Funny you mention that. In my Sophomore year of high school, I had an Honors World History class with a teacher who was really nice and bubbly but rather young and worryingly naive. As I stated earlier, I'm a military buff and a bit of a military historian as well, so going over the units that involved war were super easy for me. Several times, I knew more about certain topics than my teacher, who got her Master's Degree in this stuff. So there was more than a few times I was teaching the class a thing or two about the world's bloodiest conflicts, World War 2 especially.
History is a lot more interesting when things blow up, but I also learned that people learn to love history the more in-depth you go. Kids who probably didn't care much about history (except for maybe their grade) seemed genuinely interested once you start throwing some interesting trivia at them.
- In order to withdraw the surrounded Allied forces from Dunkirk, France, the British organized a flotilla of eight hundred of ships, ranging from a military destroyer to fishing boats to floating rafts of wood, to cross the English channel and ferry over 300,000 stranded soldiers back to the safety of England. This move was paramount in the Allied war effort, and was called, "The Miracle at Dunkirk".
- General George S. Patton was a strong believer in reincarnation, and he attributes this to his success during the invasion of Sicily and Italy. He believed he was the reincarnation of a Roman foot soldier, and that his military conquests across the Mediterranean campaign were simply him reenacting his former life's work.
- The Japanese Long Lance torpedo was perhaps the best in the world at the time, using wooden fins to stabilize their advanced design to attack targets at long distances with impeccable accuracy. This compares to the American torpedoes, whose design was so bad that it wasn't uncommon for the torpedoes to be shot out of a submarine, have it circle around, and strike the same submarine in the rear.
- There was a battle in which Germans teamed up with Americans to fight Nazis and rescue French people. The battle was known as the Battle for Castle Itter, and in it members of the anti-Nazi German Wehrmacht teamed up with American tankers to fight off fanatical elements of the Nazi SS and rescue 14 French VIP's from a fortified castle. You can read about it in this book, "The Last Battle".
I've got plenty more facts where that came from. Maybe some day, we should have, "StaR Teaches History" lessons on TeamSpeak. Or I can just encourage everyone to read
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/
