Fighting Polish bears, Japanese soldiers hiding in caves decades after the war ended,
and one extremely unexpected monarch personally pitching in to the war effort,
these are some weird World War II facts you’ve probably never heard before!
Even if you’re a World War Two expert, you’re gonna learn something new today!
For starters, Hitler had a nephew, and he fought with the US Navy!
William Patrick Hitler - who, for understandable reasons,
later changed his name to William Stuart-Houston - was Hitler’s half-nephew,
who didn’t get on great with his maniacal uncle, who referred to him as “My loathsome
nephew.” William was always critical of Hitler, and when the war started in
earnest, he wanted an opportunity to somehow undermine his famous relative’s evil regime.
There was one problem - due to national security concerns,
the US military wasn’t exactly eager to let someone with the surname “Hitler” near the
heart of the American war machine. After a brief stint in the Canadian Air Force,
William sent an impassioned letter directly to President Roosevelt, which said, partially:
“Mr. President, I am respectfully submitting this petition to you to enquire as to whether
I may be allowed to join [the Navy] in their struggle against tyranny and oppression.”
Roosevelt passed the request on to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI,
who performed a background check. After this, permission was granted,
and William Hitler joined the US Navy as a pharmacist’s mate, patching up Allied soldiers
near the front lines. Everyone is just lucky that the apple fell very far from the tree on this one.
But William Patrick Hitler was hardly the only strange service member in the US military!
The youngest American soldier during World War II was actually only twelve years old!
Calvin Graham was a young man who really didn’t care for Hitler, and he wanted to do something
about it. There was only one problem: He was twelve years old, well below the minimum age for
enlisting. So, he lied about his age and joined the Navy in 1942, being sent to boot camp in San
Diego for six weeks before being assigned to the USS South Dakota in Pearl Harbor. But before the
jig was up, Calvin Graham had a short but surprisingly decorated period of service.
For their work in the Battle of Santa Cruz, everyone on the South Dakota was
given a Navy Unit Commendation. He also received a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple
Heart for his work loading artillery on the South Dakota during the Naval Battle
of Guadalcanal. But it wasn’t long after that that everything came crashing down.
In December of 1942, Calvin’s lie was revealed to the Navy by his mother when he arrived late at an
appointment due to attending his grandmother’s funeral in Texas. He was stripped of his
commendations and spent three months in the brig before returning to civilian life. But you
couldn’t keep Calvin Graham out of the military - He enlisted in the Marines when he was 17 in 1948.
But William and Calvin don’t even come close to World War II’s actual weirdest combatant.
The Polish military officially employed a bear as part of their WWII army!
That’s right - The 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the II Corps of the Polish army was dispatched
to serve on the front lines of the Middle East in 1942, facing off against Nazi forces trying
to gain territory in the region. While there, they made a highly unusual trade with a local
Iranian shepherd in Hamadan - He wanted a Swiss Army knife, some chocolate, and some canned beef,
and in exchange, he’d give them a Syrian Brown Bear cub in a burlap sack. The company adopted
the cub and named him Wojtek, short for the Polish “Wojciech,” meaning “Joyful Warrior.”
Wojtek became something of a shared pet and mascot for the company. They trained and
played with him over their years in the Middle East, feeding him treats, beer, and cigarettes,
which he quickly became accustomed to. As Wojtek got bigger, one of the soldiers,
Peter Prendys, taught him a variety of tricks - such as how to salute, march,
and wave. Wojtek even happily wrestled and boxed with his found family of human soldiers.
Some problems arose from the resources that Wojtek drained - he had a tendency to take long,
cold showers, wasting company water - however, he earned back his respect by scaring off an
intruder who was trying to steal the camp’s arsenal for local dissidents. When the company
was called back to fight in Italy, in order to bring Wojtek with them, they had to officially
enlist him as a Private in the Polish army. But for his courage and the role he played in
boosting the morale of his fellow troops, he ended his military service with the rank of Corporal.
Corporal Wojtek spent the last few years of his life at a zoo in Edinburgh - his friends didn’t
want to take him back to Poland for fear that he would become a propaganda tool of the government.
To this day, he’s still considered one of the Second World War’s strangest national heroes.
Speaking of animals in the Second World War…
The first Allies bombing raid in Berlin killed an elephant at the Berlin Zoo!
In 1940, under the command of Winston Churchill,
the RAF bombed the German capital. It was hoped that by causing sufficient damage,
they could break the will of the people and reduce support for Hitler. However, the bombing
raid didn’t have a single human casualty, but that didn’t mean it had no casualties at all.
The raid was somewhat disastrous - six of the British bombers involved crashed,
and a bomb killed an elephant at the Berlin Zoo. Sadly, this wouldn’t even be the only
time Allied bombing raids had pachyderm collateral damage. The 1944 bombing raids,
which also had a horrific human cost, killed almost all of the other elephants at the zoo,
leaving the last one, named Siam, completely alone.
But that wasn’t the only doomed near-miss in the war.
Gandhi had a two-letter correspondence with Hitler, trying to stop the war!
Gandhi was a complicated figure, but it’s undeniable that he’s a symbol for standing
up against oppression - which is why it’s so surreal to see him send letters to history’s
greatest monster, addressed “Dear Friend.” The first letter from Gandhi to Hitler read:
“Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their
request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells
me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a
war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay the price for an object
however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one
who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any
way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.”
This letter was sent not long before Hitler invaded Poland, so Gandhi’s good-natured attempt
to change Hitler’s mind probably would have fallen on deaf ears. He sent Hitler a second,
much longer letter after the invasion, once again begging Hitler to reconsider. Neither
of these letters ever actually reached their intended recipient because they
were intercepted by the very British colonial government that Gandhi was resisting in India.
He also met with Mussolini in 1931, so Gandhi definitely kept
some complicated company. Not everyone was out of their element with the war,
though. Some soldiers proved to have truly superhuman fighting abilities.
John Randolph McKinney was an American soldier who played a part in the United
States’ recapture of the Philippines from the Japanese forces. He rose to fame after
the war for a truly spectacular feat: Killing 40 Japanese soldiers who attacked his camp in Luzon
with no reinforcements. A Japanese sergeant attacked McKinney in his tent with a sword,
cutting off part of his ear, but McKinney turned the tables.
He beat the sergeant to death with the butt of his rifle and then proceeded to
go absolutely John Wick on his men over the next 36 minutes. All 39 were killed,
with McKinney dispatching them in a mix of close combat and expert gunplay with a
variety of foraged weapons. He beat the odds and got a Medal of Honor for his
trouble. But in the interest of fairness, let’s look at his Japanese equivalent.
This would probably be Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, a legendary flying ace with not one but two
badass nicknames: The Devil of Rabaul and the Assassin of Sakura. He earned these
nicknames for truly being a devilish assassin in the air, winning over 80 aerial battles,
and making him beloved by his comrades and feared by his enemies until his death in 1944 - when he
was only 24 years old. But even his dedication pales in comparison to our next combatants.
Despite the Japanese government surrendering in
1945, one Japanese soldier in World War II didn’t surrender until 1972!
Shoichi Yokoi may have been one of the most dedicated soldiers of all time. The
26-year-old tailor was drafted into the Japanese Army in 1941 and sent to serve
in Guam, which was under Japanese occupation at the time. However,
after a few years of relatively smooth sailing, the American military reclaimed Guam in 1944.
However, Shoichi’s military training had taught him that capture was one of the
greatest embarrassments a soldier could face - so rather than becoming a POW,
he and several other soldiers retreated into the jungles of Guam and became wild men.
They’d remain isolated in the jungle for 27 years while the rest of the world moved on,
assuming they were dead. As the other soldiers did indeed die, Shoichi endured - he made a
support structure inside a cave using bamboo canes and made an eel trap out of reeds so
he wouldn’t need to subsist on small animals alone. There were multiple times during his
decades in Guam that Shoichi became very ill but refused to seek treatment. He had no idea
the war was over and would rather have died in his hole than faced capture after all this time.
In 1972, the now 57-year-old Shoichi was discovered by a group of hunters. In a
panicked and delirious state, he tried to attack the hunters but was easily overpowered due to his
malnutrition. The hunters dragged him back to a hospital, and all the time, Shoichi was begging
them to just kill him. News soon spread of the last holdout’s remarkable story, and
some representatives of the Japanese government traveled to Guam to repatriate the lost soldier.
When he was brought back to his home country, he was given a hero’s welcome,
but unsurprisingly, for a man who’d spent effectively half of his life in a jungle,
he had some difficulty readjusting to life in the Japan of the 1970s.
Strangely, while this seems like a crazy, one-off case, it was actually one of three
Japanese holdouts who didn’t officially surrender until the 70s. Another one is Teruo Nakamura,
who was hidden on Morotai Island in the Dutch East Indies until 1974,
at which point he went to Taiwan until he died of lung cancer five years later. And of course,
there was Hiroo Onoda, who remained a holdout in the Philippines - He became
a national hero in Japan, just like Shoichi, but was less of a hero in the Philippines,
where he was found to have killed several people during his holdout period.
But even crazier than that,
Queen Elizabeth II briefly served as an auto mechanic during World War II!
At the time, the late monarch was just Princess Elizabeth. She was one of the many British women
working in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and by her own choice, too. After initially being sent
out of London like many young Britons during World War II, when then-Princess Elizabeth turned 18,
she requested to join the ATS like thousands of other women in the country were doing at the time,
She was made an honorary second subaltern and began training in 1945, with a personal
request from the King that his daughter not receive any special treatment. She passed a
military driving test, learned to read maps, and became a useful asset to the war effort
by repairing military vehicles. She wasn’t the only VIP to become a part of the ATS;
Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary, was also part of the organization.
This was hardly a risk-free, do-nothing job, either - an ATS woman working with
artillery was killed in a bombing in 1942, just three years before Elizabeth enlisted.
Princess Elizabeth certainly helped the Allied War Effort, but Coca-Cola did, too!
Coca-Cola was so popular among American GIs that the company built a bottling
plant in North Africa to help manufacture and deliver ice-cold bottles of Coke to the
boys fighting on the front lines in Europe. And this was very much appreciated by the soldiers,
as one war letter from the National WWII Museum read:
“As part of our PX ration this week each man received two Cokes for which he paid four francs,
and although some people may debate whether rye or bourbon are America's national drinks,
when I saw the excitement caused by a case of Cokes and the remarks about the corner drugstore,
I did not think the national drink was quite that strong!”
But probably the grimmest rare facts of all about World War II concern the demographic
breakdowns of everyone who died in the conflict. Over 100,000 Allied bomber crewmen were killed
flying over Europe - but even before the war, these jobs were dangerous - around
15,000 Americans died during pilot training. Only 20% of males born in the Soviet Union
during the year 1923 survived the Second World War. Only one in four people serving in U-boats
survived. The mortality rate for prisoners of war in Russian camps was a horrifying 85%.
The rare death statistics under the Nazis are equally as shocking,
even beyond the obvious. Hitler had 84 of his own generals executed over the course of the war,
which only grew towards the end as the tide of the war turned against Germany
and Hitler’s paranoia worsened. Another deeply upsetting statistic is that one Polish midwife,
Stanisława Leszczyńska, who was a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp,
was given the task of delivering over 3000 babies - 2500 of which died in infancy.
And just in case that wasn’t deeply depressing enough, only 30 of the
remaining 500 are believed to have survived all the way to the liberation of the camp.
The final tally indicates that from 50 to 70 million people were killed in the war - compared
to only around 40 million deaths in the First World War. Despite more than fifty nations being
involved in World War II, 80% of the casualties can be credited to four countries - Russia, China,
Germany, and Poland. Russia lost 1.1 million troops during the Battle of Stalingrad alone,
more than the total number of British and American soldiers during World War Two.
And even darker than that, over 50% of those 50 to 70 million casualties were civilians,
most of which were women and children.
Now watch “50 Insane World War 2 Facts That Will Shock You!” or check out this video instead!