1.) The heaviest tank ever built was the German Maus II-which weighed 192 tons. However, by the end of the war it had never reached an operational state.
2.) The Soviet Red Army once tried dogs to destroy enemy tanks. Dogs were trained to associate the underside of tanks with food and were fitted with 26lbs of explosive device trapped to their backs. Once the dog crawled under the tanks, the device detonates and explodes destroying the tank (and the dog). This strategy didn’t work much as planned as the dogs were trained using Soviet tanks so more likely to run under these than the German tanks. As many as 25 German tanks were put out of action this way during the battles for Stalingard and Kursk.
3.) One of the American light cruisers anchored at Pearl Harbour during the Japanese attack of December 1941 was the Phoenix. The Phoenix survived the attack unscathed. The Phoenix, at that time of her demise, was known as the General Belgrano.
4.) Everybody knows the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. The aircraft responsible for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later is also a B-29, the Bock’s Car, and Nagasaki was not its original target – the intended target city was Kokura – which escaped as the bomber was under orders to attack only a clear target and the city was shrouded in smog at the time. Nagasaki was the first alternative target city.
5.) When World War II began, the U.S. government declared platinum as a strategic metal and its use in non-military applications, including jewelry was disallowed. To appease consumers who preferred platinum’s white luster, gold was substituted in platinum’s absence.
6.) During World War II, a German U-boat was sunk by a truck. The U-boat in question attacked a convoy in the Atlantic and then rose to see the effect. The merchant ship it sank had material strapped to its deck including a fleet of trucks, one of which was thrown in the air by the explosion, landing on the U-boat and breaking its back.
7.) The British Royal families are 100% German in origin; their original name was the House of Saxe-Coberg-Gothe. At the outbreak of World War II, they had to ‘de-Germanize’ themselves for fear of losing the throne. The name ‘Windsor’ was substituted, and was taken from one of the monarch’s castles. Queen Elizabeth II even had a cousin tried, and found guilty, at Nuremburg for war crimes.
More World War II model planes.
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