Fascinating WW2 Facts

[Hebime 1,637]

#??: The majority of Polish cavalry charges either broke the German formation charged or achieved a breakthrough.

Majority? I only know of two, but yeah, both was successful.

 

1. During the Battle of Krojanty, where Polish cavalry charged German infantry formation successfully. Later when the Poles withdrawn from the battlefield, German panzers arrived, as well as the German war corresponders. Seeing some dead Polish cavalry men and horses on the battlefield, and the German tanks, they falsly reported, that the Polish cavalry idiotically charged tanks, which is not true. This was used for a long-long time, to degrade Poles, even by the Soviet Union.

2. During the Battle of Schoenfeld, where the Polish cavalry used the cover of smoke and a ravine, and charged German infantry positions, which noticed them too late.

[Shanzival 210]

It seems I have to have more practice about sarcasm. :)

 

That wasn't directed at you as much as to how people tend to claim it in general. "Oh, of course you can't trust them, they won the war!"

 

Of course what's far more likely is that the losing side made excuses about why they lost (See: Germany after WWI with their troops getting 'stabbed in the back')

[xthetenth 532]

Majority? I only know of two, but yeah, both was successful.

 

I don't have a real source on hand that I can easily link, but the wiki list of fifteen charges is not bad.

[MyLittleRainbow 40]

A scuttling attempt is considered successful if a ship sank completly. The Graf Spee was only partly sunk and it could be seen for days above the water. So it was a half-job.

 

The Graf Spee was not partially sunk, it was sunk. The water it was in was not deep enough to completely cover the ship, and the ship could be seen above water for more than just a few days. The ship continued to sink into the mud of the harbor for months after the sinking, which is why it vanished from the surface. Parts were still above water in February of 1940, over a month later. Unless you want to contend the status of the Arizona and Utah, the Graf Spee was sunk.

 

 

Not nearly as true as people think. The amount of ACW revisionism that takes place in the US is simply amazing.

 

vvv American Civil War (See: "War of Northern Aggression", Lost Cause Myth, etc...)

 

Yes, sadly this is true. If I had a penny for every time I saw a Confederate flag as a bumper sticker or flying from someone's house, I would probably have several hundred dollars.

 

Be back with more facts soon

[hanwind 291]

Who bombed Berlin first by air? The answer is: French Naval Air Force on the night of 7/8 of June of 1940 with a single longe-range bomber Farman 223.4 ("Jules Verne"). Here an image:
 

[_Katyusha_ 1,829]

 

Yes, sadly this is true. If I had a penny for every time I saw a Confederate flag as a bumper sticker or flying from someone's house, I would probably have several hundred dollars.

 

 

 

For what it's worth, the common "Confederate" flag, sometimes called the stars and bars, that is flown from houses and used in bumper stickers, was never actually used by the Confederate army.

 

That flag is actually the "Navy Jack" or the ensign flown by Confederate ships and blockade runners.  The Confederate battle flag, in the later part of the civil war, was perfectly square.

[Hammer92 146]

#71 Haha  :Ds

[hanwind 291]

Which was the first plane British AA shot down? The answer is a "German bomber" which turned out to be a Blenheim.

Which was the first plane Spitfire shot down? The answer is Hurricane.

More details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Barking_Creek

http://todayshistorylesson.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/the-battle-of-barking-creek/
Price, Alfred: Spitfire Mark I/II Aces.

[Sodanjumala 589]

Last tank to tank battle fought in Finland was during Tornio landings (also known as poormans d-day) when Finnish T-26 destroyed German Hotchkiss H39 in 15 min firefight.

[CheapSushi 566]

The greatest tank battle was actually the Battle of Brody, not Kursk.  I can't find the exact link where a historian goes over both battles in detail but the amount of tanks that fought at Kursk was a myth/exaggerated with some nonexistent. 

 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Triangle-Defeat-Soviet-Ukraine/dp/076033434X?tag=upsideout-20

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brody_(1941)

Edited August 22, 2014 by CheapSushi

[_Katyusha_ 1,829]

Which was the first plane British AA shot down? The answer is a "German bomber" which turned out to be a Blenheim.

Which was the first plane Spitfire shot down? The answer is Hurricane.

More details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Barking_Creek

http://todayshistorylesson.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/the-battle-of-barking-creek/
Price, Alfred: Spitfire Mark I/II Aces.

 

I think both of those fall under the "Son of a..." clause.

[Quax3 1]

68. Most members of the Waffen SS were not German.

 

There were around 400.000 Reichsdeutsche, 300.000 Volksdeutsche and 200.000 Ausländer in the Waffen SS.So the majority of the Waffen SS was German. But yes it was a diverse army.

[Molnya5 873]

#? A soviet ace shot down a german plane, which the pilot bailed from, after seeing the pilot hit the ground, hide, and then soviet troops search the area and not find him, the russian pilot landed in the field, found the german and strangled him to death with his bare hands

 

Source: the blond knight of germany

[AtomicKaiser 4,905]

Who was that soviet general that hated tanks and wanted to scrap the russian tank programs and increase calvary?

[BONKERS 5,751]

Who was that soviet general that hated tanks and wanted to scrap the russian tank programs and increase calvary?

Wasn't it Siemon Budionny?

I'm not sure, but he was a cavalry lover.

[_Katyusha_ 1,829]

Here's one I didn't note.  It comes as part of a research article I'm working on:

 

German U boats only attacked submerged when they absolutely had to.  Submarine commanders preferred to attack from the surface at night.  The reason was simple.  They could see better than with the periscope, and their speed was enough that they could outrun the enemy.  On the surface they could average 18 to 25 knots, while submerged they were lucky if they could make 8 knots.

 

By comparison, the typical destroyer could make 15 to 20 knots.  However, the small size of the U boat, made it a very hard target to hit with the main guns, and meant escape was usually pretty easy.

 

On the other hand, most destroyers, knowing they weren't likely to actually HIT the submarine with their main guns, would instead ram them.

[Shanzival 210]

That's a pretty damn slow speed for a destroyer as they normally did around 30 knots. Even the old and obsolete WWI destroyers that were part of the 'Ships for Bases' deal were faster than 20 knots.

Edited August 29, 2014 by Shanzival

[hanwind 291]

Couple of last air victories by aircraft type: 

Polikarpov I-153:  

On 29.7.1944 Finnish Air Force I-153 shot down an Airacobra. Interestingly the Finnish plane was captured ex-Soviet plane and the victim was a American-built Soviet plane. One of the very last air victories achieved with biplane fighter and very probably the last confirmed air victory of I-153. 

Hawker Hurricane:

On 15.2.1944 a Indian Air Force Hurricane shot down a Japanese Ki-43. This was perhaps not the very last air victory achieved with Hurricane, but it was the first and last air victory of Indian Air Force during WW2.  

[Botan 7,952]

On 15.2.1944 a Indian Air Force Hurricane shot down a Japanese Ki-43. This was perhaps not the very last air victory achieved with Hurricane, but it was the first and last air victory of Indian Air Force during WW2.  

 

This site states otherwise though.

http://aces.safarikovi.org/victories/india-ww2.html

[WackyWeasel 929]

The Swiss Air force shot down 11 German planes during a three-day battle in the summer of 1940.... Using German built ME-109!'s

[acosn 212]

1: Public Opinion Polls after Pearl Harbor in the US rated the Japanese, Germans and Italians higher than the Roma, Jews and other ethnicities the Americans were fighting- in theory- to save.

 

 

2: Poland lasted almost as long as France did, dealing with a war on two fronts.

 

 

3: One of the first tank aces of WW2 was actually a Pole, Roman Edmund Orlik. Piloting a diminutive TKS tankette armed with a 20mm auto-cannon he destroyed 13 German tanks before Poland was conquered.

 

 

4: Though World of Tanks might not give the tank it's due, another one of the first tank aces of WW2 was actually a Frenchman- Pierre Armand Gaston Billotte- piloted his Char B1 Heavy tank through German lines and destroyed or disabled 11 panzer 3's, 2 panzer 4's, and 2 AT guns. Of the 140 rounds fired on his tank, none managed to penetrate its armor.

 

 

5: Hitler thought quite highly of the US treatment of Native American populations and credited to part of where he got the idea of how he should treat minorities he happened to dislike.

 

 

6: By the end of the war 1 in 7 Soviet citizens was killed, and 3 in 7 were gravely injured.

 

 

7: Soviet laborers- farmers, factory workers, what have you- worked 60+ hour work weeks during the war and typically had little or no leisure time.

 

 

8: Soviet troops were prone to stripping the upholstery from wrecked M4 Shermans. It made for very comfortable boots.

 

 

9: By the end of the war a solid 1/5th of the Soviet airforce was made in America or Britain. One of the top aces in the Soviet Air Force even favored the P-39 as his aircraft of choice.

 

 

10: One of the first Tiger 1's the western allies encountered they managed to disable when a Churchill's 6 pounder gun fired a round that would riccochet off the Tiger's gun barrel and got lodged in the tank's turret ring. After being repaired by British crews it was shipped back to Britain to be studied. Today it remains as the only working example of a Tiger heavy tank.

 

 

11: B-17 heavy bombers were less expensive to produce than Tiger 1 heavy tanks.

 

 

12: Soviet usage of Biplanes carried well into the war for various reasons, but particularly because many German aircraft could not stay aloft at speeds those same biplanes would max out at, making it extremely difficult to properly line up shots on the aircraft. One particular regiment, the 588th bombers regiment (later the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment), piloting PO-2 biplanes, was particularly notorious for it's night bombing runs on German targets, and gained the nickname "Night Witches" by German troops due to the pilots cutting their engines when they made their final approaches on targets, leaving only the wind noise to identify the crafts.

 

 

13: In what may be the most absurd example of German manufacturing, the Sturmtiger (you know, the tiger based assault gun that fired 380mm rockets?) was originally going to have a munition carrying vehicle built on a....tiger chassis.

 

 

14: When weather conditions threatened to hold up Patton's Third Army when he relieved Bastogne for lack of air support he ordered his army to pray. When the weather cleared up, Patton awarded the Third Army's Chaplain James Hugh O'Neill, who composed the prayer, with a Bronze Star Medal on the spot.

 

 

15: Factories owned by the Ford Motor Company in Germany would later in the war go on to manufacture parts used in the V2 rocket project.

 

 

16: The V2 rocket project actually killed more slave laborers and general personnel responsible for it's production, transportation and usage than it killed of actual targets- in London alone the V2 rockets only killed about 2 people per rocket. The only weapon development project that was more expensive than it was the Manhattan Project.

[_Katyusha_ 1,829]

Werner Von Braun, who developed the V2, is reported to have said after hearing the first one managed to hit London, quote:  "It was a good test, though there was one thing wrong. It landed on the wrong planet."

[ColorCopycat 7,171]

By the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945, only 56 Chinese POWs in Japanese captivity were still alive at the time of their release.

 

Let the magnitude of this fact sink in. Japan had fought an eight year long war against China, occupied more than half of the country, taken many hundreds of thousands, if not several million Chinese troops prisoner during that time.

 

And only 56 survived captivity.

 

You had a better chance of surviving as a Russian POW in a German death camp than as a Chinese POW in Japanese captivity.

[Isamu_Shosa 248]

For what it's worth, the common "Confederate" flag, sometimes called the stars and bars, that is flown from houses and used in bumper stickers, was never actually used by the Confederate army.

 

That flag is actually the "Navy Jack" or the ensign flown by Confederate ships and blockade runners.  The Confederate battle flag, in the later part of the civil war, was perfectly square.

 

The "Stars and Bars" was the (first) actual Confederate flag, and looked like this:

 

The one you see in common use today in various places was originally the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, though it was a square rather than rectangular flag.

 

It was later used in various designs, including later Confederate national flags, and the 1863+ Confederate navy jack and navy ensign, but it was originally a Confederate Army battle flag.

 

(Apologies for veering OT there)

[Sodanjumala 589]

During Winter War, in rather weird sense of humor and logic, Soviets parachuted "volunteers" (read: a whole football team) from Estonia to act as saboteurs and spies. In mere hours later the whole group was arrested and the only victim of this saboteur mission was lonely cow that was shot by couple of "spies" for lunch. Owners of the cow weren't happy.