Strange But True.
Local
Online Newspapers 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
The Ace Is High. At 10,000 feet a lone Messer Schmitt 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 Messer Schmitt 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 Messer Schmitt 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 Messer Schmitt 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 yes...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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GRUESOME MEDICAL MIRACLE A New York man has discovered that - without knowing it - he has had a bullet lodged in his skull for a quarter-century. The New York Post reports the following exchange between the man - William Adrian Milton, 59, "a writer and prominent dachshund fancier" - and his doctor, which took place after he had a brain scan because of head aches that he was having. Doctor: "Who
shot you in the head?" Mr Milton - who is the organiser of the annual Dachshund Oktoberfest in New York - later remembered an incident in 1976 when blood started spurting from his head, apparently for no reason. He had assumed he had been hit by debris of some sort falling from a building site, and ignored it But in fact he had been shot in the head. He has decided to let the bullet remain nestled in his skull. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MORBID MYSTERY Fire
authorities in California found a corpse in a burned out section of forest while
assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was dressed
in a full wet suit, complete with SCUBA tanks on his back, flippers, and face
mask. A post-mortem revealed that the person died not from burns, but from
massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a positive identification. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The
average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a
special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two
animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn
Germany. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A woman
came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist
towards the electric kettle. Intending to
jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his
arm in two places. Until that moment he had been happily listening to --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This female monkey is a pet that was bought from an animal trader at a shop in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, May 9, 2002. The monkey, "adopted" the puppy recently and spends many happy hours hugging it, in fact it spends ALL its time hugging it and is reluctant to ever let go of the puppy. Hunting and selling of monkeys are prohibited under Bangladesh laws but they are seldom enforced. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In New York, 1977, A Hijacker boarded a plane and threatened the crew that he would shoot someone unless the plane was flown to Detriot. The Pilot was happy to oblige because the plane was bound for Detroit anyway. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lord Horatio Nelson the world famous British naval hero who defeated the French and Spanish armadas at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and who is known as one of the best sailors ever actually suffered from sea-sickness and was sick on every journey he ever made, He hated the sea. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 1906 in a town called Redruth south west England, there was a road traffic accident when two cars collided head on, injuring both drivers. The strange thing is though that at that time these two cars were the ONLY cars in that town. |
Back To Main Links 
Page 2
Page 3
