You asked for more weird weapons that totally failed, so we found more! Welcome to part two
of the most bizarre, asinine, impractical weapons that never made it to the battlefield or were such
a disaster that they were more of a liability than a help in a fight. We dug deep into the
historical archives to uncover the worst of the worst and the weirdest of the weird. Sit back,
relax, and prepare to be awestruck by just how terribly strange some of these weapons were.
Tanks are the movable fortresses of the battlefield. But sometimes,
a tank is made so terribly that it becomes impractical. Perhaps
no tank better embodies this description than the Tsar Tank.
The Tsar Tank is by far one of the weirdest tanks ever constructed. Not only that,
but it’s probably the most ineffective tank the world of warfare has ever seen. The Tsar
Tank was built by Russian engineers in 1914 and was a big tricycle. The front
two wheels were each around 27 feet tall and powered by their own engines. After
the prototype was built and tested, a few problems became glaringly clear.
The first was that the entire contraption could barely get moving. Although tanks don’t
necessarily move very fast, the Tsar Tank actually had two engines that could each
produce 500 horsepower. This was more power than most wartime vehicles had at the time,
and the tank itself was relatively light, meaning it should have hypothetically
been able to move at a good speed. However, there was a major problem with its design.
During the design phase, the engineers miscalculated,
and the weight distribution came out all wrong. The tank was too heavy in the back,
which put too much weight on the back wheel. This resulted in that wheel getting stuck in
the ground, keeping the whole vehicle from moving. For whatever reason, the Russians
didn’t want to use tracks like other countries were experimenting with at the time. Instead,
they believed the giant wheels, and the tricycle setup was the best way to go.
You can probably guess that this wasn’t actually the best option as we don’t have
three-wheeled tanks cruising around the world today. Another problem with
this configuration was that the angle and direction the Tsar Tank’s cannon
could fire was very limited due to the large front wheels blocking the turret.
But the biggest failure of the Tsar Tank was that it was an easy target
for artillery fire. The wheels could be damaged by explosions,
meaning that all it would take is a single shell or a well-placed grenade to render
the Tsar Tank completely useless. Once the tank became incapacitated,
the crew inside would be sitting ducks. All the enemy had to do was wait for the Russian soldiers
to come out and pick them off one by one as they tried to climb down to ground level. All in all,
the Tsar Tank not only looked silly but was a complete waste of time and resources.
Nuclear weapons are incredibly scary on their own. The most concerning thing about these
next few weapons is that they increased the risk of nuclear accidents occurring.
The Davy Crockett Weapon System may be the most powerful and craziest gun ever invented). It was
a smoothbore recoilless rifle that was designed to fire a tactical nuke just over a mile. Like
many weapons of mass destruction, it was built during the Cold War in the 1950s. Launching a
nuke from a rifle may seem like a weird concept to us today, especially when you think about the
radiation and how being a mile away from a nuclear explosion is not nearly far enough.
With the right wind conditions, the radioactive fallout would be upon you in minutes. Yet,
during the Cold War, the ability for a few soldiers to fire a nuke
across the battlefield at an advancing enemy army seemed like a good idea.
Luckily, the Davy Crockett Weapon System never had to be used. Even if things did
get that far, the Davy Crockett had all sorts of problems. The rifle was incredibly inaccurate,
meaning that the nuke wouldn’t necessarily land exactly where the soldiers were aiming. Since it
fired a nuclear warhead, being inaccurate wasn’t a huge deal as the explosion would
be massive and obliterate the intended target even if it detonated several hundred feet away.
The weapon's inaccuracy, along with the likelihood of the firing team and friendly
forces in the area getting an unhealthy dose of radiation, was enough to retire the Davy
Crockett Weapon System. However, that wasn’t before at least 2,000 were made. Imagine 2,000
nukes being fired at the enemy from rifles; that is a terrifying thought. However,
there was another more ominous reason that the Davy Crockett never made it to the battlefield.
There was very little accountability for a squad in control of a Davy Crockett. Infantry soldiers
would have the ability to launch nukes without necessarily going through the proper channels
or the chain of command. All it would have taken was one rogue unit carrying a Davy
Crockett to launch a nuke at a Soviet force to kickstart World War III and the annihilation of
the human race. This was a scary thought and one that many in NATO brought up, which led to the
decommissioning of the Davy Crockett Weapon System in 1971 before it could ever be used.
If you thought the Davy Crockett was a terrifying device with several shortcomings. You won’t
believe the destructive potential of this next crazy weapon called the Blue Peacock.
The Blue Peacock was the name given to a nuclear mine developed by the British in
the 1950s. The other names given to this device were Blue Bunny and Brown Bunny. Regardless of
the weird choice of color and animals for the name of this terrifying weapon, we can
all be thankful that it was a big failure. The Blue Peacock weighed around 7.2-tons,
was the size of a car, and held enough plutonium to generate a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion.
The Brits planned to bury this device along strategic points into West Germany. That way,
if Soviet tanks ever tried to invade Europe, they would be blown to smithereens. The problem
was that if the Blue Peacock was triggered, it would not only destroy the Soviet forces but it
would annihilate any civilians, structures, or friendly forces in the surrounding area.
There are multiple reasons why these nuclear mines were failures, and each one is crazier than the
last. The Blue Peacock didn’t even work like a normal mine. The idea was that the Brits would
quickly dig a hole, drop the 7- ton mine in, and then retreat to safety. Then when Soviet forces
were directly over the mine, they would use a remote detonating system to activate the bomb.
The problem was that the triggering device was temperamental and didn’t always go off.
The backup plan for the Blue Peacock was that in case remote activation wasn’t an option,
the mine could be set on an eight-day timer. After the allotted time,
the mine would explode no matter what. It would have been a real bummer if the mine was activated
and NATO forces managed to push the Soviets back after only seven days because 24 hours later,
the Blue Peacock would detonate, vaporizing everything in the area. That is unless the
British scientists could uncover the mine, get inside it, and disarm the nuclear warhead.
It’s not clear if there ever was a safe way to disarm the timing system on a Blue
Peacock. The designers hadn’t worked out all the kinks by the time the Blue Peacock
was being considered for deployment, so there was still a solid chance that
even if the Soviets had been pushed back successfully, the bomb would go off anyway.
Another problem was that the device needed to be kept warm while it was set up underground
during winters, and this had to be done using an independent energy system. The solution that
British engineers came up with was so absurd we had to double-check it to make sure we weren’t
hallucinating. The plan to keep the device at the right temperature was to put several chickens
inside the mine with enough food to keep them fed until the British wanted the bomb to detonate. For
example, if the British needed the bomb to explode after eight days, they would give the chickens
inside the casing just enough to last them eight days, at which point they would starve to death.
Once the chickens were dead, the temperature of the bomb would drop, and it would explode.
Let that sink in for a moment. The solution to keeping the wires and circuits warm enough in
the nuclear land mine so it wouldn’t go off was to use birds that peck at everything around them.
We can’t believe we have to say this, but this turned out to be an incredibly bad
idea. The weapons specialists who came up with it proposed wrapping key components
with chicken wire to keep the birds from pecking at them, but you can only imagine
how effective that would have been. It would only be a matter of time before one of the
chickens pecked at something it shouldn’t have. thus detonating the nuke prematurely,
killing all the chickens inside and anyone else in the surrounding area.
Chickens were not the only animal considered for weird military operations. In fact,
animals have been used in some very strange ways by many countries around the world.
The CIA classified one project, Acoustic Kitty. This was not just a clever name for
a secret weapon; it was almost a literal description of what this espionage device
would be. The plan was to stick a microphone into a cat’s ear that was connected to a
radio transmitter implanted in their skull. The cat would then be released inside of a
building that the CIA wanted ears in so they could listen to everything that was going on.
However, they ran into a few problems. For anyone who owns a cat, you probably already
know what the first problem was. Cats don’t follow instructions very well. They are creatures that
play by their own rules. So, although they could infiltrate an enemy headquarters, they
would probably spend more time chasing mice and licking themselves than collecting valuable intel.
The second problem was that cats, like all living things, can be fragile. On one of the first test
runs of Acoustic Kitty, a cat was deployed in a park to pick up the conversation of two men
sitting on a bench. Unfortunately, the test didn’t go according to plan. In uncovered
documents from the program, a memo stated that the cat never made it to the men on the bench
where the conversation was happening. The researcher in charge of testing the
Acoustic Kitty in the park stated that instead of walking over to the men sitting on the bench,
“the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi."
Like that cat, the Acoustic Kitty program was squashed by the government,
and the weaponized cats never became part of the spy program.
Before the CIA started using cats as secret spies, the Soviets were using dogs as anti-tank weapons.
Dogs are man’s best friend, and the Soviets thought they would make great soldiers as well.
The Soviets needed to find a way to deal with enemy tanks as World War II looked more and more
like an inevitability in the 1930s. Since dogs are incredibly smart and loyal, the Soviets decided
that they could train them to place anti-tank mines under enemy tanks, rendering them useless.
The plan was for the dogs to act as a deployment system for the anti-tank mines. They were trained
to carry the bombs in a harness on their back, and once they were under the tank, they would
release the pack and run away to safety before it detonated. The training seemed to go well,
and when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943, the Red Army had around
40,000 anti-tank dogs to fight against the Nazi tank divisions.
Unfortunately, there were a few problems with the anti-tank dogs. At the beginning,
they worked pretty well and even incapacitated several German tanks. However,
once the Nazis realized what the dogs were doing, they would shoot them before they
reached their targets. This was not only terribly sad but pretty much put a stop to
the Soviet plans to keep the tanks from advancing further into their homeland.
The other problem with the Soviet anti-tank dog program was that the training itself wasn’t
thought out all the way. The Soviets needed to simulate a battle situation, so they had their
anti-tank dogs train on out-of-commission Soviet tanks. This made sense until the Soviet soldiers
deployed their anti-tank dogs in battle, and they didn’t attack the Nazi tanks. The issue
was that the German tanks ran on gasoline while the Soviet tanks ran on diesel. The
dogs had been trained to identify their targets by smell, and so in the middle of battle, they
would run to Soviet tanks and drop their bombs off there instead of attacking the German tanks.
This was not the dogs’ fault, as they did exactly what they were trained to do. They
sniffed out tank fumes and deployed their mines. It just so happened they were carrying
out their mission against Soviet diesel tanks instead of the Nazi gasoline tanks. This was
obviously embarrassing for the Soviets, so when they released the success rate of the
anti-tank dog program, they calculated that they had destroyed around 300 tanks. However,
this number is likely inflated or also counts the damaged Soviet tanks that
were targeted by accident to justify the time and money spent on training the dogs.
With all the anti-tank dogs running around, it’s no wonder that the Nazis took to the skies.
However, one aircraft, in particular, had a weird design and was known for being a little unstable.
The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet was the first rocket-powered fighter plane ever produced.
It was designed by Nazi scientists and had its first test flight in 1941. The size and shape
may seem a little weird at first, but this was a completely unique aircraft that was
the Luftwaffe’s answer to the high-flying American bombers that quickly became a thorn in Germany’s
side. The Komet could accelerate to 550 miles per hour and reach 39,000 feet in 3.45 minutes.
This meant that if bombers were spotted heading towards Nazi-controlled airspace, they could
launch the Me 163s to intercept and destroy the bomber before it could drop its payload.
In theory, the Komet sounded great. However, in practice, it wasn’t nearly as effective as
the Nazis had hoped. In order to reach the high altitudes at breakneck speeds,
the Komet used a mix of two highly volatile propellants that, when combined, gave the
rocket a huge amount of thrust. This resulted in the Komet moving too fast for the Nazi pilots
to engage the slow-moving bombers before they went whizzing by their target. On top of that,
the Komet could only maintain its burn for around 7 minutes, so if the pilot overshot his target,
it was unlikely he could pass the target again before running out of fuel.
The Komet was designed to expend all of its fuel before gliding back down to Earth for a
safe landing. However, controlling the descent of an aircraft without working engines is incredibly
difficult, and crash landings were not uncommon. This meant that even if the Komet was successful
in its mission, there was still a pretty good chance the aircraft wouldn’t be able to land
successfully, and the Nazis would lose both their state-of-the-art rocket aircraft and their pilot.
But all of these problems were the least of the pilot’s concerns. The
volatile nature of the propellant meant that accidents caused by
unstable fuel mixtures were common. If the proportions were just slightly off,
the entire gas tank could ignite, and the Komet would explode on the tarmac. Therefore,
every time the engines were started, there was a chance the whole plane would go up in flames.
As far as failures go, the Me 163 Komet was a doozie. Around
360 of the rocket planes were built, but they only shot down 16 enemy bombers in
total. Due to mishaps and accidents, at least 13 Komets were destroyed,
although the number is likely much higher. This means that it’s very possible that more
Nazi Komets blew up as a result of design flaws than the number of U.S. bombers they shot down.
At first glance, a sticky bomb may seem like a strange yet effective way to destroy an enemy
transport or damage a tank. However, the sticky bombs of World War II tended to have all sorts
of problems that would render them useless and even deadly to the soldier throwing it.
Sticky bombs were designed to be used against tanks during World War
II. The idea was that by having an adhesive coating around the outside of the grenade,
it would make damaging a tank much easier since the vehicle wouldn’t be able to drive
away from the explosive. However, these weapons did not always work as intended.
The Anti Tank Hand Grenade #74 had an outer shell that was removed by pulling a pin. This would
expose the sticky adhesive that surrounded the bomb. The soldier would then run up to a tank,
activate the five-second fuse, and gently toss or place the stick bomb on its hull before running
for cover. The main difference between a regular grenade and a sticky bomb is that it was intended
to stick to an object. The fact that the adhesive on the outside of the bomb wouldn’t stick to dust
or dirt was a huge problem. It meant that the sticky bomb literally couldn’t do its one job.
Obviously, a sticky bomb that doesn’t stick is a failure of a weapon; however,
it gets worse. The adhesive on the sticky bomb tended to leak and attach itself to the hand
or clothing of the soldier trying to throw it. When he let go of the sticky bomb and
found that it was now stuck to him instead of the target, there was nothing he could
do but run away from his squad mates before it exploded. Sometimes if the bomb stuck to
a soldier's clothing and he was a quick thinker, he would rip off the piece of clothing and toss it
away before the bomb detonated. This sometimes led to soldiers ripping off their pants that a
sticky bomb had attached to and fighting the rest of the battle in their underwear, which
would definitely be embarrassing but much better than being blown up by your own sticky grenade.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party designed some incredibly weird weapons. Most of them
fell into the category of Wunderwaffe or wonder weapons. Most of these devices were never built,
like the sun gun, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-distance aircraft that
could bomb the United States. However, some astonishingly large weapons were designed and
successfully manufactured by the Wunderwaffe program, and almost all were failures.
Hitler was a fan of big guns with gigantic turrets. It kind of makes you wonder if he was
compensating for something. For example, the V-3 cannon stood for Vergeltungswaffe 3 or Vengeance
Weapon 3. This was a large caliber cannon that was 430 feet long and used the multi-charge principle
to shoot its 310-pound shells. What this means is that the projectile went through a secondary
propellant chamber after it had been fired to give it more speed and, thus, a longer range.
The V-3 was constructed in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, where it was supposed
to be used to bombard London from mainland Europe. However, the amount of time it took the Nazis to
construct the gigantic cannon allowed the Allies to carry out bombing runs across the channel
to destroy key Nazi targets. Unfortunately for Hitler’s large cannons, they were all destroyed
in these bombing runs before they could fire a single shot across the Channel and into England.
It was the sheer magnitude of these cannons that made them so vulnerable
and unrealistic for the war raging in Europe. However, Hitler didn’t want to hear excuses;
he just wanted bigger guns. Enter the Schwerer Gustav. This railway cannon
weighed around 1,500 tons and fired shells weighing just under 8 tons up to 30 miles.
It was a massive weapon that could deliver a huge amount of damage to any target it could hit. But
this was the problem. The Schwerer Gustav was not very accurate, and it was incredibly slow to set
up, aim, fire, and reload. In fact, it’s reported that the Schwerer Gustav was only used a handful
of times, if at all, because of the time it took to move the gigantic weapons from place to place.
The Schwerer Gustav could only be hauled by train,
and with supplies and resources dwindling towards the end of the war, Hitler and the
Nazi leaders decided to retire the Schwerer Gustav before it saw much action. They poured
enormous amounts of resources into the massive gun, only to bring it back to a warehouse and
dismantle it so that it didn’t fall into the hands of Allied forces. It’s ironic that the
Nazis had to destroy their own insane weapon just so it wouldn’t be turned against them.
Hitler didn’t just like big guns; he liked big tanks as well. Unfortunately,
the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus was so audacious that it literally got stuck in its tracks.
This behemoth of a vehicle is the largest tank design ever built. But this big tank had big
problems. Its enormous size meant that it was incredibly slow and that the engines
would often overheat from the stress of having to move the several tons of steel. It was also
too heavy to cross most bridges without causing them to collapse, and it would destroy roads
whenever it drove over them, which was a huge problem for other support vehicles behind it.
Even though the Nazis succeeded in creating the biggest tank the world has ever seen, it ended
up being a huge failure, and the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus was retired before it saw much action.
One of the weirdest bombs ever created is probably the bouncing bomb. As the
name suggests, this device didn’t detonate when it hit something;
instead, it bounced around for a while before eventually coming to a stop and
exploding. Sometimes this was a good thing, and sometimes this was very bad.
Most often, bouncing bombs were used to target enemy dams. The idea was that the
bombs could be dropped from airplanes and would float towards their intended target.
This allowed them to avoid torpedo nets and minefields that would have
hindered the effectiveness of traditional torpedoes. The problem was that no matter
how many calculations were done, it was almost impossible to predict exactly how
the currents and waves of the water would affect the trajectory of the bouncing bomb.
The bomb would be dropped from a low-flying plane and would skip across the water until it reached
the dam. Then it would sink below the surface and detonate underwater like a depth charge.
The explosion would send shockwaves through the dam and cause it to collapse, flooding everything
down river and disrupting energy and water supplies. However, if the bouncing bomb sank too
far away from the dam, it would explode without causing damage to its target. Unfortunately,
the explosion would still kill any fish or aquatic animals in the vicinity. The unreliability of the
bouncing bombs and their unnerving ability to detonate prematurely in the planes carrying them
to their objective led to only a handful being used during British RAF missions.
Now watch “Weird Weapons of War That Totally Failed.” Or check out
“Weirdest Weapons Prisoners Made While Locked Up.”