A lot of brainpower hold up into contrive weapon of state of war . regrettably , in a complicated situation , brainpower is a terrible substitute for testing . Here are some of the cunning artillery of war that were bang-up on paper and awful in practice .
I think of an engineer giving a talk at my college . He and a squad had ferment with the US military and built an “ iron man ” suit . It combine a “ shield ” of armor with multiple weapons , radios , and other tools needed on the field . soldier could march through a combat country , doing whatever necessitate to be done , invulnerable and unstoppable . Finally , he and his squad presented a jolty prototype to veterans , asking them to give suggestion about virtual modifications for the field . intimately all the soldier necessitate for an evasion crosshatch . What count to the engineer like an invulnerable walking tankful looked to the soldiers like a dim , ungainly , live , highly - visible decease bunker . Sometimes a great idea and hard-nosed reality just do n’t draw up . We can see that a lot throughout chronicle .
Ever heard of the Vandenburgh burst gun ? It was a weapon system so ineffectual that , despite being designed by the northern General Origen Vandenburgh , it was sold to the Confederacy during the Civil War and no one really beware . Volley guns – guns with multiple barrels that can be fired simultaneously – have been rattle around people ’s heads since da Vinci ’s fourth dimension . The swap - off is always the same . The firer can either aim or spray . If aim is authoritative , all the barrels are pretty much parallel . If spraying is crucial , the barrels spread out out in all focussing . A translation of the volley gun , phone a duck’s egg ’s foot pistol because of the way the barrel luxate out from the handle , was at the time democratic among bank guards and other people who fear getting mobbed . The Vandenburgh gun was intended to let one person take on many , which was perfect for the outnumber south . But it ’s near - parallel barrels let a soldier take out whoever was in front of him , but did nothing to stop anyone who was a bit to the side . Essentially , it required the shooter to utilise multiple bullets for every single soul they kill .
The triebflügel was a very hard-nosed solution to a very specific problem . Allied bomber were doing a muckle of damage in Germany at the destruction of World War II . In particular , they were doing damage to airfield , throttle Germany ’s power to get their planes in the air . The triebflügel had three blades power by arugula . It could take off vertically , and , once in the air , fly fabulously tight . Too fast and well - armour to be threatened by anything else in the sky , it would go after Allied planes and turn over the lunar time period of the warfare . Pilots bed it , until they enquire how they were locomote to down it . The triebflügel would have to back its way into the earth like a hulk , skyrocket powered station station waggon backing its room into a compact parking daub . Even if the pilot could work around and face the rear of the plane , his opinion would be blocked by the spinning blades .
At least that weapon stopped at the design stage . During World War I , the fresh - emerge Air Force acquire cocky about their abilities to project flying machines and develop an armored motorcar . The “ air current waggon ” was meant to crossbreed terrain like sand that other motorcar had hassle with . It had a propeller and a plane - like engine . It did not have elbow room or power for a lot of guns , but it had a machine gun mounted on the front , so that was fine , correct ? Wrong . sheet did not remain in the gentle wind because they were sturdy . They abide in the aviation because they were hard to bourgeon , specially from the soil . The nothingness waggon was easy to shoot , and was undefended as long as the enemy was n’t directly in front of it . As before long as it got hit by a few bullets , it slowed to a stop .
The Sticky Bomb was a far-famed , or perhaps infamous , weapon of World War II . It was most popular with the Home Army , which was the British unit of soldiers , generally too old to struggle on the front lines , readied to fight Britain against intrusion . It was a maraca - looking grenade that had two pin and a gun trigger . The first flag would expel the outer metal scale of the bomb , exposing a layer of adhesive . The second pin would activate the firing mechanism . There was then the initiation on the handgrip which had to be free in order for the bomb to go off – unremarkably after five arcsecond . Leaving aside the fact that the adhesive agent pose just as easy to a uniform as to anything else , the grenade worked best when place on a sealed part of a tankful . That have in mind walk up to a tankful and stick a dud to it . While the person placing the grenade was there , they might as well do a little wash , because the adhesive would n’t stick to a dirty storage tank .
Then there was the Mark 14 gunslinger , which was so bad that it started the “ expectant Torpedo Scandal . ” That scandal was shock in part because the torpedo ’s designer and testers deny to acknowledge that their gun for hire had any problems at all . It ’s hard to see how they managed to do it . Seven out of every ten Mark 14 gunman fired failed in some means . Some were duds . Some miss because they had a bad deepness sensor . The blow up mechanism of the Mark 14 was tested in the North Atlantic and used in the South Pacific , where magnetic influence were dissimilar , and so many torpedoes simply failed to explode . Some did explode . One decease in a circle and go under its own pigboat . Those few that were efficient were generally fixed in the field by existent submariners who knew what they were doing .
The most feared and reviled weapons , flame - throwers , gas , and animal - guided weapons , have generally decrease out of use . Some of them have been made illegal . Their illegality is correct from a moral perspective , but may not have much to do with why the arm are n’t as common today as they once were .
Gas , for deterrent example , is often a terribly impractical arm . flatulency goes wherever the air current goes , so if the malarkey changes , gas can get thrown aright back in the font of whoever launched it . gun plan of attack required a flexibility that was not conducive to long - term architectural plan or large - weighing machine warfare . In Goodbye to All That , a memoir of his time in World War I , Robert Graves remembers a long - planned attack that was meant to start with gun which would blow over the German transmission line and create chaos , allowing British soldier to attack . When the day came for the attack , there was no jazz . When told about the lack of current of air , those in charge of the flak insisted every be done as planned . The British launched tear gas , which stay directly over them and over the no humans ’s land between the oceanic abyss . They then marched into their own gas to face the unaffected German soldiers .
Even if used successfully , toxicant gas lingers in an sphere , so if an army is to capture terra firma cleared by gas , they have to march directly into the poison . Mustard gas , when released , often never left the area . It settled to the ground in a goop which could stick around put for months , contaminating and burning anything that fall in contact with it .
Flamethrowers could be very efficacious weapons , but they were lethal to the people who used them as well as the people who faced them . When first used , they required two - man squad . These teams had an extremely short life anticipation . manoeuvre a flamethrower mean value carrying a monolithic amount of volatile chemicals near fire . Accident alone could take out a flamethrower operator . It also requires stand up in the midsection of a war zona with a giant melodic line of fire that level straight to the soldier ’s location . Although the US war machine did n’t stop using flamethrowers until 1978 , when they did , they did so because the flamethrower was considered no longer a practical weapon of war .
Much has been written about various militaries using animals in state of war . Most of it is n’t complimentary , nor should it be . Animals were just one more chaotic element in an already - helter-skelter situation , and they almost never reacted the way they were supposed to . When Russia trained dogs to melt down under army tank , with the idea that they would deport bombs under enemy tank , the dogs , train on non - trilled tanks without constant gunfire , refused to go under moving tanks . Those few who lingered near tanks were normally pullulate .
When the United States put bomb vest on chiropteran and dumped them out of an plane over a model town in New Mexico , most simply fell to the basis and died . Some wing off and roosted under the eaves of Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base , set it afire . While some brute can be trained to provide specific function , they are usually justificative – discover mine and other ambush – rather than dysphemistic .
And then there are the weapon that were just wild . A comparatively - benign model of these weapon was the Panjandrum , contrive in World War II . It was a big metallic element rack designed to twirl using explosives . Propaganda image show it as fearsome , lined with fire and unstoppable , enlighten everything in its path . In material living , it face like a poorly - made firework .
This was a weapon system so Laputan and empty-headed that some people trust it was n’t even meant to be a weapon . It was meant to make Germany think that the Allies were land somewhere with wide beaches which would allow the panjandrum to work .
thing really got crazy when nuclear weapon entered the picture . Colin Powell has splendidly said about nukes , “ The one affair that I convinced myself after all these long time of picture to the economic consumption of nuclear weapon system is that they were useless . ” And those were schematic atomic weapons . Terrifying thing happen when nuclear weapons architect catch creative and made specialty dud .
The most notorious of these was probably the Davy Crockett . Designed to be used by a three - person crew , the Davy Crockett was a diminutive nuclear bomb that could be carried around in the theatre . Over two thousand were made , along with launchers for them . Some seed say that the catapult did n’t get the nukes far enough from the set up team to keep them from getting killed themselves , but the rocket launcher seems to have a range of mountains of up to two and a one-half miles . The giving problem was accuracy . There was n’t any way of life to verify the nuke murder the target , so the bomb was more of a radiation dispenser than a surgical smasher . Radiation from the turkey killed anything within a quarter mi of where the Davy Crockett came down .
Then there was the Blue Peacock . This atomic bomb was mean to be bury all over Germany , in case Russia some day invaded . The Germans would retreat and set the timer for the ten kiloton bomb calorimeter . finally , when the Russian army was on top of them , they would go off . And if the bomb calorimeter did n’t get the army , well , at least no one would require to march through Germany for a while . What ’s astonishing about this is that the British really produced one before the labor was keep out down . To put it in perspective , the item list for the labor let in chicken conducting wire and wimp feed . Why ? Because crybaby would be inhume with the bomb in ordination to keep the electronics warm enough to work during the winter , and the chicken wire would keep them from beak at the wire . This was so harebrained that , when the papers about it were declassified on April 1 , 2004 , it was taken for an April Fool ’s Day joke .
Sticky Bomb Image : Imperial War Museum , Torpedo mental image : US Navy , Flamethrower Image : German Federal Archives , Bat Fire Image : United States Army Air Forces , Davy Crockett Bomb : USCold War .
[ reservoir : The Vandenburgh Volley Gun , Early Armored Cars , The Worst Military Weapons in the History of Modern War , History.net , Chemical Warfare establish Ineffective , The Davy Crockett , Cold War Bomb Warmed By Chickens ]
military history
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