the past

Way back when, I thought that the Second World War was decided on a football match between England and Germany. Of course, it wasn't.

Thom

After the Gulf War, I thought that wars were regularly occuring events, like the Olympics or something. I remember asking my mom, "When is the next war?" like it was already planned out.

Reese, US

As a very young child I used to believe that the Army, Air force and Navy all fought each other for a living. One day while visiting an Air Force base, I was shocked to see a lady wearing fatigues, I assumed she was in the Army, and I expected some of the Airmen wearing blue to attack her.

Jon

When I was 7 I was obsessed with all things military. So when my dad told me we were going to Germany for a holiday I became hysterical. I just couldn't grasp that WW2 had ended. I had nightmares for weeks. We ended up going to Cornwall that year.

Pete

That world war 1 and 2 were actually called WOOL war 1 and 2. i thought sheep and wool were very important if there were two wars about them.

emma

As a four-year-old with a very large vocabulary, I decided the "Civil War" was the one war where everybody pretended they were nice to everyone else. For example, a soldier would offer the enemy a cigarette, shoot him when he least expected it, and then pretend to be sad about it.

Hannah

When the BBC news reported the murder of yet another Roman Catholic man in Northern Ireland, I used to catch on to the ROMAN bit more than the Catholic bit and had an image of a Roman Centurion sprawled out dead on a street in Belfast

John Paul II

I used to think that the word Great was added to Britain because they won the Second World War.

Age

My younger brother asked me once who won the first world war. I obviously had a sense of fairness because I concluded that because we had won the second world war that Germany must have won the first one.

Paul

Confused after learning of the Civil War, I asked my mom what "civil" means. She said it was where people were nice to each other. So I pictured the Civil War as a period where people were always smiling, shaking hands, complimenting each other, etc. I justified the "war" part of the phrase by the idea that it was a niceness competition, and they thought "war" sounded cooler than "competition". Needless to say, I failed the test... and got really mad at my mom for telling me false information. It took me a while to staighten it out.

still not good at history