We all know what happened during World War II and how it ended. But there’s more to the war story than the technology, military strategies and manpower discussed in the history books. In many cases, strange contraptions and smart tricks that we never learned about also helped swing the tide on the battlefield.

These pictures will show you the strange side of World War II and confirm, one more time, that what we read in history books is not always the complete story. Here’s another side of World War II which shows that truth is sometimes even stranger than fiction.