Weird War Two: Strange Facts and Tales from the World's Weirdest Conflict

by M. J. Trow

Overview

Welcome to the wonderfully weird World War Two...

The Second World War was the bloodiest on record. It was the first total war in history when civilians - men, women and children - were on the front line as never before. With so many millions involved, the rumour machine went into overdrive, tall stories built on fear of the unknown. With so much at stake, boffins battled with each other to build ever more bizarre weapons to outgun the enemy. Nazi Germany alone had so many government-orchestrated foibles that they would be funny if they were not so tragic.

Parachuting sheep? Pilot pigeons? Rifles that fire round corners? Men who never were? You will find them all in these pages, the weird, wonderful and barely believable tales from World War Two.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164615598
Publisher:	BLKDOG Publishing
Publication date:	08/14/2020
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Richard is the co-author of the popular 'Britannia' series with M. J. Trow. These books follow a group of soldiers and their descendants through the madness of a chain of events which will eventually lead to the fall of Roman Britain and the descent into the Dark Ages.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

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Ahnenpass

Central to the ideology of the Third Reich was the concept of race. Only those who could claim pure Aryan blood going back four generations were allowed to hold professional posts in government, the armed forces, teaching and the law.

Parenting in the Nazi mindset was everything; to be a pure German was essential to have much chance of having a successful life. As well as 'pure' Aryans and 'full' Jews, there were also those with three, two or just one Jewish grandparent and various government officials spent years defining various categories. Even a German who was just one quarter Jewish was considered to be a 'Mischling (mixed-blood) of the second degree'. The Ahnenpass (ancestor passport) was another of the countless forms and papers to come out of the Reich, a state obsessed with paperwork. It wasn't an official government document, but a way for Germans to prove their Aryan parentage by tracing and documenting their family tree. Eventually it would be needed to go to school or get married. The work of tracing family trees was difficult and arduous (long before the internet!), relying on people tracking down their own family trees via church and civil records. Unsurprisingly, the services of genealogists rocketed during the Reich.

Such an arbitrary system could be turned on its head, although many women were successful in court in convincing the judge that any offspring with Jewish fathers were the results of adultery with Aryans. Bribery and corruption was also rife in the justice system with back-handers ensuring people weren't classified as mixed-blood. Sometimes on the whim of the leadership, Jewish ancestry would be 'forgiven' and people would be given Aryan blood certificates. A classic example was Erhard Milch, a Wehrmacht field marshal with a Jewish father. It is possible that up to 160,000 mischlinge fought for Hitler during the war. The Ahnenpass was available in all good book stores and cost 0.60 Reichsmarks

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'And All That Jazz!'

Nazi ideology frowned on much that was acceptable elsewhere and Jazz, which was spreading in popularity around the world as the party grew, came in for special criticism. It was popular in Germany at the time but was classified by the Nazis as 'degenerate negro music seen through the eyes of Jews'. Performances by black musicians were banned in Germany in 1932 and by 1935 they were not allowed to be heard on the radio.

Interestingly, similar doubts were being expressed in America, but there it was more of a generational issue, rather as rock 'n' roll would horrify the Moms and Dads who fought the Second World War. A rebellious group in Germany, 'The Swing Kids', continued to listen to Jazz music in private and opposed the Hitler Youth and League of German Maidens. Over three hundred Swing Kids were arrested in 1941, their punishments ranging from having their hair cropped to being sent to concentration camps.

Despite all this, Josef Goebbels still found a place for Jazz music in his propaganda repertoire. Lead by front man Karl 'Charlie' Schwedler, Charlie and His Orchestra became a surreal part of the propaganda machine in 1940. The band would play Swing and Jazz classics to their listeners in Britain every Wednesday and Saturday at 9pm but with altered lyrics, supposedly with the help of 'Lord Haw-Haw' (William Joyce), boasting of the strength of the Reich and mocking Churchill and the Allied war effort. Their cover of Walter Donaldson's 'You're Driving Me Crazy' contains a bizarre section of Schwedler impersonating Churchill, being driven crazy by the military might of the Nazis and the Jews. The ominously upbeat 'Let's Go Bombing' gives us the cheery point of view of a raid on neutral areas, civilians and churches far from the areas of conflict.

The band was broken up after the war, but treated leniently and most of them continued to have successful musical careers.

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Anti-tank Dogs

Animals and warfare have been linked for centuries. Horses charged into battle and pulled war chariots; pigeons carried messages in the First World War; dogs pulled equipment sledges over frozen battlefields.

For dog lovers, their deployment in the Second World War was perhaps going too far. The idea was particularly popular with the Russians, who carried on using anti-tank dogs until the nineties! As the name suggests, the dogs were strapped with explosives and trained to run under German tanks and use their teeth to release the bomb before running back to safety. The second part of this proved too difficult however, and it was thought more effective for the dogs to be blown up once they reached their target. The training of this involved leaving the dogs' food under tanks, so they instinctively learned to run under any tank to find their supper. Quite how the food was to be put there in the first place is not clear!

Anti-tank dogs did not always (unlike most Nazis) follow orders. In the confusion and noise of battle, having had their explosives primed, the animals would often run back to their handlers, leading to a grisly end for both of them. Of the first thirty dogs deployed on the Eastern Front against the Reich, four blew up under German tanks and six blew up returning to their handlers.

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The Armistice Carriage

Nothing typifies the contempt that Hitler felt for the French more than his use of the Armistice carriage in 1940. The original train belonged to Marechal Ferdinand Foch and was chosen for the signing of the 1918 armistice because the siding in the quiet forest of Compiegne, thirty-seven miles north of Paris, was remote and discreet. The train was briefly still in use after the First World Warbut then was handed over to the Army Museum in Paris.

Hitler, bitter and humiliated, as were many Germans, by losing the first World War, clearly remembered this. The blitzkrieg against France in 1940 was overwhelming, the Wehrmacht simply bypassing the Maginot Line with its impenetrable line of fortifications by going through Belgium. When France sued for peace against the Reich, Hitler insisted the surrender be offered inside the very train carriage of 1918. He had it removed from the Army Museum and returned to the exact same spot it had been in in November during the first armistice. In fact, he deliberately sat in Foch's seat of 1918 when France officially surrendered to him on 21 June. This was not, said Colonel General von Keitel on the day itself, an act of revenge, but merely to right a wrong.

The carriage was then taken to Germany where it was on display in Berlin until 1943. It remained there until it was destroyed by the SS in Thuringia in 1945.

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Atlantis

Heinrich Himmler, as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, was a man fascinated by mysticism and the foundations of 'Aryan' history. Many of the stories of his obsession for the occult that have survived seem rather far-fetched and the archaeology of the Nazis has been fertile ground for conspiracy theorists ever since, even finding its way into the Indiana Jones film franchise starring Harrison Ford.

It is known that many expeditions were conducted by the Nazis under the Ahnenerbe, a department set up to find evidence of the Aryan racial theory and history and personally run by Himmler.

Atlantis, mentioned by Plato, Aristotle and various writers of the ancient world, was a highly advanced and sophisticated civilization destroyed, according to legend, in a single day by some unknown catastrophe. Whether Himmler actually believed this or simply wanted to create a mythology for propaganda purposes is a matter of opinion but either way he put great efforts into the pursuit of it. The Ahnenerbe thought that Atlantis could have been a sunken island somewhere between Britain and Portugal – Plato refers to the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar – and that those who survived made it to Tibet over 5,000 miles away. A team of scientists and archaeologists travelled there where they used their pseudoscience to study the faces and head-shapes of the locals and decided they were in fact descended from the Atlanteans. However, in the Nazi view of racial purity, the bloodline had been poisoned by interbreeding with the Tibetans.

One theory that interested Himmler in the legend of the lost civilization of Atlantis was the idea the survivors were Aryans, thereby explaining why there was no archaeological evidence of an ancient Aryan culture.

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Balloon Bombs

One of the more bizarre facts of history is that war gives a stimulus to technology and more money has been spent on arms manufacture than anything to do with peace. Leonardo da Vinci is today remembered as a genius, a 'universal man' renowned as a painter, sculptor and theoretical physicist; but he made his money designing weapons for various Italian noblemen.

No less ingenious were the Japanese in the Second World War. Harnessing the power of jet streams that blew east across the Pacific Ocean, they came up with the idea of balloon bombs. The idea was relatively simple; explosives attached to paper balloons. These bombs would then float silently to the USA and cause untold damage, the brilliance of the weapon lying in the fact that there was no way to stop it until it detonated.

First created in 1944, the balloons were launched from Japan, taking approximately 30 to 60 hours to reach their destination. The first was launched on 3 November. Figures vary wildly but it is estimated that between 1,000 and 9,000 balloon bombs were created and sent to the west coast of America. Only 284 were discovered according to American reports.

The US government were quick to hide these balloon bombs from the general public, and they appeared to be ineffective, but there was one tragedy. On 5 May 1945, a group of five children and a pregnant woman having a picnic in Bly, Oregon, came across one of the balloons. With no reason to suspect it was a bomb, they accidentally detonated it, becoming part of a very small list of mainland American casualties during the war from enemy activity.

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Bat Bombs

Natural scientists may be fascinated by them, but in folklore and even today's occult world, bats are associated with death, vampirism and Count Dracula himself. A dentist from Pennsylvania, Lytle S. Adams, saw a new role for them in January 1942 when he sent a written proposal to Franklin D. Roosevelt's White House. The concept was to drop bats fitted with tiny incendiary devices onto Japanese cities, giving the animals enough time to find a building to roost in. It was estimated by experts that a bat bomb could cause ten times as many fires as an ordinary bomb, with no loss of life unlike conventional bomber units.

Adams knew Eleanor Roosevelt, the formidable wife of the President and she persuaded her husband to take the dentist's nonsense seriously. The National Research Defense Committee, headed for this project by Donald Griffin, a famous psychologist, carried out experiments. 'This man is not a nut,' F.D. Roosevelt wrote and Project X-Ray, using Mexican free-tailed bats, took wind in March 1943. Initial tests had mixed results. In one case bats were accidentally released, setting fire to an airbase and a general's car. Two million dollars were spent and then the notion of bat bombs was discarded as the development of the atomic bomb was considered a more effective way to bring the war to an early end.

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Batmen

Batman, aka millionaire Bruce Wayne, first appeared in #27 of Detective Comics in May 1939, four months before the war began. Developing over the years since, the caped crusader has adapted via the intensely serious world of comics and Hollywood, but could some of his extraordinary powers have been harnessed for real?

The element of surprise is one of a soldier's greatest weapons, and what could be more surprising than a regiment of winged soldiers gliding down silently from the sky? This was the idea of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson of the California State Guard. Nicholson was the brains behind DC Comics, for which Batman was created and had served as an officer with the 9th cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, before serving as an envoy in Russia and Japan. When his military career nose-dived, he began writing lurid pulp fiction to make ends meet. But Wheeler-Nicholson never fully abandoned a serious interest in things military and made sure, via his many useful contacts, that prototypes and testing began, with the hope that eventually all paratroopers could be equipped with jump suits fitted with diving wings, in addition to their parachutes which would be deployed later, that could then be controlled to dodge and weave enemy fire as they descended. Practicalities and lack of cash got in the way and the plans were abandoned but the concepts put forward are still used by skydivers to this day.

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The Battle of Los Angeles

After Pearl Harbor the Americans didn't know what Japan would throw at them next. The only direct air raid on the American mainland to cause any death or injury took place at Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, California on the night of 23 February, 1942. The next night one of Los Angeles' strangest incidents happened. The air raid sirens began to sound out and a black out was enforced. Air Raid Wardens dashed into action. Ed Murrow and other reporters based in London had been broadcasting regularly to American cities and everyone was on high alert, expecting aerial bombardment by the Japanese, mirroring the Luftwaffe's Blitz over England. The anti-aircraft guns fired off over 1,500 rounds into the night sky and sporadic firing continued for nearly an hour. The 'All Clear' finally sounded at 7.21am. Five civilians died – three in car crashes in the chaos of the alarm and two others from heart attacks

This 'battle' remains controversial to this day. The Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, said the following day 'it was a false alarm' and no enemy aircraft was shot down or spotted. Despite this, newspapers cried out that it was a cover up and there are a large number of people today who believe it was in fact a UFO, a theme that would capture the imaginations of Americans in the following decades.

Experts believe it was a combination of a stray air balloon, shaky nerves and that the barrage simply followed the first shot. The public's reaction to the government's official response may be the first time that Americans began to doubt the integrity of their leaders.

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'Bavarian' Joe

Scandalous cases of sexual impropriety do not belong exclusively to our own time. One of them may have removed an obstacle to Hitler's path to the war. 'Bavarian' Joe was actually a Berliner, Otto Schmidt, a career criminal and low-life who specialised in blackmailing male celebrities. The Nazi leadership, many of whom were notorious for their heterosexual flings, frowned on homosexuality and it emerged that Schmidt had had an encounter in the toilets of a Potsdam railway station with Colonel General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, commander of the Wehrmacht, in 1933.

There had been a file on all this submitted by Richard Heydrich, in his position as head of the Reich Security service, the SD. At first, Hitler purported not to believe it, but the fact was that von Fritsch was an old-school soldier, appalled by Hitler's headlong rush to a war that he was convinced Germany was not ready for. Von Fritsch was in the way. The Gestapo interrogated him on 27 January 1938 and he was confronted by Schmidt, brought from Börgermoor internment camp for the purpose. He claimed that, in the Potsdam encounter, von Fritsch had smoked a cigarette (he had given up smoking in 1925); wore a fur coat (he never owned one) and told the lad he was commander of the army (a role he was not given until a year later). Despite the arrant nonsense spouted by Schmidt, von Fritsch did the honourable thing and resigned.

He was recalled to the army just before the outbreak of war and was killed near Warsaw, Poland, on 22 September 1939. It was generally believed at the time that he had done this deliberately.

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Beefsteak Nazis

Within the political ideologies that contended in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, Fascism and Communism dominated. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 terrified the west who saw their long-held interest in capitalism under attack. To combat the Red threat, Fascism became the order of the day, accepted in Germany, Italy and Spain by the 1930s, but the way there was strewn with corpses, from street fighting in German cities to all-out civil war in Spain.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Weird War 2"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Richard Denham.
Excerpted by permission of Thistle Publishing.
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