Odd WWII Trivia

I received this e-mail a short while ago. It I have not checked it for accuracy.

From: Odd WWII Facts

You might enjoy this from Col D. G.Swinford, USMC, Retired and a history buff. You would really have to dig deep to get this kind of ringside seat to history:

1. The first German serviceman killed in WW II was killed by the Japanese ( China, 1937), The first American service man killed was killed by the Russians ( Finland1940); The highest ranking American killed was Lt GenLesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps.

2. The youngest US service man was 12 year old: Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. His benefits were later restored by act of Congress.

3. At the time of Pearl Harbor, the top US Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounced 'sink us'); The shoulder patch of the US Army's45th Infantry division was the swastika. Hitler'sprivate train was named 'Amerika.' All three were soon changed for PR purposes.

4. More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions, an airman's chance of being killed was 71%.

5. Generally speaking, there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance, Japanese Ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a big mistake. Tracers had different Ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.

7. When allied armies reached the Rhine, the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill(who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).

8. German ME-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City, but they decided it wasn't worth the effort.

9. German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

10. Among the first ‘Germans’ captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the US Army.

11. Following a massive naval bombardment, 35,000 United States and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands . 21 troops were killed in the assault on the island... It could have been worse if there had actually been any Japanese on the island.

12. The last marine killed in WW2 was killed by a can of spam. He was on the ground as a POW in Japan when rescue flights dropping food and supplies came over, the package came apart in the air and a stray can of spam hit him and killed him.

In reply to pilotbraden:

#9 is also relatively easy since a sinking submarine rarely has any survivors.

Well, that just might be true according to this article from the Daily Mail in the UK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2153688/Second-World-War--German-Japanese-soldier-stories-change-perception-ever.html

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Losey

First American was killed by the Germans, in Norway. 1940 though.

(hey, you can't start a line with the "#" character unless you want some wicked large and red text...) #9 is apparently something that sorta happened, but to a different unterwasserboot, U-1206. http://www.uboat.net/boats/u1206.htm

Short version is that screwing up the valves on the toilet resulted in sea water getting on the batteries which generated chlorine gas which required the sub to surface. There were enemy aircraft overhead at that time, though, and the boat was attacked and then scuttled.

In reply to wae:

Nvm, there were skirmishes on the north end of manchuria, but it wasn't a declared war. So, possible.....but still unlikely

FWIW, Earliest known American deaths were in the late 30's in China.

ThunderCougarFalconGoat wrote: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Losey First American was killed by the Germans, in Norway. 1940 though.

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

The Russians were at war with the Japanese right before WWII though, so maybe? (The Japanese did a number on the Russian navy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War

It is is known that the Germans had some of their conscription troops at Normandy though. It was a sign of the fact the they though the invasion would be farther north. This is depicted (as I have noted before) in Saving Private Ryan. When the two German soldiers try to surrender as the coastal fortification is flanked (they shoot them claiming they do not understand them), they are speaking a Hungarian (or one of those Balkan languages) not German.

6: I think there a couple of aspects here. Yes tracers were used, yes the enemy could see them but I am not sure that would mater much. Think about it. If it was bad the enemy saw you shooting, then clearly they did not know you were there. If they did not know you were there, just get as close as you can and blast them at close range and then of course it's too late. (see note below)

This also discounts the value of the tracers during deflection shooting (shooting ahead of a moving target). Without intense training / skill or a lead computing gunsight (which the P-51 had, but it was pretty primitive) deflection shooting would be VERY hard without tracers (to many variable to consider).

Yes, long range shooting would probably be off because of the tracers, but long range shooting is generally not a good idea because it is pretty inaccurate for a number of reasons. One of those is that planes with wing mounted guns would set the guns for convergence. It could be set to whatever distance desired but it was generally (I believe) more in the 200-400 yard range. Hitting something at the convergence point was a big increase in damage. At longer ranges (anything past convergence) and the bullets are fanny out away from each other.

One benefit of no tracers I can see (and maybe why kill rates would go up if that is true, which would be highly confounded by other variables as the war went on, especially pilot skills on each side) is that it would REQUIRE someone to get up close before opening fire. In WWI and WWII, the skilled pilots soon found the best tactic is to just get up on their butt and blast away. Anything else was far less effective.

yamaha wrote:

ThunderCougarFalconGoat wrote: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Losey First American was killed by the Germans, in Norway. 1940 though.

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

I suppose that depends on what you consider world war 2. Sept 3, 1939? Or earlier? What defines the start of the war then if earlier?

I've heard a decent argument that the start of world war 2 was world war 1, so that would make the first American casualty way before the Panay.

Regarding tracers, my grandfather said they just loaded the whole darn string with tracers. They figured out they were much more effective and easier to target.

Number 6 doesn't sound entirely truthful. Good pilots didn't care about long-range ballistics, since they held their fire until close range.

Number 8 definitely isn't true; the ME-264 was such a flaming turd that only 3 were built. Germany put a lot of effort into trying to figure out how to bomb the eastern United States, but it simply didn't have the capability to produce an aircraft that could get a useful bomb load off the ground, carry it across the Atlantic, defend itself over the target, and fly back across the Atlantic.

Read this for a good look at Germany's efforts to bomb the US.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kiska

The only thing number 11 got right was the lack of Japanese forces on Kiska.

Will wrote: Number 6 doesn't sound entirely truthful. Good pilots didn't care about long-range ballistics, since they held their fire until close range. Number 8 definitely isn't true; the ME-264 was such a flaming turd that only 3 were built. Germany put a lot of effort into trying to figure out how to bomb the eastern United States, but it simply didn't have the capability to produce an aircraft that could get a useful bomb load off the ground, carry it across the Atlantic, defend itself over the target, and fly back across the Atlantic. Read this for a good look at Germany's efforts to bomb the US.

I have that book, it's excellent. Some of those are stretching it a bit, definitely this one. Hitler wanted to bomb the US badly, and spent a lot of money and effort trying to find a way to do so. It was only our inclusion into the war, the D-Day invasion and resulting advances of the Allies that stopped it.

I've read a number of books written by or about American aces and in a couple of those books it was mentioned by the pilot that they did indeed remove the tracer rounds. It was mostly done by those pilots that have that skill of being able to determine deflection and lead angle in their head and fire their guns where the enemy plane will be when the rounds got there. Pilots that had used guns while growing up, hunting birds, etc. seemed to have more success as fighter pilots then those that didn't.

I always knew Spam was deadly!

Beer Baron wrote: Regarding tracers, my grandfather said they just loaded the whole darn string with tracers. They figured out they were much more effective and easier to target.

Served in the Pacific?

All tracers would likely do a good job igniting the un sealed fuel tanks in the early Japanese planes. A full load of tracers would also be a pretty impressive display. Makes it look like you have 5 times the number of guns you actually have! Probably do a good job of dazzling gunners on a bomber also.

aircooled wrote:

Beer Baron wrote: Regarding tracers, my grandfather said they just loaded the whole darn string with tracers. They figured out they were much more effective and easier to target.

Served in the Pacific?

Yup.

I've read that they started training gunners by teaching them skeet and/or trap shooting with shotguns. Mastering the leading with the shotgun directly transferred to shooting down aircraft.

In reply to ThunderCougarFalconGoat:

Well, that is of course the great question.....E36 M3 was hitting the fan all over the place at that point.

You want a good one, even in that era, the Soviets had female aces.

My dad shot down a pulled target.... he was training as a navigator, and he was training on the front .50 cal... he accidentally shot the tow cable, the pulled target crashed

oldeskewltoy wrote: My dad shot down a pulled target.... he was training as a navigator, and he was training on the front .50 cal... he accidentally shot the tow cable, the pulled target crashed

I read somewhere that the navigator's gun on a B-17 had almost no field of fire, and was not particularly useful. However, they added it because the navigators were freaking out from having nothing to do in the high-stress time between delivering the pilots to the target and having to get them home again.

I'm going to speculate you're actually talking about the chin turret that was controlled by the bombardier. The navigator wasn't unbusy during regular flights, and had the cheek gun (or guns, depending on model).

If you want to read up on the chin turret, here's a few training booklets and such on them, from the army air force archives.

http://aafcollection.info/items/detail.php?key=36&pkg=lx!title!!36!2!title!up!20

http://aafcollection.info/items/detail.php?key=48&pkg=lx!title!!48!2!title!up!20

No, I'm not talking about the chin turret. I'm talking about the cheek gun, located only on the right side near the nav station. It was supposedly added to give the navigator something to do during the 10-15 minutes of high stress time over the target, when everybody else on the plane had a critical job, but the navigator had some downtime. It was tough to sit there waiting for the worst with nothing to contribute to the situation, so they added the cheek gun for him to feel useful with. It wasn't really for the long round trip, when the navvie would of course be busy.

Note the fairly limited fire zone.

No gun on the left side.

Duke wrote: No, I'm not talking about the chin turret. I'm talking about the cheek gun, located only on the right side near the nav station. It was supposedly added to give the navigator something to do during the 10-15 minutes of high stress time over the target, when *everybody else* on the plane had a critical job, but the navigator had some downtime. It was tough to sit there waiting for the worst with nothing to contribute to the situation, so they added the cheek gun for him to feel useful with. It wasn't really for the long round trip, when the navvie would of course be busy.

God that is beautiful though.

I have read all kinds of odd WWII trivia, like Americans were killed on U.S. soil during the war and the Japanese took American soil, we had plenty of warning about Pearl Harbor and had we listened to the British, things in Europe would have ended months earlier. Oh, and we didn't warn the Japanese about the atomic bomb because we weren't sure it would work (and it might ignite the earth's atmosphere) and that the first people on the scene in Hiroshima had no idea what happened, assuming it was an extended firebombing campaign. Weird stuff.