5 Amazing World War II Stories That Deserve to Be Movies

Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is only the latest hit movie based on a fascinating true story from World War II. But have all the great stories from that war been mined by Hollywood? Not even close. Here are five more great tales, with suggested, marquee-ready titles.

The Night Witches.

Made up of only women, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment was trained for bombing missions behind German lines, flying 1920s-era planes built of wood and canvas with no radio or radar, their bombs held to the wings by wire. This construction gave the planes the advantage of flying below radar and surprising the enemy in the dead of night.

Flying 15 to 18 missions per night (each!), their planes often returned, “riddled with bullets,” according to Nadezhda (Nadia) Popova. Enlisting at only 19 years old, Nadia’s motive was revenge: for her brother killed on the front, her home taken over by German soldiers, and her town destroyed by German aircrafts. When shot down in the North Caucasus in July 1942, she met another shot down pilot who would become her husband when the war was over. Lt. Col. Popova flew 852 missions and was shot down several times in the freezing cold. She was lucky though; she watched several of her friends’ burning planes fall from the sky.

The regiment, unofficially known as “Stalin’s Falcons,” were given a much more chilling moniker by the Germans: Nachthexen, or “The Night Witches.” Sounds like the perfect name for a thriller, doesn’t it?

Hanns Scharff: The Gentle Interrogator.

Hanns Scharff was not meant to be part of the German army. He lived in South Africa with his family, but was drafted when visiting Germany when the war broke out. His wife convinced a general to put him with interpreters instead of front lines, but through a series of mistakes and coincidences, he became the lead interrogator for the Allied pilots felled in France and Germany. Having seen a prisoner abused when he was an assistant, he vowed against doing the same. Instead, his technique was unique in using kindness and friendly conversation to extract information.

Scharff’s success in using kindness to get what he wanted has been recently studied and compared to other interrogation techniques. It’s been found that not only does one tend to get more information and more accurate information from the prisoner; the prisoner is often unaware of how much information they’ve given away. Imagine a movie that explored this unique approach rather than 24’s techniques.

After the war, Scharff divorced and moved to the United States, marrying an American and finding success in a new career as a mosaic artist. One of his works appears in the Magic Kingdom Castle at Disney World.

Major Charity Adams vs. The Buzz Bomb.

The American 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the only all-female all-black army corps overseas in WWII. Their journey started off with a bang: a Buzz Bomb was their welcoming committee upon their arrival in London in February 1945. The battalion was especially loyal to their leader, Major Charity Adams. A visiting American general, displeased upon inspection that the Major’s whole unit was not present, threatened to replace her with a white lieutenant.

“Over my dead body,” she answered. Her battalion agreed: if he intended to court-martial her, he’d have to court-martial all of them. He apologized immediately.

Their work wasn’t finished after the war—they were sent to Rouen, France, to move letters around continental Europe. The welcome they received in Europe lay in stark contrast to their treatment back home: the French people applauded them as they paraded through Paris, and they received first-class treatment at the luxurious hotel they were put in. African-American soldiers greeted them upon their arrival and helped them unload, unpack, and even made their beds for them, leaving cards with their names and units on the pillows.

Where is our Netflix TV series to binge-watch on these ladies? It would fit right in with Bomb Girls and The Bletchley Circle.

The Ghost Army.

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troop soldier unit, also known as “The Ghost Army,” used fakery and misinformation to deceive the enemy throughout the European theatre. Full of artists, illustrators, and radio and sound guys plucked from New York and Philadelphia art schools in January 1944, the 1,100 man unit often pretended to be much larger groups with the use of 500-pound speakers that could be heard at a 15-mile radius. They sent fake radio transmissions to distract from actual missions and deployed handmade blow-up tanks and fake observation planes to round out their schemes. They marked their tanks with chalk and sewed on fake patches to pretend to be other units and hide from enemy spies.

Prevented from talking about their experience before the reports became declassified, the majority of the American army was unaware of their existence until former soldier and then-illustrator Arthur Shilstone wrote about it in 1985. While the PBS broadcast a documentary on the group in 2013, the surreal story is ripe for a movie treatment.

__Vera Atkins: The Ruthless Interrogator. __

Vera Atkins placed 400 agents out to the field, training them for months, teaching them the ropes and accounting for every detail of their new identities. So when the war ended in 1945 with over 100 agents unaccounted for, she made it her personal mission to solve the stories of these missing women herself. She muscled her way into officially joining the British War Crimes Commission. She was known for her ruthless interrogation skills: she notes in one report that she had the commandment of Auschwitz admitting to his horrible crimes before lunch. Atkins was part of several such investigations, but she also used the information to forward her search for her spies. Carved names on jail-cell walls, sketches from a former Vogue sketch artist who’d survived multiple concentration camps, intercepted letters: all were recorded and used as part of her investigation.

When she returned to the United States, she focused on publicizing and memorializing her forgotten agents, so much so that she appears briefly in some of the movies made of their lives. But Atkins was a secretive woman, and no movie has yet been made about her incredible tenacity and loyalty to these agents.