Category: War

World War II Trivia By Will Dabbs, MD

Post author By Grumpy
Post date August 30, 2026
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Jack Lucas was 17 when he earned the Medal of Honor,
America’s highest award for valor in combat. He once
thanked me for my service. Wow.

World War II was the bloodiest conflict in human history. We’ve been offing each other wholesale ever since Cain first got cross with his brother Abel. The Second World War just took everything to the next level.

Part of it was the scope of the thing. World war was not hyperbole. Most everybody on Planet Earth called a side and then went at it. The other bit was technology. In the past, we had done okay developing the tools and tactics to support mass homicide. During WWII, we raised that to an art form.

World War II burned on for six years. It ultimately claimed upwards of 80 million lives. That’s about 3% of the human species at the time. About a third of that was the result of famine and disease that exploded secondary to the conflict.

Chairman Mao said that a single death is a tragedy but that a million deaths was a statistic. Today, I’d like to dig a little bit deeper. Let’s explore some of the details associated with the most horrible war in human history.

In the Beginning …

The first German serviceman to perish during the war was Lieutenant von Schmeling. He was killed by the Japanese in 1937 while leading a Chinese infantry battalion as a military advisor to the Nationalists.

The Royal Air Force launched their first serious nighttime raid on Berlin on 26 August 1940. It was an unmitigated disaster. Six of the 50 bombers were lost, two Germans were slightly injured, and a single woodshed in a Berlin suburb was destroyed. The ill-fated raid did, however, kill one of the nine elephants held in the Berlin Zoo. Only one of the nine, an Indian bull named Siam, survived the war.

This is Calvin Graham. He was 12 when he conned
his way into the U.S. Navy during WWII.

Things Get Real

Truth be known, the war was over the moment the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. It just took another four years or so to work out the details. Grit and valor rightfully captured the headlines, but it was American production that really drove the train.

In 1941, the U.S. auto industry produced more than 3 million civilian cars. For the rest of the war, we only built 139. Every single bit of that production went to war materiel. The world had never seen production on that scale, and it never will again.

The U.S. Navy entered the war with seven fleet carriers and one escort carrier. By the end of 1942, the Japanese had sunk four of them.

By D-Day, we severely curtailed the production of capital ships. The writing was on the wall that we would win the war. While we began WWII with eight aircraft carriers, we ended the conflict with 111. At the height of production, we were churning out 65,000 M1 carbines per day.

Such breathtaking production made a great many people filthy rich. Both Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler kept pictures of each other in their personal offices. Before the war was done, we had produced enough ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet 40 times.

Relativity

I was a military pilot myself, which is the sexiest job in the universe. Every normal male, in quiet moments, imagines himself tearing about the skies over Europe in a P38 Lightning or P51 Mustang. During the course of the war, more than 128,000 Allied aircrewmen died in combat. More U.S. Army Air Corps personnel fell than did U.S. Marines.

In total, 27,000 American fliers were killed in action. In 1943, at the height of the air war in Europe, only one in four bomber crewmen survived to complete a full 25 missions. The remaining 75% were wounded, captured or killed. Fifty-one percent of British Bomber Command crews perished. However, as bad as that was, German U-boat men had it worse. Three-quarters of them were lost to the sea.

Perceptions

We rightfully fixate on American exploits during the war. “Band of Brothers,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Masters of the Air,” and “The Pacific” tend to burn the details into our national consciousness. However, if the sheer volume of blood spilled is your metric, the places where our boys bled and died were sideshows. The Eastern Front was the real slaughterhouse.

Eighty percent of the German dead incurred during the war fell on the Eastern Front. Four-fifths of all Russian males born in 1923 did not survive the war. WWII claimed 15% of the total Russian population. More Russians died during the siege of Stalingrad than the U.S. and Britain lost during the entire conflict.

William Hitler, Adolf’s nephew, served in
the U.S. Navy during the war.

Total War

Winning the war required a maximum effort. Adolf Hitler’s nephew William served in the U.S. Navy. The youngest American serviceman was a U.S. Navy sailor named Calvin Graham. Calvin was 12 when he lied about his age and somehow got past the recruiters. His actual age was not discovered until after he was wounded in combat.

Jack Lucas was big for his age. He forged his mother’s name and bribed a notary to enlist in the Marine Corps at age 14. When his commander found out how young he was, he was removed from his combat unit. Jack subsequently went AWOL and stowed away aboard an assault transport headed for Iwo Jima. He was in combat for 48 hours. During that time, he threw himself on top of two live Japanese grenades at the same time to save his buddies, and yet miraculously survived. He earned the Medal of Honor at age 17. The first communication I had with the man, he thanked me, for my service.

Lt. Hiroo Onoda was the second-to-last Japanese soldier

to surrender after WWII. He survived and fought in the Philippine
jungles for nearly 29 years after the war formally ended.

Epilogue

Many Japanese soldiers refused to surrender. They trickled in from the jungles for decades afterward. Lt. Hiroo Onoda was the next to last.

An Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer, Lt. Onoda, fought a guerilla war in the Philippines until 1974. His unit killed some 30 Filipinos after the war ended. Despite loudspeakers, leaflets and a personal entreaty from the Emperor, Onoda adamantly refused to quit. It was only when his former commander trekked in to order him to stand down that he finally came out of the jungle.

When he surrendered, Onoda had in his possession his sword, a serviceable Type 99 Arisaka rifle, several live hand grenades and 500 rounds of ammunition. He also had a dagger given to him by his mother, along with instructions to kill himself in lieu of capture. World War II was indeed a war like no other.

America Just Ruined Its Own Aircraft Carriers

Post author By Grumpy
Post date August 30, 2026
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Soldiering War

WW2 Japan’s White Soldiers

Post author By Grumpy
Post date August 29, 2026
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Paint me surprised by this Some Red Hot Gospel there! The Green Machine The Horror! War

The Intentionally Vile Hershey’s Field Ration D Bar By Will Dabbs, MD

Post author By Grumpy
Post date August 29, 2026
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Don’t let the image fool you — D bars were positively ghastly.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the plains and I flew Army helicopters for Uncle Sam, I was afforded the opportunity to attend the U.S. Air Force Arctic Survival School. The colloquial name was “Cool School.” That sounded pretty awesome. As the big day approached, I actually looked forward to the experience. It seems I was an idiot.

Hard Reality

I discovered later that Cool School was informally called the Air Force Food Appreciation Course. Not only did the average temperature hover around 30 below zero, but there also wasn’t much to eat. The mission was to simulate what it might be like to be a stranded military aviator in the frozen Arctic wastes. We were given the contents of an ejection seat survival kit and a single MRE to last the duration of the course.

After a couple of days, that MRE was but a vague memory. I consumed absolutely everything in that tan plastic pouch. I also ate a boiled rabbit. That was about as awesome as it sounds.

The survival kit included these weird compressed food bars. I would liken them to finely-ground sawdust mixed with a little sugar and pressed into a rock-hard, brick-like cube. It took a little effort to gnaw off the edges. At the end of the exercise, I had licked the cocoa beverage powder and instant coffee clean from my MRE, but I still had two and a half of my three survival food bars intact. Those things were ghastly.

That was most likely by design. If they tasted like Toblerone, you’d be tempted to gobble them up right sharpish. As it was, the consistency and flavor meant you tended to make them last. It turns out there was a WWII-vintage precedent.

The thought of having to survive on a D bar kept troops on full alert.

An Army Marches on Its Stomach

We are all rightfully enamored with the guns, planes, tanks, and ships, but it is really the mundane stuff like food and warm clothing that really drive a combat unit’s success in the field.

U.S. Marine Corps General Robert H. Barrow once famously opined that, “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.” As such, in 1937, the United States Army approached the Hershey’s Chocolate Company with a most curious request.

Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. military acutely unawares, but there were still plenty of folks who could sense that war was coming. As a result, they began reaching out to American industry to modernize weapons and support gear in anticipation of fielding massive expeditionary armies overseas. As part of that, Uncle Sam needed a new government chocolate bar. However, they wanted it to taste, in the words of the Army Quartermaster, “Only a little better than a boiled potato.”

Before these old heroes could be this awesome, they had to be fed. Public domain.

Origin Story

Hershey’s chief chemist Sam Hinkle and Captain Paul Logan of the U.S. Army Quartermaster General’s office established four criteria for what would eventually become the Field Ration D bar. It had to be energy-dense and weigh no more than four ounces. It had to withstand high temperatures without melting. It also needed to taste bad.

The logic was sound. Like those nasty compressed survival bars in Cool School, if the emergency ration chocolate was tasty, troops would consume it recreationally. They needed to save this thing for actual emergencies. The solution was to make it taste awful.

For starters, the Hershey research team dramatically reduced the sugar. Then they increased the chocolate liquor to make it bitter. After that came oat flour to create a dense, dry texture with a killer aftertaste.

The original concoction was so thick it could not be poured into a mold. Every single bar had to be manually pressed in place. The factory workers at Hershey’s reportedly despised making them. However, the resulting compact bar offered 600 calories in a 4-ounce chunk. Troops claimed it was all but impossible to get into the thing without a knife.

Of course it came with instructions. Troops were supposed to eat the quarter-pound bar slowly over the course of half an hour or dissolve it in water to make a drink. Either way, getting a whole D bar down was a gut check.

Practicalities

The Army ordered the first 90,000-bar lot in 1937 for field testing. Troops predictably despised them, but that was the point. By 1941 Hershey’s was producing D rations at scale. By war’s end, Hersey’s had produced more than three billion of the horrible things.

Troops in theater nicknamed the D bar Germany’s secret weapon. This was partly because of their deleterious effect on the human gut. Additionally, hungry civilians who got the D bars in trade often thought them inedible.

In 1943, Hershey produced a specific version of the D ration for the Pacific Theater called the Tropical Chocolate Bar. This awful comestible was designed to withstand temperatures of up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit without melting. It intentionally tasted slightly better than the standard D ration, but troops nonetheless nicknamed the Tropical Chocolate Bar the “Dysentery Bar.”

Performance

D ration bars were standard issue in aircrew survival kits. In 1943, Army Air Corps Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, the Olympic distance runner featured in Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book Unbroken, survived 47 days adrift in a life raft in the Pacific Ocean after his B24 Liberator crashed. He survived in part thanks to the D bars he had on board.

Hershey eventually earned five Army-Navy Excellence in Production awards. Before WWII, chocolate was considered a luxury in post-Depression American society. When the 16 million GIs who deployed to fight WWII returned home, they were all addicted to the stuff.

This seismic shift in American culinary tastes drove the explosion of products like candy bars and Coca-Cola in the 1950s. That’s one of several reasons Americans are so blasted fat today.

I do love me some M&M’s. They resulted from WWII-era research into shelf stable chocolate.

Spin-Off Tech

Not all military chocolate was supposed to be nasty. The confections intended for standard rations needed to be as tasty as possible. This was the stuff American GIs handed out to starving kids in liberated war zones.

When Forest Mars needed a snack that could survive high temperatures in transit, he took little gobbets of chocolate and coated them in hard candy. The result was M&M’s. Mr. Mars secured an exclusive military contract, and M&M’s went to war before they were sold to the general public. GIs came home rabid for the things.

A surprising lot of the modern candy offerings tempting you at the Walmart checkout had their genesis during World War II. Environmental stability and the necessity for maximum caloric density often drove that train. In the case of the ghastly D bar, however, it was also engineered to be gross.