Obscure facts, untold stories of heroes, and rare photographs from World War II — the kind of deep-cut history that even a WWII buff like Mike might not know. From the flooded fields of Normandy to a bear who carried artillery shells.
On September 12, 1944, the Japanese transport ship Arisan Maru was torpedoed by the USS Shark in the South China Sea. What makes this tragedy uniquely obscured: the ship was carryi…
Seven years before WWII, 23-year-old Marian Rejewski used permutation group theory to reverse-engineer the German Enigma machine without ever seeing one. He and colleagues built re…
In April 1944, four Slovak Jewish prisoners escaped from Auschwitz — Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler — and compiled a 32-page detailed report describing the camp's layout, the gas c…
Most people know Alan Turing cracked Enigma. Fewer know he also designed a voice encryption device for Churchill's transatlantic phone calls to Roosevelt called 'Delilah.' It used …
POWs building the Burma Railway (the 'Death Railway') developed a sophisticated communication system using the tapping code based on Morse code, which allowed them to warn each oth…
While the 442nd Regimental Combat Team is celebrated for their battlefield heroics, a smaller group of Japanese-American soldiers performed equally critical work in intelligence. T…
The Normandy bocage — thick hedgerows of earth and tangled bramble that separated centuries-old farm fields — created conditions worse than any planner anticipated. The hedgerows w…
Krystyna Skarbek, a Polish countess, was one of the first and longest-serving Special Operations Executive agents. She parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland and crossed the Tatra mo…
Heartfelt stories of people who fought against all odds — heroes who should be, deserved to be, or simply need to be remembered.
In the Protestant mountain village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Pastor Andre Trocme and his wife Magda created a sanctuary for 3,000 to 5,000 Jewish refugees. Magda hid people in bread ovens and cellar, …
On December 20, 1943, near Bremen, German Lt. Franz Stigler spotted a damaged B-17 Ye Olde Pub. Navigator dead, tail gunner killed, two engines out, crew wounded. Stigler recalled his commanders words…
Rabbi David Feuerwerker was the rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde in occupied France. From his rabbinical post, he organized an underground network that saved hundreds of Jewish children. He personally smug…
In 1932, a 23-year-old Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski accomplished what every intelligence service in Europe had tried and failed to do: he broke the German Enigma cipher machine. Using pu…
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." — Often attributed to Edmund Burke, a phrase that resonated throughout WWII
Every day we highlight a different piece of obscure WWII history.
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