› added 9 months ago

34

TIL a Canadian pigeon, Beach Comber, arrived in Britain from Dieppe, France carrying a message from the Army alerting commanders of their landing there, marking the start of the Dieppe Raid. It's the only Canadian war pigeon ever to be awarded a Dickin Medal, one of only three animals so honored.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

9YWeG TIL American soldiers in the Pacific theater of WW2 always used passwords containing the letter 'L' due to Japanese mispronunciation, a word such as lollapalooza would be used and upon hearing the first two syllables come back as 'rorra' would "open fire without waiting to hear the rest".
4XWlw TIL that Australia has technically been an American company since 2009 registered in Washington DC under the name of Commonwealth of Australia, LLC
PY6rn TIL that Sweden imports more live crawfish from the US than any other country, and 90% of all crawfish produced in the US is grown in Louisiana.
G8LJ TIL that the “collapsed dorsal fin” you see on killer whales in aquatic theme parks like SeaWorld is usually a consequence of captivity.
KOa94 TIL In the late 1500s, two Dutch spectacle makers stacked a number of lenses in a tube and realized that, together, they made items appear much larger than under a single magnifying glass. Because the maximum magnification was only 9x, they were more of a novelty than a scientific instrument