Born where though? Could it be, dum dum dom, Germany?
It’s the part about being surprised that surprises me. I doubt most Americans could get the first verse right.
There are documented of German crews flying captured B-17s, some as long-range transports, and some to infiltrate Allied airspace to do things like airdrops of spies and supplies.
According to Wiki, there were Genman B-17s used to infiltrate American B-17 formations, though not to attack them. Their purpose was to trail them and provide real-time intelligence. I’m not terribly clear on why this was necessary given that the Germans had radar – perhaps the crew could give more accurate reports about numbers of attackers and such.
There is also at least one documented case of an Italian pilot named Guido Rossi using a captured P-38 Lightning to shoot down straggling American bombers. This led to one of the strangest aerial confrontations of the war. In response an American pilot named Harold Fisher began flying a specially modified B-17 (an unsuccessful “escort bomber” concept, the YB-40, a B-17 loaded with double the guns and ammunition of regular B-17s) to lure Rossi into attacking it. The plan ultimately worked and Rossi was shot down by the YB-40.
Yes, the fact that someone claiming to be an American is surprised about the ignorance of Americans is really quite suspicious. We know how dumb we are!
The book, Dirty Little Secrets of World War 2, is filled with these, and the authors’ attempts to prove or disprove same. One story in it concerns an American soldier during the fighting in France.
I’ve also heard the story with a British Army soldier in the place of the American, with an additional date in 1940 added to the list.
Before the wall came down my dad took us to Berlin and I pretty clearly remember seeing pictures of lamp shades made from human skin in some of the museums on the western side of the wall. The museum exhibits mostly were only photographs of Nazi atrocities. I would not call that an urban legend.
Occasionally when he was asked to be a speaker for [whatever], Isaac Asimov would sing all verses of The Star-Spangled Banner and then give an overview on what each verse meant.
And, sweet merciful heaven. . . a recording of it is on youtube.
German recon units got as far as the Moscow suburb of Khimki. There’s a monument on the road to St Petersburg marking their farthest point of advance. It’s about 14 miles (23 km) from the Kremlin, but you still can’t see its spires from there (I doubt you could in 1941 either, despite the terrain being relatively flat).
I have this book which is loaded with strange stories, mysteries and urban legendesque stuff. Among my favorites is an ad that appeared in The New Yorker magazine just before the war for a board game, which was supposed to have provided guidance to Fifth Columnists in the United States. Then there’s the mystery radio message broadcast to an American outfit just before the Battle of the Bulge, in fluent American, warning that the “Krauts” were creeping through the woods about to attack. The unit went on alert, nothing happened, they went back to sleep and then a few hours later they supposedly were overrun by attacking Germans. No one ever figured out who the mystery broadcaster was. :eek:
Were they the ones with unmelted snow on their helmets?
Well, Pittsburgh. Is that close enough to be a fifth columnist?
There’s the story of the guy who was goofing off on an American ship who always claimed he was a “kluge maker”. Nobody wanted to look stupid by not knowing what a kluge was, so the officers let him alone.
One day, an admiral got suspicious and gave him three days to construct a kluge, or he was in big trouble. The guy frantically assembled a heap of scrap metal and spare parts, just to postpone the inevitable.
Finally, the admiral came to inspect his work. The guy accidentally knocked it overboard, and as it hit the water, the splash made the sound kluuuuuge…
Actually, this story’s a variation of a joke dating back to the 1800’s.
The snow was on their boots in any telling I’ve ever heard of it.
Could you provide a telling here?
Wait… What is the one about the Russian soldiers in Scotland in WWI? I had heard of the other two but not that one.
It was that in the darkest days of WWI that reinforcements from Russia, some said as many as 200,000 men, had landed in Scotland on their way towards the Western Front. Various tales of soldiers in odd uniforms, speaking an odd language were reported but the smoking gun was that these soldiers still had snow on their boots. Of course there were no such reinforcements but apparently at the time the story spread like wildfire and is of course still recalled today.
I’ve heard an explanation that newly recruited Scottish soldiers, especially Gaelic speakers, were mistaken for Russians by metropolitan English folk but I find that a tad hard to believe. Added to the apparently confusion was that when asked where they were from the soldiers said “Ross-shire”, an area of the highlands.
It began with the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’ll have to take a look at it, next time at the library. Thanks for the link.
Another favorite WW2 urban legend that I don’t think’s been mentioned yet is the D-Day Crossword.
I’ve heard a more sensible variation on this: during the French war in Vietnam, troops were dropped with parachutes but without parachute training. Apparently they did not suffer significantly more casualties from the drop than parachute-trained soldiers.
I’d be interested if anyone has knowledge as to the truth or falsehood of these:
[ul]
[li]During the Battle of the Bulge, an American officer responds to a German demand for surrender by saying “nuts”. Alternately, by saying a word that’s more common in soldier vocabulary that family-friendly history books just can’t print.[/li][li]During a counter-attack on an American beachead in Italy, the Germans capture some American medical supplies including supplies of donated blood. They refuse to use the blood to save their own troops because “it might have come from Jews or negroes”.[/li][li]An American soldier bursts in on some German officers about to eat a fancy meal and yells “Stop, I’ll take that!”[/li][li]A soldier’s parachute gets got on a church spire in France and he dangles helplessly while watching the battle for the town.[/li][/ul]
Not like us. We allowed the Jewish blood.
#1 - Anthony McAuliffe at Bastogne.
#4 - D-Day. St. Mère-Église. Trooper John Steele