Dirty Little Secrets of World War II: Military Information No One Told You...

There aren't many "dirty secrets" in this addictively readable book. Really, it's a compendium of fun facts about horrors arranged in bite-size prose bits and written under the influence of lead author Dunnigan's favorite book, Will Cuppy's irreverent historical classic The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. The minichapters have titles like "Killer Vegetables and the Farts from Hell" (at 20,000 feet, gas caused by eating cabbages expanded, killing airmen). Did you know that every single German spy who infiltrated England became an Allied double agent? That MacArthur, Churchill, and Roosevelt all descended from one Sarah Belcher of Taunton, Massachusetts? That World War II killed about 100 million, or five percent of humanity? That a Russian was 100 times likelier to die than an American? (A USSR boy born in 1923 had an eighty-percent chance of dying by 1945.) We learn the origin of the term "rock & roll" (all weapons firing on automatic), the superiority or stupidity of tracer bullets, Göring's air-war policy, and U.S. troop-replacement policy. Some will argue with this book's rather simple answers to complex questions--was Chamberlain smart to cave to Hitler in the Munich pact because it bought a year to build planes and invent radar, which won the Battle of Britain? Other books come to different conclusions, but few so ably honor the master of snappy history, Will Cuppy. --Tim Appelo