The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded in combat and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress)
It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake.
The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
A number of aircrewmen died of farts. (ascending to 20,000 ft. in an unpressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300%).
The Russians destroyed over 500 German aircraft by ramming them in mid-air (they also sometimes cleared minefields by marching over them). "It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the Red Army" - Joseph Stalin
When the US Army landed in North Africa, among the equipment brought ashore was 3 complete Coca Cola bottling plants
Among the first "Germans" captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the US Army.
Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska. 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been Japanese on the island.
Most members of the Waffen SS were not German
During the Japanese attack on Hong Kong British officers objected to Canadian infantrymen taking up positions in the officer's mess. No enlisted men allowed you know
I happened to find these at the end of a little pdf file I downloaded-not sure how true they are but they are interesting.
Including former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, notoriously.
“A number of aircrewmen died of farts. (ascending to 20,000 ft. in and unpressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300%).”
Fascinating.
Some reader commentary from Snopes:
“There might be a grain of truth in there, but there is a lot of technical inaccuracy.
To start with, the atmospheric pressure at 20,000 feet is only a little less than half of the pressure at sea level. When you go that high, it doesn’t make the pressure of the gasses in your guts increase, it just reduces the counterpressure applied by the atmosphere on the outside of your body. A lot of the containment pressure of the intestinal gasses is applied by the mechanical restraint of the gastro-intestinal tissues and musculature, not by the atmosphere. So, yes, the pressure of the gasses in there does cause your guts to rumble a bit as the counterpressure is reduced. But, no, they are not expanding by any 300%.
But I can say from firsthand experience that farting is an important thing for high-altitude flight. When I took the Beale AFB altitude chamber ride to 25,000 feet, it felt like there was a gale in my pants. The instructors are careful to warn you to eat carefully before the ride, and also to instruct new students in the slouching posture that allows for unimpeded fartage.
In AFUspeak, I’d label this one Fb - probably nobody died of farting, but maybe one or two died of _not_ farting. And they probably had the really greasy stuff for breakfast.”
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=89;t=000389;p=0