73 Brutal Facts From World War 2 That’ll Leave You Shocked

In 1932 Oskar Speck was an unemployed contractor in Germany who left via kayak to seek work, but en route changed his plan & decided to see the world. By 1939 he kayaked all the way to Australia. Unbeknown to him, WW2 started & upon arrival, he was detained as an enemy foreigner until WW2 ended.

52. Eugene Bullard was the first African-American fighter pilot in history. He flew in WWI and was an integral part of the French Underground in WW2 and was a national hero in France. He spent his later years as an unknown elevator operator in America.

53. During WW2, the allies tricked the German postal service into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda by airdropping bags of mail near bombed mail trains.

54. Some homosexual concentration camp prisoners were forced to serve out the remainder of their sentences after the liberation and end of WW2.

55. Judy, a purebred English pointer who would often jump in to protect prisoners from beatings in a POW camp during WW2. A British Naval pilot bargained to have her officially considered a POW so the guards could not kill her.

Lewis Lee Millett deserted the US Army when he thought they would not enter WW2 and joined the Canadian Army to fight. After the US Army joined WW2 he transferred back. During the Korean War, he would be awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the last major bayonet charge in American history.

57. Christopher Lee, the actor who played Saruman in LOTR and Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels, was related to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, was the step-cousin of James Bond writer Ian Fleming, was a Flight Lieutenant in the British Royal Air Force during WW2 and killed multiple Nazis, climbed Mt. Vesuvius three days before it erupted, tripped over a live bomb and survived, and released a symphonic death metal album at the age of 88.

58. A pigeon called Gustav carried the first word of the Normandy invasion back to the British mainland during WW2, due to the fleet undergoing radio silence at that time. He flew 150 miles in 5 hours and 16 minutes. He was awarded the Dickin Medal for bravery. He died after the war by being accidentally stepped on.

59. The Philippines has banana ketchup. During WW2 there was a shortage of tomatoes and they had to use bananas as a replacement to replicate ketchup. It’s made from mashed banana, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

60. In WW2 Russians changed their R2 rocket fuel from ethyl to methyl alcohol to prevent the problem of the launch troops drinking up the rocket fuel.

During WWII the fuel used for torpedos by the American navy was 180-proof grain alcohol. Sailors mixed it with pineapple juice and called the drink torpedo juice. Various poisonous additives were mixed into the fuel alcohol by Navy authorities to render the alcohol undrinkable, and various methods were employed by the U.S. sailors to separate the alcohol from the poison.

62. In WW2, the Allies estimated German average monthly tank production using statistical analysis of their serial numbers. They were off by one.

63. In 1940, while fighting the Battle of Britain and desperate to gain American support to win WW2, Great Britain handed over technologies to the USA that included radar, sonar, plastic explosives, the jet engine and the first practical calculations for the atomic bomb.

64. Otōemon Hiroeda, a Japanese Officer killed himself during WW2 rather than order his 2000 subordinates to conduct a kamikaze attack.

65. The US government during WW2 asked the press to avoid discussing “polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium”. Only uranium was secret, for the Manhattan Project, but was listed with the other elements to hide its importance.

Without the atomic bomb, the invasion plan of Japan in WW2 would have been the largest in all of history, including 42 carriers, 24 battleships, 400 destroyers and 6 million soldiers.

67. Star Trek's Scotty, James Doohan, was a CDN soldier during WW2, who landed on Juno Beach, killed two snipers and cleared a minefield before even getting off the beachhead.

68. During WW2, Nazis developed an experimental drug cocktail and the Nazi doctors found that the equipment-laden test subjects who had taken the drug were able to march 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) without any fatigue.

69. During WW2, Britain shipped its gold reserves and foreign securities to Canada in crates labeled "Fish". They were stored for years in an office building in downtown Montreal, where 5000 people worked throughout the war without having a clue about what was hidden in their basement.

70. Alan Turing the father of computer science, artificial intelligence and who helped break German WW2 ciphers, committed suicide after being forced to undergo hormonal treatment for homosexuality and barred from continuing his cryptographic work

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is coated with an anti-graffiti chemical. It was manufactured by the very same company that made the Zyklon B gas that was used in concentration camp gas chambers during WW2.

72. During WW2, penicillin was recycled and extracted from the urine of soldiers already on the antibiotics.

73. Russian and Japan still haven't signed any peace treaty to end WW2.