Ed Offley's Blog: Ed Offley's Blog - Posts Tagged "ed-offley"

By Ed Offley

Since the goal of this blog is to spark discussion and debate about the events of World War II, I thought it apt to reprint this longstanding list of weird events from that conflict. I encourage you to send any other tidbits that you may have picked up in your own reading.

1. The first German serviceman killed in the war was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937)

2. The first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Russo-Finnish conflict, 1940).

3. The highest ranking Americans killed in the war were Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair and Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. McNair and over 100 other soldiers were killed in a friendly-fire incident in France when USAAF bombers erroneously struck the American forward lines on July 25, 1944. Buckner was killed by Japanese artillery fire on Okinawa on June 18, 1945.

4. The youngest US serviceman was 12-year old Calvin Leon Graham, USN. He was wounded in combat on the battleship USS South Dakota at the naval battle of Guadalcanal, and awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. But when the Navy learned of his fraudulent enlistment, he was thrown in the brig and later kicked out of the Navy with a Dishonorable Discharge. In 1978, he was awarded an Honorable Discharge and received his medals and medical benefits.

5. At the time of Pearl Harbor, the top U.S. Navy command was called CINCUS (for Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, 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 were soon changed for PR purposes.

6. More American servicemen died in the U.S. Army Air Forces than in the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions, your chance of being killed was 71 percent. Not that bombers were helpless. A B-17 carried four tons of bombs and 1.5 tons of machine gun ammunition. The U.S. 8th Air Force shot down 6,098 German fighter planes, one for every 12,700 shots fired.

7. Germany’s power grid was much more vulnerable than realized. One estimate is that if just 1 percent of the bombs dropped on German industry had instead been dropped on power plants, German industry would have collapsed.

8. Generally speaking, there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. German fighter pilot Erich Hartmann was somewhat luckier. With 352 Allied aircraft to his credit – the last one shot down on the day of Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945 – Hartmann remains the leading ace of aerial combat. Hartmann survived the war, and a ten-year sentence in the Soviet gulag. He died of natural causes in 1993. Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down 87 aircraft. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane. Soviet fighter pilot Ivan Kozedub shot down 64 German aircraft, including a Me-262 jet fighter. He survived the war and became a Marshal of Aviation, retiring in 1958 six years before his death of natural causes. Major Richard I. Bong, the highest-scoring American ace, shot down 40 Japanese aircraft during the war, but was killed in the crash of a Lockheed P-80A Shooting Star in California on the day the Air Force dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

9. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every fifth 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 percent 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.

10. 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 General George Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).

11. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn’t worth the effort.

12. A number of air crewmen died of farts. (ascending to 20,000 feet in an un-pressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300 percent!).

13. 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” said Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

14. The U.S. Army had more ships than the U.S. Navy.

15. 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.

16. When the U.S. Army landed in North Africa in November 1942, among the equipment brought ashore were three complete Coca Cola bottling plants.

17. Among the first “Germans” captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to work as laborers for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to work at slave labor for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to serve in the German Army until they were captured by the U.S. Army.

18. The German battleship Graf Spee never sank, The scuttling attempt in Montevideo harbor failed and the ship was bought by the British. On board was Germany’s newest radar system.

19. One of Japan’s methods of destroying tanks was to bury a very large artillery shell with only 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,” wrote Lieutenant General Renya Mataguchi

20. Following a massive naval bombardment, 35,000 U.S. and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska island in the Aleutians on August 15, 1943. Of that total, 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been Japanese on the island (they had secretly evacuated Kiska several weeks earlier).

21. The last air-to-air combat in Europe occurred near Berlin in May 1945 involving two single-engine artillery spotter planes. The “Miss Me,” an unarmed L-4 Piper Cub, was spotting for U.S. artillery when pilot Lieutenant Duane Francies saw a German “Storch” aircraft doing the same thing. Diving on the German plane, Francies and co-pilot Lieutenants William Martin fired their pistols, damaging the German plane enough that it had to make a forced landing, whereupon American soldiers who had witnessed the aerial fight captured the German aircrew.

22. The only nation that Germany formally declared was on was the United States. The others (Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Liechtenstein, France, Monaco, Greece and the Soviet Union) were simply invaded.

23. During the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, British officers objected to Canadian enlisted infantrymen taking up positions in the officer’s mess. No enlisted men allowed!

24. 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” essential to creating bomb-grade nuclear material. He finally reached England still clutching the bottle, which actually contained beer. Perhaps some German drank the heavy water.

25. In one weird encounter, the enemies actually talked to each other in the middle of a battle battle: Convoy TM-1, a formation of nine Allied oil tankers, was proceeding from the Caribbean to North Africa on January 3, 1943, when it was detected by German U-boats. The under-strength escort group (one destroyer and three corvettes) was no match for the ten U-boats in Gruppe Delphin, who over the period of nine days sank seven tankers totaling 56,453 gross registered tons.

To my friends, sorry — I accidentally cut off the end of Item #25 in my previous post. Here it is in full:

25. In one weird encounter, the enemies actually talked to each other in the middle of a battle: Convoy TM-1, a formation of nine Allied oil tankers, was proceeding from the Caribbean to North Africa on January 3, 1943, when it was detected by German U-boats. The under-strength escort group (one destroyer and three corvettes) was no match for the ten U-boats in Gruppe Delphin, who over the period of nine days sank seven tankers totaling 56,453 gross registered tons. At one point, a U-boat brazenly followed the formation on the surface in daylight, knowing the escorts were too few to break away to attack it. Finally, an officer on the British destroyer signaled the U-boat in plain English Morse code: “Why don’t you go away?” The U-boat signaled back, “Sorry, we have our orders.”