From a ruined fighter plane found on a hike to a secret treasure hunted down on a remote
Philippine island, here are ten of the most shockin g and incredible discoveries from
World War II!
10: The Yardwork Bomb A woman in Missouri got more than she bargained
for while doing yardwork!
Located in Jefferson County to be exact, Pamela and her husband had moved to Missouri about
two years prior.
Ever since, they had been fixing the place up.
It was finally time to get the yard looking acceptable.
Pamela was in the middle of cleaning when she noticed a large piece of metal sticking
out from the dirt.
She dug it out, took it inside, and tried to figure out what it was.
Pretty soon, she and her husband realized they had a legitimate bomb on their hands!
Whoops!
She had already dug it out and carried it inside the house!!
How did it not explode??
As you can probably imagine, Pamela and her husband phoned the police immediately.
It turned out they had dug up a Japanese mortar from World War Two.
It became a whole ordeal and Pamela posted on Facebook that her driveway looked like
a crime scene since so many officers came to the scene!!
They brought the ordnance out into the driveway.
The police had to use a special bomb robot to X-ray the device from a distance, then
an explosive ordnance disposal unit was called in from a nearby Air Force base.
They eventually detonated the mortar safely and nobody was injured.
Nobody has any idea why a Japanese bomb was buried in the yard.
However, police did say the couple was extremely lucky that they found it before excavations
started and the bomb had accidentally blown up underneath a piece of big machinery.
9: An Aircraft in the Sand On an English beach, a couple stumbled upon
the wreckage of a World War Two fighter plane that had been lost for 76 years.
Amazingly, the plane had been underneath the sand of the beach ever since World War Two.
According to CNN, the craft is likely a ruined Bristol Beaufighter TF.X.
The Royal Air Force Museum in Britain was able to track down the serial number to confirm
that the aircraft had once been part of the 254 Squadron RAF.
But just how exactly did it end up on a beach in Lincolnshire?
And even more mysterious, why didn't anybody come back for its remains?
Here's what happened.
The aircraft probably crashed on the day of April 21, 1944.
It was soon after the plane took off that both its engines failed.
The plane hit the beach, and considering there was a World War on at the time, nobody bothered
to go back for it.
The people most surprised by the discovery were the two people who found it walking up
the beach, seeing as they had strolled the same beach dozens of times before and had
never seen the aircraft.
It really makes you wonder what other relics are hidden in plain sight, just under our
feet.
The woman said she had no interest in history but now she wants to learn more about the
people who flew in the aircraft.
Right now the authorities have been warned not to look for the wreckage since it can
be dangerous, and that it was already getting covered back up with sand so they didn't want
people to go and get stuck.
8: Lost World War II Aircraft Carrier Researchers have finally managed to track
down one of the most famous war machines in U.S. history.
It's called the USS Hornet, and it was a legendary aircraft carrier from World War Two that was
sunk during a battle with the Japanese Navy in 1942.
It was found deep in the Pacific Ocean, detected using sonar imagery.
It's currently sitting 17,500 feet below the surface of the ocean, near to the Solomon
Islands.
What's really eerie about the aircraft carrier is that it's sitting so far down that there
is almost no ocean life on it, despite being sunk for nearly 100 years.
There just isn't that much life down there to turn the ship into its own personal aquarium.
Though of course, there are some strange creatures that call the aircraft carrier home.
As for how exactly the Hornet sank, it was during the Battle of Santa Cruz Island.
Japanese aircraft bombarded the aircraft carrier until it sank and its crew was forced to abandon
ship.
111 sailors lost their lives in the battle.
The carrier is most famous for the role it played in the surprise bombing raid on Tokyo
back in April of the same year in which it was destroyed, when a host of B-25 bombers
took off from the ship’s deck and rained down fire on the capital city.
7: Secret Treasure In the Philippines, there is said to be a
legendary treasure hoard known as Yamashita’s gold.
So far as the story goes, Yamashita’s gold, which gets its name from the Japanese commander
in the Philippines during World War Two, is a massive hoard of treasure and valuables
buried somewhere on one of the Philippines’s hundreds of islands.
A massive hoard of loot was collected during the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia
and Yamashita himself apparently oversaw the burial of the treasure in the Philippines
prior to being captured in 1946, tried for war crimes, then executed.
But nobody actually knows where the gold is.
According to Live Science, that hasn't stopped treasure hunters from spending a small fortune
trying to figure out where it is.
Just a couple years ago, excavations got so serious that treasure hunters almost caused
a landslide in a remote Philippine village.
To this day, no trace of the hoard has ever been discovered and nobody even knows if it's
real.
6: Rare Photographs A rare collection of photographs from World
War Two were recently discovered inside a few dusty boxes in somebody's attic.
The photographs belonged to U.S. Army Captain William Cline.
After coming home from the war, William put the photos away and forgot about them.
It wasn't until 2019 that his son discovered proof of his father's past in the form of
the dusty old photos.
He also found military orders along with a letter that William wrote to his parents while
fighting on the battlefield.
The photos documented William’s time spent in Europe during the war, what you might think
of as an ancient Instagram story… but in actual physical photographs.
The truly remarkable aspect is that William’s son had not known these relics were in his
very own house for the past 30 years since his father passed away, just collecting dust
above his head in the attic.
He found them completely by accident and it was nothing short of a whirlwind of absolute
emotion for both him and his family, especially since he had never known the full extent of
his father’s service in the war.
5: Bullets and Bone There is a place of horror in Poland known
as Death Valley.
It's an area where between 1939 and 1945, German death squads executed thousands of
people and dumped them into horrifying mass graves.
But this area was never really excavated until just recently, and what archaeologists found
is truly disturbing.
Researchers with the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology were the ones to make the gruesome
discoveries.
They found fragments of bullets that were probably used to kill completely innocent
people.
They also discovered the belongings of those who had been wrongfully put to death.
These items include a wristwatch, a spoon and a plate, and even a woman’s broach.
But more disturbing than anything were the bodies found and the fragments of skulls,
femurs, and the loose teeth, almost all of them uncovered less than a foot under the
ground.
The recklessness in which these people were buried proves just how savage the Nazis were
in Poland during the war.
The bullets and shells found around the site have been identified as coming from both Walther
PPK and Po8 Parabellum pistols, suggesting those who had been executed had been shot
in the head at close range.
4: Lost Dog Tags Robin McNeill was renovating a customer's
home in Australia when he discovered something incredible.
He was messing with the mantlepiece over the fireplace when something slipped out of it
and clattered to the floor.
It was a dog tag, branded with the number NX52255.
But the really strange part is that the dog tag had the name A McNeill stamped into it.
It was the same name as the contractor, making it seem like fate had connected Robin with
the tag.
With permission from the homeowner, Robin took the dog tag down to the Australian War
Memorial.
They soon launched an investigation to find the owner of the tag.
It turned out that a man named Andrew McNeill had served in World War Two, was captured
as a POW in Singapore back in 1942, survived the ordeal and eventually made it back to
Australia.
He then moved into the house that Robin found his dog tag in 70 years later.
According to ABC News, the tag was eventually handed over to the soldier’s grandchildren,
who had always wanted to find out more about their grandfather’s service but had never
been given the opportunity.
The dog tag will now stay with them for the rest of their days.
3: Milk Can Treasures A teenager in northeastern Poland discovered
a treasure trove of relics and interesting artifacts from World War Two in the strangest
of all places.
He found the treasures inside of two milk cans.
Even weirder, the milk cans were buried next to a lake.
Someone had tried to hide what may have been ill-gotten goods, probably hoping to come
back for them later.
Instead, they'd simply left a time capsule waiting to be discovered 70 years down the
road.
What kind of stuff was inside the milk cans?
According to the report from Live Science, the teenager found an officer's uniform from
the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, a toothbrush, a pocket watch, a whole lot
of money, a bunch of coins, and even a diary from 1914 to 1918, during World War 1.
But the discovery really got crazy after the parents of the teen contact the authorities
and they later identified the relics as belonging to an aristocratic Prussian family who lived
near the lake back when the area was part of Germany, known as Prussia.
The artifacts were confiscated from the teen and then given over to the daughter of the
count who headed the family during the 40s.
The daughter was 81-year-old Waldtraut von Finckenstein, situated across the border in
Germany.
She was quite pleased to get the artifacts back, though she never did say where exactly
they came from or how they got stuffed into milk cans.
2: A Hidden Bunker After living in his home for 40 years, a man
in England finally discovered a secret hidden underneath his lawn.
What he discovered was an air raid shelter from World War 2 that had likely been used
as a hideout for the people in the neighborhood during bombing campaigns by the Germans.
The owner of the house is named Khandu Patel, and he's a school caretaker.
He had always wondered what the manhole cover in his lawn was for, then during the coronavirus
pandemic, he got bored and decided to dig it up.
Underneath the manhole, Khandu discovered a staircase going down into a shelter that's
about 5 feet by 10 feet.
It wasn't full of relics or artifacts, but it was still a pretty cool find.
Cooler still is that Khandu decided not to waste the space, and so he renovated it and
turned it into his very own bar.
And to be honest, I think turning the old air raid shelter into a bar is probably the
most useful thing he could have done with it.
At least he didn't fill it in to get rid of it or use the underground shelter for boring
old storage!
1: Ruined F-14 While out for a leisurely hike, a couple of
guys stumbled upon the wreckage of an F-14 Tomcat and an F-4 Phantom, 2 aircrafts used
heavily throughout combat up until the early 2000s.
The aircraft were discovered inside of an abandoned area in Central Texas and nobody
has any idea how they got there.
From what everyone can tell, the planes had been scrapped and abandoned, and they had
been sitting in the forest for years.
They were found with most of their parts scattered across the area, and experts say they may
have once operated at a nearby naval base in Dallas, which closed down in the late 1980s.
While most of the unused aircraft were supposed to be taken to a scrap yard, it looks like
they may have been dumped in the woods instead to make the job a little easier.
There's no word yet if these airplanes were ever recovered by the government or if they're
still rotting away in the middle of nowhere.
Have you ever come upon a treasure from World War 2?
Let me know about it in the comments and thanks for stopping by.
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