Free The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham Page B

minister at the age of only twenty-?four.
    Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
    “GREAT” WARS
    During World War I, almost fourteen million people died in battle.
    During World War I, cigarettes were handed out to soldiers along with their rations.
    Charles de Gaulle’s final words were “It hurts.”
    At age ninety, Peter Mustafic of Botovo, Yugoslavia, suddenly began speaking again after a silence of forty years. The Yugoslavian news agency quoted him as saying, “I just didn’t want to do military service, so I stopped speaking in 1920; then I got used to it.”
    Prior to World War II, when guards were posted at the fence, anyone could wander right up to the front door of the White House.
    A family of six died in Oregon during World War II as a result of a Japanese balloon bomb.
    Corcoran jump boots (Army jump boots) have 82 stitches on the inside of the sole and 101 stitches on the outside of the sole in honor of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions’ actions during World War II.
    During conscription for World War II, there were nine documented cases of men with three testicles.
    It took the United States only four days to build a ship during World War II.
    During World War II, the Navajo language was used successfully as a code by the United States.
    W. C. Fields kept $50,000 in Germany “in case the little bastard wins.”
    World champion chess player Reuben Fine helped the United States calculate where enemy submarines might surface based on positional probability.
    During World War II, Americans tried to train bats to drop bombs.
    Escape maps, compasses, and files were inserted into Monopoly game boards and smuggled into POW camps inside Germany during World War II; real money for escapees was slipped into the packs of Monopoly money.
    “John has a long mustache” was the coded signal used by the French Resistance in World War II to mobilize their forces after the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches.
    Kotex was first manufactured as bandages during World War II.
    Playing cards were issued to British pilots in World War II. If captured, the cards could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.
    The phrase “the whole nine yards” came from World War II fighter pilots in the Pacific. When arming their planes on the ground, the .50-caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly twenty-?seven feet before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got the whole nine yards.
    The universally popular Hershey bar was used overseas during World War II as currency.
    The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
    The Red Baron’s real name was Manfred Von Richtofen.
    The first atomic bomb dropped on Japan fell from the Enola Gay, named after the unit commander’s mother. The second was dropped from a plane known as Bock’s Car.
    A B-25 bomber airplane crashed into the seventy-?ninth floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.
    HE SHOULD HAVE USED THE PATCH
    The earliest recorded case of a man giving up smoking was on April 5, 1679, when Johan Katsu, sheriff of Turku, Finland, wrote in his diary, “I quit smoking tobacco.” He died one month later.

SHIP OF DREAMS
    Each anchor chain link on the Titanic was about 175 pounds.
    The Titanic had four engines.
    The Titanic’s radio call sign was “MGY.”
    The Titanic was running at twenty-?two knots when she hit the iceberg.
    Two dogs were among the Titanic survivors.
    When the Titanic sunk, there were seventy-?five hundred pounds of ham on it.
    IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS
    In 1968, a convention of beggars in Dacca, India, passed a resolution demanding that the minimum amount of alms be fixed at fifteen paisa (three cents).
    AMERICAN HISTORY 101
    More than 150 people were tried as witches and wizards in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 1600s.
    The $8 bill was designed and printed by Benjamin