Sad but interesting.
Hitler’s former food taster reveals the horrors of the Wolf’s Lair
Please share some you have read about.
This one is about Civil War Colonel John Singleton Mosby is kinda funny.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/john-singleton-mosby.html
During WW2 Witold Pilecki was all kinds of awesome.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Witold_Pilecki.html
Never understood food tasters. Is the meal made hours in advance so that the tasters can be evaluated before the meal is eaten by the VIP? What happens if only one small part of the meal is poisoned? Say for example one chickpea is hiding the lethal dose.
Anyways!
What an incredibly horrible story. The 20th century has so many of them.
My entry is from Leech’s Thirty Years From Home, page 131 on this link. The section describes the fate of a powder monkey (probably 12 to 14) aboad HMS Macedonia during a battle with the USS United States:
As a dad of a young boy I shudder to think about children in battle. So much to lose.
It might be more well known than I figure (Hell, they made a movie about it* Heroes of Telemark, *and a NOVA special), but the story of the raid to sink the German Heavy Water production in a Norway lake has always intrigued me.
The NOVA follow-up was fantastic.
The book The Road to En-Dor by E.H. Jones. A true story (despite wording of link below); but what it tells of, must be one of the most bizarre P .O.W.-escape episodes ever. The escape plan by the author and an associate, British / Australian P .O.W.s in Turkey in World War 1: involved their convincing their venal captors, that the pair – claiming to be in league with supernatural forces – knew of potential means for self-enrichment for said captors – which they would facilitate; in the process, they hoped to make their break for freedom.
As a former member of the 8th Infantry Division I was made aware of MG Charles Canham. At best he looked like an accountant. Sometime after D-Day he was promoted to Brigadier General and made the Assistant Division Commander. He was tasked to receive the surrender of the German garrison at the Port of Brest. The German commander was a Lieutenant General of paratroopers and was annoyed at surrendering to a lower ranking officer. He demanded to see the credentials of Canham. BG Canham pointed to his dirty, tired soldiers and said, “These are my credentials.” That became the motto of the 8th ID.
Earlier as a Colonel that nerdy unassuming looking officer commanded the 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division. That was the unit that hit Omaha Beach first and took devastating casualties. He was credited as almost single handedly moving his troops off the beach and inland. From wikipedia (and confirmed by other things I’ve read over the years):
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Funny you should mention chickpeas and a couple threads having me harking back to high school history classes.