History Teaches But We Don’t Learn

Remembrance day is in honour of those who died for us in the 1st World War that ended at 11am 11/11/1919. Tradition is 2 minutes of silence at 11am.

Plus 34 facts from World War II you may not know

1. Fanta was invented in Germany when the war made it difficult to bring in Coca-Cola syrup from the US.

2. The SS officer who captured Anne Frank and her family bought her book to see if he was mentioned. He wasn’t.

3. Russia and Japan still haven’t signed a peace treaty to end WWII due to a dispute over sovereignty of the Kuril Islands.

4. The lift cables of the Eiffel Tower were cut by the French when Germany occupied France in 1940. As a result German soldiers had to climb to the top to fly the swastika flag.

5. The last Japanese soldier to surrender did so in 1974, 29 years after WII was over.

6. A radio belonging to a British POW was hidden so well that when the soldier visited the camp 62 years later he found it right where he left it.

7. Leonard Dawe, a crossword compiler for the Telegraph, used D-Day operation code names as the answers to his puzzle a month before D-Day. MI5 interrogated him only to discover that it was a random coincidence.

8. HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen was a Dutch warship covered with tree branches to disguise it as a tropical island.

9. Two doctors in Poland discovered that the Nazis would not deport anyone to a concentration camp who tested positive for typhus in fear that the disease would spread. The two injected Jews and non-Jews in their city with a vaccine containing dead Epidemic Typhus that would test positive but have no adverse effects, saving approximately 8,000 lives.

10. Queen Elizabeth II joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service and was trained as a driver and mechanic.

11. Canada declared war on Japan before the US did after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

12. Juan Pujol Garcia was a double agent who was awarded both the German Iron Cross and the Member of the British Empire award.

13. After the Treaty of Versailles, Ferdinand Foch said “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” 20 years later WWII broke out.

14. The Taj Mahal was covered with a scaffold to camouflage it as a stockpile of bamboo and misguide bombers.

15. The Mosque of Paris gave sanctuary to Jews by giving them Muslim IDs and hiding them in their underground caverns.

16. Royal Air Force sergeant Nicholas Alkemade fell 18,000 feet without a parachute and survived with only a sprained leg.

17. There’s a Twitter account that narrates WWII as it happened on this day and time in 1944 onwards.

18. To prevent the Germans from finding out that the British had RADAR onboard aircraft, the British started a rumour that their pilots had excellent night vision from eating lots of carrots. This rumour has continued to today as many people think carrots improve eyesight.

19. The President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hacha, suffered a heart attack upon hearing of Hitler’s plan to bomb the capital.

20. 80% of all Soviet males born in 1923 died in World War II.

21. Due to a metal shortage during the war, Oscar statuettes were made of painted plaster.

22. Approximately 5,500 leftover bombs are discovered and defused in Germany every year.

23. World War II cost each person in the US $20,388.

24. Hitler’s nephew, William Patrick Hitler, fought for the US Navy against his uncle.

25. Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election just two months after winning the war.

26. Hitler order the collection of 200,000 Jewish artifacts to be displayed at the end of the war in a trophy case called The Museum of an Extinct Race.

27. The Polish Army trained a brown bear named Wojtek to move crates of ammunition. After the war he lived at the Edinburgh Zoo.

28. During the war, Canada gave out buttons to people who tried to enlist but were refused due to medical reasons to show their willingness to fight.

29. When chocolate became scarce due to rationing an Italian pastry maker named Pietro Ferrero started adding chopped hazelnuts to chocolate to stretch the supply. The product, Pasta Gianduja, was renamed Nutella in 1964.

30. Hitler never visited a single concentration or death camp.

31. In the fall of 1940, Japan bombed China with fleas infected with bubonic plague.

32. All venomous animals at the London Zoo were killed at the beginning of the war in case the zoo was bombed and the animals escaped.

33. While serving as a commander of a motor torpedo boat, John F. Kennedy and his crew were hit by a Japanese destroyer and stranded in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy carved a message into a coconut shell and asked two natives to bring it to the nearest Allied base. They succeeded and Kennedy was rescued. The coconut shell was preserved as a paperweight on his desk in the Oval Office.

34. Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person the Japanese government recognizes as having survived both the Hirsoshima and Nagasaki bombings.

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