True. And it was just the word “nuts”, not any type of swear word. The guy who said it was General Anthony McAuliffe. Vincent Vicari, McAuliffe’s personal aide at the time, recalled that “General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language. ‘Nuts’ was part of his normal vocabulary.”
The Germans sent a surrender party bearing a white flag and this message:
General Anthony McAuliffe laughed and said: “Us surrender? Aw, nuts!” But then McAuliffe realized that some sort of reply was in order. He pondered for a few minutes and then told the staff, “Well I don’t know what to tell them.” He then asked the staff what they thought, and Lt. General Harry W. O. Kinnard spoke up, saying, “That first remark of yours would be hard to beat.” McAuliffe said, “What do you mean?” Kinnard answered, “Sir, you said ‘Nuts’.” All members of the staff enthusiastically agreed, and McAuliffe decided to send that one word, “Nuts!” back to the Germans.
Legend: The M1 Garand rifle had a fatal flaw. It ejects it’s en-bloc clip after the last round. German sodiers would wait for the sound and then attack the helpless GI.
Truth: There is no reliably documented case of this ever happening. It takes a couple of seconds to load a fresh clip, leaving precious little time for the enemy to capitalize on the empty rifle. Any Germans close enough to hear the not all that loud sound of the clip being ejected, would probably be deaf from the sound of the preceding shots, and if engaged against multiple riflemen it would be difficult if not impossible to tell which rifle had just emptied. It would have been trivial to fake the clip ejection and thus draw the enemy out if they had been relying on this.
During the desert war in North Africa, both the British and Axis accused each other of putting oil into the wells prior to a retreat.
Turns out the most likley explanation is that oil reserves were leaking into underground water aquifers - periods of non-use of water during times when such places were in the front line would allow oil to accumulate.
Wellll… when I was in high school JROTC our instructor was a Korean War veteran. His take on this situation was that it’s not so much the sound of the clip springing out of the rifle, but the noise of the clip hitting rocks on the ground as it falls. He described it as a “clang”, and said the North Koreans waited for it as a signal to attack.
From my limited experience with the M1, there’s a greater danger of catching fingers or thumb in the breech when loading a new clip. That thing snaps like a turtle.
I do wonder now about the accuracy of coming back several times losing 12 aircraft (what’s that - about 100 trained men?)
I have just read a book about the RAF bombing in 1943 and it indicated a loss of around 5% was the upper limit. After that, the bombing would quickly become not an option.
(Of course, there was far more than the lost aircraft- many aircraft coming back would be unserviceable, aircrew wounded and stuff like that).
The evidence for the Luftwaffe actually targeting the 100th is skimpy enough to make it a UL, despite the flat assertion in the Wiki article. Its loss rate may simply have been a combination of tough targets, inexperience due to the loss rate (which would have been a self-perpetuating problem), low morale from belief in being targeted among other things (also self-perpetuating), and simple bad luck.
As to the impostor story, whether German crews of captured B-17’s actually shot down formations or not, they *could *have (and one episode of “Twelve O’Clock High” showed that ). That was enough for the USAAF to order the shootdown of any apparent straggler asking to join a formation, no matter how sure of their identify. That must have meant the loss of some planes anyway.
Bomber crews’ braveness may have been mostly helplessness - there simply wasn’t much they could do most of the time except know they were being shot at or were about to be, for hours on end, and most intensely over the target while they had to fly straight and level. Quite a few did crack up. It might have been even worse for Lancaster chaps, who had no protection below, even from a single ball turret. Their only way to know if a German night fighter was in the area was to see or feel the bullets coming up through the belly. At least infantrymen could take cover and shoot back.
Is that “almost” as in “chickening out and doing nothing at all”? I saw that one too. You’d have thought they could at least have broadcast some Chuck Berry. :mad:
And here’s another: The UL that Yamamoto said after the attack “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” He didn’t. The “quote” dates only to 1970, and the ending of Tora! Tora! Tora!. To what I hope is the surprise of no one, Hollywood made it up.
At the time, I think it was an urban legend that Hitler had one testicle, but it may have been true.
Sung to the tune of Colonel Bogey’s March
Hitler had only got one ball
Goering had two, but very small
Himmler
Was very sim’lar
And Goebbels had no balls at all…
(I think Cecil discusses this in one of his books)
Stretching it a bit, there’s a saying that Austria’s greatest accomplishment of the postwar era was to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.
IOW, there’s a UL that Austria was an innocent victim of Nazism and that “The Sound of Music” was a documentary, while the photos suggest otherwise.
I would disagree here. As I mentioned, I have just finished a book (recommend it to anyone by Kevin Wilson) about the bombing of 1943. Very basically, flak was a terrible problem for the Stirling bombers due to a low ceiling. The Halifaxes had a higher ceiling but not as good as the Lancaster. This had the effect of drawing a lot of the fire and nightfighters away from the higher flying Lancasters. When the Stirlings were withdrawn from the bombing of Germany the losses in Lancasters rose.
Anyway, by 1943 the Germans had adopted a pretty effective tactic called “Nacht Musik”. A night fighter (often a Ju 88 or ME110) was fitted with upward firing cannons. They also had a radar and when a bomber was located they flew underneath the bomber, and just fired upwards. The Lancaster crews did not even know they were there until the aircraft started being torn apart. The bombers - even without radar detection- were able to be seen by being silhouetted against high cloud and with glowing exhausts as the engines struggled with a large bomb load.
). That was enough for the USAAF to order the shootdown of any apparent straggler asking to join a formation, no matter how sure of their identify. That must have meant the loss of some planes anyway.