14 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
Like the ancient Greek soldier who returned from Thermopylae, Polish tank commander Colonel Stanislaw Szczęsny Grzmot-Skotnicki (his actual surname, 'Grzmot' meaning 'Thunder') led the 9th Lesser Poland Uhlans through the September 1939 campaign. Whe…
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 working from PC Bruno, a chateau near Paris. When France fell in 1940, …
Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued visas and passports to over 30,000 refugees fleeing France in 1940, including up to 10,000 Jews, in direct violation of Portugal's Circular 14 which forbade issuing visas to Jews. He personally told …
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. When ordered to leave he continued at the train station - writing his…
When Chiune Sugihara was ordered evacuated by Tokyo from Kaunas, he had hundreds of desperate Jewish refugees pounding on his door for visas. He kept writing visas until the very moment his train pulled out of the station. He wrote his last visa whil…
Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejon issued visas in occupied Paris to Jewish refugees in defiance of Franco's government and German authorities. Working as Third Secretary at the Spanish Embassy, he processed hundreds of visas for Sephardic …
Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately got himself arrested during a Warsaw street roundup in 1940 so he could infiltrate Auschwitz from inside. For 2.5 years he organized a resistance network inside the camp called the ZOW (Union of Mili…
Alan Turing not only cracked Enigma but designed a voice encryption device for Churchills transatlantic phone calls to Roosevelt called Delilah. It used mathematical scrambling. By the time it was perfected transatlantic cable encryption sufficed. Tu…
Albert Gortz was a Danish schoolteacher in Jutland who used his school to hide Allied airmen shot down over Denmark. Under the guise of teaching, he ran a network that moved over 2,000 people from occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden by fishing boat. H…
Descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor Inayat Khan was a pacifist childrens author who became the first female SOE wireless operator in occupied France. When her entire network was arrested, she stayed alone in Paris for four months sending vital intelligen…
Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, a Jewish refugee from Lvov (his entire family in Poland was murdered in the Holocaust), was recruited to the Manhattan Project to work on the implosion lens calculations for the atomic bomb. He developed the Monte…
The 442nd was composed almost entirely of Japanese-American soldiers, many of whose families were held in internment camps on American soil while they fought in Europe. They fought in North Africa, Italy, and southern France, becoming the most decora…