In the history of secret weapons programs and government cover-ups, none is so chilling as Germany’s Volkswaffe program. It was begun sometime before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, under the guise of producing a cheap, reliable automobile for the common man. Instead, Ferdinand Porsche’s bulbous design was used in an effort to produce an agile, lightweight fighter car for use as an elite airborne unit in Hitler’s plans to bring Europe under his control; a squadron of death-dealing Herbies emblazoned with the Balkenkreuz.
Seen here for the first time are documents, declassified footage, and eyewitness accounts of an unknown chapter in German aerospace history, and a testament to the extent of Nazi ambition and hubris. For the first time, the story of those madmen who attempted to build a car that would touch the sky will be told; and hopefully those who would attempt the same will take note, lest history be repeated.
Admiral ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife celebrate the success of Castle Bravo, the detonation of the world’s first practical hydrogen bomb — and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States — at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands on March 1, 1946. The fallout plume spread dangerous levels of radiation over an area over 100 miles long, including inhabited islands.
Records showing fallout levels from the cake are unknown. However, testimony from those who attended the event depicts a frosting that was nice to look at, but inedible otherwise. The raspberry filling was said to have been delicious. Five people fell ill, though this was attributed to excessive amounts of Scotch.
Update: Christ, have I been doing a lot of these lately or is it just me? Anyway, as wile_e_quixote points out in the comments, this photo does not depict the celebration after Castle Bravo, but a previous exercise involving atomic bombs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Newsweek has a letter, written by Kurt Vonnegut and dated May 29, 1945, from a new collection of the late authors writings entitled Armageddon in Retrospect. The letter details his time as a P.O.W., which would become the basis for his most famous work: Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death.
On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
Reading the letter in its entirety it was interesting to note that, even in his personal correspondences, he employed the repeating “tics” that can be called a hallmark of his work.
British Secret Service instructions from World War II on how to make an explosive rat:
A rat is skinned, the skin being sewn up and filled with P.E. to assume the shape of a dead rat. A Standard No. 6 is set in the P.E. Initiation is by means of a short length of safety fuse with a No. 27 detonator crimped on one end, and a copper tube igniter on the other end, or, as in the case of the illustration above, a P.T.P. with a No. 27 detonator attached. The rat is then left amongst the coal beside a boiler and the flames ignite the safety fuse when the rat is thrown on to the fire, or as in the case of the P.T.P. a Time Delay is used.
Before the Allies stumbled upon a winning strategy of just dropping 8 million pounds of ordinance on his home city, we tried everything we could think of to kill Hitler. Needless to say, our history text-books don’t detail our many blunders, only our eventual triumph, but the secret histories of World War II are more illuminating. Air dropping B.J. Blazcowicz into Castle Wolfenstein? Check. League of Nations sanctioned genetic experiments aimed at breeding a race of Nigh-Indestructible Super Jews? Ross is descended from a particularly successful strain. A total trade embargo on pig iron? Yes. We even tried traveling back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power, but due to a shoddy flux capacitor and a criminally desultory mission briefing to “Kill the guy with the Moustache,” we ended up assassinating Franz Ferdinand instead, ironically setting off a chain of events that would inexorably lead to Hitler’s rise to power in the first place. D’oh.
But perhaps the greatest unrecognized hero of World War II was The Modern Nostradamus himself, The Royal Astrologer Louis de Wohl, Captain of Her Majesty’s Army and self-proclaimed State Seer for the British Empire.
De Wohl — who fled from Berlin in 1935 to escape Jewish persecution — sprang to prominence when a Spanish duchess asked him to reveal Hitler’s horoscope to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Hailifax. He impressed. Soon, de Wohl was heading up British Intelligence’s newly formed “Psychological Research Bureau,” dashing out horoscopes of Nazi leaders by the ream. In the late 30’s, he was dispatched to America to single-handedly thwart a conclave of pro-Nazi astrologers who predicted that Hitler would win the war and take over the world. He succeeded, stopping briefly in Washington to assure President Roosevelt that he had a “stunning horoscope.”
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
