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Interesting Facts and Stories

Battle of Vitoria 1813: British 14th Light Dragoons captured King Joseph Bonaparte's chamber pot. They drink champagne out of it to this day

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Ted Weatherhead was a 21-year-old green 2nd lieutenant and co-pilot of a C-47, twin-engine, transport plane — a member of the 316th Troop Carrier Group, 44th Troop Carrier Wing, 9th Air Force — that dropped 19 fully-equipped 101st Airborne paratroopers behind enemy lines on D-Day hours before the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II.-

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2nd Lt. Ted Weatherhead

“That night we took off for France and flew south from Cottesmore, England to Land’s End, at the southern tip of the country, and crossed the English Channel,” “We came across the north side of Normandy and dropped our paratroopers.

“The weather was terrible and I was scared to death of hitting another plane flying in formation with us. Our 16-plane squadron was flying in groups of four planes each. There were 20 or 30 of these squadrons each filled with paratroopers headed for Normandy,” Weatherhead said.

“We flew in a V-formation following our leader until he gave us the green light on the top of his airplane. That was the signal to drop our paratroopers,” he said. “As we did we turned on the three black lights atop our fuselage and on both wings of our transport plane.

“We were flying 500 feet off the ground when they jumped. The paratroopers didn’t like it because we were flying too fast and too low when they bailed out,” Weatherhead said. ” We were going about 120 mph. when they jumped which was awfully fast for them. They would have much rather jumped at 2,000 feet, not 500.-

“Because we were flying so low and fast the Germans didn’t have much chance to shoot at us. Even so, the enemy’s .50 caliber machine-guns were effective. We counted 30 bullet holes in our C-47 from enemy machine-gun fire after the first flight,” he said.

“When we reached our base we thought we were through for the day. After debriefing we immediately went to bed and slept until they woke us up later that morning for our second D-Day flight. The second time we towed a glider that held a Jeep and 10 paratroopers over there.

“The Germans knew about our gliders. What they did was plant telephone pole-size posts in the ground standing three or four feet tall in many of the open fields along the Normandy coast to keep the gliders from landing. We tried to find a field that didn’t have posts when we dropped our glider off.

“When we returned from our second flight over Normandy that day they gave each of us a shot of whiskey. We took it and slept like a baby all night long,” Weatherhead recalled with a grin more than 65-years later.-

Excerpt from article in donmooreswartales
 
Soldier under three flags.

Lauri Allan Törni (28 May 1919 – 18 October 1965) was a Finnish Army captain who led an infantry company in the Finnish Winter and Continuation Wars and moved to the United States after World War II.

He is known as the soldier who fought under three flags: Finnish, German (when he fought the Soviets in World War II) and American (where he was known as Larry Thorne) when he served in U.S. Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War.

He was born Lauri Allan Törni in Finland joining the Finnish Army in 1938. He fought in Finland's war with the Soviet Union and was awarded every medal for bravery that could be awarded including the Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, which is the equivalent of the American Congressional Medal of Honor.

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Törni as Finnish official.

After Finland aligned with the Soviet Union in 1948, he joined the German SS to continue to fight the communists.

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Lauri Törni as SS-Untersturmführer.

He came to the United States after World War II and entered the Army and selected for the Special Forces program. After receiving a commission, he was serving in South Vietnam.

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In the US Army.

He was a passenger on board a Vietnamese Air Force H-34 helicopter that crashed while on a covert mission to report on North Vietnamese border activity operations. Military search missions did not find any remains of the crash and classifed as Missing In Action then presumably killed in action.

The main character of Robin Moore's "The Green Berets" is loosely based on his life and portrayed by John Wayne in the film. Twenty years later he was the subject of the book "Soldier Under Three Flags" by In 1999, in a joint United States-Vietnam mission located the crash site and the remains found there identified him and the three South Vietnamese crew members Lieutenant Bao Tung Nguyen, First Lieutenant The Long Phan and Sergeant Vam Lanh Bui. All four were buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.
 
On 15 March 1915, General John Pershing led an expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa. This expedition was ill-equipped and hampered by a lack of supplies due to the breakdown of the Quartermaster Corps. Although there had been talk of war on the border for years, no steps had been taken to provide for the handling of supplies for an expedition. Despite this and other hindrances, such as the lack of aid from the former Mexican government, and their refusal to allow American troops to transport troops and supplies over their railroads, Pershing organized and commanded the Mexican Punitive Expedition, a combined armed force of 10,000 men that penetrated 350 miles into Mexico and routed Pancho Villa's revolutionaries, severely wounding the bandit himself.
There is a prophetic photograph surviving from those days: a picture taken at Nogales of Generals Obregon, Villa and Pershing. Behind Pershing and to his left stands First Lieutenant George S. Patton, Jr.
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Nemo 33 is the deepest indoor swimming pool in the world. The pool is located in Brussels, Belgium. Its maximum depth is 34.5 metres (113 ft). It contains 2.5 million liters of non-chlorinated, highly filtered spring water maintained at 30 °C (86 °F) and holds several simulated underwater caves at the 10 metres (33 ft) depth level. There are numerous underwater windows that allow outside visitors to look into the pools at various depths. The complex was designed by Belgian diving expert John Beernaerts as a multi-purpose diving instruction, recreational, and film production facility, 2004.-
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Ernst Hess, a jew saved by Adolf Hitler.
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A German historian argues that Adolf Hitler personally defended a Jewish lawyer, his former top military in World War I, and at least temporarily protected him from Nazi persecution, according to a report published by the newspaper "Jewish Voice from Germany."

Full article, here:
http://jewish-voice-from-germany.de/cms/hitlers-jewish-commander-and-victim/
 
The Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, where Hannibal destroyed the sixteen Roman and Allied legions, led by Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. In all, perhaps more than 80% of the entire Roman army was dead or captured (including Paullus himself).
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The Death of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, by John Trumbull, 1773.-.
 
Out of tens of thousands of Germans captured by British forces in World War I and World War II, only one, Oberleutnant Gunther Pluschow, escaped successfully from a Prisoner of War (PoW) camp in Britain to return to Germany.
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After an epic series of adventures escaping from a German outpost in China in 1915 via the USA, he was captured in Gibraltar and taken to Donington Hall, Leicestershire, UK. He escaped from there and lived as a vagrant dock worker for several weeks before stowing away on a Dutch steamer, and, evading Dutch police, he eventually completed his journey by train to Germany. He married in 1916, and after the war he worked for the German air postal service.-
He died aged 44 in 1931 in a plane crash while exploring a glacier over southern Chile.-
 
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