After the fall of Poland and France in the opening stages of the Second World War, and before the
official entrance of the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain stood alone in Europe. The
colonies were far away and, in many cases, unsure of their own survival. British forces needed new
weapons to battle the continental fascists, and British inventors and engineers were given
a blank cheque to create them. But some of these inventions were, perhaps, a bit too innovative. In
this video, we shed light on five of the downright nuttiest inventions the British threw together.
Aside from the imminent threat of invasion, the main problem Britain faced was supply. The British
Isles had long relied on raw materials, fuel, and food from the rest of the empire to keep things
running. But in the first half of the Second World War, this supply line was nearly severed.
German U-boats prowling the Atlantic sank hundreds of ships and destroyed millions of tonnes
of vital supplies. The best way to defend against them was with aircraft, but in the years before
cheap steel aircraft carriers were available, one man suggested building carriers from ice.
British inventor Geoffrey Pyke developed a special kind of ice named Pykrete—which was
made from water and frozen wood pulp. It was exceptionally strong and melted very slowly;
plus, it was a heck of a lot cheaper than steel.
Pyke’s Pykrete impressed the admirals and Winston Churchill, who greenlit the project.
Testing began in 1942, and the project, now codenamed Habakkuk, looked promising. As did the
prototype. But this was its downfall. As more top military officers heard about the aircraft carrier
made of ice, more specifications rolled in. One air chief marshal decided it had to be bomb-proof,
while an admiral wanted it to mount a battery of anti-aircraft defences. The project soon
grew out of hand, and both the cost and effort of making the vessel outweighed its potential
usefulness. When it became clear it wouldn’t be ready by 1944, Pyke’s ice ship was scrapped.
It wasn’t just massive projects like Habakkuk that kept the Royal Navy busy during the war years;
they had plenty of smaller ones on the go too.
One of these was a rocket-propelled rolling death ball called “The Great Panjandrum.”
In 1943, military planners foresaw that, at some point in the future,
the Allies would launch an amphibious invasion of Europe. Hitler knew this too,
and built a formidable network of defences across the Western European coast dubbed the
“Atlantic Wall.” Panjandrum was designed for one thing: blowing holes in the Atlantic wall.
The brainchild of Vickers chief engineer Nevil Shute, Panjandrum’s core was a one-ton explosive
charge flanked by two three-metre wheels. Each wheel was turned by 18 cordite rockets,
propelling the device up to 100 kilometres per hour [Text: 60 miles per hour.]. When launched
from a landing craft, Panjandrum would roll right up the landing beach and blast a tank-sized hole
in the three-metre high, two-metre thick Atlantic Wall. What could possibly go wrong?
Shute ran his first test in September 1943 at a popular beach in Devon. Panjandrum
roared out of the landing craft and up the beach,
then ran wildly off-course after several rockets failed. There was only one solution: more power!
For his next test, the supremely confident Shute invited a gaggle
of top military officials to watch. He’d upped the number of rockets from 18 to 70
and added some cables for rudimentary steering. But when he lit the fuse, all hell broke loose.
Undulations on the beach rocked Panjandrum from side to side, detaching some of the rockets.
Every rocket that came loose further destabilised the explosive-laden cart,
and it careered towards the officers. They dived head-first into the sand to avoid the rockets
whipping around the beach like angry wasps. When Panjandrum finally came to a stop, it exploded,
showering the observers in shrapnel and sand.
The project was soon abandoned over safety concerns.
Years before dreaming up Panjandrum, Shute worked at Vickers alongside another legend of British
innovation, Barnes Wallis, who, among other things, designed the largest bomber of the war.
In the years before World War Two, British tacticians had been obsessed with the idea that
“the bomber will always get through.” They had seen the devastation a few well-placed
bombs could wreak in World War One, and when they envisioned the next war, they saw this magnified
on an unprecedented scale. They imagined whole cities levelled in a single night.
And the best defence is always a good offence.
Wallis championed the idea of the “earthquake bomb” — an explosive so powerful it caused a
localised earthquake when detonated, collapsing buildings. Such a weapon was so heavy that no
contemporary aircraft could carry it, so Wallis designed his own aircraft: the Victory Bomber.
This monster plane had six V-12 engines and could cruise at 45,000 feet.
It had virtually no defences and carried just one weapon:
a single 22,000-pound, 10-ton, earthquake bomb. From an airfield in London,
the Victory bomber could take off and bomb Moscow and then fly back, all in one trip. With just one
squadron, Wallis promised he could annihilate German heavy industry in a matter of weeks.
This he proposed in 1940, well before the widescale introduction of four-engine bombers
to the Royal Air Force. While it might have been visionary, the Victory bomber was just too costly
for a resource-strapped country. Another of Wallis’s inventions was adopted, however,
and it took centre-stage in one of the most innovative operations of the Second World War.
Wallis also designed the famous bouncing bomb used by
617 squadron to break the Mohne and Eder dams in the Ruhr Valley.
The raid was codenamed Operation Chastise, but it’s commonly known as the Dambuster’s Raid.
Wallis had worked on the idea of a bouncing bomb since 1940. It started out as a way of getting a
depth charge like the ones used by most air forces and navies to land right next to its intended
target. When the depth charge exploded, the water conveyed a powerful pressure wave capable of
destroying heavily armoured targets. The problem was that these targets, often moored battleships
or hydroelectric dams, were always well protected. That’s where the bouncing bomb came in.
You can skip a bomb on water just the same as you can skip a rock; you just need the right speed,
spin, and angle. Wallis and his fellow designers worked out that their bomb had
to be released at exactly 60 feet above the water and at a speed of 240 miles per hour.
When it hit the water, it had to be spinning at precisely 500 revolutions per minute.
Everything had to be exact, or the bomb wouldn’t explode close enough to the dam wall.
Too much spin or too high a speed, and the bomb might bounce right over it.
On the night of May 16th 1943, the 24-year-old wing commander Guy Gibson
led his squadron of 19 Lancaster bombers in the first bouncing bomb attack.
The Dambusters, as the men were called, succeeded in blowing holes in both the
Mohne and Eder dams—causing a torrential flood and temporarily shutting down industrial output
in the valleys beyond. The mission was a success, but they paid a heavy price.
Forty per cent of the men who left on that fateful mission never made it back home.
Sometimes, a product made for one purpose can be far more useful at something else.
This was certainly the case for the last of these crazy British inventions: the exploding rat.
Winston Churchill was a keen supporter of clandestine warfare.
The idea of causing havoc in occupied Europe with small-scale sabotage operations absolutely
delighted him. It’s no surprise, then, that quite frankly ridiculous plans for sabotage operations
became the standard for Special Operations Executive, or SOE.
One of their more hair-brained schemes involved 100 dead rats.
After acquiring them by posing as anatomy students, SOE agents disembowelled the rats
and filled them with plastic explosive. The plan was to airdrop them to operatives
in Europe who would then leave the rats in coal piles around factories and military installations.
When workers heaping coal into boilers discovered a dead rat,
they’d throw it into the firebox and cause a boiler explosion. At least, that was the theory.
In practice, the rats had another, unforeseen, use. As stated in an SOE report,
“This device caused considerable trouble to the enemy, but not quite in the way that was
intended.” The exploding rats were intercepted, and they caused panic amongst Axis officers. How
long had the British been sneaking in exploding rats? How many were there? Could every dead rat
be carrying a bomb? Gestapo agents scrambled to find out. And in the meantime, SOE reported,“The
trouble caused to them was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used.”
Do YOU think exploding rats would have caused any serious damage, though? How do YOU think
things might’ve changed if the Brits had a squadron of Victory bombers? Was the Panjandrum
always doomed to fail, or could it have been a clever diversion? Let us know in the comments!