Did You Know?...
Stalin's original name was Josif
Djugashvili. In 1913 he began using the
pseudonym Stalin meaning "Man of Steel".
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).
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 teetotaler, 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. |
