1.Although it is called the English Civil War, there were in fact three civil wars. And it wasn’t just limited to England; Scotland and Ireland got involved as well! One notable incident occurred on the 11th of September 1649, when soldiers of the New Model Army captured the town of Drogheda in Ireland. When they found the Royalist commander, Sir Arthur Aston, they beat him to death with his own wooden leg.
2.The night of September the 14th, 1814, saw heavy bombardment of Baltimore by the British. Despite this, the next morning, the large American flag was still flying undamaged over Fort McHenry. Such a sight made lawyer Francis Scott Key feel extremely patriotic, and he wrote four verses called
Defence of Fort McHenry, which he set to the music of To Anacreon in Heaven, a British drinking song. When it was later sold as sheet music, the publishers used a different title for Key’s ditty, and in 1931 it was chosen to be America’s national anthem. Yes - The Star Spangled Banner is based on a British drinking song!
3.The Union Army in the American Civil War began to allow black soldiers to enlist in 1863. However, whereas a white solider was paid $13 a month, a black solider was only paid $10, and furthermore was deducted $3 for clothing. In protest at this, a number of black regiments refused to accept their salaries - but still continued to fight heroically. Eighteen months later, when black soldiers made up an amazing ten per cent of the army’s troops, the high command accepted they were wrong to discriminate, raised their pay to be equal, and backdated it to the day they had enlisted.
4.The biggest explosion of the First World War was set off by miners from the allied forces, who dug shafts underneath German trenches. At Messines Ridge in Belgium, just over nine hundred thousand pounds of explosive mines were placed in nineteen tunnels. When they were detonated, the resulting explosion was so loud that it was heard by the British Prime Minister, who was at his desk 140 miles away in Downing Street, London.
5.Using a daring and audacious method, the citizens of Konstanz in Germany managed to prevent allied forces from dropping a single bomb on their city during the Second World War... they left all of their lights on at night! As the city is very close to the border with Switzerland - who were neutral in the war - the allied forces assumed the city was Swiss, and didn’t target it.
6.Only two out of every ten men born in Russia in 1923 survived the Second World War.
7.You may think that sending equipment hidden in a gift to prisoners is purely an invention of the movies, yet you might be surprised to learn it happened for real - and most likely in a more amazing way that you would expect. In the Second World War, Germany allowed the International Red Cross to send packages to POWs; amongst the items the Nazis permitted was a Monopoly set. With this in mind, Allied forces made special versions of the game that helped the prisoners to escape. German, French and Italian money was hidden amongst the standard Monopoly notes; a metal file was hidden within the board itself; a small compass could be found in one of the playing pieces and maps of the camp the prisoners were in were printed on silk and hidden inside the house and hotel pieces!
8.At one point during the war, the Germans built fake airfields out of wood to draw British bombers away from their real targets and to fool the allies into thinking they were strategically more powerful than they actually were. However, the British weren’t fooled - and took the mickey out of the Germans by dropping wooden bombs on the decoys!
9.During the Cold War, the US Government conducted a number of highly unethical experiments on their own citizens. In one, they placed blowers on schools and low-income housing projects in St. Louis to disperse zinc cad- mium sulphide, a fine fluorescent powder. They told the residents that they were testing experimental smokescreens to use should the city be invaded, however the real reason was that that layout of St. Louis was very similar to some Russian Cities, and the US were interested to know how effective chemical warfare would be against them. Despite the powder being suppos- edly harmless, there remains to this day abnormally high incidences of can- cer in the city. In another experiment, in 1955 the CIA released the whooping cough virus over Tampa, Florida without telling anyone, so they could see how quickly it would spread; they got their data, and twelve innocent civilians died.
10.There was no such thing as the Vietnam War. This rather surprising statement is in fact 100% true - on a technicality. As the US Congress never actually declared war officially against the country, the correct title is the Vietnam Conflict.
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