Unexplained Mysteries of World War II

by William B. Breuer

"As combat veterans and high commanders know, logic is often a stranger in wartime." --William B. Breuer, in

The annals of World War II are mined with captivating cases of strange coincidences, ominous premonitions, and baffling mysteries. Now, William Breuer's painstaking research has yielded over 100 fascinating historical accounts,

The mysterious fire on the Normandie . . . Who really was behind the eerily efficient destruction of the famed ocean liner?

The ominous "Deadly Double" advertisement in The New Yorker . . . Was it a coded leak to Japanese and German spies announcing the upcoming bombing of Pearl Harbor?

The botched Nazi kidnapping of the Duke of Windsor . . . How did a serendipitous series of events save the duke from Hitler's grasp (and the Allied forces from a crippling strategic setback)?

The curious sinking of the Tang

. . . How did this deadliest of U.S. submarines come to meet such an unexpected and mysterious end?

"Anyone interested in twists of fate should find this book fascinating." --Library Journal

"While away a few hours or spend a few minutes at a time enjoying this collection of inexplicable, mysterious, and strange tales." --Nashville Banner

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Military Fiction, Military History, War, Historical

238 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1997

About the author

William B. Breuer landed with the first assault waves in Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944), then fought across Europe. Later, he founded a daily newspaper on a string in Rolla, Missouri, and after that, a highly successful public relations firm in St. Louis, Missouri. He had been writing books full time since 1982

Reviews

[Douglas Berry · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fun overview of some of the weird happenings during WWII. But it was riddled with factual errors and in a couple of places facts were omitted to make the event an "unexplained mystery."

Take the entry on the Lady Be Good. A B-24D Liberator that vanished on its first combat mission in 1943 after radioing its airfield in Libya for directions due to thick clouds. A British Petroleum survey plane spotted the wreckage in 1958. An expedition found the plane in amazing shape. The machineguns were still in working order, there was a still-drinkable thermos of tea or coffee (reports differ) and oddly, the radios were still in working order. There was no sign of the crew.

This is where the entry in the book ends. However, in reality USAF searches quickly found eight of the nine crewmen in various spots along a line heading north from a point north of the crash site. The only crewman not to be found was gunner Staff Sgt. Moore, but it's possible that a body reported by another British Petroleum team in 1953 might have been Moore.

And that's the problem. Knowing what I know about the Lady Be Good showed that the entry in the book was either written after shoddy research or deliberately changed to omit facts. Which makes me question everything I read.

Kind of fun, but don't waste any serious time or money.

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel that this book should be more aptly titled "Quirky Coincidences and Anecdotes of World War II."

There really wasn't anything unexplainably mysterious here. Sure, there are stories about lots of missing people - but people go missing all over the place all the time and are never seen or heard from again. You don't need a World War for that.

I was expecting something spooky or interesting, but this is mostly mundane or "How 'bout that" kind of stuff...

Otherwise, this book is mostly people involved in kooky coincidences or predicting their death and then dying. Of course, it never goes into how many people predicted their death and then didn't die. Nor the amount of people who said "I'm not going to die today" and then did. To quote Vir from "Babylon 5": If a Prophecy Comes True It's a Miracle, If It Doesn't It's a Metaphor.

[Terry Cornell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read. Reminds me a little of those 'Ripley Believe It Or Not' books. Some stories are really not that mysterious. Some stories I have read about before. Others were a first time reading experience for me. All of the stories are footnoted. There are also a few photos. Many of the stories could've been fleshed out, but they serve as a starting point if the reader wants to do more research on an occurrence.

[Glenn Walborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book Unexplained Mysteries of World War II has many strange stories and instances that happened in the war on both sides of the conflict. One of the stories was about the most successful submarine in the US Navy's Pacific Fleet. At the end of the mission, the last torpedo fired malfunctioned and sunk the submarine instead of the target. Another story was about Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo that coincidently happened at the end of a Japanese air raid drill. The raid made Colonel Doolittle a national hero in the United States. He was almost killed when flying to North Africa when the German fighter aircraft attacked his aircraft, but mysteriously broke off and stopped attacking. One American who was talked about a lot was General James Gavin. He was the commanding officer of the 82 All American Airborne. There was story were a staff officer had to find Gavin to bring Gavin their headquarters. The landing zone was almost five miles across and would have been very difficult. In fact, General Gavin almost fell on the staff officer. Another story of General Gavin was in 1945, a German general was surrendering his army to the Americans, but would not believe that the young General Gavin ( who was in a combat uniform and carrying a rifle) could be a general. The audience for the book would be teenagers to any age of adults who are interested in World War II history. I would recommend this book to anyone regardless of gender who is interested in World War II history.

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This was a fantastic book! I really enjoyed reading it! It talks about puzzling events, odd coincidences, people who vanished, strange encounters, and much more! I would recommend it, but only for those above the age of thirteen. It mentions some things in it, along with a couple swear words, that I would not recommend. However, these things are very few and far between so altogether I think it was an extremely captivating book and shows how our Almighty God was very much involved with World War II in ways that no one can ignore. If you love reading about WWII, you will love reading this book!

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book consists of brief accounts, some only anecdotes, of a variety of mysteries and coincidences during the second world war, most from an Anglo-American perspective. A bit of a war buff, I found it a quick bedtime read.

The only glaring error I detected was in referring to the Republican government of Spain during their civil war as the 'rebels'. The author, a military historian with many titles to his credit, may prefer Franco, but it was he who led a revolt against an elected government.

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of these are common knowledge items and not "mysteries." For example -- Jewish scientists kicked out of Germany helped with the Manhattan Project. NOT a mystery. NOT written well. Most chapters are only 2 - 3 pages long and still I had trouble following the pertinent points. Paul Harvey he's not.

[Adam DeFosse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don’t have any complaints about this book, I just can’t rate it any higher due to the simple fact that I already knew decent chunks of what was in it. The “mysteries” within are easily explained through basic context and many of the topics he chose to write about are left practically untouched beneath the surface. Good beginner book for WWII stories that don’t reach the common sphere, but not my favorite out there.

[Lisa Anders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unexplained Mysteries of WW2. Wasn't too bad. The book made me want more info. It would take me to the precipice, almost pushing me over the edge wanting more. I did note take a couple of chapters to look for more info.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interestion stories from WWII. Some know (missing flight 19 from the bermuda triangle) and other less well know but interesting to me. For me the great point was that it all came in very 'bite size' pieces. I could read 1 or more items and easily put it down and then come back whenever I liked.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a mixed bag but I enjoyed this collection of stories about mysteries of World War II. A mixed bag because there were a lot of interesting stories, including about events or people I had never heard about, but the book contained a number of errors that certainly detract from the book in my view.
One thing I did was google info on some of the things I read about in this book, such as about the fire that occurred on the French ocean liner Normandie docked in New York. Following Pearl Harbor, the US Navy took over the great ship ( France, as you know, had been occupied by Germany) and began the conversion of the ocean liner into a troopship. It would have been capable of carrying 10,000 troops as well as supplies across the Atlantic to England. On February 9, 1942, the ship caught fire. It was destroyed; only one person died but the United States lost its largest transport ship. The author William B. Breuer mentions that investigators attributed the disaster to carelessness caused by civilian workers but he asserts that it could have been arson caused by Nazi saboteurs. OK, that's understandable. Checking more about this, there seems to be a consensus now that the likely cause was sparks from a welder's torch...
Some of the most interesting stories involve odd coincidences and strange disappearances. I was particularly interested in the story of the disappearance of the B-24 Liberator bomber "Lady Be Good." It was reported missing, very possibly at sea, in 1943. In 1959, an oil survey team reported that it had sighted the wreckage of a large airplane in the desert south of Benghazi, Libya. An air force search team found the wreckage and identified it but did not find any remains of the crew. A search of the area was conducted but no remains of any of the men were found... BUT, according to Wikipedia, all but one of the crew's remains were recovered in 1960. Investigations have concluded that the "Lady Be Good" crew was a first-time crew who failed to realize they had overflown their base near Benghazi in a sandstorm. They continued to fly south and then bailed out when the plane's fuel was exhausted. They died trying to walk out of the desert..
As I said, some good stories here but they may need to be checked to get more complete information about the event described.
3 stars.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hopefully few prospective readers will approach a work entitled “Unexplained Mysteries” as an academic treatise. As other reviewers have commented, there are factual errors here. Nevertheless, one of my biggest problems with the book was the inclusion of minimally significant premonitions and coincidences that almost beg to be padded with unnecessary verbiage. (What is there to say when a person switches from one chair to another and the former gets obliterated a few seconds later.) Further, the author’s attempts at a casual writing style often end up sounding silly. (“As cunning and ruthless as he was, Reinhard Heyrich, the son of an opera singer and an actress, had more than met his match in the cagey Canaris.”)

On the positive side, Unexplained Mysteries includes some genuinely fascinating tales, most of which appear in the first half of the book. Some of these may have real significance to the study of the war and might profitably become the focus of longer, more careful studies. Why, for instance, did Hitler cancel attacks on Gibraltar and Switzerland after making such extensive plans to capture them? Were more than fifty Dutch and British agents deliberately sacrificed to convince the Germans that the Allies would attempt to land in the Netherlands? How about the nearly one thousand RAF casualties taken in the disastrous raid on Nuremberg on March 30-31, 1944, which may have been deliberately leaked to the Germans? The 217-page work is broken into 122 articles, making it a great bathroom book.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is clearly overstated. From the statement it appears that the stories in this book will be bizarre occurrences that seem to have no rational explanation. However, many of the short stories are based on coincidence. Given the fog of war, where thousands of men and their machines go missing without a trace, there will always be events where there is imprecise knowledge of the outcome.
Approximately 16 million Americans served in the armed forces during World War II, so the are tens of millions of possible coincidental happenings. Therefore, while an individual instance might generate some surprise, the fact that many will happen should not. Furthermore, while some of the events can be considered strange, they were the consequence of a deliberate and knowledgeable choices of the participants.
That aside, these short stories remain interesting. They are short descriptions of events that happened during the war. Some of them are statements of great bravery against great odds while others are just the consequences of what war on the ground is all about. Fighting and killing the other side before they do it to you.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an odd mixture of short articles and factoids. Like other books of this type, you have to take the stories with a grain of salt, because many of them are incomplete and others try to imply a story that just isn't there, based on the presented facts. For instance, the story about Mrs. Goebbels, who despised her husband, trying to leave Germany for neutral Switzerland is posed as a possibility that she was really trying to defect to the Allies. Nowhere is any support for this presented, other than the fact that there were Allied spies in Switzerland.
Other stories are presented in partial form, and in some of those cases, yes, with what's presented, the reader is left puzzled, because the "mystery" of the story is left "unexplained." That doesn't mean that a more complete version of the story would have had the same effect.
Still, there were some good fragments in the book, and the light historical reading could lead someone to more in-depth versions of some of the stories.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unexplained Mysteries of World War II is the sort of book that my teenage self would have utterly adored. Collecting anecdotes, strange occurrences, and genuine mysteries, the late William B. Breuer presents this series of often short pieces from across the width and breadth of World War II. Yet as interesting as the collected pieces are, it feels like a cursory set of glances at the best of times. Worse, as Douglas Berry pointed out in his review, Breuer is guilty of some shoddy research and glaring omissions of facts, as the section on the crashed B-24 Liberator known as Lady Be Good proves. The result is a book that younger readers or those without much knowledge of World War II will enjoy, but those with more knowledge will be left more frustrated than anything else.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had been wanting to read this for a few years now & had found it at my local library. I was so looking forward to the read! It had the possibility of being interesting. It was easy to get through, & not in a bad way. BUT everything is just so textbook! It doesn’t catch attention. No feeling. And for a book that’s looking at “unexplained mysteries,” it does very little to actually dig into the mystery. Doesn’t even really discuss the mystery. There are separate sections with an overarching theme (legit, good idea) but it’s more of “here it is.” I had more than one moment of “Ok... Is this REALLY a mystery?” or “And what were the findings/explanations?”

Overall, I just felt let down by this book.

[Bryan Hieser · Rating 2 out of 5]

On November 8, 2007, my late grandmother paid $17.19 in cash at her local bookstore to buy this as a Christmas gift for me. I was 14, and I think I would have enjoyed this more had I read it then than I did now. Each mystery in this collection is maybe a couple pages at most, meaning there’s no compelling storytelling that would make this a page-turner. Because of this, along with my post-2019 skepticism of history in general and other reviews of this book that call into question the completeness of the accounts compiled here, it was minimally interesting, and I was happy to start and finish many other books last year before finishing this. I’m happy I read this for sentimental reasons, but your next book probably shouldn’t be this one.

[Rob Ballister · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting stories here. In some instances, author does a great job of relaying strange coincidences or happenings, with some analysis and "what if?" questions that make the reader think.


However, in some cases the author just relays what little facts were available, makes a wild supposition, and leaves the reader hanging. While this would probably be entertaining for someone with minimal knowledge of WWII, history aficionados will recognized that there is no new information or analysis in these stories, and be board.

So some of these vignettes are great, and some are obvious filler. For the most part, entertaining read.

[Blogul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captivating, fast-paced, diverse and interesting, it is a good entry-level attraction to ww2 for the young/less read public.
For the ww2 maniacs (like myself), it can be often annoying by some basic mistakes (like Wehrmacht paratroopers... really?! they were Luftwaffe personnel, a totally different arm; or ”Zeke, as the kamikaze were known” - no, Zeke was the plane type; or Bulgaria declaring war on Germany in... 1943, and so on) and general half-documentation, most likely willingly done so by the author to make some quite ordinary coincidences into ”wow! mysteries”.
Still a fun read.

[Larry Fleisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It reads like a tale of short vignettes, which makes for a fast read. Most of the stories offer interesting coincidences and the book is interesting enough to keep reading to see what other odd or interesting occurrences took place in an otherwise horrific war known for it destruction on a grand scale, especially in Europe and Asia.

[Wendy]

This sounded interesting when I picked it up, but I don't like open ended things, so I'm not sure why I picked it up. I apparently don't like short stories either. I really like long books, and this one just didn't do it for me. I do like reading about World War II, I believe it's a subject I read a lot about, this book just didn't do it for me.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was searching for other books in the same section of the library and so picked up Unexplained Mysteries of World War II as well. Short stories regarding various incidents of WWII. Not really mysteries - "Happenings of WWII" might be more apt. My rating as "average" does not denigrate any of the incidents themselves - the telling did not capture my attention.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit. I was familiar with some of the accounts but learned about others that I was not familiar with. This must have been an earlier addition because his information on some of the incidents that I was familiar with were not up to date. I didn't appreciate the bad language in the book, even though it was in the context of direct quotes.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I was quite impressed by this book in
very many different ways. I would rate
the writing as 4.5 stars.

Some segments--articles--were not as
interesting as others. Sortof a birds-eye
view of the war.

However, as I've said, I was quite impressed
by this book in very many ways.

[Jay Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a trivia book. It is chocked full of unexplained occurrences. Each story averages one to two pages. While I usually read in depth histories, this book did provide some interesting scenarios. Many people like books with these short snippets.

[Alethea Hammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The format is anecdotal and non linear. So in a former era it would have been a good book to keep in the bathroom. Most people nowadays read their phones in the bathroom. So a book of history for short attention span has less of a niche

[Frank Kohl · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a collection of short articles of strange and mysterious events during World War Two.

I would have liked it better if it was arranged chronologically instead of grouped by type of occurrences.

[Luis Martinez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting information about Himmler that it's worth reading.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of the stories are not all that mysterious

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mildly interesting, but it felt like reading down a list - most of the "mysteries" are only discussed for a couple of pages and aren't connected to each other.