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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.

The desert can hold many secrets. The desert near Los Alamos in New Mexico just after World War 2 held perhaps the biggest secret of them all. Learn more about the Most Dangerous Science Experiment in the World with another Dark Docs presented by Dark5.

May 21st, 1946. A top-secret laboratory. A group of scientists look on as one of their colleagues, a Canadian named Louis Slotin, conducts a demonstration. Slotin hovers over a strange object, which sits on display on a small table in front of the crowd of onlookers. The object looks like a metal sphere, nested inside a more substantial metal hemisphere like an egg in a nest. But this metal device contains a terrifying potential. Why? Because it is nothing less than the exposed core of a nuclear bomb, and the egg at the center is an orb of pure plutonium. Imagine being in that room. You probably would have heard a pin drop, such was the intense atmosphere. Slotin’s demonstration was a risky one. The operation he was performing had an ominous nickname among the group – they dubbed it [quote] “tickling the dragon’s tail.”

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It was near the end of World War II, and the Germans were getting desperate to turn the war back in their favor. This included a plethora of suggested scientific and engineering projects, many of them quite bizarre, in what they termed Wunderwaffen, or 'wonder weapons.'

There was an almost megalomaniacal tendency by the German leadership in their belief that science could compensate for Germany's fast-deteriorating position fighting the combined might of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

One idea proposed in 1942 by Hermann Göring, head of the air force and one of the most senior members of the ruling elite. Göring had made a call for light bomber designs capable of meeting what he called the "3×1000" requirement; namely that the craft be able to carry 1,000 kilograms (that is, 2,200 pounds) of bombs a distance of 1,000 kilometers (or 620 miles) with a speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour, equivalent to 620 miles per hour.

Göring had proclaimed: "I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5-tonne munition load. I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber, which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea."

Pictured: A photo of First Lightning, the first ever Soviet atomic bomb test. The United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was detonated on 29 August 1949 at 7:00 a.m., at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after top-secret research and development as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

It was in 1939 that Winston Churchill famously defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The Soviet Union’s atom bomb project could certainly be considered a riddle, a mystery, and an enigma, such was its secrecy at the time.

Russia had been conducting independent research into radioactive elements as early as 1910, long before it even became the Soviet Union or USSR. By the 1930s Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts towards the advancement of physics research, even with setbacks such as the 1917 October Revolution and civil war of 1922.

Scientists tend to be a sharing community. That’s why Russian physicist, Georgy Flyorov, became suspicious in 1942 that the Allied powers were secretly developing an atomic super-weapon when his literature search showed that no one in the West was writing on nuclear fission. And so he wrote an urgent letter to Joseph Stalin pleading with him to start a Soviet atomic program.

Notable too is a report dated February 28th, 1945, and written for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the NKVD, the country’s dreaded secret police. The report was titled “Progress of the Atomic Bomb Abroad” and stated that it was expected the United States would produce an atom bomb by July of that year.

How close was Germany to developing an atomic bomb in World War 2? Learn the story of the secret commando raid to destroy Germany's Heavy Water facility. Subscribe now: bit.ly/DarkDocs

Just why was Germany so interested in the remote Vemork hydroelectric facility? Nestled in the southern mountains of Norway, and perched on a ledge overlooking a deep valley, the site harbored a dark secret. In the 1930’s and 40’s, it was the only plant commercially manufacturing heavy water, a key component in the production of nuclear weapons.

When Norway was invaded by Germany in 1940, concerns mounted that the Germans would seize the plant and its heavy water facilities and control most of the global supply. Tensions were high, as German scientists had already discovered nuclear fission two years earlier. Due to the extreme secrecy, no one knew how close the German weapons program was to successfully producing an atomic bomb, but the Allied Powers were not about to wait around to find out.

When history reflects on Pearl Harbor, the attack is often remembered as a strictly aerial battle. But there was another, much smaller group of Japanese soldiers who were extensively trained for a little-known second phase of attacks to correspond with the air raids. This mission was comprised of ten men making up a secret and elite midget submarine force. Called the “Special Attack Naval Unit,” they would ultimately be unsuccessful, and yet even their failure wouldn’t go as planned. Tasked with destroying his own submarine, one of those men would instead accidentally pass-out and become the first Japanese POW of World War II.

It was late into the night of December 6, 1941. America did not know it yet, but it would awake the next morning to find itself under siege. On the morning of December 7, the Pearl Harbor Naval Base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu would be bombarded with a series of surprise attacks from Japanese aircraft. It would be the final straw that drew the U.S. out of its isolationism and into the global scuffle of World War II.