STRANGE BUT TRUE STORIES FROM A HISTORY OF CONFLICT

War often calls for quick thinking and unconventional tactics, but few battles have ever been won with… potatoes. But, during World War II, the USS O’Bannon, a U.S. Navy destroyer, found itself in a tense standoff with a Japanese submarine. With the enemy dangerously close, too near in fact for their deck guns to be effective, the crew resorted to a rather unexpected weapon. 

This is the incredible tale of how the USS O’Bannon used quick thinking, and a well-stocked pantry, to help sink a Japanese submarine.

In 1788, the Austrian army marched toward Karansebes expecting to fight the Ottoman Empire.

Instead, a drunken argument somehow ended with thousands of Austrian soldiers firing on each other. Cavalry were mistaken for enemy troops, artillery opened fire on friendly forces, and Emperor Joseph II ended up fleeing for his life.

By the time the real Ottoman army arrived, the Austrians had already done most of the damage themselves.

This is the ridiculous and tragic story of the Battle of Karansebes, when an army accidentally went to war with itself.

War has always been a place of bold innovation and wild gambles. But every now and then, a plan comes along that is so truly bizarre. It sounds more like a joke than an actual military strategy.

In eighteen sixty two, during the early days of the American Civil War, one union officer came up with an idea that was as daring as it was unconventional.

It involved a night time operation. A group of unsuspecting mules and a whole ton of explosives.

The Berlin Airlift was one of the defining moments of the early Cold War, but hidden inside the story of cargo planes and blockaded Berlin is something much stranger.

American pilot Gail Halvorsen began dropping chocolate and chewing gum to children below, attaching the sweets to tiny handmade parachutes so they could float safely to the ground. The idea caught on, and Halvorsen soon became known around the world as the “Candy Bomber of Berlin.”

During World War II, the sailors at Simon’s Town Naval Base gained an unlikely new recruit: a giant Great Dane named Just Nuisance.

After repeatedly sneaking onto trains to follow his sailor friends into Cape Town, the Navy solved the problem by officially enlisting him, giving him a rank and the right to free rail travel.

From attending parades and breaking up fights to escorting drunken sailors home, Just Nuisance became a beloved wartime mascot and one of South Africa’s most unusual military legends.

This is the funny, heartwarming story of the only dog ever officially enlisted in the Royal Navy.

Before lacrosse became a modern sport with helmets, pads, and tiny goals, it was a massive Native American war game played across miles of open land.

But in 1763, outside Fort Michilimackinac, the Ojibwe and Sauk used it for something even more dramatic: a deception so simple the British never saw it coming.

This is the bizarre but true story of how a ball game, an open fort gate, and one very badly timed lack of suspicion helped turn a sporting spectacle into one of the strangest infiltrations in North American military history.

In the 1950s, the CIA helped the Philippine government fight communist rebels known as the Huks. But instead of relying only on bullets and bombs, one American operative turned to something far stranger: vampire folklore.

This episode tells the bizarre true story of Edward Lansdale, the Aswang legend, and one of the CIA’s most disturbing psychological warfare operations.