fact or fiction?
A survey of over 2,000 British adults shows just how ignorant many people are when it comes to History. 9% believe Winston Churchill was a fictional character, 5% think Conan the Barbarian actually existed, 11% believe Hitler never existed, 33% think Mussolini didn't either, 6% think The War of the Worlds - H G Wells' account of a Martian invasion - actually happened, over 60% think the Cold War was not real, 42% believe William Wallace was an cinematic invention, 53% think Lord Nelson led British troops at Waterloo and 25% think the admiral's fatal triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar did not take place, 3% think the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings actually happened, 2% reckon the Battle of Endor in The Return of the Jedi was for real, more than a quarter of people do not know in which century the Great War took place, 57% believe the Battle of the Bulge - the Nazi counter-offensive in the Ardennes - never happened, 38% think Genghis Khan was a figment of someone's imagination, 40% think Benjamin Disraeli was too, 48% think the Battle of Little Big Horn - scene of Custer's last stand - was a myth, 44% don't believe the Hundred Years' War ever happened, 1% even believe that the Planet of the Apes and Battlestar Galactica - the latter featuring the defeat of humanity by Cyborgs - were based on fact.