Odd WW2 factoids.

Sometime in the late 1930s, under circumstances which remain obscure, a group of larch trees was planted in a swastika-shaped pattern in a pine forest in eastern Germany.  When the larches (which unlike pines are not evergreens) change colour in the fall, the result seen from the air is a yellow swastika against a green background.  The pattern remained intact throughout the war and undetected until 1992.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/horticultural-hate-mystery-forest-swastikas/story?id=19588288

Ever heard of the Triebflügel? It is one of the many wunderwaffe the germans created.

Here is a picture:

That is excellent Axistiger.

Marc: I had read about that forest too.
I would have loved to have seen that.

The Heinkel He 162 Volksjäger, a single-engine, jet-powered fighter which was built out of non-strategic materials and which could in principle be manufactured cheaply in large numbers, was optimistically intended to be so easy to fly that pilots with little experience – Hitler Youth members, student pilots, and glider enthusiasts – could handle it.  It turned out that the cockpit of any jet-powered aircraft was no place for an amateur, especially at a time when jets were still in their infancy and could most aptly be regarded as experimental aircraft.  A Royal Navy test pilot who evaluated the He 162,  Eric “Winkle” Brown, described it as very light controls and thus suitable only for experienced pilots.  An RAF pilot who flew the plane in November 1945 ignored Brown’s advice to treat the rudder with caution and got himself killed during an attempted low-altitude roll.

I just like these things:

The german Fliegende Panzerfaust (its name is already funny) was a german parasite aircraft, meant to be towed under a ME 109G. Its task was to be launched by the ME 109, then fire it´s rockets.

Once it had fired its rockets, the plane would split in 2 parts: the front part with the pilot, and the back part. The parts would land with parachutes, and retrieved to fire another day.

only one mock-up was ever build.

A state temperance society chapter lobbied to have the battleship Missouri christened with Missouri spring water rather than the traditional bottle of champagne.  They were unsuccesful: a bottle of Missouri sparkling wine was used at the ceremony.  Margaret Truman, the ship’s sponsor, would have been better off if the chapter had been more persuasive because the Treasury Department (which for some reason is responsible for such things) botched the job of scoring the wine bottle ahead of time so that it would shatter properly. When Margaret hit the prow of the ship, the bottom of the bottle dropped out and she and the admiral standing beside her got drenched with bubbly.  She was wearing a fur coat at the time, and in later years she said that the coat smelled like champagne from that day onward.

She was lucky it was Champagne.
Fur is murder!

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.