Nothing pushes technology forward like a good
war.
Sounds lieke a pretty crass thing to say,
but it's true.
World War II gave us modern computing, modern
rockets, improved surgery and medical care,
radar...
Lots of stuff that we owe a huge debt for
today.
But not all innovations from the war were
quite as successful or had quite such a big
impact.
Some of the inventions, particularly the weapons,
were simply bizarre.
Here's our list of the five strangest weapons
of World War Two that were actually built.
And at number five, a particularly useless
weapon courtesy of the UK.
The unrotated projectile was a short range
rocket with parachutes and cables attached.
The idea was that a salvo would create a temporary
aerial minefeld, with attacking planes snagging
on the cables and pulling the rockets into
the plane.
But it was useless.
Attacking planes could easily fly above and
below the fairly visible chutes, and with
the slightest change in wind, the salvo would
slowly drift back to the launch site, usually
a ship.
And there was very little the crew could do
about it.
Despite being a winning combination of ineffective
against its target and downright dangerous
to the user, the system was used extensively
at the beginning of the war.
And speaking of which, bomb dogs were useless
enough to become a running joke amongst historians.
Because this soviet invention was a brilliant
example of how to get it wrong.
Faced with an onslaught of German tanks at
the start of operation Barbarossa, the Russians
had to act fast with a cheap, effective defence.
And their answer was the bomb dog.
The idea was, on paper, sound.
Dogs were kept hungry and then unleashed on
tanks with food hidden in their chassis, training
the dogs to run at the tank.
They were then strapped into a harness containing
an explosive charge with a vertical wooden
stick trigger on it, which would get knocked
down when the dog went under the tank, setting
off the bomb and destroying the vehicle.
And the dog.
Seems like a sensible enough idea, right?
As long as your not a dog.
But it went horribly wrong.
The dogs had practiced on stationary tanks
in quiet training camps.
Faced with gunfire, movement and the smell
of diesel oil that came with attacking vehicles
in the heat of battle, most of the dogs ran
back to their handlers.
Before exploding.
The soviets claimed over 300 tanks were knocked
out by the dogs.
That number is almost certainly total nonsense.
Incidentally, the Americans tried a similar
idea of stuffing crates with bats, which carried
incendiary bombs around their waists.
The idea was that the crates would be dropped
over Japanese cities by bombers, the bats
would roost in the tightly packed and highly
flammable wooden houses, then their timed
bombs would go off sparking huge fires.
When they tested the idea, several of the
bats vanished.
It turned out they had gone to roost in the
roofs of several of the test facilities warehouses
and sheds.
Which subsequently burned to the ground.
So at least it sort of worked.
The German V weapons were Nazi Germany's high-tech
war-winners, though they came too late to
actually...
Win the war.
they were, however, marvels of engineering.
The V-1 doodlebug was a sort of pulse-jet
missile that rained down on London, the V2
was the first truly modern rocket, which...
Rained down on London.
And the V3...
Yes, there was a V3, a huge, multi-charged
cannon that wreaked...
Well actually very little devastation against
Luxembourg.
The Germans were big fans of big guns - their
31.5" calibre Gustav and Dora cannons required
a crew of 4,000 to assemble and operate, and
could fire a 4.8 tonne shell capable of piercing
30m of rock.
But that was small fry to the V3.
These guns were bizarre - a large tube with
an explosive charge at one end and a series
of secondary charges in side valves along
the barrel.
The full weapon would have been vast, a 140m
barrel propelling 140kg shells over 100 miles
to wreak devastation over London.
Hitler ordered 25 to be built in France, but
the war was getting on and the area was repeatedly
bombed by the allies, putting paid to the
German's plans.
Eventually, two shorter versions with 50m
barrels were built, and lobbed over 180 shells
at Luxembourg, where they wrought almost no
devastation at all, killing 10 civilians and
injuring 35.
Both guns were eventually captured by the
US, who, it turned out, were far more impressed
with the V2 than this slightly bizarre and
very, very impractical weapon.
This is the Kugelpanzer.
That's not it's official name.
It's official name isn't known.
Nor is what it was used for - it's believed
to be a reconnaisance vehicle or cable layer.
But it truly is bizarre.
the object is officially known as Itm #37,
and it's in storage at the Kubinka Tank Museum
in Russia.
It really is a mystery.
Almost nothing is known about it other than
that It was built in Germany and shipped to
Japan, and was captured in Northeast China
by the Soviets in 1945.
The tank has a small trailing arm behind it
which was used either for steering or stabilising
the ball, and a viewign slit at the front.
A small engine powered the one man tank, but
it's long since been removed.
Bizarrely, no metal samples are allowed to
be taken from the tank, so it's not known
what it is made from, but the armour is a
mere 5mm thick - enough to stop most smallarms
fire, but not much good against anything heavier.
It would certainly have been hard to hit though,
whatever it was used for.
And on the subject of awesomely futuristic
mini tanks, check out Goliath.
The name is a lie.
Goliath was actually rather small, a tiny
tank the size of a coffee table.
But it WAS ingenius.
Goliath was the first real military robot
- a wire guided micro tank carrying an explosive
charge of up to 100 kilos, designed to roll
under enemy armour and up to bunkers before
exploding.
It was an idea decades ahead of its time,
but the robots were small and, for the most
part, their charges were underpowered.
Nevertheless over 4,500 were produced
And that concludes our list of sometimes ridiculous,
sometimes overly ambitious ideas which made
it off the drawing board, but not really into
the history books.
There's so many more we could have included...
Check out the Habakuck, a British idea for
a huge aircraft carrier made out of ice and
sawdust.
Or Germany's plans for bombers and missiles
that could hit the US.
Think we've missed a cracker?
Let us know in the comments.
