Bryan Yorke

Anti-aircraft gunners of the Zheleznyakov coast defense armored train by a DShK machine gun, preparing to defend against German air attack, May 1942

German forces on a short-barrel StuG III Ausf B cross the Desna river on their march east, 1941.

Two German soldiers near Sevastopol, December 1941.

In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages. They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away. They believed the area was infected with typhus. It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing. The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back. He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight. What he had was medicine. His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus. They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war. And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance. Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone. So he started injecting his patients. He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again. The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them. Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable. Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect. Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry. The tests came back positive. The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people. Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk. After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War. He died in 2006. He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.

Hürtgen Forest, Fall 1944.

Aviation Metalsmiths assembling a F4F-3 Wildcat inside USS Enterprise's hangar deck, 28 October 1941; note spare TBD and SBD aircraft hanging overhead

October 27, 1943. Marine paratroopers land on the Japanese held island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands. Their real mission is to make the Japanese believe something that isn't true. The Americans were about to invade Bougainville, a much bigger island. Lieutenant Colonel Victor Krulak's 2nd Parachute Battalion was sent to Choiseul to make as much noise as possible so the Japanese would think the main attack was coming there. The same day, New Zealand troops stormed ashore on the nearby Treasury Islands. It was New Zealand's first opposed amphibious landing since Gallipoli. Krulak's battalion of about 650 men raided Japanese positions, ambushed patrols, and blew up supplies for a week. They acted like a much larger force, and it worked. The Japanese rushed in reinforcements. When it was time to leave, one patrol got trapped by Japanese forces. Help came in the form of a battered PT boat, commanded by a young Navy lieutenant named John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's boat pulled the Marines out under fire, overloaded and low on fuel. A badly wounded Marine died in Kennedy's own bunk on the way back. Krulak promised Kennedy a bottle of whiskey for the rescue. He finally delivered it years later, when Kennedy was President of the United States.