Believe it or don’t, dear readers, but yours truly’s fancy degree says he is trained as a historian. Not that I consider myself much of a historian, at best I remember the most uselessly trivial details of history. I don’t remember who led the Stalingrad offensive, but I do know that German soldiers sawed the feet off frozen Soviet bodies to get their boots. Such is the extent of my historical prowess – which I will now share with you in this first of a series of “Things You Probably Didn’t Know”, my compendium of trivia and interesting historical oddities that stand out in my mind, but are generally overlooked by everyone else.
Today, budding historians, we will be talking about dubya dubya two. With the renewed interest in WWII spurred on by the recent release of Valkyrie (a good historically accurate film, if not the most thrilling action movie), I figure this is as good a time as any to share my useless knowledge with you lot.
I.A.
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1. Hitler was a teetotaling vegetarian:
Some have heard of this tidbit of info about the personality of the most evil dictator in history. Indeed, it is true – no urban legends or wartime propaganda here. Hitler was completely opposed to drinking, smoking, and didn’t eat meat, one of the great ironies of history – the most evil individual the world has known had a strict code of purity in his habits. He went so far as to completely oppose drinking and smoking in his presence, and he had his meals specially prepared by a personal chef. Some argue that Hitler was not a true vegetarian, instead cutting meat from his diet due to digestive problems, but the fact remains he did not eat meat – whether you love animals or not, if you don’t eat meat you are by definition a vegetarian. I guess vegites are a little sensitive about comparisons to the architect of the holocaust.
Despite this, there is considerable evidence that Hitler was a drug addict – witnesses report that he received daily injections from a private physician, and historians have surmised he may have been getting some sort of morphine cocktail to keep him going despite failing health and fatigue. There was even a secret programme that funded production of a mysterious drug that was buried in the Nazi archives. Most of this is speculation, but it has a strong basis in fact. It would not be a stretch to imagine that Hitler was a hypocrite, after all.
2. The Soviets used anti-tank dog-bombs:
One of the oddest weapons to see use in WWII was the infamous Soviet dog bomb. Long before the advent of PETA Russian dogs were trained to dive under tanks, and once they had mastered this suicidal tendency a large bomb backpack was strapped to them with an antenna sticking straight up to serve as a contact detonator. The idea might have worked, except for one problem – the Soviets trained the dogs using their own tanks. They didn’t count on the dogs being clever enough to recognize a Soviet tank and dive under it, instead of the German tanks they were supposed to blow up. Whoops. Thus the program was discontinued after limited battlefield use.
3. Dora, the biggest gun of all time:
The biggest artillery piece of all time was built by the Germans around 1941. In fact, they built two of them – Schwerer Gustav and Dora. Using conventional artillery technology of a shell fired by a powder charge, just scaled to big-ass proportions, the two guns had 800mm calibres and fired a seven tonne shell to a maximum range of around 37 kilometres. The gun was so big, weighing in at 1350 tonnes, that it had to be mounted on four rail platforms on two parallel tracks. Total crew for setup and firing was 2000 men. Amazingly this ridiculous piece of German phallic power was employed on the battlefield – around 48 shells were fired in combat from Gustav, not including over 200 test shots during development. Despite the impressive size of power of the weapon, it was essentially useless – the range was less than a decent naval gun, it used enormous amounts of raw materials (not just for the guns but also for the gigantic shells), and by the time is was employed it was no longer needed – Dora was developed as a bunker buster during the 1930s, anticipating attacks on dug in fortress emplacements, but by 1941 and later the age of bunker defences was long over, particularly after the Germans bypassed and captured the forts on the French Maginot Line.
4. The top German air ace, Erich Hartmann, shot down 352 planes, while the top scoring Allied ace shot down 62:
You read that correctly – the top Luftwaffe ace shot down 352 planes, while the top Allied ace (Soviet ace Ivan Kozhedub) shot down 62. In fact there were quite a few Luftwaffe aces with well over 100 or 200 kills. Much has been made about the accuracy of such amazing claims, but the fact remains that the Luftwaffe had some of the strictest confirmation of kill procedures of any air force. Hartmann’s record was examined over and over and has been confirmed as accurate. That’s not to say that the Allies didn’t have good pilots – the deciding factor was numerical differences in the air forces. The Luftwaffe was a small force up against huge numbers of enemy planes, and high kill tallies were common against overwhelming enemy air superiority, especially on the Eastern front (as in Hartmann’s case). Allied tallies were comparatively low because there were many more allied pilots going after a limited number of Luftwaffe planes, particularly in the later years of the war when the Luftwaffe was often grounded due to losses and lack of fuel. Hartmann was a such a respected pilot that enemy planes would often turn around and flee when they identified his black-tulip nose art; to counter this, Hartmann remove the distinctive artwork.
5. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was forced to commit suicide:
If you’ve seen Valkyrie, you know that after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler in 1944 there was a huge purge of suspected conspirators and their families – thousands were killed in the wake of the incident. Included among these victims was Erwin Rommel, one of Germany’s best field marshals. Rommel died in October 1944; the Nazis claimed he had succumbed to injuries sustained after a British aircraft strafed his car. In fact, this was a cover. Rommel was accused of involvement in the assassination plot and given an ultimatum – either take his own life and die a hero, or face court martial and execution as a traitor. Choosing to die rather than face the Nazi courts, he took a cyanide capsule on the spot, in the backseat of the car of his accusers. Some claim he was actually shot by Gestapo agents, but the essence of the event is the same – Rommel chose immediate death and protection for his family rather than trial and persecution by the Nazis.
6. The Hiroshima bomb was 1% efficient:
That’s right. The explosion that destroyed Hiroshima used only 1% of the potential energy of the uranium in Little Boy. Early atomic bomb technology was crude by modern standards and highly inefficient; regardless, it was still enough to create the largest man made explosion up to that point, equivalent to 13 000 – 18 000 tons of dynamite. Little Boy used the crudest form of atomic bomb technology – an internal “gun” that fired a plug of uranium into another block of uranium, causing a supercritical reaction that created the atomic explosion. It was still enough to kill over 100 000 people and level Hiroshima.
