50 World War II Facts You Probably Weren't Taught in School

50 Lesser-Known Facts About World War II

School history lessons on the Second World War tend to cover the big turning points: the invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, D-Day, the Holocaust and the atomic bombs. The war, though, was also made of millions of smaller stories, odd coincidences and unexpected consequences that still shape daily life, from the soft drinks we buy to the myths we believe about carrots.

The fifty facts below are grouped by theme: life on the home front, spies and deception, remarkable individuals, leaders and diplomacy, crimes against civilians, and the war’s staggering scale. Each one has been checked against reliable references, and where a popular version of a story turns out to be exaggerated or wrong, we explain what the record actually shows. Some of the figures are estimates that historians still debate, and we say so where it matters.

Life on the home front

1. Fanta was born in wartime Germany. When the war cut off supplies of Coca-Cola syrup to Coca-Cola’s German bottler, its manager Max Keith developed a new drink from whatever ingredients were available, such as whey and apple pomace. He named it Fanta, from the German word Fantasie. After the war the brand returned to the parent company.

2. Nutella grew out of a postwar cocoa shortage. Chocolate stayed scarce after the war, so in 1946 the Piedmont pastry maker Pietro Ferrero stretched it with plentiful local hazelnuts, creating a sliceable paste called Giandujot. A spreadable version followed, and the recipe was reworked and renamed Nutella, with the first jars leaving the Alba factory in 1964.

3. Oscars were made of plaster for three years. Because metal was needed for the war effort, the Academy handed out painted plaster statuettes during the war years. Winners were later invited to swap them for the usual metal figures once the war was over.

4. American car factories almost stopped making cars. US manufacturers built over three million passenger cars in 1941, but civilian production was halted in early 1942 so plants could turn out tanks, aircraft engines and trucks. A commonly cited figure holds that only 139 new cars were made for civilians for the rest of the war.

5. Soldiers’ toilet paper was rationed. A widely repeated statistic says British soldiers were issued three sheets a day while Americans received 22. It is hard to find the original source, so treat the exact numbers as folklore, but the gap reflects how much better supplied US troops generally were.

6. The carrots-for-night-vision story was propaganda. Britain wanted to hide that its night fighters were using new airborne radar. The Air Ministry encouraged a story that pilots such as John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat’s Eyes,” saw so well because they ate plenty of carrots. Carrots supply vitamin A, which the eyes need, but eating extra will not sharpen normal vision.

7. Canada gave badges to men who were turned away. Volunteers who tried to enlist but were rejected on medical grounds could receive a small war service badge. It let them show strangers that they had offered to serve, sparing them accusations of shirking.

8. London Zoo killed its venomous animals. At the outbreak of war, the Zoological Society of London destroyed its venomous snakes and spiders in case bombing let them escape into the city. Many larger animals were moved to Whipsnade, the society’s country park.

9. The bill was enormous. Journalist Chris Hedges, in his 2003 book What Every Person Should Know About War, calculated the cost of the war to each American at about $20,388. Whatever the exact method, the US spent roughly $300 billion at the time, an astronomical sum that dwarfed every earlier conflict.

Spies, codes and deception

10. A crossword setter scared British intelligence. In the weeks before D-Day, answers in Leonard Dawe’s Daily Telegraph crosswords included “Utah,” “Omaha,” “Overlord,” “Mulberry” and “Neptune,” all secret code words. Investigators questioned the schoolmaster and found no espionage. The likely explanation emerged later: Dawe asked pupils to suggest words, and some had picked them up from soldiers camped nearby.

11. One double agent was decorated by both sides. The Spanish spy Juan Pujol García, code-named Garbo, fed the Germans an invented network of agents and helped convince them that the main Allied landing would come at Calais, not Normandy. Germany awarded him the Iron Cross, and Britain made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

12. A Dutch warship disguised itself as an island. In 1942, as Japan overran the Dutch East Indies, the minesweeper HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen covered itself in branches and foliage, hid near the coast by day and moved only at night. The disguise reportedly worked, and the ship reached Australia.

13. The Taj Mahal was hidden under scaffolding. Fearing air raids, British authorities in India covered the mausoleum’s dome with bamboo scaffolding so that from above it would look like a pile of building material rather than a landmark. India reportedly repeated the precaution during its wars with Pakistan.

14. The Eiffel Tower’s lifts stopped working. According to the familiar account, French workers disabled the lift cables before German troops entered Paris in June 1940, and spare parts were impossible to obtain. German soldiers had to climb the stairs to raise a swastika flag at the top, and Hitler never went up during his brief visit.

15. A hidden radio stayed hidden for decades. Prisoners of war risked severe punishment to build and conceal radios that brought them Allied news. In one story covered by the BBC, a former British POW returned to his camp more than sixty years later and reportedly found his radio still in its hiding place.

Remarkable individuals

16. The future Queen trained as a mechanic. In early 1945 Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army. She learned to drive and maintain heavy vehicles, becoming the first female member of the royal family to serve full time in the armed forces.

17. Hitler’s nephew fought against him. William Patrick Hitler, born in Liverpool to Hitler’s half-brother Alois, moved to the United States and, after appealing directly to President Roosevelt, joined the US Navy in 1944 as a medical corpsman. He later changed his surname and lived quietly on Long Island.

18. The youngest US serviceman was twelve. Calvin Graham lied about his age to join the US Navy in 1942 and was wounded aboard the battleship USS South Dakota during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. His age came out only after his mother contacted the Navy. He lost his medals and was discharged; most were restored in 1978, and his Purple Heart was finally given to his widow in 1994.

19. An RAF gunner survived an 18,000-foot fall. On the night of 24 March 1944, Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade jumped from his burning Lancaster bomber without a parachute rather than burn to death. Fir trees and deep snow broke his fall, and he escaped with a sprained leg. His German captors only believed him after examining the wreckage.

20. A bear served in the Polish army. Wojtek, a brown bear adopted as a cub by Polish soldiers in Iran, was officially enlisted with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the 2nd Polish Corps. During the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944 he reportedly helped carry crates of shells. He spent his later years at Edinburgh Zoo and died there in 1963.

21. A coconut helped rescue John F. Kennedy. In August 1943 Kennedy’s patrol boat, PT-109, was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands. Islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana found the survivors and carried a message Kennedy had scratched on a coconut husk to an Allied base. As president, Kennedy kept the coconut on his desk in the Oval Office.

22. One man survived both atomic bombs. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945, then returned home to Nagasaki in time for the second bomb three days later. Japan officially recognised him as a survivor of both in 2009, the only person to receive that status. He died in 2010 at the age of 93.

23. A midwife delivered thousands of babies at Auschwitz. Stanisława Leszczyńska, a Polish Catholic midwife deported for helping Jews, is credited with delivering around 3,000 babies in appalling conditions at the camp. She refused orders to kill newborns. Few of the infants survived, but her testimony became an important record of the camp.

24. Two doctors faked an epidemic to save thousands. In Rozwadów in occupied Poland, Eugeniusz Łazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz injected people with harmless killed bacteria of the Proteus OX19 strain, which made blood tests show a false positive for typhus. The Germans, terrified of the disease, quarantined the area instead of deporting its residents. An estimated 8,000 people were spared.

25. The Grand Mosque of Paris sheltered Jews. Rector Si Kaddour Benghabrit is credited with giving false Muslim identity papers to Jews, including the Algerian singer Salim Halali. How many were saved is disputed: estimates range from about a hundred to over a thousand, and historians such as Serge Klarsfeld have questioned the larger figures.

26. Anne Frank’s arrester went looking for himself in her diary. Karl Silberbauer, the SS sergeant who led the arrest of the Frank family in August 1944, was tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal in 1963, by then working as a police inspector in Vienna. He told reporters he had recently bought the diary to see whether he was in it, and found he was not; the diary ends days before the arrest.

27. Two Greek students tore down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis. On the night of 30 May 1941, weeks after Athens fell, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas climbed the Acropolis and removed the swastika flying over the city. The act became one of the first symbols of resistance in occupied Europe, and Glezos went on to a long political life.

Leaders, diplomacy and long endings

28. A French marshal predicted the next war. Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander in 1918, is reported to have said of the Versailles settlement that it was not peace but an armistice for twenty years. He objected that it left Germany too strong. The Second World War began in September 1939, almost exactly two decades later.

29. Hitler’s threats left a president collapsing. In the early hours of 15 March 1939, Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha was told in Berlin that Prague would be bombed unless he accepted German occupation. He suffered a heart attack or collapse during the meeting and was revived with an injection by Hitler’s doctor before signing.

30. Canada declared war on Japan before the US did. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and on Hong Kong on 7 December 1941, the Canadian government declared war on Japan that same day, a few hours ahead of the US declaration on 8 December. Canadian troops were already fighting in the defence of Hong Kong.

31. Churchill lost power soon after victory in Europe. Britain voted in July 1945, about two months after Germany surrendered, while the war against Japan was still going on. Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won a landslide on promises of housing, jobs and a national health service. Churchill returned as prime minister in 1951.

32. Hitler is not known to have visited a death camp. Historians have found no record that Hitler ever toured a concentration or extermination camp. He kept his distance from the killing itself, leaving its organisation to Himmler, Heydrich and the SS, although documents leave no doubt of his central responsibility for the Holocaust.

33. Russia and Japan never signed a peace treaty. The two countries ended their state of war with a joint declaration in 1956, but a formal peace treaty has never been signed. The sticking point is the southern Kuril Islands, seized by the Soviet Union in 1945 and still claimed by Japan as its Northern Territories.

34. Some Japanese soldiers kept fighting for decades. Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda held out in the Philippine jungle until March 1974, surrendering only when his former commanding officer flew in to relieve him of duty. Private Teruo Nakamura, found on the Indonesian island of Morotai in December 1974, is generally considered the last holdout.

Crimes against civilians

35. As many as 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust. Over a million of them were Jewish, and tens of thousands were Roma. Children were among the first selected for death on arrival at killing centres because they were not considered useful for labour.

36. Auschwitz was the only camp that tattooed prisoners. The practice began in autumn 1941 with Soviet prisoners of war, who were marked on the chest. From 1942 Jewish prisoners selected for labour were tattooed, usually on the left forearm. People sent straight to the gas chambers were never registered or numbered.

37. The “Museum of an Extinct Race” is largely a legend. A popular story claims Hitler planned to display looted Jewish objects in a museum to a vanished people. What is documented is the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, founded in 1942, where Jewish curators catalogued items from destroyed communities with Nazi approval but for very different aims. Historians have questioned whether a museum of the kind described was ever planned.

38. Japan dropped plague-infected fleas on China. In 1940, Japan’s biological warfare programme, Unit 731, spread fleas carrying bubonic plague over Chinese cities including Ningbo, causing deadly outbreaks. Japan acknowledged the unit’s existence only decades later.

39. Chemical weapons were rarely used on battlefields. Poison gas was first used on a large scale in the First World War. During the Second World War, Japan used chemical weapons in China; Italy had used mustard gas in Ethiopia in 1935–36, just before the wider war. Nazi Germany did not use gas against Allied armies, but it used poison gas to murder millions in its death camps.

40. The Red Army committed mass sexual violence. As Soviet troops advanced into Germany and other parts of Central Europe in 1945, rape of civilians was widespread. Historians’ estimates for Germany run as high as two million victims, figures based on demographic research rather than precise counts. The subject was suppressed for decades in both East and West.

The war in numbers

41. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people. Older lists give 21 million for “Russia,” but the figure most often cited today is about 27 million deaths for the whole Soviet Union, including roughly 8.7 million soldiers. Ukrainians, Belarusians and other Soviet peoples suffered enormous losses alongside Russians.

42. The Eastern Front consumed Germany’s army. Roughly three-quarters or more of German military deaths occurred fighting the Soviet Union. The scale of combat there dwarfed the campaigns in North Africa, Italy and western Europe.

43. The “80% of men born in 1923” claim is shaky. A widely shared statistic says four in five Soviet men born in 1923 died in the war. Demographers have not confirmed that figure, but the young men born in the early 1920s were drafted first and suffered terrible losses, leaving a gender imbalance visible in Soviet censuses for decades.

44. Total deaths reached 70 to 85 million. Modern estimates for the whole war, including deaths from famine and disease, range around 70–85 million, about 3% of the world’s population at the time. The Soviet Union, China, Germany and Poland accounted for the largest share, and the majority of the dead were civilians.

45. Flying was deadlier than the Marines. The US Army Air Forces lost more men than the US Marine Corps: roughly 88,000 airmen died compared with about 24,500 Marines. Bomber crews over Europe had especially grim odds.

46. Over 100,000 Allied bomber airmen were killed in Europe. RAF Bomber Command alone lost about 55,000 aircrew, and the US Eighth Air Force lost tens of thousands more. For much of the war, a bomber crew had poor chances of completing a full tour of missions.

47. Millions of tons of bombs fell. A commonly cited figure says the Allies dropped about 3.4 million tons of bombs between 1939 and 1945, an average of roughly 27,700 tons a month. Cities from Hamburg and Dresden to Tokyo were largely destroyed.

48. Germany is still digging up wartime bombs. Construction sites regularly uncover unexploded shells and bombs, forcing evacuations of whole neighbourhoods. Bomb disposal teams reportedly deal with around 2,000 tonnes of old munitions every year, and experts expect the work to continue for decades.

49. You could follow the war on Twitter. The account @RealTimeWWII, created by historian Alwyn Collinson, retold the war day by day, starting with events of 1939, posting as though the news were breaking in real time. It drew hundreds of thousands of followers.

50. Nothing else in history compares. The Second World War killed more people, destroyed more property, cost more money and redrew more borders than any other conflict. Institutions it produced, including the United Nations, still shape the world today.

How to read “facts you weren’t taught” lists

Viral trivia lists are fun, but they often blend solid history with exaggerations, unsourced numbers and tidy anecdotes that are hard to verify. When a fact sounds too neat, look for a primary source, a museum or archive, or a reputable historian. For the Holocaust, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem publish carefully sourced material. And remember that behind every number on this page were individual people and families whose stories are worth learning in full.

Sources: Leonard Dawe; Calvin Graham; Nicholas Alkemade; Wojtek (bear); Eugene Lazowski; Grand Mosque of Paris; Karl Silberbauer; Nutella; Jewish Museum in Prague; Second Italo-Ethiopian War (all Wikipedia); Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; ZSL London Zoo during World War Two; Veterans Affairs Canada; Library of Parliament, Canada.