History Facts About Wwii

The first bomb dropped on Berlin in WWII killed an elephant in the Berlin Zoo - but it wasn't the only one. The zoo had nine elephants when the war began.

During WWII, because a lot of players were called to duty, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles combined to become The Steagles.

The universally popular Hershey bar was used overseas during World War II as currency.

At age 18, the Queen of England was a mechanic for the British Military.

After Germany surrendered in WW2, people in Moscow partied until the entire city actually ran out of vodka.

Nicholas Alkemade, a pilot during World War 2, survived falling 18,000 feet after jumping from a burning Lancaster bomber.

Queen Elizabeth II served as a mechanic and driver in World War 2.

A WW2 observation pilot, bored of not being in combat, decided to strap 6 bazookas to his plane. He destroyed several enemy tanks and vehicles. His name was Lt. Col. Charles Carpenter, aka Bazooka Charlie / The Mad Major.

Unsinkable Sam is a legendary ship's cat said to have survived the sinking of three warships during World War II—the German battleship Bismarck, then two British vessels, HMS Cossack and HMS Ark Royal—each time reportedly found clinging to floating debris.

During WW2, captured German officers were sent to Britain as POWs and lived in luxury in Trent Park. This was done to make them feel relaxed. However, they were being listened to by 100 ‘listeners’. They revealed secrets about the holocaust, events in Berlin, Hitler's madness and V2 rocket bases.

Americans filled a 700-boxcar train with food for war-torn France in 1947. It came entirely from ordinary citizens, not the government. France answered two years later with 49 boxcars of its own, one for every state. Six million French and Italian donors packed them with 52,000 gifts. Air Force jets and fireboats greeted it in New York Harbor. Most of those boxcars are still around today, kept in museums nationwide.

Explorers just found a 1940s Ford parked inside the wreck of the USS Yorktown, the aircraft carrier lost at the Battle of Midway. It sits three miles down in the Pacific on the ship's hangar deck, its leather seats and chrome trim barely touched after 83 years underwater. Nobody knows why the crew never threw it overboard while trying to save the sinking ship.

USCGC Eagle led America's 250th birthday parade through New York Harbor on July 4, 2026. The three-masted tall ship started life in 1936 as the Horst Wessel, training future officers for Hitler's navy. The US took her in 1946 as compensation after World War II. Nearly every Coast Guard Academy graduate since has trained aboard the same ship.

American cavalry soldiers teamed up with German troops who had just surrendered to them. Together they fought off the SS to save more than 1,200 horses in Czechoslovakia. The herd included Lipizzaner mares and foals that stock Vienna's Spanish Riding School. Colonel Charles Reed organized the raid days before Soviet tanks reached the farm. The Lipizzaner bloodline survived the war.

A World War II bomber named Doc sat in the Mojave for 42 years as a Navy target. An Air Force veteran spent more than eleven of those years talking the Navy into letting it go. It went home to Wichita, where 1,644 B-29s were built, and retirees from those lines helped rebuild it. Doc is one of two B-29s still flying, and it lands at airports every year so people can climb inside.

Crews in Richmond, California launched a 441-foot cargo ship 4 days and 15 hours after laying its keel. They built the SS Robert E. Peary around the clock in November 1942, during World War II. They lifted in giant sections built ahead of time, about 250,000 parts in all. No ship that size has ever been built faster.

Harold Jellicoe Percival died alone at 99 with no family to attend his funeral. The care home placed a four-line notice in the Lytham St Annes Express asking anyone to come. Someone tweeted a photo of it. On Armistice Day at 11am, over 200 strangers packed the crematorium and scores more stood outside in the rain.

Hedy Lamarr - Hollywood's "most beautiful woman" - co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during WWII to guide Allied torpedoes. The Navy dismissed it. Her patent expired in 1959. She never received a dollar. That technology became the foundation for WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth.