The Second World War is so vast that the people inside it are easy to lose. A bear who enlisted as a private. A film star whose invention the Navy set aside. A famous poster that almost nobody saw at the time. These are true stories from 1939 to 1945, told with respect and checked against museums, archives and historians.
Every tile in a World War II game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
People
nine stories
1The spy the Gestapo hunted as the Limping Lady
On the tile: Virginia Hall1940s
Virginia Hall wanted to be an American diplomat. After a hunting accident in Turkey in the early 1930s cost her the lower part of her left leg, she was told the loss was cause for rejection. So she became a spy, first for the British and then for the American OSS, working in occupied France on a prosthetic leg she named Cuthbert. The Gestapo wanted desperately to catch the woman it called the Limping Lady. She hiked over the Pyrenees into Spain, came back in disguise, and won the Distinguished Service Cross.
Juan Pujol García offered to spy for Britain and was turned away. So he posed as a devoted Nazi, was taken on by German intelligence, and was told to go to Britain. He went to Lisbon instead and invented reports from a tourist guide, library books and newsreels, credited to agents who did not exist. The British finally recruited him and named him Garbo. After D-Day his reports helped keep German divisions waiting at the Pas de Calais for a second invasion. Germany awarded him the Iron Cross, and Britain made him an MBE.
In April 1942, Polish soldiers in Iran came across a young bear cub, and a Polish supply company adopted him and named him Wojtek. When the unit had to sail to Italy, and rules barred mascots from the transport ships, Wojtek was enlisted as a private, with a service number and a pay book. Soldiers who were there said that at Monte Cassino in 1944 he helped carry ammunition crates, and the company's badge became a bear carrying a shell. Promoted to corporal, he spent his last years at Edinburgh Zoo and lived until 1963.
4The consul who wrote transit visas for 2,140 people
On the tile: Sugihara1940
In the summer of 1940, Jewish refugees from occupied Poland came to Chiune Sugihara, Japan's consul in Kaunas, Lithuania. Many carried bogus visas for Curaçao and other Dutch possessions in the Americas. Sugihara decided to help them escape and granted ten-day visas for transit through Japan. Before his consulate closed he even gave visas to refugees who had no travel papers at all. By the time he left Lithuania in early September, he had issued visas to 2,140 people, and those visas covered some 300 more, mostly children. Yad Vashem honored him in 1984.
On March 28, 1944, the Dutch minister Gerrit Bolkestein spoke on Radio Oranje and urged people to keep their wartime diaries and letters. In hiding in Amsterdam, Anne Frank took the idea to heart. She planned a book, Het Achterhuis, The Secret Annex, and joked that from the title alone people would think it was a detective novel. On May 20 she began rewriting her diary on loose sheets of paper, leaving some passages out and adding new ones. Her rewrite ends with the entry of March 29, 1944.
Desmond Doss called himself a conscientious cooperator. A Seventh-day Adventist, he believed his duty was saving lives, not taking them, and he would not carry a rifle, even when officers tried to have him discharged or court-martialed. As an Army medic he earned two Bronze Stars. In May 1945 on Okinawa, atop a cliff roughly 400 feet high, he lowered wounded men to safety with a knot he knew and is credited with rescuing 75. On October 12, 1945, President Truman gave him the Medal of Honor, the first for a conscientious objector.
In February 1945, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion arrived in Britain and set to work in Birmingham, where bags of mail and packages for American troops were stacked to the ceiling. The battalion was more than 800 Black women, commanded by Major Charity Adams. Army leaders estimated the backlog would take at least six months, and closer to a year. Working in shifts and processing as many as 65,000 pieces of mail a shift, the SixTripleEight did it in three months. Then the women moved on to Rouen and Paris.
A story that began before the war was even over says no bomber escorted by the Tuskegee Airmen was ever shot down by enemy aircraft. A version appeared in Liberty magazine in March 1945. Air Force historian Daniel Haulman went through mission reports and missing air crew reports and found otherwise: bombers under their escort were shot down by enemy aircraft on seven different days, 27 in all. The real record still stands out. The average for the other fighter groups of the Fifteenth Air Force was 46.
9The blood bank pioneer who objected to segregated blood
On the tile: Charles Drew1940-1942
From September 1940 to January 1941, surgeon Charles Drew was medical supervisor of Blood for Britain, standardizing its collection procedures, equipment and records. The project gathered 14,556 donations. In February 1941 he became assistant director of an American Red Cross pilot program that introduced mobile collection units, later called bloodmobiles. At the armed forces' insistence, that pilot excluded Black donors, and so did the national program that began that November. Only in January 1942 did the Red Cross accept their blood, and then it segregated it. Drew objected that there was no scientific evidence of any difference between the blood of different races.
On the tile: Polish CavalrySeptember 1939Myth busted
One of the best-known images of 1939 is Polish cavalry charging German tanks with sabers and lances. It did not happen. At Krojanty on September 1, Polish uhlans charged a group of German infantry and scattered them, then came under fire from armored cars and pulled back. Journalists were later shown the field, along with German tanks that had arrived after the fight, and an Italian reporter wrote of a charge against tanks. German propaganda put the story to use. Polish cavalry actually carried bolt-action rifles, machine guns and antitank rifles.
2The counterattack that spooked Hitler and his generals
On the tile: ArrasMay 21, 1940
On May 21, 1940, the British struck back at Arras with two divisions and a tank brigade. Their slow but heavily armored Matilda tanks pushed about 10 miles and captured several hundred Germans, until 88mm antiaircraft guns turned on the tanks began knocking them out. It came nowhere near breaking Erwin Rommel's spearhead. But Hitler and many of his generals overestimated what it meant and demanded that the British around Arras be contained. Hitler's halt order then gave the British vital time and helped make the evacuation from Dunkirk possible.
The fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain are remembered as the Few, and RAF Fighter Command needed about 1,400 of them. More than 275 came from countries the Germans had already conquered, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and France, and American volunteers joined them. Behind the pilots stood 21 Chain Home radar towers along the coast that could detect aircraft up to 200 miles away, 30,000 trained ground observers at more than 1,000 posts, and members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force plotting aircraft movements in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory.
4The sea battle where the ships never saw each other
On the tile: Coral SeaMay 1942
In early May 1942, American and Japanese fleets fought the Battle of the Coral Sea, the world's first carrier-versus-carrier battle and the first naval battle in which neither side's ships sighted the other's. Japan lost the light carrier Shoho, and the United States lost the carrier Lexington. But the planned Japanese landing at Port Moresby did not happen, which made it a strategic victory for the Allies. And two Japanese fleet carriers were out of action for the Battle of Midway a month later.
In spring 1942, Navy codebreakers at Station Hypo in Hawaii were reading enough Japanese naval messages to know a major attack was coming. The target was called AF, and the Americans needed to be sure what AF meant. So the base at Midway sent out a false message saying it was short of fresh water. Japan then sent a message reporting that AF was short of fresh water. Forewarned, American carriers were waiting. On June 4, 1942, dive bombers left the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga and Soryu ablaze, and Hiryu was sunk later.
6Army bombers from a carrier they could not land on
On the tile: Doolittle RaidApril 18, 1942
On April 18, 1942, sixteen Army B-25 bombers took off from the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Kobe. The bombers were not equipped to land back aboard. The task force had been spotted about 650 miles from Japan, some 200 miles short of the planned launch point, so Jimmy Doolittle's crews left early. Fifteen planes reached China, where the crews crash-landed or bailed out, and one landed in the Soviet Union. All sixteen bombers were lost, but the raid pushed Japan to move ahead with its plan to attack Midway.
On August 23, 1942, as German forces approached Stalingrad from the north, they ran into the Soviet 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Many of its crew members were women. The guns had been placed to defend against aircraft, but the regiment fought the advancing tanks, and its 6th Battery alone claimed 28 of them. The regiment's after-action report praised the steadfastness and heroism of the battery's women. In two days it lost 35 guns. The fight has become something of a legend, and two of the women received the medal For Valor.
On February 23, 1945, Marines raised an American flag on top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, and Leatherneck magazine photographer Louis Lowery took pictures. That was not the famous photograph. A bigger flag was ordered, one that could be seen across the island, and a different group of Marines raised it that afternoon. Joe Rosenthal photographed that second raising and won the Pulitzer Prize. Even then the story was not settled. In 2016 and again in 2019, the Marine Corps corrected who was in the picture, based on research by amateur historians.
9The Rhine bridge the demolition charges failed to drop
On the tile: RemagenMarch 7, 1945
On March 7, 1945, troops of the US 9th Armored Division reached the Rhine at Remagen and found the Ludendorff Bridge still standing. German engineers blew a charge near the west span, but when they tried to blow the central span, the charges failed to go off. Another blast made the bridge seem to rise in the air before it settled back down. Lt. Karl Timmermann, born in Frankfurt, Germany, led the men who took it, and Sgt. Alexander Drabik was credited as the first American across. The bridge collapsed ten days later.
Germany's Enigma cipher was first broken not at Bletchley Park but in Poland. In December 1932, Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau worked out the wiring of the machine's rotors, helped by documents that French intelligence had obtained from a German spy. With Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski he found ways to read Enigma routinely, and by 1938 they had an electrical machine, the bomba, to find daily keys. On July 25, 1939, with war approaching, the Poles revealed their work to British and French codebreakers at Pyry, near Warsaw.
Enigma was not Germany's only cipher. Messages between Hitler and his generals went through the Lorenz machine, known at Bletchley Park as Tunny. To find its wheel settings, Tommy Flowers spent eleven months designing and building Colossus at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in London. The first machine was working in early February 1944. The National Museum of Computing calls it the first computer that was digital, programmable and electronic. Ten were in use by the end of the war, each with as many as 2,500 valves, and the work stayed classified until 1975.
Alan Turing developed the Bombe to work out the settings of Naval Enigma, which could not be broken by hand methods of the time. By speeding up the search for each day's settings, it let Bletchley Park decode quickly and pass the intelligence on. Hundreds of the machines were operated by Wrens, women of the Royal Navy, in long shifts in dark, stuffy rooms, and by 1945 three quarters of Bletchley Park's staff were women. The work paid off. In 1944 Enigma decrypts gave details of German defenses for the D-Day invasion.
In 1942 the first class of 29 Navajo recruits finished Marine Corps training as code talkers. Their code was built from their own language. To spell, the Navajo word for ant, wo-la-chee, stood for the letter A, and in their military dictionary besh-lo, iron fish, meant submarine. The codes were never broken. Code talkers from at least 14 other Native nations, including the Cherokee and Comanche, served too, from Utah Beach to Iwo Jima. The program stayed classified until 1968, and Congressional Gold Medals did not come until 2001.
5Rubber decoys, fake radio traffic and future artists
On the tile: Ghost Army1944-1945
The Ghost Army's main unit was the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, about 1,100 men, and its job was to look like two divisions, roughly 30,000 soldiers. In more than 20 operations in Europe they set out inflatable rubber decoys, sent fake radio traffic that imitated the sending styles of real Morse operators, and played recorded sounds of troops from 500-pound speakers heard up to 15 miles away. Many in its camouflage battalion had studied at art schools such as Cooper Union and Pratt, and Ellsworth Kelly and Bill Blass served in the unit. It stayed secret until 1996.
Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood star who had once been married to an Austrian arms manufacturer. In 1940 she met the composer George Antheil at a dinner party, and together they designed radio control for torpedoes that hopped between frequencies, so it would be hard to jam. Antheil's experience with player pianos helped. Their patent, No. 2,292,387, was issued on August 11, 1942. The Navy rejected it, and Lamarr was told to sell war bonds instead. In one 1942 drive she raised $25 million. She entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Andrew Higgins of New Orleans built shallow-water workboats for oil and gas exploration in the Louisiana bayous. When the military needed a landing craft, he adapted his Eureka boat and combined earlier designs into the LCVP, which let infantry or small vehicles leave through a front ramp. Higgins Industries grew from 75 workers in 1938 to more than 20,000 by 1943 and built more than 20,000 boats by the end of the war. Its workforce was the first in New Orleans to be racially integrated, with equal wages by job rating.
The idea was number 28 on a list of deception schemes from British naval intelligence, widely credited to Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond: let the Germans find a body carrying false plans. Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley made it work. The body became Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, with letters, theater tickets and bills in his pockets and documents pointing to Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. It washed ashore at Huelva, Spain, on April 30, 1943, and Hitler moved a panzer division from France to Greece. His real name, Glyndwr Michael, was added to the grave in 1997.
9The artificial harbor a storm wrecked, and what worked
On the tile: MulberryJune 1944
To supply the Normandy invasion, the Allies built two artificial harbors: Mulberry A for the Americans at Omaha Beach and Mulberry B for the British at Arromanches, off Gold Beach. Then a storm struck from June 19 to 21, 1944. Mulberry B, in a sheltered cove, mostly survived. Mulberry A was wrecked beyond repair, and its parts went to fix the British harbor. The Americans kept landing supplies straight onto the beaches, grounding ships and opening their bow doors, and Omaha was soon handling 13,500 tons a day, more than it had been planned to.
1The famous poster was not called Rosie in wartime
On the tile: We Can Do It1943Myth busted
The woman flexing her arm under the words We Can Do It is known today as Rosie the Riveter. In wartime she was not. J. Howard Miller designed the poster for Westinghouse Electric to boost morale among women already on the job, and it was displayed in company factories for two weeks in February 1943. Few people outside saw it. Rosie herself came from a 1942 song, and Norman Rockwell painted his own Rosie for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover. Miller's poster became famous in the 1980s, after The Washington Post Magazine reproduced it.
2The White House garden the president did not want
On the tile: Victory Garden1942-1945
Between 1942 and 1945, Americans tended more than 20 million victory gardens, and the Department of Agriculture reported that 42 percent of all produce grown in 1943 came from them. Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard worried that, without guidance, beginners would waste supplies that farmers needed, and he called a conference to plan a national campaign. When Eleanor Roosevelt planned a garden on the White House lawn in 1943, to set an example, President Roosevelt was dismayed. “Tell Eleanor the yard is full of rocks or something,” he said.
On January 14, 1941, Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian World War I veteran who headed the BBC's Belgian broadcasts, proposed the letter V as a sign of resistance. It stood for victoire in French and for freedom in Flemish, and it took only two strokes to draw, which lowered the risk of arrest. A BBC broadcaster calling himself Colonel Britton spread the campaign in seven languages. In Morse code V is three dots and a dash, like the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and Churchill began making the V sign at nearly every public appearance.
At noon Tokyo time on August 15, 1945, a recording of Emperor Hirohito was broadcast across Japan. It was the first time the emperor had ever spoken directly to his people, and he never used the word surrender, saying only that his government would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Because of time zones, President Truman had announced the news on the evening of August 14. So V-J Day has more than one date: August 15 in Britain, Japan and Australia, and September 2, the day of the formal surrender, in the United States.
Tires were the first product rationed in the United States, starting in January 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor. Food rationing began that May with sugar, gasoline was rationed from May too, and coffee followed in November. By March 1943 meats, fats, canned fish, cheese and canned milk were on the list, and shopping took two kinds of currency: a pound of bacon cost about 30 cents plus seven ration points. By the end of 1945, sugar was the only thing still rationed, and that lasted until June 1947.
6Citizens behind barbed wire, and reparations decades later
On the tile: Order 90661942-1945
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized removing Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast. About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry lived on the US mainland, and about two thirds of them were citizens, born and raised in the United States. The War Relocation Authority set up 10 camps, mostly in the West, though two were in Arkansas. People lost some $400 million in property while they were held. Congress paid $38 million in reparations in 1948, and forty years later paid $20,000 to each surviving person who had been detained.
On September 28, 1943, a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, secretly told the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport Denmark's Jews. The roundups began on October 1. Within a few weeks, Danish fishermen had ferried some 7,200 Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members across the narrow water to Sweden, which had announced it would take them in. The Germans deported 470 Jews from Denmark to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and Danish officials kept pressing the Germans about their well-being. All but 51 of them survived.
In 1936 the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1940 Summer Games to Tokyo. In July 1938, with Japan at war with China, the Japanese government abruptly canceled, and the IOC gave the Games to Helsinki instead. In June 1939, London was chosen for 1944. Then Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, and both sets of Games fell away: the IOC canceled the London Olympics and suspended the Games for the duration of the war. London finally got its turn in 1948, still battered from the bombing of the Blitz, and hosted an austere version.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, New Orleans canceled its official Carnival celebrations, and they stayed canceled from 1942 through 1945. The excess of Carnival did not suit a nation at war. It was not the first time. Mardi Gras had been called off nine times before, including in 1918 during World War I and in 1919 during the flu pandemic. The city put its energy elsewhere: on Mardi Gras Day 1943 a Million-Dollar War Bond Drive on Canal Street beat its goal, selling $1,192,000 in bonds. Carnival returned in March 1946, with discharged troops among the first-time revelers.