Originally someone else asked this somewhere, but I've been thinking about it for a while, and now my intrigue about it has become a clone of theirs.

I hear a lot of stories that sound like they were probably made up, both from WWII and other wars. Like the guy who survived falling out of a plane only to be captured by the Germans and then released because the Germans were impressed that he survived. Or the guy who escaped Auschwitz only to track down his attacker and then just decide to forgive him at the last minute. Or the guy who shot Genghis Khan with an arrow only to be hired by him because, again, he was impressed.

Say it with me. Who verifies this stuff? For starters, the constant idea of being spared because your enemies were "impressed" sounds both counter-intuitive and suspiciously tropey. Imagine being spared by Genghis Khan and having the Mongols just assume you're not going to backstab them and ask Genghis "hey, want to be impressed again?"

Meanwhile, the WWII ones in particular are everywhere. I kind of thought they weren't so noticeable. Then they became impossible to ignore. They're in every five videos. Hitler somehow has five times the number of ironic factoids about him than other famous people. Hmm...

If you had to bet on any war story (be it from a person, video, etc. just as long as it's not meant to be taken as fiction) being made up, which one would it be?

Pretty much anything Chesty Puller did. Dude is a legend because so much of what he did sounds like it was made up on the spot by a drunk guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carriers_of_Japan

Japanese submarine aircraft carriers.

This sounds like something out of a Captain America comic, circa 1943.

That's the coolest thing I've seen in recent memory

For me, it would have to be the guy in WWII who supposedly saved Hitler's life as a child while at the beach and had his life supposedly spared during the holocaust in return (since the person was Jewish). Like bro, the culprit of a mass genocide isn't going to remember that, somehow stalk his files, pinpoint who he is, single him out, and go the effort to save him. That's sadly not how a genocide works. When you're genocidal, most likely you sadly don't care about those things, especially when soldiers are doing your dirty work. This was always a common story in WWII videos and it's very deceptive when you think about it, especially when you consider Neo-Nazis would share the story specifically to make Hitler sound like he had some kind of honor (spoiler alert, he didn't, he was an extreme form of a genocidal maniac).

Such stories should be filtered by more investigative peoples out of public discourse, they're traps.

I wish I could remember the name of the novel I read.