From the BBC News Magazine's obituaries page:

If it had not been for Annie Penrose, RAF pilots might have found themselves piloting Shrews rather than Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Her father, Sir Robert McLean, was chairman of Vickers between the wars and worked closely with R J Mitchell who was designing a new single-seater fighter. Mitchell had wanted to call the new plane the Shrew but McLean insisted it was called the Spitfire, the nickname he had bestowed on his somewhat headstrong daughter. After opposition from the Air Ministry he finally got his way. Annie, who was born in India, went on to marry the actor Robert Newton before his drinking and womanising led to divorce. She later married Beakus Penrose and became the chatelaine of the Killiow Estate in Cornwall which she ran well into her 80s.

The Supermarine Shrew just doesn't feel right, somehow.

Tom Ricks on a pro-Nazi US Army unit in WWII:

I know it sounds like the reverse of a Quentin Taratino movie, but it is true: During World War II, the Army intentionally formed a unit chockablock with fascisti and their suspected sympathizers. [...]

Young [PFC Dale Maple] spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German [...] Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.

And thereby hangs this tale. [...]

[Via Blood & Treasure]

Hitler-mocking dog enraged Nazis:

BERLIN – Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to the history of the Second World War: a Finnish mutt whose imitation of the Hitler salute enraged the Nazis so deeply that they started an obsessive campaign against the dog's owner.

Absurdly, a totalitarian state that dominated most of Europe was unable to do much about Jackie and his paw-raising parody of Germany's Fuehrer. [...]

Half a dozen screenwriters will be sending their agents outline scripts for the film adaptation before the month is out.

[Via The Awl]

The Wellcome Library blog has a fascinating post about newly-released papers written by Churchill's personal physician, Lord Moran:

Churchill himself is examined closely, in passages written towards the end of the conflict when Moran takes stock of the traits of character that both helped and obstructed the war effort: the supreme self-confidence that enabled Churchill to take on and hold the responsibility of wartime leadership leading also to problems in his management of his subordinates. In a particularly revealing file, PP/CMW/K.5/5/1, we read

While he could concentrate for six hours at a stretch on intricate documents and feel at the end of it that he was just beginning the night's work … he also had grave disabilities which added to the strain. He had no gift of devolution. He liked a finger in every pie. Rowan [Leslie Rowan, Churchill's private secretary] complained at Potsdam that he could not get the P.M. to read important papers and yet he would not hand over anything…

Perhaps Winston found that when he did choose a man to do a job of work he so often let him down. For he had no gift of picking people. It was his Achilles heel… he is always losing opportunities of learning by his desire to instruct, or at any rate by his urge to lay down some proposition. That is the secret of his inability to pick the right right people, he isn't interested in them.

A nice rant on the sheer implausibility of that 'World War II' show¹ that The History Channel keeps showing:

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

1. As a UK-based viewer who only has access to Freeview, I can but assume that this is the same show that keeps popping up on Yesterday. Surely it beggars belief that two producers would have come up with the same bad idea simultaneously. ↩

From an obituary for former OSS agent Roger Hall:

One of his favorite OSS stories involved a colleague sent to occupied France to destroy a seemingly impenetrable German tank at a key crossroads. The French resistance found that grenades were no use.

The OSS man, fluent in German and dressed like a French peasant, walked up to the tank and yelled, "Mail!"

The lid opened, and in went two grenades.

[Via Schneier on Security]