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It was one of the strangest battles of WW2 in which a most unlikely team of soldiers came together in one of the most heroic stories of the war.
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Early in the afternoon on May 3, 1945, a Yugoslavian prisoner named Zvonimir Čučković left the gates of Austria’s Itter Castle, the looming fortress on a hill where he was being held by SS guards and bicycled into the thick forests beyond. He was supposed to be running an errand for the prison’s commander, Sebastian Wimmer - a not infrequent occurrence, as Čučković had earned the commander’s trust as a maintenance man and electrician who had helped convert the castle into a German prison.

But Čučković had an ulterior motive that afternoon. He was carrying a contraband note written by English-speaking prisoners inside. He had agreed to take the note out of prison and present it to the first group of American soldiers he encountered. And so, instead of running the errand and returning to the castle as he usually did, he continued riding.

Čučković considered making the short ride west to Wörgl, a small city close to the German/Austrian border. But the town was still densely occupied by German troops, and so instead he made the much longer trip to Innsbruck, riding over 40 miles along the Inn River valley. He reached the city that evening, where he succeeded in tracking down a group of Americans - the 409th Infantry Regiment of the American 103rd Infantry Division - and passed on his note. The unit did not have the authorization to move forward with a rescue attempt themselves, but they promised Čučković a definitive answer from their headquarters by the next morning.

What followed is one of the more extraordinary and unlikely stories of World War II; the story of an American Army commander working together with his enemy - an SS captain and a Wehrmacht major - to lead a mixed company of American and German troops to an Austrian castle and rescue a group of French political prisoners. What is now known as, the Battle for Castle Itter.

During the Cold War arms race, both the US and USSR were testing top-secret, cutting-edge technologies that seemed beyond belief to deliver nuclear warheads effectively to the other side. The goal was to strike as quickly, quietly, and as devastatingly as possible. To accomplish this, in 1964 the Soviets began developing an audacious plan that turned their focus to a most unlikely place. While US attention was trained upwards towards aerial superiority, the USSR would instead target the ground beneath their feet. Underground, in fact… with a brand-new experimental vehicle nicknamed the "Battle Mole."

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As images and footage of actual events are not always available, Dark Docs sometimes utilizes similar historical images and footage for dramatic effect. All content on Dark Docs is researched, produced, and presented in historical context for educational purposes.

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As Cold War tensions grew in the 1950s, the U.S. relied upon the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance spy planes and reconnaissance balloons from its Genetrix Program. But these tools, unable to surveil some of the darkest and farthest reaches deep within the USSR, did not provide enough aerial coverage to accurately determine Soviet military operations, movements, and capabilities.

Instead, the US was forced to reach even higher with its reconnaissance missions using the “Keyhole” series of satellites. Unlike modern digital spy satellites, the KH-series relied on the use of physical film that had to be secretly jettisoned and returned to Earth. To keep the film out of enemy hands, each KH satellite utilized a simple but effective trick. When their missions were complete, the KH satellites dumped their top-secret film into a reentry capsule and dropped it back to Earth. If the fiery descent went to plan, the capsule would jettison its heat shield and a parachute would deploy. All that would be left was for an airplane to hook it in mid-air some 60,000 feet above the ground...

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In the summer of 2013, Timothy Koeth, a physicist at the University of Maryland, received a mystery birthday gift in the form of a mysteriously heavy metal cube. He had agreed to go to a parking lot for an unspecified delivery. Inside a blue cloth sack left in the lot for him, swathed in paper towels, he found what he immediately identified as a small chunk of uranium. The cube of uranium was a sight to behold. Held under ultraviolet light, it glows an eerie cerulean blue, with cracks and ridges of jet black...

Pictured: The aggressive take-off profile of the Soviet TU-144 supersonic passenger airplane (right) vs. the French-British Concorde (left).

At its peak, the Anglo-French Concorde was the epitome of technological prowess and super sleek design in 20th-century aviation. It was considered the most beautiful commercial plane the world had ever seen - and, being the West's first supersonic jet, it was also the fastest of its era. However, the Concorde was not the first supersonic plane to make it to market. This honor went to a Soviet aircraft that reached supersonic speed months before the Concorde, and one that briefly became the pride of the USSR, before its ultimate failure.

The communist version of the Concorde was the Tupolev Tu-144, and it was the first passenger aircraft to fly at more than twice the speed of sound. The Tupolev's first flight occurred three months before the Concorde took to the air on March 2, 1969. But the Tu-144, which was dubbed 'Concordski' by Western observers for its similarities to its Western rival, never became quite as popular.

It was perhaps most notable as the first commercial supersonic plane to have a crash landing - which it did not once but twice.

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