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Around Christmas 1914, along roughly 20 miles of the Western Front, German soldiers climbed out of their trenches unarmed and walked toward British lines to shake hands. Nobody had arranged it, and officers on both sides were unhappy when they heard.
That episode opens a list of five wartime curiosities. Several come with a catch, such as a number that varies by source or a tale that grew in the retelling, and the notes below flag those.
1. The 1914 Christmas Truce
The truces were many local events, not one. Some began the night before Christmas, some on the morning and some in the afternoon, and they ranged from shouted promises not to shoot to soldiers mingling in no-man’s-land and swapping cigars and chocolate. Football is the best-known detail, yet firsthand evidence is thinner than the legend, and most references describe impromptu kickabouts rather than organized matches.
Officers on both sides disliked the fraternizing, and British commanders threatened to discipline participants, fearing it would erode the will to fight. One account says that in December 1915 Allied commanders tried to prevent a repeat with explicit orders and by arranging raids and artillery barrages around the holiday.
2. One wartime code was never fully cracked
The Marine Corps began recruiting Navajo men in 1942, starting with a group of 29. In all, about 461 Navajo Marines served as code talkers, and 13 were killed in action, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The code used a spoken language plus roughly 450 memorized words, with animal names standing in for letters.
At Iwo Jima, six code talkers reportedly sent more than 800 messages without error in the first 48 hours. Major Howard Connor, the 5th Marine Division’s signal officer, said the Marines would not have taken the island without them. The code stayed classified until 1968, and the NEH describes it as never deciphered.
3. Entire cities were “hidden” using urban camouflage
The best-documented case is the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California. After Pearl Harbor, it was disguised with chicken wire, netting and painted canvas to look like a suburb from the air. Airfields were painted green, fake "burlap bungalows" and laundry lines were added, and fake trees had spray-painted chicken feathers for leaves. A general flown over at 5,000 feet reportedly saw only suburb after suburb.
Germany tried something similar in Hamburg, covering the Binnenalster lake to look like land and building a dummy viaduct parallel to the real one. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the work was done in daylight and was too dramatic to be convincing, though it suggested the dummy viaduct may have helped protect the real one.
4. Carrier pigeons were once decorated for bravery
Cher Ami was a homing pigeon with the 77th Division in France’s Argonne Forest in October 1918, when more than 500 men were cut off. On October 4, American artillery mistakenly shelled their position. Two earlier pigeons had been shot down; Cher Ami carried the plea to stop the barrage about 25 miles back to her loft.
She was shot through the chest, lost most of a leg and was blinded in one eye, but the message arrived and the shelling stopped. She received France’s Croix de Guerre, died on June 13, 1919, and her mounted remains are in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Accounts of how many soldiers were saved range from about 193 to 200.
5. Some wars technically ended by diplomatic accident
The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and again in March 1920. Congress instead ended the state of war with Germany and Austria-Hungary with the Knox-Porter Resolution, signed by President Harding on July 2, 1921, more than two years after the 1918 armistice.
The financial side lasted far longer. On October 3, 2010, Germany made a final payment of €69.9 million. The Peace Palace Library notes it was not strictly reparations but the last interest installment on bonds issued in the 1920s under the Dawes and Young plans and mostly sold to American investors, settled under the 1953 London Agreement.
The Ghost Army and its inflatable tanks
In 1944, about 1,100 American soldiers of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, were assembled to invent divisions that did not exist. The unit included artists, radio specialists and theatrical personnel, and relied on inflatable tanks, sound effects and fake radio traffic.
Their job was to mislead the enemy about the strength and location of American troops. Accounts of how many deception operations they carried out differ, but they put it somewhere above twenty, spread across the last year of the war in Europe. The same impulse links them to Burbank’s painted suburb: make the other side see what is not there. See also our facts about kings and queens for older versions of wartime theater.
Korea’s armistice and the peace treaty that never came
The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, at Panmunjom by Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison Jr. for the United Nations Command and Gen. Nam Il for the Korean People’s Army and Chinese People’s Volunteers. The truce took effect at 10 p.m. that evening.
The document is purely military, no country signed it, and it only recommended a political conference to settle the larger questions. It remains in effect, and no peace treaty has replaced it. It created a demilitarized zone about 4,000 meters (roughly 2.5 miles) wide and a Military Armistice Commission of ten officers.
Since you made it this far, you’ll probably also like learning more about facts about kings and queens and about facts about world religions.
Want to dig deeper into military history?
World War II: The Definitive Visual History — a comprehensive, richly illustrated look at one of history’s most studied periods.
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A painted-canvas suburb in Burbank and a one-eyed pigeon in the Argonne are small in the scale of any war, yet each worked because ordinary materials and ordinary creatures were pressed into jobs nobody had planned for them.