Survivorship bias is reasoning from cases that passed a filter while ignoring those that did not. In WWII, Abraham Wald applied this insight to bomber damage, though the popular retelling embellishes the record.
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Yamaguchi was a Japanese engineer who was in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki on 9 August. Japan officially recognized him in 2009 as the only person to survive both.
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Alexander Fleming noticed mould killing bacteria in 1928. An Oxford team purified it by 1940, and US fermentation research made mass production possible by 1943.
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Operation Mincemeat was a 1943 British deception in which a corpse carrying forged papers was left off Spain to convince Germany the Allies would not invade Sicily first.
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The code combined a letter-by-letter substitution system using Navajo words for English letters with Navajo terms for hundreds of military concepts, all memorized and sent by voice.
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