World War Ii Facts

Just before the US started bombing Baghdad, nearly $1 billion dollars was stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq and is now the largest bank robbery in history.

German soldiers, both heterosexual and homosexual, are allowed to have sex with each other!

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.

First four countries to have television: England, the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and Brazil.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb detonated three kilometers away. He was burned, blinded, and his eardrums ruptured. He spent the night in a shelter and caught the morning train home so he could get to work on time. His office was in Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived the second atomic blast.

In the 1930's, American track star Jesse Owens used to race against horses and dogs to earn a living.

In 1943, Polish soldiers in Iran bought a bear cub from a young boy, bottle-fed him on condensed milk, named him Wojtek, and enrolled him in the army. At Monte Cassino in 1944, he carried 100-lb artillery shells to the guns without dropping one. The 22nd Artillery Supply Company still uses a bear carrying a shell as its official emblem.

In 1956, 80% of all U.S. households had a refrigerator, but only 8% of British households had one!

A singing birthday card has more computing power than the allied forces in 1945.

In 1918, after the treaty of Versailles (end of WWI), the French Commander-in-chief said "This is not a peace. It is an Armistice for 20 years." 20 years and 65 days later, WWII happened.

There's a Swedish power metal band called Sabaton who teach history through their music, including multiple albums devoted to World War II battles and heroes.

During World War II, dog lovers asked American families to lend their pets to the military. Owners signed up more than 40,000 dogs. Over 10,000 of them served as sentries, scouts and messengers. When the war ended, the military retrained the survivors to be family pets again. Many came home with honorable discharge papers.

The Buck 110 is the brass-and-wood folding knife in a million pockets. At 13, Hoyt Buck forged his first blade from a worn-out file. In WWII, the country ran short of knives for soldiers. He built a basement forge in Mountain Home, Idaho. "I didn't have any knives, but I sure knew how to make them," he said. His son Al built the company. The 110 came in 1964. The family still makes them.

Before he played Dracula, Saruman, and Count Dooku, Christopher Lee served as an RAF intelligence officer attached to Britain's Special Operations Executive - and spent the final months of the war hunting Nazi war criminals. He was fluent in five languages, sworn to secrecy for life, and once corrected Peter Jackson on how a stabbing actually sounds. The man who played 200 villains had hunted real ones.

A 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier named Smoky was the smallest soldier in the Pacific during WWII. At Lingayen Gulf, engineers needed telephone wire threaded through a 70-foot pipe buried under an active airfield - too narrow for any person to enter. Smoky crawled through in minutes, saving an estimated 250 ground crew from three days of digging in open enemy fire, with 40 planes parked nearby.

Josephine Baker used her fame as a jazz superstar to spy for the French Resistance during World War II. She hid intelligence about German troop movements in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinned notes inside her bra - certain no one would dare search her. In 2021, France inducted her into the Pantheon as the first Black woman ever honored there.

Christopher Hutton, a British MI9 spy, hid real escape kits inside Monopoly sets sent to Allied POW camps in WWII. He chose Waddingtons - the only UK firm that made Monopoly AND printed on silk - to hide silk maps, a compass, a file, and real foreign cash inside each box. A red dot on Free Parking told captured RAF pilots which sets held the tools.

Operation Magic Carpet turned Navy warships into giant floating dorms. The mission: bring 8 million WWII troops home. Nearly 370 Navy ships took part in the Pacific, with bunks stacked up to five tiers high on hangar decks. USS Saratoga alone carried more troops than any other ship in the fleet: 29,204 men. Flight decks built for fighter planes were packed wall to wall with veterans, finally sailing home.

Wounded World War II veteran Bob Dole was raising money for a memorial that much of America did not know was planned. He went to Tom Hanks with a long list of reasons to help. Within ten seconds, Hanks said, "I'm your man." He became the campaign's national spokesman, and more than 600,000 donations came in. It opened in 2004, and about four million people visit every year.

A 29-year-old London stockbroker secretly organised 8 trains that smuggled 669 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 - forging documents, bribing officials, finding British families - then told nobody for 50 years. In 1988, the BBC invited him to sit in a studio audience without explaining why. The host asked anyone who owed their life to Nicholas Winton to stand. The entire row behind him rose. He had no idea they were there.