As if the mission wasn't insane enough, the Germans then decided to beef up the plant's defenses, sprinkling mines, floodlights, and guards all over the place. The only way to get into Hitler's Arctic nuke factory was a Nazi-held bridge over a 660-foot ice gorge, because sometimes history sounds like shit that we just made up.

Anders Beer Wilse

Or at least the Germans thought that was the only way in -- the Norwegians simply climbed down the supposedly un-scalable ice gorge and snuck into the factory. They laid the explosives and were about to light the fuse and escape, but (and none of this is a joke) the base's Norwegian caretaker, whom they were holding at gunpoint, announced he'd lost his glasses and refused to leave until they were found. Naturally, the commandos put the "stop Hitler from getting the bomb" plan on hold until they'd located gramps' glasses.

Hallvard Straume/Wiki Commons

Not only did the commandos complete their mission without casualties (they released the caretaker and another civilian as soon as the fuses were lit) and get medals up their asses, one of them (and three other Norwegians) actually came back later to sink the ferry the Germans were trying to use to evacuate the heavy water they already had. Jesus. We know these were literally Nazis and the fate of the world was at stake, but that just feels like bullying now, Norway.

The revolutionary ideas of Nikola Tesla have inspired electric car manufacturers, awesome T-shirts, and the "revolutionary" ideas of Thomas Edison. What you might not know is that Tesla also caused WWII-era Japan to aspire to even higher levels of batshit insanity when he uttered two little words: "death" and "ray."

Dickenson V. Alley

After famously inventing an earthquake machine, alternating current, and even drones, Tesla claimed in 1934 that he had a "death beam" that could wipe out entire armies. This was never proven, and most of the world didn't seem to take the idea very seriously ... except for Japan, who took it seriously enough to give their scientists the dramatic sum of 1 million yen to build one of these things. Future Nobel Prize winner Sin-Itiro Tomonaga was involved in the appropriately titled "Project Power," which by the end of the war had produced a legit death-ray prototype capable of killing at a distance of up to half a mile. The catch: The target had to stand perfectly still for five to 10 minutes, so this doomsday device would have been effective only against the extremely lazy.

via worldwarphotos.info

The prototype wasn't particularly cool-looking, either. It was just a magnetron (equipment mostly used for radars back then) and a 75-foot mirror, which is generally not something you'd try to haul to a battlefield. Still, it was a work in progress, and it did work -- Japan's mad scientists successfully tested it against tied-up rabbits, monkeys, and marmots, and even managed to use it to stop a motor (if the hood was up). One of the experimenters tested it on himself for a few seconds and felt dizzy and fatigued for the next 24 hours. Presumably, he grew into a giant and stomped Tokyo after that.

Japan never got a chance to whip out their death ray during battle. We have no idea what happened to the prototype (some say they threw it into a lake), but we can only hope some American soldier snuck it home and used it to cook hamburgers from a mile away on the Fourth of July.

The scientists also learned how to weaponize a whole bunch of human diseases, including typhoid, cholera, and, oh, freaking anthrax. The ingenious synthetic medium they invented to keep the diseases dangerous for weeks was considered an "outstanding" (read: terrifying) achievement by the American scientists who raided Nazi laboratories after the war.

So why didn't they use all this stuff? Because the boss-man didn't like it. Early in the war, Hitler issued an obscure order that said there could be no offensive biological weapons research. Nazi scientists basically ignored that order and did it anyway, but Hitler refused to change his mind when he was informed that he now had WMDs. Theories about why he did that abound: Maybe it's because he had bad experiences with bioweapons during WWI, or because he considered science in general an elaborate Jewish plot, or because he was high on cocaine and bull semen around this time. Probably a combination of all three.

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Still, you would think selling Hitler on the "wipe out America tonight" idea would be an easy task, but nope; he didn't budge. The moral of this story: If you want to take over Europe, don't be a paranoid anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist with an affinity for cocaine-bull-semen speedballs, kids.

To be fair, they had no idea the U.S. was now at war with Japan, since Niihau didn't have advanced technology like "phones" or "any form of communication."

James Lansdale/U.S. Army

Yoshio Harada, a natural-born American citizen of Japanese ancestry, was brought in to translate for Shigenori, so he did exactly that ... while leaving out some small details, like the whole "This guy just bombed Pearl Harbor" part. Word of the attacks reached the island anyway, at which point the situation turned rather awkward -- Shigenori demanded that the guy who pulled his ass out of the wreckage, Howell Kaleohano, return some Japanese documents he'd grabbed from the plane. Kaleohano declined, presumably because toilet paper was a rare commodity on the island. Fittingly, that's when shit got real.

Deciding that Japan was definitely gonna win the war, Harada stole some guns and basically enrolled in the Japanese army right there. He attacked the guard keeping tabs on Shigenori, and then the two paid Kaleohano a visit to politely ask for the secret papers back (with a shotgun). Kaleohano escaped and went into full Paul Revere mode, telling everyone on the island the luau was definitely over. As panic gripped Niihau, Shigenori and Harada went drunk with power: They carjacked a wagon and pimped it with belt-fed machine guns salvaged from the wreckage, then went around shooting guns and taking hostages. They also went back to Kaleohano's house and burned it to the ground for no reason, since Kaleohano was by then in the process of rowing to the nearest payphone.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images

When the Japanese duo threatened to start executing hostages unless they produced the secret papers, a man named Ben Kanahene and his wife, Ella, charged at the pilot, bashed his head, and slit his throat with a knife. Harada still had a gun, but he used it in the most sensible way, given the situation: He shot himself rather than face the husband-and-wife tag team. Kanahene was loaded with awards, medals, citations, a purple heart, and even a song titled "They Couldn't Take Niihau, Nohow" for defeating a Japanese invasion with a knife and a wife. Ella got a "Nice going, sweetheart. Now bring us some Mai Tais."

Hawaii Reporter