In the recent movie, Snowden, about the man by the same name, the head of CIA asks the title character if he ever wonders, “Why there has never been a World War III?” It is curious how, after seven decades, we have not witnessed the worldwide armament of nations.
(Source: secretsofthefed.com)
Essential reading: 5 Mysteries of WWI We May Never Solve
No complaints here, but what might it be like to suffer such massive conflict today? Would we see the same strange events? Would UFO’s appear above Los Angeles? Would fighter planes disappear at random?
It’s hard to imagine unsolved mysteries as pernicious as the stories from WWII. We have cameras everywhere. Surely, nothing would escape our view, right?
Don’t be so sure. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared off the map in 2014. We’re buried in data and theories on that event, but no closer to the truth.
Another worldwide war would not be without mystery. We’d just go crazier wondering how it could be possible that anything so mysterious would take place in our modern world.
Let’s hope we never find out.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of unsolved mysteries from the last world war. Here are my five favorites.
The Battle of Los Angeles
(Source: historicmysteries.com)
February 25, 1942.
Only three months after Pearl Harbor, strange lights in the night skies over Hollywood appeared to be another attack from the Japanese.
The official word from the military would be that was a false alarm. It was “war nerves.” The people were just witnessing a lost weather balloon.
The people of Los Angeles would beg to differ.
The juiciest theory is that the lights were from UFOs, but were they just experimental aircraft? If so, whose were they? Why would they fly over a populated city like Los Angeles?
The Auschwitz British 17
(Source: dailymail.co.uk)
From 1940 to 1041, 1.5-million people died in Auschwitz. In 2009, from routine preservation activities of the internment camps in Auschwitz, historians discovered a new document.
That document bore the name of 17 British soldiers. However the assertion came up, someone suggested that these might be the names of a British infiltration army.
The soldiers were really employed by the Nazi’s. Since the discovery, historians have requested access to the British records in order to investigate further.
Anne Frank’s Snitch
(Source: ushmm.org)
One of the more well-known stories from WWII was that of Anne Frank, the fifteen-year-old Jewish girl whose family hid from the Nazis for two years.
Anne and her family hid in the attic of a house until Nazi’s finally caught them, interning them in a camp. Little Anne kept a journal during the two years before the camps, which she squirreled away in the attic.
Sadly, she did not survive the war, but her father did. He found and published her journal, immortalizing her forever.
What her story does not reveal is, who snitched on their hiding place? Historians debate the names of several people, but with no proof, we’ll never confirm any of the accused.
Flight 19
(Source: youtube.com)
Two months after the war, the disappearance of Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle goes down in history as a casualty of the same war.
There were 14 airmen on the bomber who disappeared. When the Navy sent a flying boat to locate Flight 19, they too disappeared. There were 13 crew members on that plane, all gone.
It seems as if someone wanted the bomber and the men to stay missing.
The military investigation into the missing flight registered the loss as “cause unknown,” but this isn’t the only missing vessel from the Bermuda Triangle.
We have no other evidence for either flight.
Dead Body From Operation Mincemeat
(Source: bbc.co.uk)
The simple plan for Operation Mincemeat was to deceive the Germans. The Allies intended to invade Italy by way of Sicily through North Africa.
As a precaution, they wanted the Nazi’s to believe they were attacking Greece. The means for the deception was to plant their fake top secret plans for the invasion on the corpse of an allied soldier’s body planted on the shore in Spain.
The ruse worked. The Germans bought it, but nobody has even known or proven beyond a shadow of a doubt who was the dead soldier. The most historians can agree on, is that he was British and probably a soldier.
(Source: buzzfeed.com)
Pray that we never find out how a third world war would stack up. These stories are best left in the past. Let’s hope the old saying about, “history repeating itself” is just a saying
There are plenty more stories from WW II. Some of them are downright chilling if you believe the eyewitness’ accounts.
Keep an eye out for our next blog on this subject. The stories are about to get spookier…