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World War Two was undoubtedly the deadliest and most brutal conflict this world has ever seen.
Even if massive battles with millions of casualties, genocide, and the mass suffering
of hundreds of millions of people were not enough, there were various weapons employed by all sides
that magnified the carnage by an immeasurable magnitude.
Ethics aside, these weapons are included in this list due to their known ability to cause damage,
with a list of theoretical weapons reserved for another time. What makes any particular
one of these weapons so terrifying is either through the suffering they caused the victims,
their effectiveness on the battlefield, or their ability to defeat countermeasures.
But without further ado, here are some of the most terrifying weapons of World War Two.
Kamikazes As the war in the Pacific turned ever worse
for Japan, they turned to increasingly desperate measures to stem the tide of the American Navy.
Though all sides had undertaken suicide missions by individual pilots in the war to some extent,
the Japanese were the ones to employ this horrifying tactic regularly. In October of 1944,
the American and allied navies began to face an enemy deadlier than any other encountered before.
The premise behind a kamikaze attack was simple. Load an aircraft with as many bombs and explosives
as possible, find a high-value target like an aircraft carrier, and keep going until you hit it.
Though it might seem that kamikazes would have been easy to defeat, you would surely be mistaken.
In conventional air attacks, if the flak is too heavy or too many enemy aircraft approaching,
pilots concerned with preserving their lives would break off and return to base.
That was not the case for kamikazes. What made these men so terrifying was
not only the weapon they piloted at US ships at hundreds of miles an hour, but their training
before even stepping into the cockpit. Though most of the early kamikazes were already experienced
veterans, most of the ones that flew later on were raw recruits. Receiving little flight training,
these men instead went through intensive religious and ideological classes to further increase their
conviction for the cause. That way, by the time they took off for that final time,
they were more determined than ever to deliver their deadly payload.
Even though the US did develop tactics such as increasing air patrols, building defense
in depth with picket ships, and developing better time-delayed fuses, kamikaze attacks were still
devastating. During their debut in the Pacific theater, kamikazes obliterated an American task
force steaming for the Philippines sinking seven ships and damaging another 40. These attacks would
continue with intensity through the battle of Okinawa, which saw 36 ships sunk, 386 damaged,
and almost 5000 sailors killed, making it the deadliest battle of the war for the US Navy.
The Schu-mine 42 Mines are a great way to deter
enemy movement or funnel them into areas where you can bring preplanned fire on them. They are also
an excellent delaying tactic since it forces an advancing enemy to slow down to carefully
prod for these devices since, unlike most other mines, the Germans made these mines out of wood!
As its name would imply, the shoe mine was an anti-personnel mine that the German Army
first developed in 1942. Due to the increasing number of ways to detect and destroy mines,
they wanted something that allied troops could not detect. Additionally, due to the wartime shortages
of metal, the Germans wanted to conserve as much as possible. With millions of these mines being
produced, the cost savings proved significant for the German war machine but where the mine really
paid off was the fear brought into the hearts of allied soldiers hoping not to step on them.
The shoe mine was not designed to be an extremely large or complex mine. It was composed of a simple
wooden box with a detonator and some explosives. Its primary purpose was to maim soldiers,
and the war diaries and official records of allied troops can attest to their effectiveness.
Due to their small size and inability to be detected with a metal detector,
the only sure-fire way to identify these little buggers would be to probe the ground
with a knife or bayonet manually. However, such methods proved impractical when the
Germans placed them on roads or other areas that allied troops had to cross under fire.
Not wanting to be defeated, some allied troops came up with ingenious methods to defeat them.
The British, for example, came up with the idea of placing a garden roller with metal spikes
on the end of it. A brave volunteer would kit up in an early version of a bomb suit
and roll this contraption across the battlefield. Whenever it hit a mine, it would blow up,
and the soldier would keep moving to the next one. Though this design was eventually not approved for
broader use by General Montgomery, it is an excellent example of how such a simple
device could defeat every advanced detection system the allies possessed, causing fear and
casualties in its wake. Despite lacking official bodies of research, from contemporary accounts,
troops noted that this mine, along with the vaunted MG42 and "screaming memie"
Neberlwerfer guns, were chief among their least favorite things to encounter on the battlefield.
US Submarines German U-boats
get a lot of the credit for World War Two, and rightfully so. They sunk almost 15 million tons
worth of war material and sent tens of thousands of sailors down to an early watery grave. However,
even though U-boats are more famously known during the war, it was actually the US submarine force
that was much more feared, and for a good reason. Immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the first units that struck back were US submarines. President Roosevelt ordered that
a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare would be brought against the Japanese, and the service
gladly obliged the order. Pretty soon, without warning, Japanese naval and merchant vessels were
being sent to the bottom at an alarming rate. US submarines were so successful at attacking
Japanese shipping that by the end of 1944, most submarine commanders reported patrols
were increasingly difficult not due necessarily to enemy action but due to a loss of targets to
shoot! This sentiment can be seen in the data for Japanese merchant shipping losses, with over 8.5
million tons of shipping sunk. Those figures mean that the entire Japanese merchant marine
was sunk almost twice over compared to its starting tonnage at the beginning of the war.
Not only did the Japanese Navy and merchant marine fear US submarines, but also their
Army. During the war, historians have estimated that over 44 Japanese troopships were sunk,
with over 33 of these causing over a thousand deaths. Some of these troopships, such as the
sinking of the Toyama Maru, resulted in the deaths of over 5000 soldiers. In total, tens of thousands
of Japanese troops were killed at sea, and the threat posed by submarines was so bad top army
commanders were unsure if they would be able to reinforce their far-flung Pacific outposts.
If sinking the entire Japanese merchant fleet, helping cripple the Japanese Navy,
and preventing the Japanese Army from moving were not terrifying enough, another way
that submarines caused even more suffering was through their blockade of Japan. Since so many
merchant ships were sunk and so many had to delay their journeys days or weeks to get into Japan,
the civilian population suffered immensely. Because Japan is an island nation,
it relies solely on imports of raw materials, food, and fuel from abroad to keep it going.
However, because of the constant attacks by US submarines, the Japanese war economy greatly
suffered and the blockade was the main cause for every type of shortage possible in Japan.
US commanders would remark after the war that US submarines were the most critical weapon
at disabling the Japanese economy and war effort. Sarin Gas
While many people might be familiar with sarin gas from its use in modern-day war zones in the
Middle East, the Germans actually invented it in 1938. During the research to design a better
pesticide to kill weevils, German scientist Gerhard Schrader found that it created a
combination far too deadly for some afternoon gardening when he mixed phosphorus with cyanide.
A loyal Nazi, Gerhard took his findings to the German military, who quickly embraced the
concoction. After rigorous testing, the military produced around 30,000 tons of the stuff. The
sarin gas was then weaponized by putting it on specially designed artillery shells that could
hurl the deadly gas at advancing allied troops. Despite having it available since the beginning
of the war and against his generals' urging to use it, Hitler probably made the only correct decision
in his life by not employing the weapon. Though conspiracy theories abound as to why Hitler never
used it, especially as he knew the war was lost and had nothing to lose, the matter is probably
more pragmatic than someone would think. Many people claim that due to his survival
of a poison gas attack in the First World War, he was scarred for life and refused
to use it on other people. As anyone with any knowledge of the Holocaust would know,
he had no problems using deadly cyanide against millions of victims. Rather, it is
likely he believed that doing so would result in a massive retaliation against his military, which,
especially with the war going the way that it was, was probably something he did not want to risk.
For the allies, it was definitely good that he never chose to employ sarin gas in combat.
Sarin gas is a terrible chemical weapon and kills by essentially blocking the nerves in
your muscles from speaking with your brain. As a result, you begin to convulse and essentially
suffocate to death since your muscles need much more oxygen than your body can provide.
Additionally, it was in the allies' favor since when American and British troops captured
stockpiles of the weapon at the end of the war, they had no idea what it even was, much less
being able to provide effective countermeasures against it. So even though it never was employed
in action, this weapon definitely ranks among the most terrifying weapons of the war
due to its potential to be used. Unit 731 Biological Attacks
The human experiments and torturous murder of tens of thousands of prisoners are widely known
and studied in this infamous weapons facility. Though Unit 731's main complex in northern
China has garnered the most attention in Western literature, a little-known yet
even more terrifying aspect of its methods includes an organized biological weapons
campaign designed to defeat the Chinese people. With the war in China raging for over five years
by 1941, the Japanese Army was looking for ways to turn the tide of the war and crush
stubborn Chinese resistance facing them. By this time, the Japanese Army had already proven that
they viewed Chinese soldiers and civilians as less than human and would resort to any means
necessary to defeat them. When researchers with Unit 731 approached army officials with
their plans to test a variety of diseases to see which ones were the most effective
at causing a pandemic, they happily obliged. After choosing various diseases such as cholera,
bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax, botulism, and dysentery, Unit 731 decided to run live test
trials of the effects of these deadly diseases by employing them against the civilian population.
Throughout the course of 1941, no fewer than 11 Chinese cities were devastated by these diseases,
as they killed tens of thousands and sickened hundreds of thousands more.
Either through dropping specially made porcelain bombs, crop dusting with aircraft,
poisoning water supplies, or purposefully infecting food and clothing heading towards
civilian population centers, the Japanese scientists proved their ability to bring
biological destruction against their enemies. The Army was more than pleased with the results
of these tests and soon ordered detachments of scientists and specially trained army personnel
to be distributed throughout their forces in China to be used against the Chinese military as well.
Though there were many such attacks throughout the war in China, perhaps
one of the deadliest and most terrifying was the May 1942 biological attack on Baoshan.
Situated near the border with Burma, this area of southeastern China was vital for the Japanese
military to control in order to prevent resupply of Chinese forces in the region from the south.
After the successful test trials of 1941, the Army wanted to start conducting biological
warfare operations in conjunction with its conventional military attacks.
Between May 4th to May 6th, 1942, the city was bombarded by tons of munitions from Japanese
planes to include numerous bombs filled with disease-ridden flies. Additionally,
troops from Unit 731 poisoned local water supplies with cholera. The Japanese hoped that after the
successful assault on the city, the remaining civilians would flee into the countryside and
infect their countrymen. To the surprise of the Japanese, it worked better than expected.
Within weeks a full-blown epidemic was ravaging southeastern China.
Entire families were wiped out, and villages were decimated. This area of China had never once had
a recorded cholera outbreak, and this added to the suffering of those exposed who had no
natural immunity to the disease. Because of this, by July, some estimates propose that over 200,000
people died. Even though data is scarce and death tolls from the attack range widely depending on
defining the geographic location and timeframe, this attack is still by far the deadliest
single biological weapon attack of the war. Thanks again to our sponsor Warpath, free-to-play
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