89 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
At Camp Manners Creek in Australia, the U.S. Army's 682nd Amphibian Tank Battalion became so homesick that their commanding officer organized an elaborate 'invasion' of their own camp as a morale exercise, complete with amphibious tanks, fake radio b…
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…
When German authorities imposed strict press censorship in Denmark, the Danish resistance didn't just print underground newspapers — they created hundreds of them. At the peak, over 50 illegal newspapers were published in Copenhagen alone. The most f…
The Great Panjandum had two 10-foot wooden wheels with rockets, designed to clear mines. Tested on Devon beaches in 1943, it was spectacular failure. Rockets fired unevenly, it caught fire and careened toward officers filming. A cameraman Lt. Col. Sm…
The Great Panjandum was a massive contraption designed by the British Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (an actual government department with that actual name). It consisted of two 10-foot wooden wheels with rockets attached to the rim,…
The Great Panjandum was a massive contraption consisting of two 10-foot wooden wheels with rockets attached to the rim, designed to be a self-propelled mine-clearing device. It was tested on beaches in Devon and was an absolute catastrophe. The rocke…
At the heavy water plant in Vemork, Norway — perched on a cliff above a 1,400-foot gorge — the Norwegian Resistance carried out two separate sabotage missions. First, four commandos parachuted in, then skied for 18 days across frozen terrain to reach…
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted 28 days — April 19 to May 16, 1943 — making it the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. A force of approximately 750 poorly armed Jewish fighters (with handguns, homemade grenades, and Moloto…
Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, siblings from a deeply moral German family (influenced by their father's repeated arrests for criticizing Hitler), distributed six anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich. In the final leaflet, they wrote: 'We wi…
Captain Frank Lillyman of the 101st Airborne was the first Allied soldier to land on D-Day, parachuting into Normandy at 00:15 to mark the drop zone near Sainte-Mere-Eglise. Weather and cloud cover scattered his team - only two pathfinders landed cor…
The Germans at Normandy were partly misled by 'Operation Bodyguard' — the strategic deception that the main invasion would come at the narrowest point of the Channel (Calais/Dieppe), not the beaches. This deception included fake radio traffic from a …
Spanish citizen Juan Pujol Garcia managed to convince the Germans he was a fanatical Nazi, then convinced the British he was a valuable spy, then played BOTH sides simultaneously. He created a fictional network of 27 sub-agents that didn't exist, fab…