Questions tagged [world-war-ii]
Questions about World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War; a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945.
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Does the "survivorship bias" airplane diagram come from World War II research on returning war planes?
This is a famous diagram. It is used extensively to demonstrate the concept of "Survivorship Bias".
Here is a typical example claim associated with this diagram:
In World War 2 the allies ...
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Did the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff claim the USSR would convince all Japanese?
An opinion piece posted on 10.05.2016 08:46 by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey on Pravda states that Peter Kuznick claimed:
The Japanese leaders did not know that at Yalta Stalin had agreed to
come into the ...
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Did a million Germans die after World War 2 in "Eisenhower's death camps"?
According to The Millennium Report
Call it callousness, call it reprisal, call it a policy of hostile neglect: a million Germans taken prisoner by Eisenhower’s armies died in captivity after the ...
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Was plastic from a seaplane shot down in 1944 recently found in an albatross stomach?
The environmentalist website Ocean Sentry makes the claim (citing Calgary Herald) that:
The massive clockwise North Pacific Gyre is carrying plastic that is over 50 years old. Last year, plastic ...
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Secret instructions for the German submarines for the cruise to Agartha, a hidden land in the Antarctic. Are they authentic?
I saw this document posted on several websites about forgotten continents. They detail the maneuvers that a submarine must take to make it through the Antarctic to the other side.
Is there anything ...
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Did "the" London Agreement of 1945 bind the Soviets in writing to provide air access to [West] Berlin?
One Australian Airforce page offers this nutshell version of why the Soviets agreed to air corridors but shut down land access to West Berlin in the late 1940s.
Berlin was in the centre of the Soviet ...
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Did Truman say this about helping whichever of Germany and Russia were losing during the war?
Taken from Good Reads:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't ...
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Did British journalists keep silent about Russian defections to Germany in WW2?
In George Orwell's essay, The Prevention of Literature, he claims this:
When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians — mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives —...
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Did German troops ignite pools of kerosene on a ship in March 1943?
A recent video on the YouTube Lindybeige channel relates the story of Operation Creek in WWII in which irregular British forces invaded a German ship off Goa (now in India), March 1943. He cites James ...
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Did besieged Russians eat 'library candy' made from boiled down book binding glue?
David Benioff's 2008 historical fiction novel City of Thieves follows two youths during the siege of Leningrad in 1942.
In one scene, the narrator explains how the starving inhabitants of the city ...
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Was Koenigsberg area given to the USSR for 50-year administration rather than permanently?
This article says:
That is how a third of the northern part of Eastern Prussia was handed over for the USSR to manage – until the Peace Conference would decide otherwise. Because Moscow was ...
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Was the EU created or supported by Nazis? [closed]
My dad has started preaching from this self published book (Indisputable Evidence Proving the EU Was Created by Nazis, by Jack King) which claims the European Union was both wanted and created by ...
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Did 40% of the NKVD (Soviet police) leadership have Jewish nationality?
Timothy D. Snyder wrote a history book, Bloodlands about the mass killings of Central/Eastern Europeans between 1933-1945.
Jewish Currents, a magazine of the Jewish Left, cite him in making claims ...
user52544
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Did the Allies reverse the threads on secret microfilm-hiding buttons to thwart the Germans?
Here is an anecdote that I recall reading as a child:
During World War II, the English found a way to smuggle microfilm past the German authorities. They sewed a hollow button to their jackets that ...
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Was the first German bombing of London an accident?
A 2002 Telegraph article reports:
The first German bombing of London on the night of Aug 24, 1940, was an accident but sparked a war of attrition that would last for five years.
German aircraft ...
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Did WWII Japanese soldiers engage in cannibalism of their enemies?
This Cracked article claims that Japanese soldiers in WWII would eat prisoners of war.
The article claims that there were a number of documented cases of Japanese soldiers engaging in cannibalism:
...
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Did 57% of people in France believe that the USSR contributed the most to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945?
The following image is frequently circulating when WWII is discussed:
Poll in France: "In your opinion, which country contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945?" (Source: polls IFOP 1945, ...
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Is the March of the Immortal Regiment a cult of the German Third Reich?
The March of the Immortal Regiment is a recent tradition which is part of the annual Moscow Victory Day Parade
Russian journalist and politician, Alexander Nevzorov has criticised it:
(Inaccurate ...
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Is this an authentic US army pamphlet about Red Army, issued to soldiers in 1945?
Archive.org contains a scan of an 84-page pamphlet, called "Our Red Army Ally" that purports to be a document published by the United States War Department in 1945, for the purposes of ...
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Was the German V2 rocket the only weapon whose production killed more than its use?
Early in David Edgerton's history of technology, The Shock of the Old he discusses cost benefit analysis applied to some military weapons.
He argues, for example, that the US would have caused a lot ...
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Was the UK's drive to acquire civilian metals to use in WW2 necessary for the war effort?
This question was asked here recently:
Were World War II scrap drives in the United States truly necessary for the procurement of raw materials?
And it has produced some very solid analysis and ...
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Did Obama defy precedent by not visiting the D-Day monument?
This seems like a very dubious picture, from a very clearly politically motivated website, but I was wondering if there was any truth to this picture?
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Did New York Times post this Hitler apology stating Jews baited the Nazis by trying to fight back on June 15, 1934?
Post from Revolution News reads,
"By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his policies against them.
"If Jews throughout the world try to instill ...
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Did Vichy France make shoes and sweaters from human hair?
According to this source,
A 1942 government decree asked that all barbershops collect and donate hair to the war effort, to be manufactured into slippers and sweaters. The rebellious zazous refused,...
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Were nuclear weapons not effective in ending WWII? [closed]
The claim:
The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did
Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
Initially, few questioned President Truman’s decision...But in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz ...
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Did Britain borrow $120 billion in 1945?
This copy-paste has being doing the rounds of local newspaper letters pages and dodgy hard-core pro-Brexit Facebook pages, etc:
JEAN Claude Juncker should be forced to walk past every white ...
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Does plutonium exist in the world, apart from being manufactured?
In reference to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, a mathematician, Peter Lax, described his time working there as "living science fiction". He said:
we were told essentially the basic thing: ...
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Did Franciscan friars survive the nuking of Nagasaki in a way suggesting a miracle?
Note: This is a very similar question to this:
Did eight Jesuit priests survive the nuking of Hiroshima in a scientifically inexplicable manner?
However, since in spite of their parallelism these ...
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Did eight Jesuit priests survive the nuking of Hiroshima without serious injury?
It is being frequently claimed by Catholic sources (e.g. Catholic News Agency, Catholic Herald) and even Wikipedia that eight Jesuit priests survived the nuking of Hiroshima with very minor physical ...
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Is there any evidence that soldiers turned traitor due to Chinese "brainwashing"?
The Wikipedia article on brainwashing states:
Hunter and those who picked up the Chinese term used it to explain
why, during the Korean War (1950-1953), some American prisoners of war
...
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Were many Ukrainian and Polish women raped by Soviet soldiers during the WWII?
This[1] site claims:
It's not that the idea of rape as a weapon of war is implausible. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian, Polish and most of all German women were raped by Red Army soldiers as ...
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Did Gen. Patton say "We defeated the wrong enemy?"
I've seen this quote in various far-right memes. Supposedly, Gen. George S. Patton, upon taking control of Berlin in 1945, said "We defeated the wrong enemy." The Communists, one supposes, were the ...
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What is the real history behind of the Ford GAA engine?
I have been searching for quite some time trying to find out if what I have heard is true with the history of how the Ford GAA engine came to be.
(Note: this site has some errors, such as its ...
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Did Germans receive corn instead of wheat and rye after WW2 due to a translation error?
After World War II, the U.S. army sent food supplies to Germany. There is a widespread legend that they delivered maize instead of wheat and rye because the Germans demanded "Korn" which means grain ...
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Do only 49% of Americans know which country bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
From Alternet: Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?, July 1, 2008 (referring to polls conducted over the past three decades):
Which country dropped the nuclear bomb? Only 49% [of Americans ...
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The problem with freezing oil gun for the firearms [closed]
A detailed question is the next. It is not specifically about WW2. It is about firearms and freezing gun oil in general. Whether it is possible even today to have a malfunctioning gun which was oiled, ...
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Were the Dene people unaware they had mined ore for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until the 1990s?
From a web project called The Forbidden Rock Prophecy (elsewhere it claims the atomic bombs were prophesied):
Nor did they know what the materials they carried would be used for.
So in addition ...
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Did the German navy use UV lights for communication from submarines?
An article about vision anomalies claims that the increased sensitivity to UV light in aphakia sufferers has been put to use to detect UV signal lamps from German submarines in World War II.
"Let the ...
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Is "Syphilis: All of these men have it" a WWII propaganda poster?
Spotted via https://twitter.com/LI_politico/status/692846941034549248 (courtesy of a parody picture in https://twitter.com/Megapope/status/692850205297741827), but described as real by Mother Jones in ...
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Did Soviet soldiers commit two million rapes of German women in 1945?
During the Allied troops entry and occupation of German territory during the later stages of World War II, it is alleged that mass rapes were committed by Allied Forces.
The Telegraph reported:
...
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Was Ignaty Karpezo buried alive and then found alive?
Wikipedia claims the following. Ignaty Karpezo was a general during WWII. After a heavy bombing he was found without signs of life. A medic determined death. He was buried consequently.
But after a ...
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Did the United States' internment involve Japanese foreign nationals?
The mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, David Bowers, wrote in a statement
President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it ...
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Is this a photo of the result of a kamikaze attack on a ship in WWII?
A Reddit user titled this photo "Kamikaze hit on HMS Sussex" and it currently has 5,532 points (96% upvoted).
Here is a cropped version of that photo:
Another user cites Wikipedia:
On 26 July ...
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Did the Nazis kill Jews with gas chambers?
I just heard Holocaust denier and former academic, Robert Faurisson, explaining a few things about gas chambers.
What he claims :
The dilapidated chambers, thought to be gas chambers in the Nazi ...
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Did the No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron score the most kills in the Battle of Britain?
It's often claimed in Polish media that No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron scored the most kills in the whole Battle of Britain. This claim is repeated in Wikipedia, although with annotation [citation ...
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Do ~25% of Japanese people believe that USSR dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I have heard this claim a few times from some random people, and recently came across it in pravda.ru as well:
from "Japan will never forgive USA"
There is such a statistics: 25 per cent of young ...
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Did WW2 pilots lead a swinger's lifestyle to ensure that their friends would take care of their family if they died?
Cracked.com referenced this interview where author Christopher Ryan claims that:
“World War II fighter pilots had the highest fatality rates of any
division of the military. When they were back ...
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Is this tweet about classes one month after the Hiroshima bombing, and the 2011 tsunami accurate?
https://twitter.com/TheKnowledge/status/593936133358276609
Japan. Top: One Month After Hiroshima, 1945. Bottom: One Month After
The Earthquake and Tsunami, 2011. Incredible.
Are the images ...
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Is Holocaust denial illegal in the West? [closed]
Living in the Middle East, I've had many discussions with fundamentalists and Islamists about freedom of speech. They have often claimed that freedom of speech in the West is a myth because denying ...
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Were staff at Bletchley Park predominantly male?
In The Imitation Game, most of the staff portrayed on-screen were male, and Joan Clarke faced sexist assumptions that because she was a woman, she was in the wrong room when she tried to go into the ...
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