# Any famous urban legends of WWII? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 13, 2012, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640 "2012-09-13T23:09:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/141 "2012-09-25T17:29:15Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I picked up a copy of _The History Buff’s Guide to World War II_ by Thomas R. Flagel. It’s a book of trivia lists about the war. > > Here’s his list of the “Top Ten Popular Myths and Misconceptions” (he goes on to devote a page or two to refuting each of these items). > > 1. Hitler was into the Occult > 2. Roosevelt knew in advance about Pearl Harbor > 3. French soldiers readily surrendered in 1940 > 4. Blitzkriegs succeeded because of overwhelming numbers > 5. Hitler’s jet fighters could have controlled the skies > 6. Rockets could have won the war for Germany > 7. Only Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps > 8. Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima > 9. Use of the atomic bomb was racially motivated > 10. Truman “gave up” Eastern Europe I dunno if 4 through 7 are really all that popular. For example, I’ve never heard anyone actually say that Nazi rockets could have won the war. Number 1 is understandable, in that people wrongly assume that Nazism was a unified creed. Certainly _some_ leading Nazis were into the occult (Hitler himself thought they were nuts, and I believe said as much). ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/142 "2012-09-25T18:58:35Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I picked up a copy of _The History Buff’s Guide to World War II_ by Thomas R. Flagel. It’s a book of trivia lists about the war. > > Here’s his list of the “Top Ten Popular Myths and Misconceptions” (he goes on to devote a page or two to refuting each of these items). > > 1. Hitler was into the Occult > 2. Roosevelt knew in advance about Pearl Harbor > 3. French soldiers readily surrendered in 1940 > 4. Blitzkriegs succeeded because of overwhelming numbers > 5. Hitler’s jet fighters could have controlled the skies > 6. Rockets could have won the war for Germany > 7. Only Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps > 8. Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima > 9. Use of the atomic bomb was racially motivated > 10. Truman “gave up” Eastern Europe We can’t KNOW about #9, but I feel sure the people of Dresden would laugh at the idea that we took it easy on the Germans because they were white. ---
**Author:** ![That\_Don\_Guy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/that_don_guy/32/538_2.png) [@That\_Don\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/That_Don_Guy)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/143 "2012-09-25T19:17:22Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > There’s one about the Luftwaffe repairing shot-down B-17’s and crewing them with English-speaking Germans who would pretend to be stragglers, fit into an American formation, then start firing. “The version I heard was,” the Swiss would take planes that landed in Switzerland and use them to shoot down planes of the same nationality that subsequently violated Swiss airspace. The main WWII UL I know is the one about how the Red Cross suddenly started charging exorbitant amounts of money for things like sweaters in Hawaii in the days following Pearl Harbor. ---
**Author:** ![muldoonthief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muldoonthief/32/3188_2.png) [@muldoonthief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muldoonthief)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/144 "2012-09-25T19:20:34Z")
There’s the UL that the RAF started a program to harden bombers and make them more able to survive flak & machine gun damage. So they examined damaged planes that had returned successfully, and armored the parts of the plane that seemed to suffer the most damage. This had no effect on survival rates. Then a clever chap (since he was British) suggested armoring the parts of the planes that showed the _least_ damage. This immediately decreased the rate of lost planes by 50%. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/145 "2012-09-25T19:31:02Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > We can’t KNOW about #9, but I feel sure the people of Dresden would laugh at the idea that we took it easy on the Germans because they were white. They only got roasted, not irradiated. Major improvement. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2012, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/146 "2012-09-25T19:32:13Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > There’s the UL that the RAF started a program to harden bombers and make them more able to survive flak & machine gun damage. So they examined damaged planes that had returned successfully, and armored the parts of the plane that seemed to suffer the most damage. This had no effect on survival rates. > > Then a clever chap (since he was British) suggested armoring the parts of the planes that showed the _least_ damage. This immediately decreased the rate of lost planes by 50%. I never heard that one, but I can see why it would make a good UL. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Cicero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cicero/32/3594_2.png) [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/147 "2012-09-26T01:34:17Z")
Spurred on by Little Nemo and his book, I found the one I have named “Myths and Legends of the Second World War”. It covers a lot of ground from the little boats saving all the soldiers at Dunkirk to paratroopers dressed as nuns, but the one I like is probably more a belief then a myth. This was Churchill’s stirring broadcasts to the nation which seem to appear in most movies. In his finest voice he talks of "blood, toil, sweat and tears’, "their finest hour"and “fighting them on the beaches”. Well, Churchill did make the speeches, but to the House of Commons. The voice on the radio repeating the speeches was a professional actor named Norman Shelley, who featured as Larry the Lamb for The Childrens Hour. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/148 "2012-09-26T12:29:35Z")
The Norden Bombsight. Used in USAAF bombers, this device was supposed to be super accurate-but you had to be flying level, and be able to see the target. I was told (by an 8th AF veteran) that they had strict orders to destroy the bombsight if the plane crash landed-it was “top secret”. Only the NB would have been of no use to the Luftwaffe at all-they didn’t have heavy bombers, and were in no position (by 1943) to mount mass air raids over England. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/149 "2012-09-26T13:03:01Z")
The size of the bombers didn’t matter. The Norden bombsight was standard equipment in US level bombers, including even single engine carrier-based planes, and more commonly B-25 and B-26 twin-engine medium bombers, and the Germans had thousands of similar planes that could have used it. The real myth was the secrecy of the bombsight, [as the Germans had the plans as early as 1938](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight#Espionage). ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/150 "2012-09-26T13:34:47Z")
> [@Cicero](#): > > Spurred on by Little Nemo and his book, I found the one I have named “Myths and Legends of the Second World War”. > > It covers a lot of ground from the little boats saving all the soldiers at Dunkirk to paratroopers dressed as nuns, but the one I like is probably more a belief then a myth. This was Churchill’s stirring broadcasts to the nation which seem to appear in most movies. In his finest voice he talks of "blood, toil, sweat and tears’, "their finest hour"and “fighting them on the beaches”. Well, Churchill did make the speeches, but to the House of Commons. > > The voice on the radio repeating the speeches was a professional actor named Norman Shelley, who featured as Larry the Lamb for The Childrens Hour. Let’s hope he never mixed up his scripts, then. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/151 "2012-09-26T13:38:57Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > The size of the bombers didn’t matter. The Norden bombsight was standard equipment in US level bombers, including even single engine carrier-based planes, and more commonly B-25 and B-26 twin-engine medium bombers, and the Germans had thousands of similar planes that could have used it. > > The real myth was the secrecy of the bombsight, [as the Germans had the plans as early as 1938](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight#Espionage). Did the US authorities know that the Germans had the secret? I see that the guy was convicted of spying. Plenty of secrets held by either side and treated as secrets were in fact known to the other side(most famously, the Allies knew all about the Enigma machine). ---
**Author:** ![muldoonthief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muldoonthief/32/3188_2.png) [@muldoonthief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muldoonthief)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2012, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/152 "2012-09-26T13:47:30Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Plenty of secrets held by either side and treated as secrets were in fact known to the other side(most famously, the Allies knew all about the Enigma machine). And there’s the disputed story (does that make it an urban legend?) that the [British knew about an upcoming bombing raid on Coventry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ultra), but didn’t take any defensive action to prevent it or even evacuate the town in order to protect the secret that they’d broken Enigma. ---
**Author:** ![movingfinger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@movingfinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/movingfinger)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/153 "2012-09-27T07:02:25Z")
A story I heard about Churchill’s “Never surrender” speech: he was trying it out on some supporters and media types and after he said “We shall never surrender” he added “And we shall fight them by throwing empty beer bottles at them because that’s all we’ve got,” ---
**Author:** ![slaphead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9bcb4/32.png) [@slaphead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slaphead)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/154 "2012-09-27T11:36:15Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Did the US authorities know that the Germans had the secret? Probably not, since the germans didn’t bother copying the norden in a recognizable form. They instead used [their own simplified version](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotfernrohr_7) which was cheaper, simpler to make and use, and plenty good enough. In combat it was actually pretty hard work to get half the bombs within a quarter-mile of target, regardless of how sophisticated the bombsight was - the norden was a bit like fitting a 10x scope on a blunderbuss. ---
**Author:** ![Cicero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cicero/32/3594_2.png) [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/155 "2012-09-27T15:34:42Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > And there’s the disputed story (does that make it an urban legend?) that the [British knew about an upcoming bombing raid on Coventry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ultra), but didn’t take any defensive action to prevent it or even evacuate the town in order to protect the secret that they’d broken Enigma. I started to reread my book about the myths today and it seems like this was a myth, caused by the faulty recollections of a codebreaker in a book. There was no Enigma decodes pointing to Coventry. There was a collection of information (from downed German fliers amongst others) that a large raid was planned, but due to a “technical” malfunction the British didn’t divert it. It wasn’t really much to do with Enigma. ---
**Author:** ![An\_Gadai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/156 "2012-09-27T16:08:54Z")
The only time I ever heard that Coventry myth before this thread was in an episode of Babylon 5! ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/157 "2012-09-27T17:02:56Z")
> [@An\_Gadai](#): > > The only time I ever heard that Coventry myth before this thread was in an episode of Babylon 5! It also got mentioned in a second-season episode of Sherlock. I wonder, does that story have any relation to the phrase “gone to Coventry” for someone who is being shunned? A quick Google indicates the phrase is older than that, now that I look. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/158 "2012-09-27T20:46:56Z")
Regarding British decoding of German Enigma messages: the German navy started losing submarines like crazy-many times they would surface (at night to recharge batteries), only to find a PBY overhead-ready to drop a torpedo or depth charge. What did it take Adm. Doenitz so long to realize that daily position reports were a bad thing? ---
**Author:** ![Gray\_Ghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c0e974/32.png) [@Gray\_Ghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gray_Ghost)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2012, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/159 "2012-09-27T22:37:01Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Regarding British decoding of German Enigma messages: the German navy started losing submarines like crazy-many times they would surface (at night to recharge batteries), only to find a PBY overhead-ready to drop a torpedo or depth charge. > What did it take Adm. Doenitz so long to realize that daily position reports were a bad thing? It wasn’t just the code-breaking. Radar at night, especially centimetric radar deployed starting 1942-ish, is a pretty effective tool. So too, radio direction-finding. Recent (within the last 20 years) scholarship has suggested that D/F was as effective or more than ULTRA in finding U-boats, particularly U-boats near the convoy. Clay Blair’s _[Hitler’s U-Boat War](http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-U-Boat-War-Hunted-1942-1945/dp/0679457429)_ goes into the subject _ad nauseum_ and is an essential reference. Here’s some more [info](http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/ETO/Ultra/SRH-025/SRH025-8.html) about D/F, and German attempts to foil same. Submarines of that era preferred to cruise on the surface. Their speed and maneuverability were much higher on the surface (14-18 knots vs. 2-3 (burst speed of 7 kts)) and their endurance was near-infinitely greater on the surface. Eventually, the U-boats, after flirting with strategies like Flak-boats and cruising in groups through choke points like [Biscay](http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2-2Epi-c4-WH2-2Epi-a.html), eventually adapted with the snorkel. Though snorkel speeds were ~6 kts max, the snorkel could still be detected from the air, and the submarine was wholly blind while snorkeling. The daily position reports weren’t so much the issue as was the constant communication necessary to set up a wolfpack—that got D/F’d by the convoy, and often earned the submarine an immediate charging DE down the line of bearing—and the necessity for ultra-long range missions to rendezvous with supply submarines. After mid-1943, when the Allies started to have sufficient excess escort capacity, those decoded position reports for rendezvous and for ordinary submarines were the subject of hunter-killer groups with orders to ‘hunt to exhaustion.’ They were more often than not successful. Finally, how was Doenitz going to know what killed the submarine in question or even when it was killed? All Lorient knew was that U-‘so and so’ never replied to requests for status reports. Often, a sunk U-boat did so with no survivors, and so no way for POWs to exchange information like, “We transmitted our acknowledgement of the proposed rendezvous, and as soon as we got there, we were set upon by an Avenger/Hellcat team. With a brace of destroyers lighting us up with sonar.” ---
**Author:** ![Pine\_Fresh\_Scent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/43a26b/32.png) [@Pine\_Fresh\_Scent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pine_Fresh_Scent)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2012, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640/160 "2012-09-28T04:12:25Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > One of the pilots who shot down the two twin-engine “Betty” bombers carrying Admiral Yamamoto and his staff once noted that he got right in on the tail of the Betty he shot down; his gun suite fired straight down the length of the narrow, flimsy aluminum fuselage at point-blank range. He said he was _certain_ he killed everyone in the airplane with that single burst. My Time/Life _The Epic of Flight_ book mentions that the pilots’ names weren’t released by the US after the shoot down because the brother of one was in a Japanese POW camp at the time. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-famous-urban-legends-of-wwii/634640.md?page=9)