During wartime many different things happen. Some of these things are truly regrettable while other things may be considered wrong by today's standards, but are understandable. Just about everyone knows that during World War II the Germans collected all the valuable art and sculpture from every country that they went into. Even to this day, some of it is still listed as missing. When the German army went into the Soviet Union, they continued that policy of looting important objects of art. Stalin also felt the same way and when the war started to turn, he had his soldiers loot as much of the German stolen art that they could get their hands on. Some of the art had originally been stolen from the Soviets in the first place, but much of it had been looted from other countries. The Hague Convention was signed in 1954 and both parties were a party to it. It provided for the return of all these stolen works by both sides. The Soviets gave the Germans a list of over 40,000 missing art objects while the German's list was comprised of 200,000 museum pieces, over 2 million books and a huge amount of archival material. It is known that modern day Russia still has many of the art objects taken from Germany and has recently admitted that they have 700 paintings and 2,000 archaeological pieces and this could be only the tip of the iceberg.

It turns out that the Germans were not the only power to have incredible secret weapons. The U.S. had an incredible secret weapon and never put it to use. Major General Fuller was the man who invented modern armored warfare in the 1920s. He said that not using this secret weapon was , “the greatest blunder of the whole war." So what was this thing? It was a strobbing light known as the Canal Defense Light. It would flicker six times a second and had 13 million candle power and was tank mounted. The light was so powerful that the enemy would not be able to see. If the tanks were placed in the proper formation they became invisible because they fell into dark triangles that hid them. The lights worked so good that in test where tanks used the light, they could not be seen even when they advanced from 2000 yards to 500 yards. The lights had a special armor reflector and even when an area was sprayed with machine gun fire the light would deflect the bullets. It is said that using this light would have allowed us to run through all of Germany before the Soviets got there.

When we think of radar, we usually give credit for its invention to the British. It is true that they were the first to have practical radar stations installed, but it was because they decided to go ahead with the development of radar just before World War II, suspecting that they were in danger. The truth is that radar was being developed as early as 1933 in Germany and shortly after that in the U.S. and several other countries. The difference was that only Britain had given this development work a priority, none of the other countries had grasped the importance of radar. When the Nazis decided to bomb Britain there were already 29 radar stations in use and as we know today, this allowed a numerically inferior fleet of planes to best an overwhelming force, namely the Luffwaffer. This also allowed the U.S. Navy to win important battles at sea where they were able to fire at Japanese ships that were over the horizon.

Did you ever wonder where the famous German coding machine, called the Enigma, came from? No? I will tell you anyway. There was an inventor who lived in Germany named Arthur Scherbius. He invented a machine for use by companies that would allow them to transmit coded documents to each other. The machine had rotors that turned on a common axis. Each rotor had a number from 1 to 26 on its edge. You transmitted messages by setting the rotors to a particular combination. The machine was a commercial failure. Scherbius next offered it to the German Navy who were reluctant at first, but he explained that if they added the correct number of dials, seven, there would be over a billion combinations and this would take one thousand men working 24 hours a day, over 14 years to break the code. No one was thinking about computers yet at this time. Eventually the navy accepted and this is how the Enigma coding machine of World War II was born.

Speaking about computers, if it hadn't been for the use of the Colossus Computer, we may never have broken the German codes. The Colossus was the first computer to be programmable, digital and electronic. Tommy flowers was the engineer who designed it. The machine was placed in Bletchley Park in Britain in 1943 and became operational in 1944. It was first used for the Normandy Landings and by the time the war ended, there were ten of these machines churning away. This machine and others like it, made the estimate of over 14 years to decrypt a German message obsolete. All the machines and plans were destroyed for the Colossus to maintain secrecy, but still, scientists were able to reconstruct the machine in 2007. Alan Turing was the head code breaker for the British during World War II.

During World War II the Germans had designed a tank called the Maus or Mouse in English. What made this tank so incredible was that it weighed 180 tons. Just the turret weighed far more than most World War II tanks at 55 tons. The armor plating was ten inches thick and it carried two guns. The first gun was the same size as those carried on some warships at 128 mm or slightly larger than a 5 inch cannon. The tanks was so heavy that they needed an airplane engine to move it. It couldn't cross bridges because it was too heavy so it had a snorkel built onto it so it could wade under the water. There were so many problems in its construction that they couldn't be solved before the war ended. Only two of these tanks were ever built. The Germans were actually planning to build a 1,000 ton and 1500 ton tank when the war ended. The two tanks were known as the Landkreuzer P 1000 and P 1500. The larger tank was to contain a gun so big that the shell weighed 7 tons and could reach over 23 miles. It is not clear to me how these monsters could move without sinking into the road. Maybe that was the reason that they were never built? I also imagine that they would have been very hard to move and would have required something like a giant naval diesel engine to power them.

Landkreuzer P1000 Smaller Of The German Monster Tanks Weighed 1000 Tons
Graphic Source: Public Domain

From a historical perspective, World War II has many secrets and these are only a few of the lesser known ones.