Bizarre History by Joe Rhatigan

Battle of the Bulge was upcoming. Patton, desperate for some good weather, called headquarters and asked if anyone had a good prayer for weather. The man who answered the call, Chaplain James H. O’Neill, wrote a prayer, and under the general’s orders had 250,000 copies of the prayer printed and handed out to the whole Third Army.
    What happened next during the Battle of the Bulge sounds best coming directly from the chaplain: “On December 20, to the consternation of the Germans and the delight of the American forecasters who were equally surprised at the turnabout, the rains and the fogs ceased. For the better part of a week came bright clear skies and perfect flying weather. Our planes came over by tens, hundreds, and thousands. They knocked out hundreds of tanks, killed thousands of enemy troops in the Bastogne salient, and harried the enemy as he valiantly tried to bring up reinforcements. The 101st Airborne, with the 4th, 9th, and 10th Armored Divisions, which saved Bastogne, and other divisions, which assisted so valiantly in driving the Germans home, will testify to the great support rendered by our air forces. General Patton prayed for fair weather for battle. He got it.”
    O’Neill received a Bronze Star from Patton for his prayer.
Seeing Double
    Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Confederate Army had surrounded the well-manned and heavily fortified Union earthwork at Athens, Alabama, on August 24, 1864. Forrest sent a demand for surrender, but the Union commander, Colonel Wallace Campbell, refused to acquiesce unless it could be proven that he was up against a superior force. Forrest happily obliged; however, as Campbell reviewed the Confederate troops, Forrest had the men whom Campbell had already counted quietly move to the back of the line to be counted again. Campbell counted nine thousand men and twenty-four cannons. Forrest actually only have around 3,500 men and eight cannons. Campbell surrendered without a fight.
Civil War Math
    The Civil War split the United States in two and was fought along many fronts—even in children’s textbooks. Young boys and girls going to school in the South learned math from Lemuel Johnson’s
An Elementary Arithmetic, Designed for Beginners
textbook. Here are two problems the children had to solve:
    A Confederate soldier captured eight Yankees each day for nine days. How many Yankees did he capture in all?
    If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers can whip forty-nine Yankees?
    Not to be outdone, children learning their ABCs on the northern side of things could read from
The Union ABC
(published in 1865), which was printed in red, white, and blue and taught grammar to preschoolers. Like today’s alphabet books, it presented a word from each letter in the alphabet. Here’s a sample:
    A is America, land of the free. [So far so good.]
    B is a Battle, our soldiers did see.
    C is a Captain, who led on his men.
    N is for Negro, no longer a slave.
    T is a Traitor, that was hung on a tree. [Oh, dear.]
    U is the Union, our soldiers did save.
Chew on That!
    General Hideki Tojo was the Japanese Prime Minister during World War II, and he was the one who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, Tojo was soon captured (not before attempting suicide). After recovering from his injuries, he was moved to a prison in Japan where an American dentist, Jack Mallory, was ordered to make him a new set of dentures. Apparently Tojo loved his sweets. The dentist, however, loved his country and secretly engraved a note to Tojo in Morse code on the teeth. The note read: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
    At first, Mallory kept his prank a secret, but a friend of his wrote about it in a letter. The story then reached a local radio station, and it wasn’t long before
Stars & Stripes
and newspapers around the world carried the story. In order to avoid any further trouble, Mallory visited Tojo once