The Ace Is High

At 10,000 feet a lone MesserSchmitt was patrolling over enemy territory when the pilot spotted a Spitfire Mk IX flying 5,000 feet below him flying in the other direction.  The pilot executed an ariel roll and shallow dived to end up with his MesserSchmitt behind the unsuspecting Spitfire he then shot at the plane with short accurate  bursts of machine gun fire and the Spitfire went down in a trail of smoke...

" Strange Encounter " By Artist Roy Grinnell

...The MesserSchmitt pilot was not a German, he was an American. The Spitfire was not flown by an Englishman it was flown by an Arab, the Spitfire had Egyptian Air Force markings. The date was not 1944 and it was not over Europe !

The date was actually the 16th October 1948 and the MesserSchmitt was an Avia S-199 which was a Czechoslovakian copy of the ME-109 Bf Fighter built to exact Luftwaffe specifications. The pilot was Rudy Augarten, an American who joined the Israeli Air Force during the Arab-Israeli War. The Spitfire that he shot down was one of many that were sold to the middle east by the British at the end of World War II.

Rudy Augarten D.M.C (pictured right) achieved the status of Ace ( five kills ) after shooting down two more Arab planes in the conflict adding to the two kills that he already had in world war II when he shot down two Messerschmitt ME-109s !!  This he did whilst flying a P47 Republic Thunderbolt with the 376th Fighter Group. He became one of only six Americans to achieve  fighter ace status by accumulating victories in two separate wars.

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Little Known Fact

Hair dresser Vidal Sassoon who made his name in Britain with his hair dressing saloons and shampoo's was an Iraqi Jew who joined the Israeli army and fought in the Middle East wars. 

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The USS Phoenix

Why did the British Royal Navy sink the American ship USS Phoenix ?

One of the few American ships that survived the attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th  Dec 1941 was the cruiser USS Phoenix.  This ship had survived service through the entirety of World War II only to be sunk not by the Imperial Japanese Navy but by the British  Royal Navy ?

USS Phoenix as seen in 1941

After the end of WWII the USS Phoenix was was decommissioned and in 1951 she was sold to Argentina and the Argentineans re-named the ship "The General Belgrano"

In the 1970's she was re-equipped with British SeaCat missiles and fitted with a Dutch radar system.

On the 2nd of May 1982 during the Falklands war  she was attacked and sunk by the Royal Navy nuclear-powered hunter killer class Submarine "Conqueror" She sank rapidly, when two torpedoes slammed into her  with the loss of 368 of her crew.

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The Enigma Machine

The highly top secret Enigma machine that the German Intelligence utilized throughout the Second World War to cipher and de-cipher very important messages was actually an item that was patent pending at the patent offices in London well before World War II started.

Further more it was even offered to the British Government by its inventor Hugo Alexander Koch  but it was turned down as " having no viable commercial value or otherwise " !

There were two types of Enigma machine one was for military use and the other was commercial and in the early 1930's the Polish hierarchy had found out about the Enigma through connections in the German company that was advertising the machine. So quite simply they went and purchased a few of them ! 

And from there  the method of how to  decipher the militaries coded messages  was cracked by a Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski.  All information on every available method of breaking the Enigma codes were passed on the Britain and France just before the fall of Poland in 1939.