The Royal Navy used Q-ships in both world wars. These were warships disguised as merchantmen, or merchant ships with hidden armament, typically behind hinged panels, used as decoys to draw German submarines to the surface. The name comes from their home port of Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland.
When the Lusitania was sunk by a U-boat in 1915, the survivors and victims were brought to Queenstown (which would be renamed Cobh in 1922). Over one hundred of those who perished are buried in the Old Church Cemetery just north of town.
The German U-boat U-505 was captured by the U.S. Navy in 1944. It was later donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and has been an exhibit at that museum since 1954.
The fortune of U-boat commander Georg von Trapp, immortalized (though in a very fictitious way) by Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, came from his English first wife, Agatha Whitehead, whose grandfather invented and manufactured the leading torpedoes for both the German and the British navies before World War I. Most of the fortune he inherited from her was lost during the Depression and the baron refused to work at a desk job, thus the family’s main source of income came from converting their mansion into a hotel and from their concert appearances (though unlike the musical what they sang was a form of German religious folk music).
Commander Edward Whitehead, despite his war service, gained his lasting fame as the spokesmodel for Schweppes soda.
Gustave Whitehead (born Gustav Weiskopf) of Bridgeport, Connecticut is credited by some with making the first successful heavier-than-air flight two years before the Wright Brothers, although documentation is scant and dubious and he never repeated the feat.
When the Wright Brothers reported their first successful powered, controlled flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. to their hometown Dayton newspaper by telegram in December 1903, a skeptical editor saw to it that the paper simply noted, “The Wright Brothers will be home for Christmas.”
Too late again…
One custom in England is to burn Christmas mistletoe on the twelfth night. This supposedly increases the liklihood that boys and girls who have kissed under the mistletoe will eventually get married.
Many commentators have noted similarities between the character of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and film comic Stan Laurel. Since Laurel and Hardy first rose to popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, is has not been uncommon for actors, including some famous ones, to incorporate Laurel-like mannerisms when portraying this character.
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Stan Laurel got his start in Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, where he worked with another young British comic named Charles Chaplin.
If she is still on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II will become the longest-reigning British monarch in history, surpassing Queen Victoria, on September 10, 2015 at age 89.
Legend has it that the Cunard-White Star liner RMS Queen Mary was originally intended to be named RMS Queen Victoria, but when company officials informed King George V that the ship would be named after England’s greatest queen, he replied “Her Majesty will be so pleased.”
Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V, details the search for a mysterious character known only by that initial. It was the first use of his fictional company Yoyodyne.
A creative play there, sir!
Thomas Pynchon’s best-known novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, starts with the image of a German rocket hitting a man right in the head, nose first, and ends with a story of a stowaway on another V-2. In between is a display of serious mental illness. 
In the United States, mental illness is generally diagnosed using the DSM IV-TR, a manual for clinical psychological and psychiatric use published by the American Psychiatric Association. DSM stands for “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”
[del]The large municipal civic center in Huntsville, AL is the Von Braun Center, named in honor of Werner von Braun who was an officer in the SS, a member of the Nazi party, and most famously designed rockets for Hitler’s automated blitz of England. After the war he became a highly decorated and honored scientist for NASA and head of the Marshall Space Flight center in Huntsville.[/del]
One of the regular comic foils of the Animaniacs - Yakko, Wakko, and Dot - is their Germanic “p-sychiatrist”, Doctor Scratchandsniff.
Doctor Leonard H. “Bones” McCoy was chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise for most of Capt. James T. Kirk’s tour of duty. He lived at least to the age of 137 and came aboard the Enterprise-D for a brief visit in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Encounter at Farpoint.” He was played by actor DeForest Kelley, who died in 1999.