› added 7 years ago

187

TIL Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, devised a WWII plan to plant false info about the Allies’ next attack on a dead man, drift him at sea, and hope he’d be found by Nazi sympathizers. Operation Mincemeat worked, turning the tide for the Allies, who stormed Italy while the Nazis defended Greece.

Read more npr.org

via reddit.com

V7eZ TIL Sir Hugh Beaver, of the Guinness Breweries, got into an argument over which was the fastest game bird in Europe. There was no book in the world with which to settle arguments about records and questions debated nightly in pubs throughout Ireland. Guinness World Records was born.
b685j TIL in 1917 Italy had a Prime-Minister called 'Vittorio Emanuele' at the same time they had a King called 'Victor Emmanuel'.
R7RY9 TIL whilst filming the movie Entebbe, about a plane being hijacked, a plane was hijacked and landed at the airport on the day of the filming. They then filmed the real hostages being released and edited it into the movie. The producer called it a "blessing from the sky on a day of bad acting."
0d0Jp TIL that before his involvment in the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler was extremely lazy, never had a real job, dropped out of school and was very poor for many years. At one point he was sleeping on park benches and begging for money and later lived at a home for poor men for a few years.
0d5pA TIL Margot Kidder (Lois Lane from the original Superman) had a manic breakdown after the laptop she was using to write her autobiography crashed. She disappeared for four days