Obscure WWII Facts

When Bastogne was surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge, Patton promised to relieve the siege in 4 days. He turned his entire Third Army 90 degrees north - an unprecedented maneuver for an army of 600,000 men. Through snow and German resistance, they made it in 3 days. The 101st Airborne heard tank engines - friendly tanks. McAuliffe's "Nuts" response became famous, but Patton's achievement was greater.

During the Battle of the Bulge, a brief unofficial cease-fire occurred on Christmas Eve 1944 near Bastogne. German and American medics met in no-man's-land to exchange wounded prisoners. Both sides agreed to not fire for approximately 2 hours so medics could recover the dead and wounded. When it ended, they returned to fighting.

A British M4 Sherman tank named "Bomb" survived D-Day, fought across Europe, and was later shipped to the Pacific. It was present at Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell - inside a reinforced warehouse just 1km from ground zero. It was recovered and is now at the Australian War Memorial. Sherman tanks had a 60% survival rate for their crews.

America's first major battle in Europe was a disaster at Kasserine Pass. German General Rommel exploited American inexperience. 6,000 Americans were killed or captured in 3 days. This defeat led to Patton taking command and implementing brutal training. Veterans later said "Kasserine made us what we became at Normandy."

Australian soldiers defending Tobruk were nicknamed "Rats of Tobruk" by Nazi broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw. They embraced the name. They held the port for 242 days against Rommel, preventing him from reaching Alexandria. Their defense used captured Italian wine bottles as Molotov cocktails and dug thousands of miles of tunnels in the rock-hard desert.