74 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
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 replica machines and the Bomba code-breaking device. In July 1939 they s…
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 Bureau built replica Enigma machines and the 'Bomba' — the first machine de…
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 …
Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming 'Mad Jack' Churchill entered battle throughout WWII armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and bagpipes. He used his longbow to kill an enemy officer with an arrow during the retreat to Dunkirk in …
Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately allowed himself to be captured in Warsaw on September 19, 1940. Assigned prisoner number 4859, he spent 2.5 years inside Auschwitz and organized a resistance network called ZOW with hundreds of inmat…
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…
On August 20, 1941, Soviet Lt. Zinoviy Kolobanov buried his KV-1 tank in a swampy overlook near Krasnogvardeysk. A column of 43 German vehicles from the 4th Panzer Division advanced. Kolobanov single-handedly destroyed 22 tanks and 2 anti-tank guns i…