Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Assassination by plane. This is opening a new tag on instances where state actors have deliberately killed marked individuals by shooting down or, otherwise destroying, the plane that they happened to be travelling on. Operation Vengeance A couple of examples just to get the ball rolling. First, Operation Vengeance. Early April 1943 the US picked […]

Beach came across this list of Japanese generals that was allegedly published in a Mexican newspaper in 1941. It was republished in A. Jimenez, Picardía Mexicana in 1965. The joke is that the names are all clever and very obscene double entendres in Mexican Spanish. Beach does not understand them all, but if anyone else […]

Beach has a busy day, so he offers this story up almost without comment. It would be fun to expand it though. Can anyone help with original sources, or at least ones nearer the fount: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com Thousands of peasants in the province Sessbu [in Japan] are engaged in a dragon hunt. […]

There is a post to be written and perhaps, when his file is big enough, Beach will attempt it of puerile acts of revenge carried out against defeated nations. Limiting ourselves here to the Second World War there is, for example, Hitler’s insistence that France’s surrender be signed in the same railway car, where German […]

The US bombing of Hiroshima went off, in operational terms, flawlessly. The bombing of Nagasaki was a different matter. For one thing, Nagasaki was not even the target: Fat Man was supposed to have been dropped on nearby Kokura but smoke from a conventional raid obscured the bombing run. Everything that could go wrong on […]

This is the most bizarre aircraft carrier story of them all. It involves suitably enough a Japanese and an American aircraft carrier. May 7 1942 American and Japanese forces are fighting in the Coral Sea. Both American and Japanese planes have been flying off the flat-tops, hoping to hunt down the enemy’s ships. It was […]

Beach recently added to his tag on the worst careers in the world, noting how being an English or, God forbid, a Scottish king was really very dangerous in the Middle Ages. He has now decided to bring these observations up to date with presidents and prime ministers. Instead of covering periods of 500 years, […]

Thanks to Ed for this story! This blog has long pioneered wrong place objects, artifacts that turn up thousands of miles from where archaeologists would have expected to find them. So how about a round of applause for this beautiful blue glass bowl that was removed from a tomb in the Nara prefecture in Japan […]

We are in the Middle Ages beyond the banks of the Rhine in the pagan communities there. A young man has had a great disappointment, he has married a woman only to discover that she is not a virgin. There follows a wretched series of illnesses that lead the young man towards death. In all […]

On the 6 August 1945 American planes dropped their first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Japanese would surrender within a month, arguably hundreds of thousands of US lives and very possibly hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were saved by Little Boy and his elder brother Fat Man. The Japanese surrender came about because of […]

As all Americans and many non-Americans know, 7 Dec 1941, the day of infamy, was the date of a brilliantly planned and brilliantly executed Japanese attack on America’s most important Pacific base, Pearl Harbor. The attack was, for the Americans, a bolt from the blue. Yes, America’s leaders were aware that a Japanese assault was […]

Battles have been fought in some odd places: in sewers, on iced lakes, in factories, across impossibly high mountains… But a battle on a tennis court is surely unique? Other strange examples: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com The scrap in question took place in April 1944 at the bungalow at Kohima and was one of […]

***This story came from Invisible for which many thanks*** In 1613 a group of Japanese soldiers and diplomats undertook an extraordinary journey that would end with blue spots on the bottoms of babies in Andalucia (Spain). The diplomatic group was led by a northern aristocrat, Hasekura Tsunetaka and a crew of 180 under HT sailed the Pacific landing […]

One of the neatest sentences about the Second World War is that the Allies won their victory because of ‘Soviet blood, British time and American resources’. This is an approximation, of course, to truth but a pretty effective one. The Soviets lost perhaps 26 million, enough dead to damn the river of German invasion. The […]

The laws of war dictate that if someone puts up their hands then they are prisoners and must be treated as such. However, despite the traditions of ages and now the strictures of various conventions mercy is ignored at times even by civilised armies. Two striking examples from the Second World War where the opposition […]