fact
World War II Spitfires only had about 20 seconds of ‘gun time’ before running out of ammo, making most movie depictions wildly inaccurate. Also one of the biggest issues any historian of WW2 aircombat notices in movies depicting it, is that anyone shoots anything down. Top 5% of pilots shot down about 85% of all […]
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The US Army made a tactical deception unit known as the “Ghost Army” during World War II. This 1,100-man unit created a “traveling road show,” utilizing inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions & scripts. It was kept secret for more than 40 years until declassified in 1996.
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The men who served in World War II are a dying breed – in fact, most of them have already passed on from this plane of existence to the next (where hopefully they will not be asked to save the world by enacting great mental and physical trauma on themselves).
They’re not all gone, though. One of those great, brave men just celebrated his 110th birthday.
Lawrence Brooks of New Orleans, Louisiana was born on September 12th, 1909, and had his most recent birthday celebration at the National World War II Museum in his hometown.
During the war, Brooks served in a primarily African-American unit in the army, the 91st Engineer Battalion, with which he was stationed in New Guinea before heading to the Philippines. He was active between 1940 and 1945, exiting duty as a Private 1st Class.
The National World War II Museum in New Orleans has hosted Brooks’ last five parties, loves doing it, and hopes to be asked to help celebrate for a few years yet to come.
“We absolutely love Mr. Brooks,” said a spokesperson for the museum. “We’ve told him, ‘As long as you keep having birthdays, we are going to keep having birthday parties for you here.’ We consider him ‘our’ veteran.”
Though Brooks is definitely getting long in the tooth – he has poor vision and low blood pressure and requires a walker to get around – he’s thankful to have good hearing and to never have been faced with any serious diagnoses in his long life.
“I’ve started to think about not having many birthdays left. But I’m not worried about it, because God has let me live this long already. I think it’s because I’ve always liked people so much. Oh, yes, I do.”
It’s safe to say that plenty of people like him right back – including me, now that I’ve leaned a bit most about him.
Brooks takes over the title of oldest living WWII veteran from Mr. Richard Overton, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 112.
The post America’s Oldest World War II Veteran Has Celebrated His 110th Birthday appeared first on UberFacts.
I bet that your grandmother had box-loads of these beautiful, brightly colored and extremely fragile ornaments. You can also find them in antique and vintage stores, and, if you’re lucky, thrift stores. They’re called Shiny Brite, and the story behind them is rooted, surprisingly, in war.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
Shiny Brite originated with a German toymaker named Max Eckardt. Eckardt was born in 1890 in Oberlind, which was 20 miles away from the glass ornament hub of Lauscha. In 1926, he opened his first ornament company in Oberlind with his brother, Ernst. Presciently, they also opened an office in New York City, where Max emigrated in the late 20s.
In 1937, Eckardt foresaw a second world war on the horizon, and he feared he would no longer be able to import his glass ornaments from Germany. So he decided to open his own factory stateside. He called it the Shiny Brite Company because the insides of the balls were coated with silver nitrate, which kept them shiny and reflective.
That same year, Eckardt approached the Corning Glass Company. He told them Woolworth’s would buy a sizable amount of ornaments if their light bulb production machinery could be modified to make the glass balls. Corning was able to successfully produce the glass globes that Eckardt needed – and Woolworth’s very first order was for 235,0000.
Woolworth’s Five-and-Ten-Cent Stores started selling them in 1939 for up to ten cents each.
Eckerdt’s foresight paid off. By 1939, with Hitler in power and the British setting up blockades, glass ornaments from Germany were impossible to import.
Corning was making 300,000 Shiny Brite ornaments a day by 1940. They lined the balls with silver nitrate and coated them with lacquer before sending them out to the artists, including the ones at Eckerdt’s factory, for decorating. After the artists painted the silver balls in vibrant colors, they were packaged to be sold in their iconic brown and green boxes.
Over time, other designs emerged such as tops, bells and icicles.
While World War II waged overseas, Eckardt had to make some adjustments. Silver nitrate and lacquer became scarce, so the company had to paint directly onto clear glass. Metal caps and hooks were eliminated in favor of cardboard and yarn. And the tiny bits of tinsel inside some of the ornaments had to be taken out altogether.
Then, when the war finally ended, the U.S. government asked Eckhardt to go to West Germany and help rebuild the original ornament industry there.
Here in the States, Eckardt’s business continued to boom, with thousands of machine-painted Shiny Brite ornaments flying out factory doors daily from four facilities throughout the 1950s.
Eckardt died in 1961, right as plastic ornaments began to get popular. Glass ornaments slowly fell out of favor, and their production eventually stopped.
Then, in the late 90s, designer Christopher Radko obtained the Shiny Brite name and began making and selling replicas.
But keep an eye out for boxes of the original Shiny Brite ornaments – if you spot one, you’ll get to hang a little vintage luxe in your tree.
The post Check out the History of the “Shiny Brite” Christmas Ornament appeared first on UberFacts.
In a small town in Austria on the border of Germany sits a structure with a notorious past. It was here, in a nondescript building downtown called the Braunau am Inn, that Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889.
The building has been used as a school and a library over the years, but it has also been a magnet for neo-Nazis who view it as a shrine to Hitler. People have been coming since all the way back in the 1940s just after World War II ended, when Austrian and German veterans would flock to the house on Hitler’s birthday.
In 1972, the interior ministry of Austria took over the main lease from the family that owned the building so that the government could eventually have the final say about what the building would be used for. In 1984, the Austrian government tried to acquire the building outright from Gerlinde Pommer, who had sole possession of the building, but she refused to sell. Pommer also refused to renovate the structure so the government could not find a good tenant for the property.
Finally, in 2017, the Austrian government seized the building from Pommer and the dispute ended. Authorities have decided to turn Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to hopefully deter neo-Nazis from visiting the site.
In 1989, a stone was put in place in front of the building that reads, “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions dead are a warning.”
There will be an international architectural competition to redesign the building for its future police tenants.
Wolfgang Peschorn, the interior minister of Austria, said, “The future use of the house by the police should send an unmistakable signal that the role of this building as a memorial to the Nazis been permanently revoked.”
And it’s about time.
The post A Town in Austria Is so Sick of Nazis Visiting Hitler’s Birthplace That They’re Turning It into a Police Station appeared first on UberFacts.
File this under “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”
You’d think that when visiting a place that will be indelibly associated with the absolute depth of human suffering and cruelty, people would take it seriously. And yet, I guess we can’t be too surprised by how insensitive people are.
The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland is a site where over 1 million people were murdered during the Holocaust. I had the opportunity to visit it as a young lad with my parents, and the feeling you get there is indescribably sad. Indeed, the very air around the place is still thick with the misery of all those lost souls, to the point that even decades after my visit I still start to choke every time I think of it.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that visitors have been posting inappropriate photos from Auschwitz to social media, the memorial site had to put a tweet out admonishing that kind of ridiculous behavior.
When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths. pic.twitter.com/TxJk9FgxWl
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019
The infamous train tracks of Auschwitz carried untold numbers of people to their deaths, and to see people acting this way has upset many. People on Twitter were taken aback by the trend and weighed in with their own opinions.
This is a very necessary post, our picture-taking habits are completely out of control. I may be visting in the summer, I will make sure I am aware of your photography policy. Thank you for all the essential work you continue to do. Without our historical memory we are nothing.
— Francesca
(@Just__Fran) March 20, 2019
I don’t understand why people use Auschwitz as a photo op or how they take cheerful selfies in front of a site that saw the murder of thousands of innocent people. I just can’t wrap my head around that one.
— Morgan Blythe (@tippotate) March 20, 2019
Amazing. How anyone could crack a smile within miles of that place is beyond me.
— Take a stand (@dailypaint) March 20, 2019
We visited on Monday, but couldn’t believe how many individuals took it as an attraction rather than a memorial. This is a site of mass extermination of many people. It’s a completely harrowing experience. pic.twitter.com/8QSFIuT1Vg
— Martin (@mdjcrimmins) March 20, 2019
There are simply no words for this kind of disrespect
— Ricky Edwards (@spongelover90) March 20, 2019
The Auschwitz Memorial later added these tweets.
It's simple: be respectful. https://t.co/qqb5rbwZur
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 23, 2019
Smiling is human. There are also human stories from #Auschwitz that can make people smile. You do not have to be solemn and stern all the time. Yet, there are some things which are simply disrespectful.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019
If you’re visiting a place where unfathomable atrocities took place, have some respect and be aware enough not to take cute selfies. Thank you.
The post The Auschwitz Memorial Actually Had to Ask Visitors to Stop Taking “Playful” Selfies appeared first on UberFacts.
There were some truly awesome war stories that came out of World War II, but the story of a U.S. soldier named Moffatt Burriss might be one of the absolute best.
In April 1945, Burriss was in Berlin as the war was winding down. He received orders from none other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself that he needed to stand down and let Russian troops take control of the city.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
By this point, Burriss had seen heavy combat in the Battle of the Bulge and in battles in Italy and the Netherlands, and he didn’t want to let the Russians take all the credit in Berlin.
Burriss recalled, “I said: ‘I can’t stand this any longer.’ I got in my Jeep with the lieutenant and sergeant and said, ‘Let’s go across the river and see what we can see, see if there are some [krauts] still over there…’”
That’s just the beginning of the tale. Watch the video of Burriss telling the rest of the amazing story in the video below.
After World War II, Burriss went on to become a successful businessman and a politician. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1977 to 1992. Burriss died in January 2019 at the age of 99.
A true American hero!
The post Here’s How 3 U.S. Soldiers Fooled 15,000 Nazis into Surrendering During WWII appeared first on UberFacts.
A Japanese Oil Tanker captain fell into a cactus at a Santa Barbara Oil Field, provoking laughter from the local workers. 5 years later he returned in an Imperial Japanese Navy sub and made the first mainland shelling of the US at that oil field. 00
A Japanese Oil Tanker captain fell into a cactus at a Santa Barbara Oil Field, provoking laughter from the local workers. 5 years later he returned in an Imperial Japanese Navy sub and made the first mainland shelling of the US at that oil field. 00
A Japanese Oil Tanker captain fell into a cactus at a Santa Barbara Oil Field, provoking laughter from the local workers. 5 years later he returned in an Imperial Japanese Navy sub and made the first mainland shelling of the US at that oil field. 00
. . . . 
: Chris Granger Photography #LawrenceBrooks #110Years #110thBirthday #WWIIVet #WWIIVeteran #VictoryBelles #WWIIMuseum #WWII #Kisses #LipstickVictims #Smooch #Lipstick #RedLips #Birthday #HappyBirthday #NewOrleans #Louisiana #NationalWWIIMuseum #WorldWar2 #WorldWarII #Army #ArmyVet #VintageLadies #1940s #1940sHair #1940sMakeUp #1940sLook
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Morning beauties 
@vintagevspot @oldhappyhome
”It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
