A mere eight hours after Britain declared war on the Nazis, a German torpedo struck the SS Athenia, sinking the passenger liner and killing more than 100 civilians. The ship’s final resting place has eluded shipwreck-hunters for nearly 80 years, but sonar images taken off the coast of Ireland now show what appears to…
Large sections of central Frankfurt, Germany were evacuated on Sunday in preparation for authorities to defuse a World War II-era, 1.4-ton HC 4000 air mine, with CNN reporting at least 60,000 people were asked to leave the area while the bomb defusal operation proceeds.
A team of civilian researchers has discovered the wreck of the USS Indianapolis, a US Navy cruiser which Imperial Japanese forces sunk in July 1945 to the loss of nearly three quarters of its crew.
A professor of cryptology has auctioned off a rare and fully-functional Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt messages during the Second World War. Incredibly, the collector found the machine at a flea market in Bucharest—which suggests Romania may house other machines still waiting to be discovered.
Investigators in Chile have released thousands of declassified documents dating back to the Second World War, revealing the extent to which Nazi spies had infiltrated the country. Among the more shocking revelations is the discovery of a Nazi plot to destroy the Panama Canal—an act that would have changed “the history…
Federal police in Argentina recently discovered a time capsule of evil, hidden inside a house near Buenos Aires. Roughly 75 Nazi artifacts, including everything from a large knife to Nazi medical devices to a photo negative of Adolph Hitler, were uncovered in a secret room. Police are investigating when and how the…
When 14-year-old Daniel Kristiansen was assigned a World War II project for history class, his father jokingly suggested he look for a German plane that had allegedly crashed at the family farm. Well wouldn’t you know it, he actually found the damned thing—along with the dead airman’s remains. It’s being called one of…
Everybody’s wondered what it would be like to be James Bond. Not the womanizing or the killing or the endangering national security parts, of course. No, Gizmodo readers, it’s all about the gadgets, and today’s your lucky day.
Late last year, the Netherlands defense ministry confirmed that two of its ships lost during World War II had disappeared from the bottom of the Java Sea, likely the result of illegal salvaging. Now, a trio of Japanese shipwrecks off Borneo have likewise been torn apart for scrap, highlighting what appears to be a…
German researchers have discovered the wreck of U-581, a Nazi sub that sunk near the Azores in February 1942. The 220-foot-long VIIC U-boat—the same type of sub featured in the classic films Das Boot and Raiders of the Lost Ark—was found broken in two, and at a depth of nearly 3,000 feet.
I’ve been getting a lot of tweets and emails from neo-Nazis and neo-fascists lately. To be fair, I said that Nazis and fascists were bad, so I was kind of asking for it. But the thing that I’ve found most interesting amongst the mountains of hate are all the fake quotes that racists send me, purportedly by famous…
I remember the exact moment that I connected internment with my family. I was in elementary school, and we had learned all about the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in social studies. Later that week, I was at my grandparents’ house for a family dinner, and I was reciting all these things I had learned at…
A pair of warships lost during a historic 1942 naval battle have completely disappeared from their resting places at the bottom of the Java Sea. Large portions of a third ship are also missing. An international investigation has been launched in hopes of solving this bizarre maritime mystery.
On April 10, 1940, British submarine HMS Tarpon and its crew of 50 were sent to Norway to intercept Nazi merchant vessels. They were was never heard from again. Now, after 76 years, the sub has finally been found. An investigation of the remarkably well preserved vessel shows it didn’t go down without a fight.
I came across this fantastically modern ad in the April 1945 issue of Radio-Craft magazine and just had to share it with you as we all slowly slide into the Fourth of July weekend.
Using ground penetrating radar, a team of archaeologists has uncovered a tunnel dug by Jewish concentration camp prisoners to escape the Nazis.
Once in a while, you hear an old war story that restores your faith in humanity. Usually it involves a moment of quiet in the midst of chaos; some singing or the sharing of a few condiments. But how many of them take place in mid air?
Did you know that Chrysler built more than 25 percent of America’s tanks during World War II? And in addition to tanks and trucks too, it even helped arm the Allied Powers’ mighty warships. You can learn more about the Chrysler “Arsenal of Democracy” in this new film.
For the past 20 years, divers have unsuccessfully tried to explore and photograph a PBY-5 Catalina seaplane shot down during Japan’s opening salvo of the Pearl Harbor attack. Now, some 74 years after that fateful day, archaeologists have finally accomplished the task. Here’s what they saw at the bottom of Kāne‛ohe…
Before there was a CIA there was England’s Special Operations Executive. And, as WWII heated up, it put all of its collective tradecraft knowledge into a single training manual. And, it turns out that training spies to operate behind enemy lines is often good training for going outdoors, too.
