats were reportedly made.

James Rusbridger examined some of the theories in his book Who Sank Surcouf?, finding them all easily dismissed except one: the records of the 6th Heavy Bomber Group operating out of Panama show them sinking a large submarine the morning of 19 February. Since no German submarine was lost in the area on that date, it could only have been Surcouf. He suggested that the collision had damaged Surcouf’s radio and the stricken boat limped towards Panama hoping for the best.[13]

Gar,

––That’s a totally fascinating story,…thanks for telling it. Do you know if there is a book about the Surcouf including all of it’s exploits? If so,….I’d love to buy a copy and learn more. Thanks again.

“Tall Paul”