Rico's rants: History for the day: World War Two

War History Online has facts about World War Two they did not teach you in school:

Leonard Dawe, a crossword compiler for the Telegraph, used a number of D-Day operation code names as the answers to his puzzle in the months before D-Day. MI5 interrogated him, only to discover that it was a random coincidence.
The lift cables of the Eiffel Tower were cut by the Resistance after Germany occupied France in June of 1940. As a result, German soldiers had to climb to the top to fly their swastika flag.
The last Japanese soldier to surrender, Hiroo Onoda, did so in 1974, twenty-nine years after World War Two was over.
A radio belonging to a British POW was hidden so well that, when the soldier visited the camp sixty-two years later, he found it right where he left it.
A Dutch warship, the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, was covered with tree branches to disguise it as a tropical island.
On average, it took sixteen thousand anti-aircraft shells to bring down a bomber.
Japan and Russia still have not signed a peace treaty to end World War Two, due to a dispute over sovereignty of the Kuril Islands.
Two Polish doctors discovered that the Nazis would not deport anyone to a concentration camp who tested positive for typhus, for fear that the disease would spread. The two injected Jews and non-Jews in their city with a vaccine containing dead epidemic typhus that would test positive but have no adverse effects, saving approximately eight thousand lives.
Canada declared war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but before the US did.
Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany when the war made it difficult to bring in Coca-Cola syrup from the US.
Juan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo, was a double agent who was awarded both the German Iron Cross and the Member of the British Empire award.
After the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, Ferdinand Foch said that “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Twenty years and sixty-four days later, World War Two broke out.
To prevent the Germans from finding out that the British had Airborne Interception Radar onboard fighter aircraft, the British started a rumor that their pilots had excellent night vision from eating lots of carrots. This rumor has continued and, today, many people think carrots improve eyesight.
Emil Hacha, the president of Czechoslovakia, suffered a heart attack upon hearing of Hitler’s plan to bomb his capital.
Eighty percent of all Soviet males born in 1923 died in World War Two.
Royal Air Force Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade was a rear gunner in a RAF Avro Lancaster heavy bomber during World War Two when, forced to bail out, he fell eighteen thousand feet without a parachute. His fall was broken by pine trees and a soft snow cover on the ground, and he survived with only a sprained leg.
Hitler’s nephew, William Patrick Hitler, fought in the US Navy against his uncle.
Approximately five thousand bombs that failed to explode are discovered and defused in Germany every year.
Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election, just two months after winning the war, and had to leave the Potsdam conference and return home.
Hitler ordered the collection of two hundred thousand Jewish artifacts, to be displayed after the war ended, in a trophy case called The Museum of an Extinct Race.
The US Army had more ships that the US Navy.
In 1942, the Polish Army trained a brown bear named Wojtek to move crates of ammunition, a task he performed in Italy. After the war, he lived at the Edinburgh Zoo, where he died in 1963.
Of 7,374 Lancaster bombers built, 3,349 would be lost in action, their British crews had a one-in-five chance of surviving.
During the war, Canada gave out badges to people who tried to enlist but were refused due to medical reasons, to show their willingness to fight.
Hitler never visited a single concentration or death camp, nor ever visited a bombed out city.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person the Japanese government recognizes as having survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
Following a massive naval bombardment, over thirty thousand American and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska. Twenty soldiers were killed in the fire-fight. It would have been worse if there had been Japanese on the island.
All venomous animals at the London Zoo were killed at the beginning of the war, in case the zoo was bombed, and the animals escaped.
While serving as a commander of PT boat 109, John F. Kennedy and his crew were hit by a Japanese destroyer and stranded in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy carved a message into a coconut shell and asked two natives to bring it to the nearest Allied base. They succeeded, and Kennedy was rescued. The coconut shell was preserved as a paperweight on his desk in the Oval Office.
The youngest American serviceman was twelve-year-old Calvin Graham, who served in the Navy. He was wounded in combat and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age, though his benefits were later restored by act of Congress.
The first American serviceman killed in the European Theater was killed by the Germans in Norway in 1940.
The highest ranking American killed was Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, who died in a bombing raid by the American Army Air Corps.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, the top Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounced “sink us”), the shoulder patch of the Army’s 45th Infantry division was a swastika, and Hitler’s private train was named Amerika. All three were soon changed for PR purposes.
More American servicemen died in the Air Corps that the Marine Corps. While completing the required thirty missions, your chance of being killed was seventy percent. Not that bombers were helpless: a B-17 carried four tons of bombs and a ton and a half of machine gun ammo. The Eighth Air Force shot down 6,098 enemy fighter planes, one for every twelve thousand shots fired.
Generally speaking, there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance, Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over eighty planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.
It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every fifth round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake, as the tracers had different ballistics so, at long range, if your tracers were hitting the target, eighty percent of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
When the Allied armies reached the Rhine river, the first thing men did was piss in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and General George S. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).
German Me-264 bombers would have been capable of bombing New York City, but it wasn’t worth the effort.
Back in the autumn of 1943, a fierce battle was fought in and around Leros island between the British and the Germans, for the control of the Dodecanese Islands, after the capitulation of the fascist Italian regime in September of 1943, which had occupied the islands since 1912. The Germans managed to take control of the island of Leros, after a battle that lasted for several days, involving naval forces, parachutists, Brandenburg troopers, aircraft and land forces.
In 2003, a Ju-52, shot down over Alinda Bay in Leros on 13 November 1943, was salvaged after a difficult operation and transported back to the Hellenic Air Force Museum in Tatoi near Athens, to be maintained and exhibited.
The Colt M1911 pistol served as the official sidearm for the American armed forces from 1911 and 1985. It is a .45 caliber semi-automatic, single-action, recoil operated, magazine-fed pistol. Semi-automatic means it fires one round each time the trigger is pulled. Nearly three million of M1911s and M1911A1s were produced. The M1911 was designed in 1911, and the M1911A1 was designed in 1924. These hand guns were widely used as service pistols in World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In the Persian Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq war, there were non-standard usages of the Colt M1911s. These guns were not completely phased out even after the introduction of Beretta M9 due to their popularity. A special variant of this handgun is still in use by some units of the Navy, Army Special Forces, and Marine Corps.
8,533 Colt M1911s were used by US forces during World War One. Due to the expansion of the war, besides Colt, other firearms manufacturers also got the contracts to produce army weapons including the M1911. The government procured two million M1911s and M1911A1s from different manufacturers during World War Two. M1911A1s were favored by both US and Allied combatants due to its smaller size. British commando units, British Special Operations Executive units, and Commonwealth South African forces prized M1911A1s during World War Two.