Customer Reviews

World War II: 4,139 Strange and Fascinating Facts (Strange & Fascinating Facts)

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I'd rate this a zero except that the system won't allow it.
"Strange and Fascinating Facts" - my wife gave it to me for my birthday since I'm a WWII historian and the title sounds good.
It's laid out alphabetically like a dictionary. As such when they got to the V's it appears the authors needed filler; so we have "Van Dyke, Dick" a comedian actor who spent two years in the "Army Air Force" (sic) in WWII. This is an example of their idea of a "strange" and/or "fascinating" fact. Doesn't even say where he was or what he did. Now if it said something like he was a waist gunner on a B-17 and flew 23 missions over Germany then maybe (?) it could qualify for being fascinating.
Please don't waste your money; I'm sorry my wife wasted ours.

I bought this book based on the title and was very intrigued by it, but then... I started to notice errors. Once I started noticing the errors, I noticed more and more... I ended up compiling them, and will post on my homepage once my provider fixes their service to permit me to update it. homepages.address.com/atadkins under my page (tom) and then on a subpage. (I can't give direct link since it isn't working yet) The errors were blatant (Bismarck is called a pocket battleship in five entries), some are simple typos in name. The most frequent errors are in dates, especially those surrounding Stalingrad and the Bismarck Hunt.

I have compiled them into a document to send to the publisher. There are 123 errors, 15 internal contradictions, 31 questionable items, and I added on for good measure 80 updates and additions. That means at least 150 errors.

While I am not saying the book is bad (it contains many, many interesting tidbits and stories), the sheer magnitude of errors is irresponsible in my opinion, and reason to pause before buying.

This book is a waste of money. Not only does it contain numerous spelling errors, it also is historically inaccurate in several passages which leads me to be suspicious of the accuracy of the rest of the book. Although some of the "facts" may seem interesting, the factual errors are too numerous to count.

This is a fun book just to flip though. I did notice a few errors but I do not think my knowledge of the events would rate as expert enough to come up with 130. The Penguin dictionary of the third Reich is better. Get this book for what it is, a time killer or help with trivial pursuit.

There were so many errors. The facts were lame. I almost fell asleep reading the first page! Write a good book next time. If I could I would mark this a 0!

This book is an auxillary-dictionary for World War II researchers. Although it is not sufficient alone, it supports researchers' fast-reading demands about the Second World War entries. Entries in the book were selected prior to less known facts. All facts have short and brief descriptions. Subjects are consist of biography (military, political, scientific, etc.), technology, abbreviations, operations, weapons, basic command structures, intelligence services and more... Authors had also added movies about the Second World War in which you can find according to the name of the movie as well as who played whom related to the biographic subject. On the other hand, there are few weapons that used in the war. There are not enough details of weapons either. Also addition of political biographies from the independent countries could be better.

I found this to be a most interesting book, full of stats and facts of a war of major proportions. There were sixty-one countries involved, which included seventy-five percent of the world's population at that time. The dollar cost of the total expenditures was at least $1,600,000,000,000.

There were fifty-five million fatalities including civilian and military. Forty-four million were from the Allied forces, with eleven million Axis killed. In one battle, at Iwo Jima, the bloodiest engagement in Marine Corps history, only about two hundred out of twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers survived. Twenty-seven Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to returning U. S. Marines, the most for one battle. There is a new movie soon to be released about this historic event which prompted the famous photograph, taken on the spur of the moment, of the three Marines raising an American flag on Mount Suribachi in the midst of that battle. 'Flags of Our Fathers' will show this engagement from the USA side with its victory, while another major film, 'Lamps Before the Wind,' will portray the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese side. These two screenplays by the same production company are attempting to show that this particular part of World War II was mainly a 'clash of cultures.'

Of American troops, there were 292,000 military personnel killed in action and an additional 671,000 wounded in action. There were fifty-nine thousand American aircraft lost; military vessels lost were one hundred fifty-seven, while 866 merchant ships were destroyed by the enemy. At peak strength, these countries had in service: British Empire & Commonwealth, 8.7 million; China, 5 million; Germany, 11 million; Japan, 7.1 million; USA, 12.2 million; and USSR, 12.5 million.

Of the U.S. military, 61.2 percent had been drafted, while 38.8 were volunteers. Seventy-three percent of the 16 million troops total, from 1941-45, served overseas; the average time being 16.2 months abroad. There were 350,000 women in military service. About 10,000 dogs were trained for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard throughout the war. Scout and messenger man-dog teams were attached to units with reconnaissance, combat and security patrols and for communication purposes. A brown bear adopted as a mascot actually helped to carry ammunition at Monte Cassino in 1944; he lived another twenty years and died in the Edinburgh Zoo in 1964.

The GI average age was twenty-six years. The youngest U.S. serviceman was twelve years old and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age, after he was wounded in combat. The average length of service of the U.S. military was thirty-three months, half of that spent overseas. Enlisted men were paid $72 per month, while officers earned $204 each month.

Some of these most-interesting facts may not seem so strange, but they are indeed fascinating. The war ended on May 8, 1945 in Europe and August 15, 1945, in Japan. This was the most destructive war in history. Its size and complexity were so great that even today historians can't agree on all of the facts. Some mark the beginning of the war at September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, while many believe that it started eight years earlier on September 18, 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. They would have been two separate wars had not the other countries joined in and it became the Allies against Axis. Extreme turmoil made precise recordkeeping impossible for some governments, some lost control of the data, while others manipulated it for political purposes.

More than a global conflict, this war was the catalyst for many of the technological, economic and social fundamentals which today influence our lives. By all reports, it was the bloodiest, costliest conflict in world history and it drastically altered the world's balance of power. There was a total of 110 million people mobilized for military service from 1939 to 1945. The number of baby boomers born during the eighteen years following this war was a whopping 3.4 million.