Came across this really interesting artacle

Really,its interesting,
Worth sharing anyway.
Amazing Wartime Facts from WWII

 

Bump,Ok,seems people dont like clicking on links,heres what it said anyway.

Amazing Wartime Facts from WWII

• The first German serviceman killed in the war 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 US Army Air Corps.
• The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded in combat and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress).
• At the time of Pearl Harbor, the top US Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounced “sink us”), the shoulder patch of the US Army’s 45th Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler’s private train was named “Amerika”. All three were soon changed for PR purposes.
• More US servicemen died in the Air Corps that the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions, your chance of being killed was 71%. Not that bombers were helpless. A B-17 carried 4 tons of bombs and 1.5 tons of machine gun ammo. The US 8th Air Force shot down 6,098 fighter planes, 1 for every 12,700 shots fired.
• Germany’s power grid was much more vulnerable than realized. One estimate is that if just 1% of the bombs dropped on German industry had instead been dropped on power plants, German industry would have collapsed.
• 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.
• It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th found with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the 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. That 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.
• When allied armies reached the Rhine, 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. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act). Don't believe me? Take a look at this.
• German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn’t worth the effort.
• A number of air crewmen died of farts. (ascending to 20,000 ft. in an un-pressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300%!)
• The Russians destroyed over 500 German aircraft by ramming them in midair (they also sometimes cleared minefields by marching over them). “It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the Red Army”. Joseph Stalin
• The US Army had more ships that the US Navy.
• The German Air Force had 22 infantry divisions, 2 armor divisions, and 11 paratroop divisions. None of them were capable of airborne operations. The German Army had paratroops who WERE capable of airborne operations.
• When the US Army landed in North Africa, among the equipment brought ashore were 3 complete Coca Cola bottling plants.
• 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 forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were capture by the US Army.
• The Graf Spee never sank, The scuttling attempt failed and the ship was bought by the British. On board was Germany’s newest radar system.
• One of Japan’s methods of destroying tanks was to bury a very large artillery shell with on ly the nose exposed. When a tank came near the enough a soldier would whack the shell with a hammer. “Lack of weapons is no excuse for defeat.” – Lt. Gen. Mataguchi
• Following a massive naval bombardment, 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska. 21 troops were killed in the fire-fight. It would have been worse if there had been Japanese on the island.
• The MISS ME was an unarmed Piper Cub. While spotting for US artillery her pilot saw a similar German plane doing the same thing. He dove on the German plane and he and his co-pilot fired their pistols damaging the German plane enough that it had to make a forced landing. Whereupon they landed and took the Germans prisoner. It is unknown where they put them since the MISS ME only had two seats.
• Most members of the Waffen SS were not German.
• The only nation that Germany declared was on was the USA.
• During the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, British officers objected to Canadian infantrymen taking up positions in the officer’s mess. No enlisted men allowed!
• Nuclear physicist Niels Bohr was rescued in the nick of time from German occupied Denmark. While Danish resistance fighters provided covering fire he ran out the back door of his home stopping momentarily to grab a beer bottle full of precious “heavy water”. He finally reached England still clutching the bottle, which contained beer. Perhaps some German drank the heavy water…

 

Most members of the Waffen SS were not German.

What were they then?

 

I find a couple of those to be rather dubious at best. As per the Army having more ships than the USN. I say this because the USN didn't count landing craft as ships, but boats and didn't include them in its commissioned listings.

From the edition of June 4th, 1945; The U.S.Navy, biggest in world history, had almost as many ships in commission last week as it had sailors in 1938. In that year its establishment numbered 109,065 officers & men. Last week the Navy announced that it had added 100,000 vessels (above the size of landing craft boats) to the 7,695 it had in commission on Dec. 7, 1941.

I doubt the Army had over 107,000 ships in commision, and this isn't counting the landing craft, lighters that officers used between ships, or launches.

The first US serviceman killed was by the Germans, in Norway. US Army Captain Robert Losey was killed in a German bombing raid in Dombas, Norway, on April 21, 1940.

Losey was an attaché to the American mission in Finland, which is perhaps where the confusion comes in. Losey had been in Finland since February 1940, but was ordered to neutral Stockholm when the Germans invaded Norway. He was then ordered to Oslo, Norway, to help with the evacuation of the US Embassy in Norway. Losey was trying to locate a convoy carrying the families of the US delegation to safety in Sweden, when he was caught in a bombing raid near the town of Dombas. He took refuge in a railroad tunnel, but while trying to watch the progress of the raid from the mouth of the tunnel, he was hit in the chest by bomb fragments and killed.

As to Bohr and the heavy water, so what? deuterium was never used in the American nor the British atomic programs as a moderator, we used graphite until post war when we converted the Hanford plant to "heavy water" moderators for plutonium production. Those two materials had been known as possible moderators since the late thirties, the Germans went down the wrong path with deuterium, and never even explored graphite, as one of their "lead men" said it wouldn't work.

German Me-264 bombers were capable of reaching the north American landmass, but the claim that a German plane flew to within 12 miles of NY, NY is false. The plane which supposedly did this feat was a prototype and every moment of its existence is recorded by the hour, and it never left European airspace.

The airmen dying of internal gas is also false, as neither the sphincter nor the muscles of the throat are capable of holding the pressure necessary for the internal organs to explode. This is another one of those "urban legend" type statements that is just to "funny" not to believe.

The Coke plants didn't come ashore until long after the area was secured, and it was due to the ability for the plants to produce a potable drink, which the local water was NOT.

That Graf Spee statement is patently false, it's radar was removed by British salvage divers.

As to the Waffen SS, a great number of them were from foreign occupied nations, French, Norwegian, Belgian, Yugoslave, Polish, Czech, etc.. So that is possible, by number and such. The final SS defending Berlin were foreign troops more than German troops.

 

Well the airmen being killed by expanding farts was a bit much.