TRIVIA

[Cadetat6]

The only nation that Germany declared war on was the USA.

 

The German submarine U-1206 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

 

 

That's not true.

 

The story I heard about U1206 is that the submarine took water because of a toilet problem. Water got into the engine room, getting the engines wet and releasing chlorine gases.

 

The U-Boat commander ordered the boat to surface, so that ventilation could occur.

 

When they surfaced, they opened hatches, and the U-boat was ventilated.

 

When they were surfaced, a British Aircraft spotted them and attacked their position, sinking the ship.

 

* When the US Army landed in North Africa, among the equipment brought ashore were 3 complete Coca-Cola bottling plants. Why? Because the water was disgusting. Imagine drinking water that tasted much like that of your local swimming pool. Soldiers simply favored drinking Coca-Cola. In 1939, Coca Cola only had 5 overseas bottling plants. By 1945, they had 64.

 

* During World War II the military production of the Ford Motor Company exceeded that of the whole of Italy. . During 1942, Ford Motor Company halted its civilian car output and shifted to total military production."

 

All car makers were ordered to stop civilian car production not long after Pearl Harbor (I don't have the date). The initial order wasn't so much to cause the conversion to war production, but because the access to rubber from S.E. Asia was cut off by the Japanese advance. No rubber, no tire production, and the military knew it was going to need all the rubber it could lay its hands on for tires to support the military vehicles. The automakers appealed to Roosevelt not to close down their industry, offering to make new cars without tires, arguing that the buyers could then take the tires off their old vehicles and transfer them to the new cars. Roosevelt knew, however, that once new cars started coming off the assembly line without tires, there would be tremendous political pressure to lift the ban on civilian tire production. So he didn't relent.

 

* The youngest U.S. serviceman was 12-year-old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress).

 

* To conserve metal during World War II the Academy Awards of Merit - also known as the Oscars - were made out of wood.

 

* In the US in 1943, to conserve metal, the production of blades to make sliced bread was ended.

[Misha]

More Trivia:

 

Benito Mussolini, during the First World War, was an editor for an Italian newspaper partly financed by the British and French. At that time he was an opponent of the Germanic Central Powers (he also served in the Italian army until wounded).

 

Stalin's original name was Josif Djugashvili. In 1913 he began using the pseudonym Stalin meaning "Man of Steel".

 

Heinrich Himmler, the evil head of the Nazi SS, was once a chicken farmer.

 

You've heard of suicide or kamikaze bombers - but how about suicide battleships!? On 7th April 1945 off the island of Okinawa the Japanese battleship Yamato, which had not been given fuel for its return journey home, arrived with several other ships to attack the American fleet. The Yamato, which was one of the two largest battleships ever built, and her accompanying ships, were sunk by American aircraft before they reached their target.

 

Adolf Hitler was a teetotaller, vegetarian and non-smoker.

 

 

Although many people refer to the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy as "Operation Overlord", the operation was actually called "Operation Neptune". The landings were originally known as Overlord, but in September 1943 the codename was changed to Neptune, and Overlord from then on was used to refer to the general Allied strategy in northwestern Europe.

 

Despite what you might see in the movies, the regular German Army (Wehrmacht) did not usually use the Nazi salute. Only after the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life were they forced to use the Nazi salute as standard.

 

Virtually everybody knows the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima - the Enola Gay - but how about the one that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki 3 days later? This B-29 was known as "Bock's Car", and Nagasaki was not its original target - the intended target city was Kokura, which escaped as the bomber was under orders to attack only a clear target and the city was shrouded in smog at the time. Nagasaki was the first alternative target city.

 

After suffering heavy losses during the airborne assault and capture of Crete, Hitler never again committed his airborne troops to large-scale operations and they were instead used as ground infantry.

 

On January 17th 1942 Churchill was nearly shot down by the enemy and then his own airforce. During a return trip from the United States, his flying boat veered off course and came close to German anti-aircraft guns in France, after this error was noticed and corrected, his aircraft then appeared to British radar operators to be an enemy bomber. Six RAF fighters were scrambled to shoot him down, but fortunately for Churchill they failed to find him.

 

 

One of the American light cruisers anchored at Pearl Harbour during the Japanese attack of December 1941 was the Phoenix. The Phoenix survived the attack virtually unscathed, however, more than 40 years later she was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine Conqueror in the South Atlantic. The Phoenix, at the time of her demise, was of course known then as the General Belgrano.

 

Amongst the methods of transport used by the 2nd Polish Corps fighting the battle of Monte Cassino was a brown bear called Wojtek who helped to move boxes of ammunition.

 

The Soviet Red Army once trained dogs to destroy enemy tanks. The dogs were trained to associate the underside of tanks with food and were fitted with a 26lb explosive device strapped to their backs. Once the dogs crawled under the tanks, the device was triggered and exploded destroying the tank (and of course the dog). Unfortunately this didn't always work as planned as the dogs were trained using Soviet tanks so were more likely to run under these than the German tanks. As many as 25 German tanks were put out of action this way during the battles for Stalingrad and Kursk.

 

The heaviest tank ever built was the German Maus II, which weighed 192 tonnes. However by the end of the war it had never reached an operational state.