April Fool’s Day WW2 trivia
During an exercise, “Mad Jack” Churchill can be seen leading his men in a charge (lower right) while wielding his signature sword.
Longtime readers here will probably have heard of some of these from our own Commissioner Wretched. One of these was featured in last week’s Valor Friday. I never told you there’d be a test, but here we are!
From John Long of the Roanoke Times;
Fools of the world unite! This is our day!
I was going to write on some other topic in the news when I happened to glance at the calendar. I noticed that my biweekly musings on this page would chance to fall on the first of April. While the origins seem obscure, at least since the middle ages April 1st has been reserved for practical jokes, good-natured tricks and general tomfoolery.
April 1 also happens to be my late grandfather’s birthday. We share a middle name — it was inflicted upon me at birth; a name so wretched that I’ve often wondered if he originally received it as an April Fool’s joke.
Anyway, to honor the day and my grandfather, a U.S. army veteran, I’ll throw out some odd statements about World War II. Can you guess which are true and which are April’s Fools hoaxes?
At least one British officer claimed to have killed an enemy soldier with a medieval long bow. Survival training for Americans in the Pacific included these tasty tidbits: if you see a monkey eating something, it’s edible for humans ,too. In a pinch, so is the monkey. U.S. personnel stationed in Britain were advised that “the British don’t know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don’t know how to make a good cup of tea. It’s an even swap.”
Actress Hedy Lamarr helped invent a technology for radio guidance of U.S. torpedoes. That technology became the basis for your Bluetooth and Wifi devices. The last confirmed Japanese soldier to surrender did so in 1974. The last escaped German prisoner of war in the U.S. surrendered in 1984 —on the Today Show.
The U.S. military experimented with “bat bombs” during the war, attaching small incendiary charges to bats, to be released over enemy cities. Japan attempted to start fires in the U.S. with balloon bombs. The Germans employed falconers in Europe to intercept Allied carrier pigeons. At least one dog was killed in the Normandy invasion parachuting into France. While we think of WWII as the first mechanized war, in fact most armies were essentially horse-drawn. Germany’s vaunted Blitzkrieg army employed millions of horses behind the frontlines.
James Doohan, later to be famous as Scotty on Star Trek, lost a finger on D-Day. Baseball star Yogi Berra manned a naval vessel off of the coast of France that day. The only known woman to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day was Ernest Hemingway’s estranged wife.
Great Britain arrested and tried a well-known clairvoyant for witchcraft, afraid her psychic abilities might reveal military secrets. A crossword puzzle creator was investigated prior to D-Day when he included — apparently entirely by coincidence — several crucial codewords in one of his puzzles, including Overlord, Neptune, and Omaha. Hitler had a nephew who served in the U.S. Navy. Boxing great Joe Louis enlisted in the Army but retained the heavyweight boxing title throughout the war.
Eisenhower demoted and sent home from Europe a West Point classmate and dear friend after he drunkenly revealed too much about the timing of the cross-channel invasion. Monopoly games were used to smuggle escape maps and other tools to Allied prisoners held in Europe. Some decks of playing cards were disguised to hide maps as well. In 1943, with a shortage of young athletes due to the draft, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles merged teams and played as the Steagles.
The youngest sailor in the American navy was only 12 when he enlisted. The youngest Medal of Honor recipient was only 17. The first time any Medals of Honor were awarded to African-Americans for heroism in WWII was in 1997.
To disguise the effectiveness of their radar systems, the British spread a rumor that their pilots’ accuracy was due to a diet rich in carrots. American Boy Scouts could earn a special medal named for Dwight Eisenhower for collecting piles of scrap paper for recycling. Girl Scouts took on the task of gathering millions of unused keys to recycle for the specialized metals they often contained. But butter and sugar rationing meant several years without Girl Scout cookies.
So what do you think? How much of this is fact and how much fiction? April Fool’s! As you might have already guessed, all of these factoids are true. More or less — you can quibble over some of the details. Sailor William Patrick Stuart-Houston was only Hitler’s half-nephew, for instance. But it only goes to show — sometimes truth is stranger than April 1st.
I got to meet James “Scotty” Doohan once. Really nice guy, very down to earth. At the time I didn’t know about his war wounds and didn’t notice his finger. An artillery officer, he was also trained as an aerial observer pilot, what we’d call a forward air controller now.
Thanks to ninja for forwarding the article!
Category: ninja, War Stories
The following is no shit.
The Royal Navy put substantial R&D money into a proposed iceberg aircraft carrier. Project Habakkuk was to build an enormous (like three Nimitzes) out of “Pykrete,” a compound of water, sawdust, and a few other additives that, once frozen, was both highly buoyant and very slow-melting in warmer temperatures. The project’s top proponent, Lord Mountbatten, demonstrated the protective qualities of the material during a meeting with Churchill, FDR, and their respective staffs by setting up a block of Pykrete at the end of the room and shooting it with his sidearm. The pistol round bounced right off the test block and grazed Admiral Ernest King’s leg (couldn’t happen to a nicer guy…).
The proposed vessel would displace 1.8 million tons, have the propulsion machinery of a battleship, which would give it an estimated top speed of 3 knots, and would have a 2,000-foot flight deck. Most importantly, any torpedo damage too serious to simply ignore could be quickly repaired by spraying more Pykrete slurry over it and applying some refrigerant. The British intended to park this thing south of Iceland to close the gap in land-based air cover over the North Atlantic. Was it just a fanciful sketch? Nope, they actually built a 1,000-ton prototype to prove the concept, and construction started on facilities to mass-produce Pykrete in the quantities needed.
What killed it? Escort carriers. Converted C-3 hulls were vastly cheaper even in large numbers. They could also go pretty much anywhere and cover a lot more ocean than the iceberg with a runway on it.
The pykrete carrier is a cool concept. I even made some pykrete one time. It’s fun stuff to play with. Really is like cold concrete and takes forever to melt.
Still make Pykrete for camping. Sealed up in Zip-lock bags to keep the ice chest clean, a couple of half-gallon size bricks will last a week.
Sadly enough, I knew that these were true stories. Well, ‘cept for the Grandfather part. I really, really need to get out more often. Lubs me some trivia stuff.
There’s one that should be on this list but isn’t.
During WWII, the German military needed to have something to help them predict the weather (of course nothing like weather satellites or radar existed at this time.) Because weather in the Northern hemisphere generally moves west-to-east, the Allies in Europe didn’t have this issue – they could easily track a storm as it moved from North America, across the Atlantic and into Europe, but the Germans could not since that was “enemy territory” for them.
So they built a secret weather station with unmanned sensors that could communicate temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, etc, via radio, and German sailors operating from a U-Boat secretly placed it on Canada’s Eastern shore on Labrador island in 1943.
However, the station was discovered by the Canadian government…..
In 1977. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Station_Kurt#:~:text=Weather%20Station%20Kurt%20(Wetter%2DFunkger%C3%A4t,of%20Newfoundland%20in%20October%201943.
A lot of those are in my data file, and some have been used in previous trivia columns. Love it!
A popular science fiction writer of the ’30s and ’40s named Eando Binder (later the co-creator of Supergirl) had a story published in spring 1945 in which “atomic bombs” figured prominently. He got visited by government agents, then essentially held incommunicado, until after the Nagasaki drop.
The term “atom bomb” was coined by H.G. Wells some time before WW1. I want to say 1913 or 1914.
Damned if I can remember which book I found this in, but it’s funny.
South Pacific, 1944 (I wanna say it was Cape Gloucester). Marines are dug in for the night. The Japanese are similarly entrenched less than 100 yards away. An English-speaking Jap decides to try his hand at psychological warfare and shouts “Fuck FDR!”
A Marine promptly replies “Fuck Tojo!”
The Jap shouts back “Fuck Babe Ruth!”
Another Marine answers with “Fuck Hirohito!”
Then the Jap tries “Fuck Eleanor Roosevelt!”
There is a pause, until a Marine finally yells “No way, man! YOU can fuck her!” Dozens of other Marines join in, adding their own opinions of any man who could actually have a sexual interest in the then-First Lady.
Soon the original shouter could be heard saying something defensive in Japanese, followed by dozens of Japanese soldiers laughing at him. Apparently there was another English-speaker among them who had translated the Marines’ responses.
I liked in the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old how the Brits responded to the Germans’ sign “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) with a sign that read “We’ve got mittens too!”
So who was the bowman with the long bow that scored a kill? Churchill never confirmed the rumor it was him so who could it be?
It’s commonly attributed to Churchill, but likely never happened.
Here’s another one, albeit from WWI. USS New York (BB-34) was part of Battleship Division 9, which was detailed to assist the Royal Navy in the North Sea as “5th Battle Squadron, Grand Fleet.” Any day now, the increasingly-desperate Germans were expected to sortie the High Seas Fleet for a Jutland rematch. The British had been bloodied in the previous action, losing three battlecruisers* in the space of a few minutes with heavy damage and casualties on numerous other ships. The Germans had taken fewer losses, but the British could afford to lose ships; Kaiser Bill’s fleet couldn’t, so it was a net win for the Brits. In any event, they were anticipating Round Two and wanted to bring overwhelming firepower to the party, hence the American presence. The German high command would eventually order a final sortie, but their crews said “fuck that” and mutinied at the docks. So it was on October 14, 1918, that New York was cruising off the Scottish east coast when something impacted her starboard bow, below the belt armor. There was no explosion or flooding, but men in adjacent compartments could hear the moan of steel being twisted outside the ship. A few seconds later, a second, less-focused impact was felt aft, at which point her starboard screw (New York and her sister Texas were the last US battleships to run on two shaft instead of four) chopped into something hard and started vibrating badly. The starboard engine was shut down and speed was reduced to 12 knots. There were no reefs in the area, and the waters were too deep for the battleship to have struck an uncharted wreck. She was ordered to head to Rosyth for repairs. Along the way, three torpedoes were seen passing ahead of the ship. A U-boat, unaware of her damage, had overestimated New York’s speed and fired ahead of her. New York reached Rosyth and went into a drydock. Once she was out of the water, a dent was found on her starboard side, well below the waterline, whose dimensions matched the bow of a Type… Read more »
Someone seemed to have forgotten something important – the establishment of the rank of Chief Petty Officer happened on 01 APR 1893
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_petty_officer_(United_States)
Happy birthday to my fellow CPO’s!
I was just about to post the same thing! Kept waiting for it all day yesterday and nada. Need some Anchors on this editing staff!
During WWII Russell Johnson (The Professor from Gilligan) nearly became a castaway when he was shot down over the Pacific while serving as a B25 Navigator.
The “Skipper” served in the Coast Guard
Bea Arthur was a Marine. She served as a Truck Driver and Typist. She worked her way up to Staff Sergeant but got booted when she caught the Clap. Likely because of that she denied that she ever served for the rest of her life.
Mel Brooks was a Combat Engineer. He would joke; “I was a combat engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.”
Clark Gable joined after the death of his wife and became an aerial gunner. Hitler loved Clark Gable and offered a huge bounty for anyone who could capture him and bring him to Berlin alive.
Jimmy Stewart was a certified Instructor Pilot in B-17s and B-24s. He served as a B-17 IP at Kirtland Field, New Mexico in 1942 and 43. His repeated request for a combat assignment were granted in November ‘43, and he went overseas with the 445th Bombardment Group (Heavy) to Tibenham, East Anglia. He would later be reassigned to the 486th BG, where he became a squadron CO. He flew B-24s in both units, and went out of his way to avoid publicity. The men he served with appreciated his humility and respected his leadership and his piloting skills. He was officially credited with 20 combat missions, but was said to have flown another 20 or more off the books, as he wanted to stay with his men and didn’t think he would be allowed to volunteer for another tour if his official count reached 25. At the war’s end, Stewart was a bird colonel (having enlisted as a private in ‘41), and was assigned to preside over the court-martial trial of LT William Sincock and LT Theodore Balides, the lead pilot and navigator of a B-24 formation that went off course from their mission to strike a target at Frankfurt and mistakenly bombed Zurich, Switzerland, thinking they were over Freiburg im Breisgau. The court-martial determined the navigation error to have been caused by bad weather, and both men were cleared. Stewart was praised for his professionalism and objectivity at the trial.
Stewart stayed in the reserves after the war, transitioning from B-24s to B-36s. He was actually flying the B-36 in several scenes of “Strategic Air Command.”
Charles Bronson (real name Charles Buchinsky) was a B-29 gunner in the 39th BG (H) based at Guam. He flew 25 combat missions against Japan and got a Purple Heart.