Funny side stories of WWII thread

[tloger]

LOL, thats right, I remember that.  What a way to sugar coat it

[Adlertag]

@RogertheShrubber:

LOL, thats right, I remember that.  What a way to sugar coat it

So, are we running out of funny stories, or what ?

[CWO Marc]

@Adlertag:

So, are we running out of funny stories, or what ?

Here’s another one.  In early August 1941, Churchill, various members of his staff and a number of officers were on a train heading to northern Scotland, where they would embark on the battleship Prince of Wales to cross the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt for the Atlantic Charter conference.  After an excellent meal aboard the train (Churchill not being particularly finicky about observing wartime food rationing regulations), the Prime Minister asked his scientific advisor Professor Lindemann to figure out how much champagne he had consumed during his adult life at the rate of around one pint per day.  Lindemann took out his slide rule and did a few computations, then announced the answer.  Churchill, very pleased with the impressive-sounding figure, then asked Lindemann to calculate how many trains would be required to carry that much champagne.  To Churchill’s disappointment, the answer he received to that question was that one-half of the train car in which they were sitting would be quite sufficient.  (Someone then jokingly asked Lindemann to determine how many yards of cigars Churchill had smoked over a lifetime, but “The Prof”, as he was known, declined to make the attempt.)

CWO Marc

[tloger]

Allied window tint-  In an attempted to charter Roosevelt in secrecy from the airport to his Moroccan hotel in the week before the Casablanca meeting.  Allied soldiers slung mud onto the windshields of his escort car to conceal sight into the vehicle.  Perplexed Arabs and French locals were intrigued by this odd juvenile behavior in witnessing grown men fling mud onto the car like children.

[CWO Marc]

And here are two more amusing stories connected to the Atlantic Charter conference.  Roosevelt travelled to the rendezvous site (Placentia Bay, Newfoundland) aboard the cruiser USS Augusta.  At one point along the way, the cruiser was getting ready to deploy its paravanes, an operation involving a lot of dangerous steel cables.  An officer stood on deck supervising the preparations, making sure that everything was properly set up and that everyone was in a safe place before the paravanes were released.  He was just about to blow into a whistle to give the release signal when Fala, Roosevelt’s famous terrier, appeared on deck and walked right into the middle of the paravane cables.  The horrified officer quickly dropped the whistle from his mouth – if he’d blown into it, Roosevelt’s dog would have been torn to pieces – and told somebody remove Fala from the scene.  From that day onward, Roosevelt’s staff was put under strict orders to keep Fala on a leash whenever the Presidential pooch went for a walk around the ship.

When the Augusta met the Prince of Wales and its three escorting destroyers in Newfoundland, a young lieutenant from the Augusta was put in charge of a group of sailors and given the task of transporting to the other ships around 2,000 cardboard gift boxes which had been prepared at Roosevelt’s instructions.  Each box contained cheese, fruit, a carton of American cigarettes and a card from the President expressing his best wishes to the officers and crew of the Royal Navy ships.  The young lieutenant had the boxes piled into one of the Augusta’s boats, then he and his men set off for the Prince of Wales.  They were received very gratefully by the British sailors, who had been operating on rather tight food rations (but who, unlike American sailors, had access to alcohol aboard ship).  The British officers rushed the American lieutenant to the wardroom, where they gave him a glass of gin, while his enlisted men were taken below deck by the British sailors and given a ration of grog.  The Americans then got back into their boat and delivered the remaining gift boxes to the British battleship’s three accompanying destroyers – where in each case they received the same kind of high-proof welcome they’d gotten on the Prince of Wales.  The whole group was pretty well sloshed by the time they got back to the Augusta.

CWO Marc

[Jermofoot]

2nd Lt. Charlie Brown & his B-17F Flying Fortress named “Ye Olde Pub”

2ND Lt. Charlie Brown was a B-17F Flying Fortress pilot with the 379th
Bomber Group at Kimbolton, England. His B-17F was called “Ye Olde Pub” and
was in a terrible state, having been hit by flak and fighters. The compass
was damaged and they were flying deeper over enemy territory instead of
heading home to Kimbolton. Most of the tail & half of the stabilizer were gone.

After flying over an enemy airfield, a pilot named Franz Stigler
was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17F. When he got near
the B-17, he could not believe his eyes. In his words, he “had never seen a
plane in such a bad state”. The tail and rear section was severely damaged,
and the tail gunner wounded. The top gunner was all over the top of the
fuselage. The nose was smashed and there were holes everywhere.

Despite having ammunition, Franz flew to the side of the B-17
and looked at 2nd Lt. Charlie Brown, Lt. Brown was scared and
struggling to control his damaged and bloodstained plane.

Aware that they had no idea where they were going, Franz waved
at Charlie to turn 180 degrees. Franz escorted and guided the stricken
plane to and slightly over the North Sea towards England. He then saluted
Charlie Brown and turned away, back to Europe.

When Franz landed he told the C.O. that the plane had been shot
down over the sea, and never told the truth to anybody. Charlie Brown and
the remainder of his crew told all at their briefing, but were ordered
never to talk about it.

More than 40 years later, Charlie Brown wanted to find the
Luftwaffe pilot who saved the crew. After years of research, Franz was
found. He had never talked about the incident, not even at postwar
reunions.

They met in the USA at a 379th Bomber Group reunion, together
with 25 people who are alive now - all because Franz never fired his guns
that day.

Research shows that 2nd Lt. Charlie Brown lived in Seattle and Franz
Stigler had moved to Vancouver, BC after the war. When they finally met,
they discovered they had lived less than 200 miles apart for the past 50
years!

[losttribe04]

I am kind of supprised not to have seen the exchange between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor…

Lady Astor was known as a fierce debater. The famous exchange between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor took place when they were both staying at Blenheim Castle visiting the Marlboroughs. The two politicians had been at each other’s throat all weekend when Lady Astor said, “Winston, if I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee.” Whereupon Winston said, “Nancy, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

[CWO Marc]

Another good mutual-insult exchange (though this one wasn’t face to face) was the one between MacArthur and Eisenhower.  Ike had served on MacArthur’s staff prior to the Second World War, and there was clearly no love lost between the two men.  Eisenhower later said that he had studied drama under MacArthur for seven years, and MacArthur said that Ike was the best clerk he had ever had.

CWO Marc

[Historybuff]

During the battle for Port Morsbery Japanease air raids were so frequent that soldiers would sleep in thier tiny slit trenches!  Or they would dig them inside their tents so they could just roll out of thier cots into the trenches.

[aequitas-et-veritas]

their was that school teacher in england who loved to make riddles where you have to figure out all the lines to get the final solution…accidently he put words in it like juno, sword and so on and the crossword was overlord!!..he brought it up only a couple of weeks before the allied blow and landing in normandy w. the same TOPSECRET name OVERLORD and some of their beachhead-landingzones…
he got busted by american intelligence and held prison until overlord was over…it was one over other reasons that the whole mission was almost about to be called off!!!
(their were other reasons as well)
they interrigate the teacher but the outcome was that it was pure coincidence…however, they had to let him go…

[tloger]

During a meeting between de Gaulle and Stalin the talks had stalled over the topic of which government to recognize in Poland.  In a fit Stalin remarked he could not deal with a country who ran from an enemy to meet defeat.  De Gaulle quipped under his breath, “In your case you just have much more room to run.”

[Crazy Ivan]

:roll:
My dad was a B17 ball turrent gunner in the 8th Airforce. While he was stationed in England he and the other crewmen would get together in the club between missions and drink cases of beer. So much so that they would stack the cans in the middle of the room in a pyrimid 5 or 6 feet high!
At sometime late in the evening their C.O. would come running into the room and dive head first into the pile of cans!
Everyone would cheer and go back to the barracks to sleep it off.
One night and new squadron came into the club early and started the stacking before the veterans got there, the pile was qutie large already so everyone tried to catch up to them by drinking a lot more quickly than usual, but what they did not know was that the new crews had started the stack around and on top of a table!
As usual the C.O. charged into the room and dived head first into the hugh stack!
Yep, he suffered a concussion, and then forbid the stacking of beer cans in the club for the rest of the war.  :-P

[MadMc]

When Hitler was told that Brazil was leaning to the Allies camp, he remarked “Brazil will join the Allies when snakes smoke ciggarettes” When the Brazillian Expeditionary Force began fighting in Italy, they wore a shoulder patch showing a snake smoking

[CWO Marc]

@MadMc:

When Hitler was told that Brazil was leaning to the Allies camp, he remarked “Brazil will join the Allies when snakes smoke ciggarettes” When the Brazillian Expeditionary Force began fighting in Italy, they wore a shoulder patch showing a snake smoking

Here’s a similar story about Hermann Göring, courtesy of Wikipedia:

On 9 August 1939, Göring boasted “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring: you can call me Meier!” (“I want to be called Meier if …” is a German idiom to express that something is impossible. Meier (in several spelling variants) is the second most common surname in Germany.) By the end of the war, Berlin’s air raid sirens were bitterly known to the city’s residents as “Meier’s trumpets”, or “Meier’s hunting horns.”

CWO Marc

[tloger]

During operation HUSKY, German officers made vast attempts to mislead Italian soldiers about the treatment of POW’s in US camps.  Efforts in this area were increased as the operaton went on in order to convince the Italians that fighting to the death would be a better road to take then surrendering after hoards of Italian units began surrendering en masse.  During one interrogation of an Italian officer, the captive inquired, " So when are you gunna start?"  The quizical interrogators replied, “Start with what?”  The captured officer then returned to say, “Cutting off our balls.”    After a brief moment of laughter the US interrogators assured him that they were not here to castrate him but only question him.  With tears in his eyes he graciously thanked them for their clemency.  To most US camp interrogators they felt more like saviors then their captors. (Atkinson “Day of Battle”)

[CWO Marc]

Also on the subject of Italian POWs: some Italians captured by the British in North Africa ended up being interned in the Orkney Islands, where they were put to work constructing concrete barriers to seal off the eastern entry route into Scapa Flow (the route taken by U47 when it torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak in October 1939).  Sometimes, arguments would break out between the Italians and the British personnel supervising the work, and an Army interpreter would be called in to sort out the dispute.  After one such altercation, a Navy officer took the interpreter aside and asked him why he had been translating for the Italian man who’d been complaining, saying that, “This fellow can speak English!”  The interpreter retorted that the man couldn’t “even speak Italian!” – an answer which no doubt baffled the Navy officer until the prisoner later confided that he’d been speaking in dialect.  (“Churchill’s Prisoners: The Italians In Orkney, 1942-1944.” St Margaret’s Hope : Orkney Wireless Museum, 1992.)

CWO Marc