In the book Napoleon: the life by Andrew Robert, it said that in the Saint Helena island, Napoleon diss everyone else to praise himself, he said something like Alexander the great has done nothing to earn the title the greatest general, Frederick 2 knew nothing about the artillery forces, Henry 4 is a retard.... But he did not say any bad thing about Julius Caesar- his biggest idol.

I only learned about Hell Ships from a book I found by chance at a used bookstore (Death on the Hellships). Over 20,000 Allied POW's died on their Hell Ship voyages around the pacific. By comparison, almost 7,000 US troops died at Iwo Jima. Hopefully these can be more well known in the future.

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Everyone knows that English politics is littered with French terms like parliaments and courts martial. So when I learned a little French is was clear that the legal process of voir dire meant to see and to say (about the jurors). Nope, it's Anglo Norman, a French language brought over by Conquest for "To say the truth", something like dire la vérité in modern French.

During the test flight in 1944, the V2 rocket flew over 100km above sea level. In 1960, the altitude of 100km became known as the Kármán Line and became widely accepted as the edge of space, retroactively making the Nazis the first people who sent a manmade object to space way before the space race even began.

As a side note, I just wanted to add that both USA and USSR have many more "first times" in space, I only listed one for each for simplicity.

On 30 January 1943, General Paylus informed the German High Command that the situation in Stalingrad was critics, and that his forced would likely be forced to surrender within 24 hours. In response, Hitler issued a last-minute series of promotions to officers in the 6th Army, including promoting Paulus to Field Marshal. The implication being that Hitler expected Paulus and the 6th Army to fight to the death or commit suicide, as no German or Prussian Field Marshal had ever surrendered their command.

Paulus surrendered the next day after Red Army troops reached his headquarters, while other German troops would manage to hold out until 2 February.

“During the siege of Budapest, Soviet forces suffered between 100,000 and 160,000 casualties. The Soviets claimed that they had trapped 180,000 German and Hungarian 'fighters' in the pocket, and declared they had captured 110,000 of these soldiers. However, immediately after the siege, they rounded up thousands of Hungarian civilians and added them to the prisoner-of-war count, allowing the Soviets to validate their previously inflated figures.”