Weirdest War Two: Extraordinary Tales and Unbelievable Facts from the Second World War

By Sara Hughes

Was Britain's Thermopylae really fought over a tennis court? 

 

What happened in Canada during the invasion of Winnipeg? 

 

How did the Night Witches terrify and torment the Axis?

 

Was Hitler actually sent to spy on the Nazis by the army?

 

Who was the schoolgirl who helped win the Battle of Britain?

 

Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war. You will have to decide how many such casualties occur in this book, the third in the Weird War series. Amber rooms worth a fortune, the spear that pierced Christ's side, deadly female snipers and Lucille Ball's spooky teeth, it's all here for the discerning buff of 1939-45.

 

Whether it's official Nazi propaganda dreamed up by Josef Goebbel's Ministry of Enlightenment or the 'scuttlebutt' of the US navy; tall stories from the officers' mess or attempts to escape from the grim reality of total war, the Second World War provides a fascinating glimpse into the mindset and ingenuity of a generation.

 

Have we now exhausted our supply of weirdness? With new information coming to light all the time from the classified archives in the corridors of power, we wouldn't bet on it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BLKDOG Publishing
• Release date: Jul 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201930738

Sara Hughes

M.J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King’s College, London and is probably best known today for his true crime and crime fiction works. He has always been fascinated by Richard III and, following on from Richard III in the North, also by Pen and Sword, has hopefully finally scotched the rumour that Richard III killed the princes in the Tower. He divides his time between homes in the Isle of Wight and the Land of the Prince Bishops.

Book preview

WEIRDEST WAR TWO

RICHARD DENHAM

&

M. J. TROW

Copyright © 2021 Richard Denham & M. J. Trow.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-913762-89-6

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

All images within are believed to be within the public domain. If you are aware of any copyright issues, please contact us.

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

www.blkdogpublishing.com

Other titles by Richard Denham

The Britannia Trilogy

World of Britannia: Historical Companion to the Britannia Trilogy

Arthur: Shadow of a God

Robin Hood: English Outlaw

Prester John: Africa’s Lost King

Other titles by M. J. Trow

The Maxwell Series

The Inspector Lestrade Series

The Children’s Crusade

Richard III in the North

The Killer of the Princes in the Tower

Other titles in the Weird War Two series

Weird War Two by Richard Denham & M. J. Trow

Weirder War Two by Richard Denham & Michael Jecks

‘There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.’

- Winston Churchill

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Introduction

The Battle of the Tennis Court

The Bee Bombs of Prester John

The Bielski Brothers

The Black Beast

The Black Book

The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic

Carrot on a Stick

Cheers!

‘Clutty’

The Cooler

The Colditz Cock

The Curse of the Willie Dee

Dealing With the Devil

The Defector

The Dictator of Bristol

The Disappearance of Doctor Death

Enemy at the Gates

The Falcon has Landed

Fido

Flying Tanks

The Gauleiter of the Bahamas

The Gold of the North

Gustav Siegfried Eins

To Hell and Back

Hibakusha

Hitler’s Women

I Love Lucy

I Was Hitler’s Maid

Ice Cream

If Day

Knitting for England

The Little Dutch Girls

The Mad Colonel

The Mad Hatter

Men in High Castles

The Men Who Broke Into Auschwitz

Meschuggismus (The Cult of Insanity)

The Mouse that Invaded

The Myths and Miracles of Dunkirk

The Night Witches

An Officer and a Gentleman

The One-eyed Ghost

Operation Mistletoe

The Pigeon Mystery

The Red Book

Santa’s Wars

The Schoolgirl and the Spitfire

The Second Book

Slinky

The Spear of Destiny

Submarine Tanks

The Sword of Islam

Uncle Adolf

The Unlikely Agent

The War of the Worlds

Went the Day Well?

The White Rose of Stalingrad

‘Who do you Think you are Kidding, Mr. Hitler?’

Whose Side Are You on?

The Wigwam Murder

Zigzag

Foreword

Weird; out of the ordinary, strange, unusual...odd, bizarre, incomprehensible.

New Shorter English Dictionary

First of all, a quick confession, this book isn’t the ‘weirdest’ of the trilogy, the stories within are no more nor no less extraordinary than the first two books. However, I hope you will forgive this as ‘weirdest’ is a useful and appropriate title to end the series.

For those of you who have read ‘Weird’ and ‘Weirder’, it would be fair to be concerned that we have scraped the barrel of remarkable and unbelievable facts and tales from the Second World War, but to our surprise as much as anyone’s, this simply isn’t the case. For instance, there is a huge amount of facts written throughout the trilogy but never made the cut for a variety of reasons, be they to contentious, uncertain, upsetting or simply to ridiculous. There are also a dwindling few who live to this day, and mentioning their stories, of which we are only bystanders, felt wrong.

As with the first two books, it would be inappropriate to categorise this title as ‘humour’. Some of the stories within are heartwarming, full of kindness, love, courage and dogged determination. Other stories are dark, distressing and contentious. But that is what history is. We live in a world where any question can be Googled and answered (up to a point) in seconds and the uncertainty of history doesn’t always have a black and white answer. So much of history is opinion; ‘history is written by the victors’ rings truer than we know. For example, depending on who you ask, the Soviet Union won the Second World single-handedly by withstanding the onslaught of Operation Barbarossa, courageously fighting to the end while the Western Allies sat and watched; or the war was only possible because Hitler secretly allied with Stalin in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, carving up eastern Europe between them (as seen in Poland) and freeing Hitler to turn his eye to the West, it was Soviet oil and Soviet grain that fed the German war machine. In a cruel twist of history, it is likely that Operation Barbarossa, and perhaps even Germany’s ability to wage war, was only possible because of Soviet trade in the first place. A cold view is that undeniably the Soviet Union spent a third of the war on Nazi Germany’s side, and spent two-thirds facing the brunt of Hitler’s aggression.

Look at figures such as Winston Churchill, idolized by some, despised and condemned by others. At the very least he is a ‘problematic’ figure, but who isn’t? No one comes out of history well; the ideas of the age never stay. Is it particularly fair to call him a racist imperialist when that’s what most people thought at the time? We, in our age, will not escape this retrospective justice from generations to come. And like those before us, we will have no clue why. Perhaps future generations will be disgusted by our treatment of the planet, or the fact we eat the flesh of living creatures, and not being brave enough to do it ourselves, pay for workers in giant factories to slaughter animals for us. Perhaps we will be ridiculed for being so easily offended and upset, or chastised for not being offended and upset enough?

There is a very disturbing trend in recent years for censorship and a form of modern idolatry. Generations from now, I hope that they will look back at our time and find us bizarre and unreasonable for being offended by the past and trying to censor it. Who benefits from censoring films, adding ‘trigger warnings’ to old classics, tearing down statues of men and women long dead? Being involved in the murky world of history makes things even worse for us. For a broad example, the treatment of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade is no doubt horrific and should strike a chord with all of us, but how far do we spread our net? The treatment of African slaves in the Arab world was much larger and much more brutal, but the modern mob either doesn’t know or doesn’t understand that. Do we go even further, we live in a world where one wrong word or out-of-context tweet condemns a person to be ‘cancelled’, so it would be a brave one who raised the issue that Africa was the biggest market for African slaves, and they were enslaved by other Africans and then sold to other nations. The slave trade couldn’t have happened without inter-tribal warfare. With all this talk of reparations, an obscene and inhuman idea that those alive now should take the blame for things their ancestors may have possibly been involved in the slave trade and compensate those alive who were never part of it. This is all uncomfortable reading, but it has to be. The cherry picking and selective outrage of history is one of the biggest dangers facing us.

And with all that said, we can begin to understand, whether we like it or not, that history, and the interpretation of it, can only be our own opinions. There is no search engine on Earth that can tell us what is and isn’t morally justifiable and what is and isn’t going to stand the test of time. Most of us will agree that the Second World War raged on between 1939-1945 (it’s a different story in Asia etc.), but what happened, and why, within those six unbelievable years is a different story.

As always, I hope those of you with a strong interest in World War Two will forgive the whistle-stop tour nature of the book, and I hope those of you with a casual interest will forgive getting bogged down in dates and technical terms and perhaps not always providing enough context which would disturb the readers’ flow. What we could like is for you to use this book as a starting block, and run off with those facts which interest or intrigue you, and make up your own mind from there – because that’s all history ever can be.

A huge thank you to the talented M. J. Trow for collaborating with me on this project. His wealth of knowledge is admirable and his decades of expertise as a history teacher shine through to this day. The Weird War trilogy has been a part of both of our lives for over five years and a huge amount of painstaking research has been undertaken to make this series. Another huge thank you goes to Carol Trow, our long suffering conduit, editor and oracle who, with patience, humour and endurance, has not only mediated between two occasionally contrasting views, but also taken on the task of typing it up and generally keeping the peace!

Below each title, you will find one to three exclamations to demonstrate how weird we personally believe something was, from weird, to weirder, to weirdest.

Welcome, one last time, to Weird War Two...

Richard Denham

Introduction

The Second World War 1939-45

The Causes

The older generation still call it ‘Hitler’s War’ but monumental events that lead to the deaths of millions cannot be placed at any one man’s door. To understand how war came about in September 1939 we have to go back to the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War.

The victors at Versailles – Britain, France, Italy and the United States – decided that Germany had caused the First World War (which they hadn’t) and that Germany must pay. To that end, territory which once belonged to Germany was taken away, German armed forces were cut to almost non-existence and the country was saddled with a massive reparations bill of £3.5 billion (at least $46 billion today) and it couldn’t possibly pay.

The weak democratic Weimar government struggled on for ten years, but the financial disaster of October 1929 – the Wall Street crash – plunged Germany particularly deeply into recession and that gave a new impetus to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party, which, until then, had been regarded as something of a lunatic fringe. In a series of underhand political manoeuvres, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and set up a state he promised would last a thousand years – the Third Reich. In fact, it lasted just twelve and a half years and the steps that led to the Second World War also led to Germany’s second defeat in thirty years.

THE STEPS TO WAR 1933-39

1933 Hitler becomes Chancellor of a bitter and angry Germany.

1934 On the death of President Hindenberg, Hitler becomes President, giving himself the title Fuhrer (leader).

All members of the German army (Wehrmacht), air force (Luftwaffe) and navy (Kriegsmarine) swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler.

1935 In an Anglo-German naval agreement, Germany is allowed to build