Today is the day to stock up on olive oil.

You may have heard about the wartime hoax that struck some trusting folks in downstate Illinois. Basically, a woman managed to trick a man and a young girl into pretending to be a soldier killed in Iraq and his orphaned daughter, respectively, for the benefit of the staff at a college newspaper. The strange thing though is that apparently this woman did it for her own, so-far-unknown reasons. She was not profiting form the hoax monetarily or, until this moment, receiving notoreity.

While this is a complicated and interesting hoax, it's a bad one, in that it's fairly pointless. I wanted to take a look at some of the other worst wartime hoaxes in American history:

Revolutionary War: Wee Tea-Totaler:
Quickly dampening the popular enthusiasm for the wharffront rebellion of 1773, Boston newspapers reported on the tragic story of Wee Willy Williams, son of the captain of the Dartmouth. "O what shall we tell the king now?" he was quoted as bawling in The Pennsylvania Evening Post, capturing the sympathy of literate colonials everywhere. Soon it was revealed that this was the effort of a bored ne'er-do-well hoping to avoid doing battle with the British. The hoax was revealed and the hoax-perpetrator was drawn and quartered.

Civil War: Clara Barton:
Clara Barton never existed. I have no proof of this but I am working on it.

World War I: The Doubtful Doughboy
Becoming a darling of the media with her tenuous communication with her husband, Martha Pills of Cleveland, Ohio shared with others letters she received from her husband, who was popular with his fellow soldiers due to his interminable pale complexion, fat belly and high-pitched giggle. This was quickly put to rest and Pills was committed due to insanity caused by wartime rationing.

Korean War: MASHed Potatoes
I just found out that some of the things that were said on episodes of "M*A*S*H" might not have actually been said during the Korean War. Did anybody else know this?

Second Gulf War: Saddam, Part II
According to my sources, the dramatic footage of a bearded, bedraggled Saddam Houssein was faked. A day before, Saddam was awakened in his bed in Tikrit and laughed: "Well, I guess I knew this day was coming!" Over coffee later that day, he said, "You know, I know a way we can do this that makes everybody look cooler." A spider hole was dug, some cotton was torn up and rubbed with coal to falsify a beard and Saddam rended some of the clothes he had in his Louis Vuitton suitcase. If you look closely at the video from Saddam's capture, you can see him whispering to one of the American soldiers, "That was awesome."