28 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
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…
Miep Gies, an Austrian-born Dutch citizen, risked her life to feed and shelter the Frank family for two years in Amsterdam. After their arrest, she found Anne's scattered diary pages on the floor and kept them in a drawer, unopened, for months. After…
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…
While Desmond Doss's story is known, fewer know about Richard T. Trask, a medic who treated over 200 wounded soldiers under fire on the Volturno River in Italy without ever firing a weapon. Or about T5 Sergeant Carl E. Nelson, a Native American medic…
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…
Born in Moscow to an Indian Muslim father and a European-American mother, Noor Inayat Khan was a pacifist writer of children's stories rooted in Indian spiritual traditions before volunteering for the SOE's Special Operations Executive. She was the f…
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…
Private Keith Gaze of the British 12th Parachute Battalion parachuted into Normandy on June 6, 1944, as part of Operation Tonga. During fighting shortly after landing in the early morning hours, he was shot in the head. His comrades, assuming him dea…
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944 and immediately began issuing 'Schutz-Pass' — protective passports that identified bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation. He created safe houses for Jews throughout the ci…
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…
The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) — the 'Monuments Men' — consisted of 345 men from 13 nations who recovered and returned more than 5 million artworks stolen by the Nazis. They found caches in salt mines, castles, and caves across…