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.
When the Japanese cargo ship Lisbon Maru was torpedoed by an American submarine in 1942, the Japanese guards locked the holds containing 1,816 British POWs below deck and covered t…
When Germany invaded Poland, the Polish cryptologists who had broken Enigma were evacuated east. Three of them — Rejewski, Rozycki, and Zygalski — made it to France and continued w…
Group Captain James Stagg, a Scottish meteorologist, personally convinced Eisenhower to launch D-Day on 6 June based on a brief window of improving weather that German meteorologis…
Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski — age 23 — applied pure permutation theory to break the German Enigma cipher in 1932, seven years before the war began. The Polish Cipher Burea…
The strangest battle of WWII: On May 5, 1945 — four days after Hitler's death and one day before Germany surrendered — American soldiers and German Wehrmacht troops literally fough…
Before D-Day, the U.S. 23rd Headquarters Special Troops — known as the 'Ghost Army' — deployed inflatable tanks, sound trucks broadcasting fake radio traffic, and even fabricated u…
Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1940 disobeyed Tokyo and issued transit visas to thousands of Jewish refugees. He wrote visas by hand for 18-20 hours daily.…
On August 20, 1941, near the town of Krasnogvardeysk (now Gatchina) outside Leningrad, Soviet Lieutenant Zinoviy Kolobanov took his KV-1 heavy tank — one of the few Soviet tanks he…
Heartfelt stories of people who fought against all odds — heroes who should be, deserved to be, or simply need to be remembered.
In 1932, 23-year-old Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski used permutation theory to reverse-engineer the German Enigma machine without ever seeing one. He built replica machines, cracked daily key se…
In 1945, a 17-year-old Czech boy named Jiri Vavra watched as a damaged German Tiger II tank was abandoned on the outskirts of Prague during the uprising. With no experience driving a tank, he and seve…
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…
Before WWII, Vera Atkins was a Romanian-born librarian and socialite who spoke four languages and had a photographic memory. She joined SOE's French Section as an intelligence officer and personally r…
"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.
Today's Fact → Random Trivia 🎲