4 Heroes of World War 2 Who Have Yet To Get Their Own Movies

During the war, the U.S. Army Air Forces had great difficulty making a bombsight (as the name suggests, an aiming device for bombs) that could withstand the freezing temperatures at high altitudes. The material they used to make the crosshairs for these devices -- black widow spider webs -- was not only brittle and extremely difficult to work with, but also extremely rare.

Out of desperation, the War Department went to their back-up plan and posted advertisements in several newspapers asking for blonde women to send in samples of their hair -- but only if it had never been "primped with curling irons or treated with chemicals of any kind." It took two years, but eventually, Mary Babnik Brown, a factory worker from Pueblo, Colorado, responded with a sample of her hair and an ironclad guarantee that not only did it match their requirements perfectly, but that she also had enough hair for several wars' worth of bombsights.

Mary Babnik BrownThat's not a shawl she's draped in.

The government immediately snapped her up and asked her to send in strands 22 inches long ... a challenge she, no pun intended, blew apart by sending in strands 34 inches long.

Although Brown was eager to help the war in any way (so much so that she refused to take the money that the government was offering), the process wasn't easy for her. After her hair was removed, she reportedly cried for two days straight, and in a later interview, she described how it took two months to get over her loss. ("At first I was so ashamed, I wore a bandana to work so people wouldn't ask me about it.")

The kicker to this story, however, is that it wasn't until 1987, over 40 years after her donation, that she learned precisely what her hair was used for. As it turns out, the initial ad was rather vague, since the War Department -- some would say, wisely -- didn't want to advertise to the enemy that their bomb-dropping skills matched those of a toddler playing Angry Birds.

Over the course of the war, 500+ conscientious objectors willingly became test subjects for "dangerous and life-threatening medical experiments seeking cures for malaria, hepatitis, atypical pneumonia and typhus." In other words, all of the nasty natural bullshit that was killing the troops faster than the enemy could.

In 1941, for instance, a group of conscientious objectors based at Campton, New Hampshire signed up to be infected with lice (the primary cause of typhus) in order to provide a way for scientists to test different concoctions of anti-louse powders. In the words of the guy who ran the experiment, they lived "in complete isolation for 18 days, without changing or washing their underwear, clothing, or bedding ... and [tried] out any powders or sprays which [the scientists] thought safe for human trial."

It wasn't just diseases and all-you-can-scratch body bugs, either. Some signed up to be dehydrated or starved in order to determine the best way of keeping, for example, dehydrated shipwrecked sailors or starved civilian populations alive after they were saved, lest rescuers accidentally kill them.

The most famous of these experiments was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which a group of 36 subjects were starved -- again, with their consent -- for an entire year, which resulted in "significant decreases in their strength and stamina, body temperature, heart rate and sex drive," along with causing them to "dream and fantasize about food, read and talk about food and savor the two meals a day they received."

The kicker is that the war was over by the time that it wrapped, although it wasn't entirely in vain. The long-term results of the experiments were severe enough to help spur the creation of the Marshall Plan, which was designed to assist postwar countries in fighting disease, malnutrition, and poverty.

As one enforcer described an average night:

"The Nazi scumbags were meeting one night on the second floor. Nat Arno and I went upstairs and threw stink bombs into the room where the creeps were. As they came out of the room, running from the horrible odor of the stink bombs and running down the steps to go into the street to escape, our boys were waiting with bats and iron bars. It was like running a gauntlet. Our boys were lined up on both sides and we started hitting, aiming for their heads or any other part of their bodies, with our bats and irons. The Nazis were screaming blue murder. This was one of the most happy moments of my life."

Huh. We guess Inglorious Basterds was historically accurate after all.

And as we mentioned, Lansky himself was a lead-by-example boss:

"We got there that evening and found several hundred people dressed in brown shirts. The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speaker started ranting. There were only about fifteen of us, but we went into action. We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. Yes, it was violence. We wanted to teach them a lesson. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."

Lansky was also assisted in his quest to introduce Nazi face to Jewish fist by Walter Winchell, a journalist who would not only broadcast glowing reviews of his "work," but also leak information to the gang about forthcoming meetings that could do with some disruption. We'd recommend that modern-day journalists take notes, but honestly, at this point we'd settle for having them stop writing glowing profiles about white supremacists.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

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