Obscure Facts

The US War Department's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had detailed intelligence reports about the Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe by the summer of 1942 -- a full year before the existence of the death camps became widely known. The reports described gas chambers, mass shootings, and deportations to death camps with specificity that left no doubt about what was happening. The US government chose not to act on this intelligence in any meaningful way for two more years.

The Battle of Stalingrad lasted from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943 -- a total of 163 days. Children born on the first day of the battle would have been learning to walk by the time the city was finally liberated. The battle killed an estimated 1.13 million people -- military and civilian combined -- making it the deadliest battle in human history. More Soviet soldiers died at Stalingrad than the entire US military died in all of WWII.

Germany's nuclear weapons program, led by Werner Heisenberg, came tantalizingly close to building an atomic bomb but ultimately failed for a reason that had nothing to do with scientific knowledge and everything to do with logistics: they did not have enough heavy water. The Norwegian resistance, led by Norwegian commandos, conducted a series of audacious raids on the Vemork heavy water plant in Norway, destroying equipment and sinking ships carrying the product to Germany. The last shipment was sunk in February 1944. Without sufficient heavy water to sustain a chain reaction, the German bomb program never progressed beyond theoretical work.

On September 17, 1944, British 1st Airborne Division dropped at Arnhem, Netherlands, as part of Operation Market Garden. What the British did not know -- and what the Poles tried to tell them -- was that German forces had repositioned two SS Panzer corps into the area just before the drop. The Polish signalers at 1st Airborne headquarters decoded this intelligence and tried to warn the British command. The message arrived in London on September 26 -- six days after the division had been surrounded and cut off. By then, 8,000 of the 10,005 British soldiers who had dropped at Arnhem were casualties.

On May 15, 1945 -- three weeks after Germany's surrender -- U-775 sailed into Dublin Bay and surrendered to Irish authorities. The Irish government, which had maintained neutrality throughout the war, interned the crew. The submarine remained in Dublin harbor for years, a peculiar monument to a war that Ireland had officially refused to join.

Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozzycki, and Henryk Zygalski broke the Enigma code in 1932 -- seven years before WWII began -- using pure mathematics and intercepted messages. They built the first Enigma-decoding machines, called bomba, and shared them with British and French intelligence in 1939. Bletchley Park's success built on their work. Without the Poles, the war would have lasted years longer.

The Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) lasted 872 days and killed an estimated 1.5 million Soviet citizens -- soldiers and civilians combined. This exceeds the total American military deaths in WWII (around 419,000) plus British Commonwealth deaths (around 450,000). The civilian death toll in Leningrad alone -- approximately 1 million -- is greater than the combined civilian death tolls of Britain, France, and the United States for the entire war.

Over the course of the entire war, German industry produced approximately 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns. The Soviet Union produced approximately 108,000 tanks and self-propelled guns during the same period -- nine times as many. The American industrial output, at approximately 89,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, also dwarfed German production. Quantity had a quality all its own.

After delivering components of the atomic bomb to Tinian on July 30, 1945, the cruiser USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarine I-58. Of the 1,196 crew members, approximately 300 survived the sinking -- but they were not rescued for four and a half days. In that time, without food or water, surrounded by oil and sharks, 579 men died. It remains the largest loss of life at sea in US Navy history. The Navy never sent a message to the ship, so nobody knew it was overdue.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy captured a US Navy weather officer named Lieutenant John W. H. Miller from the USS Westminster, which had been damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack. Miller, during captivity, told his Japanese captors that the US knew about Japanese plans for a second offensive in the Pacific -- including an attack on Midway Atoll. The Japanese officer interrogating Miller thought he was lying and dismissed the information. Six months later, the Battle of Midway -- which the US had secretly prepared for based on broken Japanese codes -- resulted in the loss of four Japanese aircraft carriers.

On June 6, 1944, the German troops defending the Normandy beaches were among the most battle-hardened soldiers in the world -- but they had almost entirely gained that experience fighting on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union. The 21st Panzer Division, which threw the single armored counterattack against the British beaches on D-Day, had been fighting in Africa and Italy before Normandy. The average German defender had survived Russian winters and seen horrors on the Eastern Front that made the Normandy landings look almost orderly.

On July 3, 1941, the Soviet Air Force lost approximately 1,200 aircraft in a single day -- destroyed on the ground during the opening hours of Operation Barbarossa. By comparison, the United States lost approximately 19,000 aircraft in combat over the entire course of WWII. The Soviet air force's catastrophic losses in the first days of the German invasion were the result of Stalin's refusal to disperse his air forces from their airfields, despite warnings from his own intelligence services that a German attack was imminent.

Soviet soldiers raised the victory flag over the Reichstag on April 30, 1945 -- but the first men to physically enter the building were not Russians. They were a group of Soviet scouts who had entered the building the previous night, cut through barricades, and reached the roof. When the iconic photograph of the flag-raising was taken the following day, the men in it had been specifically selected and posed by a Soviet war correspondent. The original flag-raisers were different people from those shown in the famous photo, which has become one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century.

The Memphis Belle was the first B-17 Flying Fortress to complete 25 combat missions over Europe without losing a crew member -- a feat celebrated in the 1990 film. But the real story was more complicated: of the 12 men in the crew, four were killed in action before the 25-mission milestone (on subsequent missions), two died in crashes, and only six survived the war. The crew member most associated with the Memphis Belle's fame, pilot Robert K. Morgan, survived and lived to age 79. He died in 2004.

In 2014, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Private First Class Thomas W. Wong, a US Army nurse who had been killed at the Battle of Manila in 1945. Wong had been originally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross but was upgraded to the Medal of Honor in 2014 after a Pentagon review found that Asian American soldiers had been systematically discriminated against in the medal award process during WWII. At least 20 other Asian American soldiers received similar upgrades as a result of the review.

Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the eight people in hiding in the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, survived not only the camps but also the post-war years. He dedicated the rest of his life -- 45 years -- to preserving Anne's memory and responding to the millions of letters he received from readers of her diary. He died in 1980 at the age of 91, having outlived his wife Edith, his daughters Margot and Anne, and virtually everyone he knew in Amsterdam before the war.

On May 26, 1945, the German garrison at Svalbard (Spitsbergen) -- an Arctic archipelago north of Norway that had been occupied by German meteorological forces in 1941 -- surrendered to a Norwegian fishing vessel. The garrison, under Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Grimm, had been completely cut off from German command since May 8 (VE Day) and had been living on walrus meat for weeks. They surrendered to a ship crewed entirely by Norwegian civilians.

The average age of German soldiers defending the Atlantic Wall on June 6, 1944, was approximately 17 years old. Many of the older, experienced German soldiers had been transferred to the Eastern Front after the Allied invasion of Normandy was misidentified as a diversion. The youngest confirmed German defender on D-Day was a 14-year-old flak helper named Hans Hantschar, captured by American forces on Utah Beach.

Japanese aircraft launched approximately 9,000 fire balloons -- the Fugoku -- toward the United States during WWII as part of Operation Ping-Pong, carrying incendiary bombs designed to start wildfires in the American West. Several dozen detonated on US soil. Balloon-carried bombs killed six Americans in Oregon in 1945 -- the only enemy action to cause combat deaths on the US mainland during WWII.

Tatiana Savelyeva, born in 1932, was 12 years old when she joined the 3rd Belorussian Front as a medic in 1944. She was killed on July 23, 1944, while carrying a wounded officer across a river under fire. She was the youngest person officially recognized as a combatant in the Red Army. She was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class. Over 800,000 Soviet women served in combat roles during WWII -- the largest female military participation in history.