Elite Facts Presents
15 facts about World War II
15.Author Ian Fleming based his character of “James Bond” on the Yugoslavian-born
spy Dusko Popov (1912-1980).
Popov spoke at least 5 languages and came up with his own formula for invisible ink.
He was the first spy to use microdots, or photos shrunk down to the size of dots.
He obtained information that the Japanese were planning an air strike on pearl Harbor,
but the FBI did not act on his warning.
Popov later lived in the US in a penthouse and created a reputation as a playboy.
He wrote an account of his wartime activities in his novel “Spy, Counterspy” (1974).
14.At the behest of the Nazi regime, book-burning campaigns took place in Berlin and other German
cities between March and June 1933, with senior academics and university students incinerating
books deemed to contain “un-German” ideas.
Authors targeted by the book-burning campaign included Jack London, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann,
Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein.
A century before Hitler, the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) predicted: “Where one
burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”
13.Many Jews were subjected to gruesome medical experiments.
For Example.
Doctors would bombard the testicles of men and the ovaries of women with X-rays to see
the impact of different doses on sterility.
Nazi Doctors would break bones repeatedly to see how many times it could be done before
a bone could heal.
They hit people’s heads with hammers to see what their skulls could withstand.
Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of atmospheric pressure on the body.
Prisoner were injected with different drugs and diseases, and limbs were amputated and
muscles cut for transplantation experiments.
Today reference to or use of the Nazi research is considered unethical.
12.It was common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer to aid
in aiming.
That was a mistake.
The tracers had different ballistics so (At long range)) if your tracers were hitting
the target, 80% of your rounds were missing.
Worse yet, the tracers instantly told the enemy he was under fire and from which direction.
Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to
tell you that you were out of ammo.
That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy.
Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss
rate go down.
11.World War II was the last war to register official use of the English Longbow as a weapon
of War.
A weapon used in many of england’s wars, The Longbow was not a standard weapon for
your average World War II soldier.
Jack Churchill (no relation to Winston Churchill) is claimed to have been the one to kill an
enemy soldier with said Longbow in 1940, in a French Village during The Battle of France.
The Kill was Churchill’s way of giving his troops the signal to ambush a German patrol.
10.Operation Barbarossa was the codename for Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which
was outlined in his manifesto “Mein Kampf”.
Originally, Hitler planned to invade Russia on 15th May 1941, however it began on 22nd
June 1941, after taking an extra 7 weeks to prepare his forces.
Germany had several victories during the operation, but ultimately were pushed back before they
reached Moscow, due to their offensive strikeforce stalling, giving the USSR the chance to attack
with a computer offensive.
This was the last time Germany tried to mount a simultaneous offensive along the Soviet-Axis
front.
9.The First Tiger tanks could actually act as submarines.
Each tank was fitted with a snorkel that would allow the tank to operate underwater as long
as it could reach fresh air.
This was intended to allow tanks to drive through deep rivers in Russia.
Eventually the parts were dropped in favor of making the tanks easier to produce.
8.Up until 1940, there was a well established nazi party operating in the United States.
Among the supporters, Henry Ford was one of the most notable members.
Henry Ford is most famous for creating the first commercially available car, The Ford
Model T. He financially backed the US Nazi party and Hitler himself with several million
dollars.
Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories
into practice in Germany,” leading to the creation of the Volkswagen Beetle (“The
people’s car”).
This transaction ended when the US became more involved in the War, with the attack
on Pearl Harbor.
7.A German submarine torpedoed the HMS Nelson with a total of 4 torpedoes.
Out of the 4, not a single one detonated.
After this incident, in his rage, The Sub-Commander went all the way up his chain of command telling
officials about the failures of the German equipment.
As a result of his information, he was promptly fired, rather than fixing the potential underlying
problem.
6.“Loose Lips Sink Ship”, a popular phrase created as part of America’s war time propaganda
campaign, was created as a result of a loss of thousands of American servicemen to German
submarines, operating off the coast of the United States.
The phrase wasn’t created to avoid leaking information to German spies, though that certainly
helped, It was created to prevent American morale to dropping.
If it was public knowledge that the Germans were a few 100 yards off the coast, sinking
ships and killing unprepared soldiers, people would have started to panic.
5.The Aircraft carrier “Graf Zeppelin” was to be Germany’s lead ship in an attempt
to create a well-balanced, oceangoing fleet, capable of protecting Germany’s naval power
far beyond the confines of the Baltic and North Seas.
However, the carrier was never finished, since construction on the carrier was constantly
in flux, because of the demands of the war.
After Germany surrendered, the USSR acquired the ship and used it to train their troops
how to sink Western Carriers.
The sunken remains of a ship fitting the Graf Zeppelin’s description was discovered on
12th July 2006 by the Polish oil company “Petrobaltic”.
Historians are “99% certain” that this sunken ship is the “Graf Zeppelin”.
4.One of the most popular and interesting myths about Amelia Earhart involves her potential
capture by Japanese Forces prior to World War II.
Amelia Earhart was a famous pilot, the first woman to fly a plane solo across the Atlantic
Ocean and Famously disappeared while crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Just prior to the surrender of The Empire of Japan, The US government requested a list
of POWs (Prisoners of War) be handed over.
An “Amelia Earhart” was listed as a Prisoner of War in a prison camp transfer from the
Philippines.
The US Government tried to track down this person’s records at the end of the war,
without any success.
3.While there was only 1 incident of chemical warfare being used, there were multiple cases
of Biological weapons being used.
The recorded instances were primarily from Japan using them on Chine.
In 1940, the Japanese Army Air Force bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying
the bubonic plague.
To this day, people are still dying from their usage, as the viruses were so efficiently
weaponized that fully vaccinating against them is nearly impossible.
During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapons
against US civilians in San Diego and California, during “Operation Cherry Blossoms”.
The plan was set to launch on 22nd September 1945, but it was not put into action due to
Japan's Surrender on 15th August 1945
2.There was only 1 incident of chemical warfare being used during World War II.
The US Military had brought several canisters of Mustard Gas to the Italian Port of Bari
“Just in case” they wanted to use chemical warfare against Germany.
Mustard Gas, or Sulfur Mustard, was predominantly used in World War I, which is absorbed through
the skin, inhalation, ingestion, or coming into contact with the eyes, causing severe
burning of the skin, eyes and respiratory tract.
The German Luftwaffe bombed the container ships, releasing the gas.
Approximately 27 cargo ships were lost and over 2000 military and civilian casualties
resulted.
It is still unknown just how many were killed by the release of the gas and how many were
killed by the explosions.
1.There is only one recording of Adolf Hitler talking casually to another person currently
known.
Referred to as “The Mannerheim Tapes”, secretly recorded in 1942 by the Finnish army,
these tapes remained secret until the 1950’s.
Some Historians refuse to accept the existence of the tapes, saying it paints a different
picture of the war and Hitler.
The Conversation begins with Hitler conferring with Baron Mannerheim (Finnish military leader
and statesman) how astonishing it was that the USSR had 35 thousand tanks.
Mannerheim explains that, because Russia had been at peace for 20-25 years, they had all
that time to manufacture Tanks.
Hitler explains about the failure of Operation Barbarossa, The defeat of Italy in North Africa,
Yugoslavia and Albania and arguments with the Soviet Union.
The conversation was secretly recorded by Thor Damen, an engineer from the Finnish Broadcasting
Company “Yle”, before being found out and commanded to stop.
He captured the first 11 minutes on tape.
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