Little-Known WWII Facts

[Tsyroc]

On the Lighter Side: Little-Known WWII Facts

1. The first German serviceman killed in World War II was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest-ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the U.S. Army Air Corps - so much for allies.

2. 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).

3. At the time of Pearl Harbor, the top U.S. Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounced "sink us"), the shoulder patch of the U.S. Army's 45th Infantry Division was the Swastika, and Hitler's private train was named "Amerika." All three names were soon changed for PR purposes.

4. More U.S. servicemen died in the U.S. Army Air Corps than in the Marine Corps. While completing the required 25 missions your chance of being killed was 71 percent.

5. Generally speaking, there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance, Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different ballistics so at long range if your tracers were hitting the target 80 percent of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.

7. When the allied armies reached the Rhine River in Germany, the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal, from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. George Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).

8. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City, but it wasn't worth the effort (?).

9. The German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

10. Among the first "Germans" captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and then forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and further forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the U.S. Army.

11. Following a massive naval bombardment, 35,000 U.S. and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands. Twenty-one troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese soldiers on the island.

Credit Col. D.G. Swinford USMC (Retired). ©2003 DefenseWatch.

[CrimsonRaine]

On the Lighter Side: Little-Known WWII Facts

2. 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).

Credit Col. D.G. Swinford USMC (Retired). ©2003 DefenseWatch.

This one was my favorite. Makes me wonder how he got away with looking like an 18-year-old (that's how old you had to be then, right?). I just wondering how someone could get away with something like that.

Crimson Raine

[Zoink]

Google says the range of the Me-262 with the "new" engine was 1000 miles.

New York - London is about 3,500 miles (I think).

I read that Germany was developing a long range bomber to reach New York but scrapped the idea.

EDIT: sorry I read Me-262 instead of Me-264.

[Sea Skimmer]

Number one is wrong. If you count the Japanese invasion of China as WW2 then the first American dead of the war came in 1937 as well. Number six is also wrong and a well repeated myth. The majority of tracer ammunition, espically that for aircraft guns is ballisticly matched to the normal rounds.

[Zoink]

http://www.luft46.com/prototyp/me264.html

They say there was one prototype. Estimates range with drop tanks 8451 miles. The flight testing went well into 1944, and was eventually destroyed in a air raid in 1944. It would have been stupid to send your only prototype to New York, only to be lost at sea because of mechanical failure. The alternative would be to build and send a large formation of unproven expensive bombers with a small chance of success. There would be little benefit other than to make the U.S. angrier.

[MKSheppard]

Number six is also wrong and a well repeated myth.

P-38 crews did this and it worked well, the Japanese if they saw tracers
whipping buy would take evasive action HARD, but if they didn't see
tracers, you could get closer.

[Tsyroc]

Number one is wrong. If you count the Japanese invasion of China as WW2 then the first American dead of the war came in 1937 as well. Number six is also wrong and a well repeated myth. The majority of tracer ammunition, espically that for aircraft guns is ballisticly matched to the normal rounds.

I didn't think tracers fired any different than regular bullets but then then there was this part

Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.

It might be that they stopped trying to shoot from further away than they could reasonably expect to hit in the first place. Without the tracers they couldn't as easilly see where they were aiming off in the distance so maybe they didn't try to overshoot the effective range of their weapons. If they weren't doing that then they weren't allerting the enemy to their presence until the odds of them hitting their target were better. I could see something like that reasonably fitting with those statistics. Heck, it could solely be something as simple as then enemy not being able to determine a location based on back tracking tracer fire.

[HemlockGrey]

Why not attempt to trace the enemy with actual bullets? Just the cost?

[Tsyroc]

P-38 crews did this and it worked well, the Japanese if they saw tracers
whipping buy would take evasive action HARD, but if they didn't see
tracers, you could get closer.

That makes more sense than the ballistics problem.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why not attempt to trace the enemy with actual bullets? Just the cost?

A tracer is a bullet with a small bit of magnesium powder or something similar in the base, which ignites on firing. The bullet then glows brightly so that a pilot or gunner can see where it is traveling. Normal ammunition is effectively invisible.

While tracers are normally only used with machine guns, you watch the tracers and use them to walk your fire onto the target, you can get tracer ammunition for just about anything from pistols to 120mm tank guns

[TrailerParkJawa]

I have a neat book called World War II , 4139 Strange and Interesting Facts

Here are a few I picked at random.
1. The construction of the Pentagon was commanded by Leslie Groves.
2. Joseph Goebbels was 5 feet tall.
3. Arthur C. Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor.
4. The Sherman tank aquired the nickname "Ronson" due to its
gas engines which made it more prone to burning than a diesel tank.

[Bill Door]

4. The Sherman tank aquired the nickname "Ronson" due to its gas engines which made it more prone to burning than a diesel tank.

And there was me thinking that it was due to the lack of protected ammunition stowage, so spalling could ignite the ammunition...

[TrailerParkJawa]

4. The Sherman tank aquired the nickname "Ronson" due to its gas engines which made it more prone to burning than a diesel tank.

And there was me thinking that it was due to the lack of protected ammunition stowage, so spalling could ignite the ammunition...

That too.

[Zaia]

On the Lighter Side: Little-Known WWII Facts

9. The German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

Bummer.

[Sea Skimmer]

4. The Sherman tank aquired the nickname "Ronson" due to its gas engines which made it more prone to burning than a diesel tank.

And there was me thinking that it was due to the lack of protected ammunition stowage, so spalling could ignite the ammunition...

A lot of Sherman's did have protected ammunition storage. The Ronson bit came from the Normandy landings, their Sherman crews in both the American and British armies grossly overloaded their vehicles with ammunition, basically sacking it anywhere. The result was they exploded very readily when hit. The strong German anti tank defenses made it all the worse.

[Boba Fett]

I rather think that Shermans got the "Ronson Lighter" nickname in North Africa.

The later models which had thicker armor and wet storage for the ammo ("W" series) were much better.

[Perinquus]

I rather think that Shermans got the "Ronson Lighter" nickname in North Africa.

The later models which had thicker armor and wet storage for the ammo ("W" series) were much better.

The "Ronson" nickname also came about from a bit of gallows humor. The Ronson lighter advertizing slogan was: "Always lights the first time". According to the GIs, so did the Sherman.

[Nathan F]

While tracers are normally only used with machine guns, you watch the tracers and use them to walk your fire onto the target, you can get tracer ammunition for just about anything from pistols to 120mm tank guns

.308 tracer ammo is easily obtained, and while it's a military caliber, it's also a widely used civilian caliber. I've shot tracer rounds through my old .308 Mauser (not a German, but still a good shooting rifle) into water, which is pretty cool looking.

[Bill Door]

I rather think that Shermans got the "Ronson Lighter" nickname in North Africa.

The later models which had thicker armor and wet storage for the ammo ("W" series) were much better.

The "Ronson" nickname also came about from a bit of gallows humor. The Ronson lighter advertizing slogan was: "Always lights the first time". According to the GIs, so did the Sherman.

Along the same lines was:
"Always tip your hat to the Tiger"
This was supposedly due to the 88mm gun in the Tiger blowing off turrets.

[justifier]

6 reminds me of the story about how US torpedoes were really bad for most of the war because when they were tested the test warheads were filled with sand with was a different weight than explosives and threw the targeting off

[ArmorPierce]

2. 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).

Not impossible, when my friend was a freshman at HS at age 13, people mistook him for a senior, actually, I got a photo of him at 13 over here the one with the du-rag

[LT.Hit-Man]

Here's something I heard about but was unable to confrim

Juring that last few years of the war with Gremany the SS was working on the Toden Korps basicly trying to bring the dead back to life to stem the tide of there losses in troops and fater the war was over the US had goten a hold of some kind of chem weapon that sprang a leak and made it's way though a vent into a room where dead troops had been put before they where to be laid to rest and the bodies started twicthing for a few moments then it was over and that was saposedly where the idea for the frist night of the living dead moive came from.
Not that I'd realy belive that but who knows.

[Frank Hipper]

Here's something I heard about but was unable to confrim

Juring that last few years of the war with Gremany the SS was working on the Toden Korps basicly trying to bring the dead back to life to stem the tide of there losses in troops and fater the war was over the US had goten a hold of some kind of chem weapon that sprang a leak and made it's way though a vent into a room where dead troops had been put before they where to be laid to rest and the bodies started twicthing for a few moments then it was over and that was saposedly where the idea for the frist night of the living dead moive came from.
Not that I'd realy belive that but who knows.

That sounds a whole hell of a lot more like someone spinning an urban legend out of The Return of the Living Dead of 1985, instead of the Romero movie.

[Alyeska]

6 reminds me of the story about how US torpedoes were really bad for most of the war because when they were tested the test warheads were filled with sand with was a different weight than explosives and threw the targeting off

Actually US torpedoes were bad simply because they had a 30% failure rate on the warhead itself for much of the first half of the war.

[kojikun]

I don't fuck kids, but if that boy, Calvin Graham, asked me to bend over so he could fuck me, I'd let him. Holy shit hes brave. His balls must have been huge. If theres anyone who doubts his adult-ness, you're nuts.