163 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
Ukrainian sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko had 309 confirmed kills during the Siege of Odessa and the defense of Sevastopol — the most kills by a female sniper in history. She started the war as a university student studying history, and volunteered for t…
Belgian Andrée de Jongh, age 24, founded the Comet Line, helping 800 Allied airmen escape to Spain. She personally escorted 118 airmen across the Pyrenees on foot, crossing 24 times. She wore a red carnation as her signature. Arrested in 1943, she ne…
The Comet Line (Reseau Comete) was a Belgian-French escape network that helped nearly 800 Allied airmen escape from occupied Europe to neutral Spain. It was founded and run almost entirely by young women. The leader, 24-year-old Belgian Andrée de Jon…
The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days — the longest and most destructive siege in history. Over 1 million civilians died, mostly from starvation. When Lake Ladoga froze solid in winter, the 'Road of Life' became the only supply route into the city. …
On August 20, 1941, near the town of Krasnogvardeysk (now Gatchina) outside Leningrad, Soviet Lieutenant Zinoviy Kolobanov took his KV-1 heavy tank — one of the few Soviet tanks heavy enough to penetrate German armor — and positioned it in a swampy a…
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…
Most people know Alan Turing cracked Enigma. Fewer know he also designed a voice encryption device for Churchill's transatlantic phone calls to Roosevelt called 'Delilah.' It used mathematical scrambling rather than physical key rotation and was neve…
Thousands of Soviet orphan children were taken in by partisan units during the Eastern Front. The partisans in Belarus maintained schools, newspapers, and hospitals in forests - running a shadow government with its own currency of wooden chips, court…
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…
Czechoslovaks Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, trained in Britain by SOE, parachuted into their occupied homeland to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich — the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany and architect of the Holocaust. They ambushed Heydrich's open …
Eight German saboteurs were landed on U.S. soil by U-boats in June 1942 — four near Amagansett, Long Island, New York, and four near Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida — as part of a sabotage plan code-named Operation Pastorius. They carried high explosives,…
Dentist Lytle S. Adams (a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt) proposed dropping bomb-laden Mexican free-tailed bats over Japan. The bats were chosen because a single bat could carry a small timed incendiary device, they hibernate in buildings, and …