5 Stories That Prove Everyone Gets WW2 Wrong

The first instance we know of involved Pyotr Nesterov taking down an Austrian reconnaissance plane by way of aerial ramming. When the war broke out, aiming a spent warplane at a valuable target had become an official Russian tactic known as taran. Of course, these weren't technically suicide attacks, there being an infinitesimal chance that a sufficiently skilled pilot could bail out before the kaboom.

For the Poles, going in for the ol' explosive headbutt was what one did when out of ammo. And shortly after the U.S. entered the war, USAAF Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr. was portrayed as the first true American hero of the conflict when he piloted his tattered B-17 directly into the smokestack of a Japanese battleship. That story turned out to be complete horseshit (Kelly kept the plane in the air long enough for his crew to escape before going down in a non-battleship-related crash), but it nevertheless elevated him to bona fide rock star status at a time when the American public needed it. All cultures have had suicide missions in some form or another -- it's just that when the other guy does it, it's crazy and barbaric, but when we do it, it's tragic yet necessary. You know, like double parking.

When the Allies denied that request, the Russian / Nazi / briefly Allied POWs resorted to rioting, attempted mass suicide, and tried to sabotage the engines of their transports -- anything to avoid being shipped back to Russia. Regardless, the vast majority were indeed sent back to the Motherland. And we'll go ahead and assume Stalin laughed it all off as a case of "boys will be boys." Too many of these entries are ending on a bummer.

While it's comforting to imagine that all the lowly German soldiers and police officers were decent human beings stuck in an impossible situation, the uncomfortable truth is that there was always a choice. For instance, during the massacre of the 1,200 Jews from the Polish village of Jozefow (what remained of the village's 1,800-strong population after the fittest were shipped off to work camps), officers were allowed to bow out if they found the "work" distasteful. Nevertheless, 80 goddamned percent of them kept shooting until the job was done, mostly citing their desire to have a continued career after the war as justification.

Career is important, of course, but it's rarely "slaughter 1,200 innocent people" important.

What's that? Who in the ever-loving hell is Wilhelm Tranow? Tranow was Turing's Nazi doppelganger. Initially a battleship radio technician during the First World War, Tranow found he had a knack for breaking the British Navy's encrypted codes -- the ones they never bothered changing, like your old Hotmail password. So when war broke out again in 1939, Germany already knew where the Allied fleets were. From 1940 to 1943, the Nazis read 80 percent of all British naval communications, and knew the exact positions of more than half of all Allied convoys at any given time. The British would develop a new cipher after a devastating loss to German U-boats. Tranow and his team would crack the new cipher. Repeat ad infinitum. Historian David Kahn once said, "If one man in German intelligence ever held the keys to victory in World War II, it was Wilhelm Tranow."

It was largely due to the efforts of the B-Dienst that the Nazis were able to waltz right into Norway virtually unopposed. Only with 1943's development of the Typex cipher machine (basically a souped-up Enigma) did Britain effectively hide Allied movements from the Nazis.

Not that America did any better, mind you. Most of the world had already cracked America's codes, and were routinely eavesdropping on our top-secret diplomatic cables years before Pearl Harbor. Thank god the U.S. learned its lesson from all that, and now guards its classified information very closely.

For more war facts not taught to us by Steven Spielberg, check out 5 Bizarre Ways Everyone Gets World War II Wrong and 5 Insane True Stories That Change How You Picture WWII.

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