74 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
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…
Geoffrey Pyke proposed building an aircraft carrier from Pykrete - 86 percent sawdust and 14 percent water frozen together. Pykrete was as strong as concrete but floated and self-repaired. The ship would have been 2,000 feet long. A 60-foot prototype…
Australian-born Nancy Wake earned the nickname 'White Mouse' from the Gestapo for her uncanny ability to evade capture. After witnessing Nazi persecution in Vienna in 1937, she began working as a journalist and later became a courier for the French R…
The Military Intelligence Service trained over 6,000 Japanese-Americans as translators and interrogators. Many had families in internment camps. They translated captured documents including the Z Plan revealing Japanese fleet positions before Leyte G…
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…
Brigadier Orde Wingate's Chindits — officially the Long Range Penetration Groups — were formed to operate deep behind Japanese lines in Burma. In March 1943, 3,000 men crossed the Chindwin River and operated for three months behind Japanese lines, de…
British woman Pearl Witherington was rejected three times by SOE before being sent to France undercover as a lingerie saleswoman. When her commanding officer was arrested, she took command of 3,000 Maquis fighters. Under her leadership they derailed …
British inventor Geoffrey Pyke proposed building an aircraft carrier from 'Pykrete' — a mixture of 86% sawdust and 14% water frozen together. Pykrete was as strong as concrete but would float. The ship, called Habakkuk, would have been 2,000 feet lon…
On October 14, 1943, Jewish prisoners at Sobibor escaped after killing 11 SS men with axes and knives. Approximately 300 escaped through minefields, only about 50 survived. The Nazis demolished Sobibor, built a farm over it, and planted trees attempt…
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…
German Luftwaffe pilot Leutnant Franz Stigler spotted a badly damaged American B-17 bomber named 'Ye Olde Pub,' piloted by 2nd Lt. Charles 'Charlie' Brown, limping across the North Sea on the way back from a bombing raid over Bremen. The B-17 had los…
POWs building the Burma Railway (the 'Death Railway') — constructed by the Japanese using 60,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 Asian forced laborers — developed a sophisticated communication system using tapping codes based on Morse code. But their most in…