Chapter 582

Some history compliments of Rrrosco

Here Are 34 Things About World War II You Weren’t Taught In School

1. Fanta was invented in Germany when the war made it difficult to bring in Coca-Cola syrup from the US.

2. The SS officer who captured Anne Frank and her family bought her book to see if he was mentioned. He wasn’t.

3. Russia and Japan still haven’t signed a peace treaty to end WWII due to a dispute over sovereignty of the Kuril Islands.

4. The lift cables of the Eiffel Tower were cut by the French when Germany occupied France in 1940. As a result German soldiers had to climb to the top to fly the swastika flag.

5. The last Japanese soldier to surrender did so in 1974, 29 years after WII was over.

6. A radio belonging to a British POW was hidden so well that when the soldier visited the camp 62 years later he found it right where he left it.

7. Leonard Dawe, a crossword compiler for the Telegraph, used D-Day operation code names as the answers to his puzzle a month before D-Day. MI5 interrogated him only to discover that it was a random coincidence.

8. HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen was a Dutch warship covered with tree branches to disguise it as a tropical island.

9. Two doctors in Poland discovered that the Nazis would not deport anyone to a concentration camp who tested positive for typhus in fear that the disease would spread. The two injected Jews and non-Jews in their city with a vaccine containing dead Epidemic Typhus that would test positive but have no adverse effects, saving approximately 8,000 lives.

10. Queen Elizabeth II joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service and was trained as a driver and mechanic.

11. Canada declared war on Japan before the US did after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

12. Juan Pujol Garcia was a double agent who was awarded both the German Iron Cross and the Member of the British Empire award.

13. After the Treaty of Versailles, Ferdinand Foch said “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” 20 years later WWII broke out.

14. The Taj Mahal was covered with a scaffold to camouflage it as a stockpile of bamboo and misguide bombers.

15. The Mosque of Paris gave sanctuary to Jews by giving them Muslim IDs and hiding them in their underground caverns.

16. Royal Air Force sergeant Nicholas Alkemade fell 18,000 feet without a parachute and survived with only a sprained leg.

17. There’s a Twitter account that narrates WWII as it happened on this day and time in 1944 onwards.