There are plenty of examples of very unusual weapons in the games. This is understandable – you have to surprise the player with something. In Half-Life 2 was a gravity gun, and The Order 1866 – thermite gun, works as a two-phase flame thrower. Locusts from Gears of War weighed live monsters with weapons, thus creating walking mortars, tanks and nightmarish counterparts of helicopters. The developers of Far Cry 5: Lost on Mars came up with a laser that turned enemies into chickens, and in Postal 3you could pick up a chainsaw beaver. But reality is sometimes no less strange than fiction, and there have been many examples in history, too, when, trying to gain a radical advantage on the battlefield or compensate for the lag, people tried to create very unusual weapons and equipment. With varied success.
“Brumak” – a walking tank of Locust from the Gears of War series
Leather cannons
The phrase “leather cannon” sounds like an awkward euphemism, but in fact such a weapon really existed and was even used in war. It appeared in Sweden during the time of Gustav Adolf – the king was looking for a way to increase the mobility of artillery so that it could keep up with the army on the march, and wanted to quickly transfer guns to the hottest areas of the battle.
For this, the guns had to be greatly lightened. To achieve this, the Swedes came up with the idea of casting a very thin copper barrel, reinforcing it with many copper hoops, and pulling off leather strips smeared with special glue. Despite the fact that it all sounds like a recipe for crafting in Skyrim , the weapon turned out to be quite working and very light, although much less reliable than conventional cannons. It is because of this that the Swedes eventually abandoned the novelty rather quickly.
Leather cannon
True, leather cannons nearly took part in the Caucasian War of 1817-1864, and on the side of the troops of Imam Shamil. He, admiring the Russian artillery, all the time tried to start his own, but it was difficult to do it with the help of blacksmiths from friendly villages and confiscated copper utensils. Nevertheless, the highlanders used the captured Russian guns and managed to cast several dozen of their own. At some point, Shamil was offered a way to speed up production – to make those very leather guns according to the Swedish model. But the imam refused, “for fear of arousing laughter in the Russians.” And he did the right thing – the Caucasians had their guns and so it turned out to be extremely unreliable, and constantly burst when fired. What would happen if Shamil’s supporters began to make thin leather cannons, and it’s scary to imagine.
Glass bullets
Baron Roman Ungern-Sternberg was one of the brightest personalities of the Civil War in Russia. He fought for tsarist Russia, and after the revolution joined the whites and by the will of fate found himself first in the Far East, and then in Mongolia. Then he was captured by the idea of reviving the empire of Genghis Khan and thus launching the restoration of other monarchies, including the Russian one.
Then China ruled in Mongolia, and the logical first step for Ungern was the fight against the Chinese occupation. Here things went well for him – once in the country in the fall of 1920, already in February 1921, the baron and his small army captured the capital, Urga, defeating the garrison, which outnumbered them by almost 7 times. They say that Ungern, preparing for the battle, even personally entered the city to look around, or rather, impudently entered the main gate, walked around Urga, and finally whipped a Chinese sentry who dared to doze off on duty. After such a performance and subsequent military successes, the baron became a local hero, because neither the Mongols nor the Russian colonists who lived here liked the Chinese.
Ungern’s troops in Urga
But there were also difficulties. Chinese troops soon launched a counteroffensive, and in order to finally throw them out of the country, Ungern mobilized local militias. They really wanted to fight, but in nomadic Mongolia there were problems not only with ammunition, but even with lead. Then among the people of Ungern there was an engineer Lisovsky, who suggested casting bullets from glass. Oddly enough, it turned out that they really could have been shot from smooth-bore weapons. Not without problems, of course – such ammunition flew much worse. But bad bullets are better than none at all. And the Chinese soldiers were then equipped with so-so, so even such strange ammunition was quite effective against them. So Lisovsky’s invention was quite useful.
True, this did not save Ungern in the end. In the same year, the Baron raided Siberia in the hope of raising a popular uprising against the Bolsheviks, but no uprising happened. Ungern himself was eventually captured by the Reds, quickly tried and shot – already quite ordinary, lead, bullets.
Glider tank
Back in the 30s in the USSR, they tried to figure out how to transport tanks by air, suspending a small (about 3 tons) tank to a heavy bomber. But the T-37 and T-38 were rapidly becoming obsolete, and the new light tanks had become quite stout compared to them. The same T-60 already weighed 6 tons, which, in any case, would violate the alignment of the bomber. And with old people like the T-37, everything turned out not at all smoothly.
T-37 airborne experience
The Soviet designers did not want to abandon the idea of a tank transported by air, and proposed a new idea – to make the cheapest glider from non-scarce materials, attach a 6-ton T-60 to it and attach it to the aircraft. And at the right time – to unhook and plant by hand, like a glider, and not just drop it into the water, as in the old experiments with the T-37.
The idea seemed interesting to the authorities, and in the fall of 1942 the first tests were carried out. It was possible to raise the glider only to a 40-meter height, after which the bomber’s engines overheated. The flying tank landed at the nearest airfield, which they did not even have time to warn of such a surprise, so its employees were extremely surprised by such a sight.
Glider with a T-60 tank in flight
This was the end of the tank flights. The power of the forced engines TB-3 was not enough, and no one began to allocate the modern Pe-8 to the designers – such engines were more needed at the front. And it was not worth the transfer of tanks such efforts. If there was a way to do the same with the thirty-four, it would be a different matter. But not a single production aircraft of that time could pull such a thing, so the project was abandoned.
By the way, similar experiments were carried out during the Second World War in Great Britain. Only the British decided to teach the Willis jeep to fly. To do this, they tried to make a gyroplane out of it – they equipped the car with a two-bladed rotor and the likeness of a small fuselage with keels and stabilizers. This miracle of nature could take off both independently and in tow by a bomber – if long-distance delivery was required. Due to the lighter weight, such problems as with the “flying tank” did not arise in the jeep-autogyro.
Flying “Willis”
Test flights were performed from November 1943 to September 1944. As a result, it was possible to achieve more or less intelligible controllability and defeat the disturbing vibration, but too late. By that time, the Allies had already landed in Northern France. The need for a flying jeep has disappeared.
Aircraft carrier submarine
In an ordinary war, the Japanese did not even have a shadow of a chance to win over the United States – their economic potentials were too different. Therefore, during World War II, Japan was constantly looking for some kind of non-standard solution that would mix all the cards. Impressed by the success of their raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese wanted to repeat the success.
This required another surprise attack, but now the enemy was on the alert, which greatly complicated the matter. One of the ways the Japanese contemplated getting close to American shores was a submarine aircraft carrier. Japanese engineers had already crammed small seaplanes into submarines – now it remained to build a couple of dozen large boats, equip each with at least 3-4 attack aircraft carrying a torpedo or a large bomb, collect them in one place, and deliver a sudden blow.
Model of the Japanese submarine aircraft carrier I-400
In theory, it was possible to attack at least San Francisco. Even if the success of Pearl Harbor could not be completely repeated, the very fact that the enemy could appear anywhere at any time would have forced the Americans to be more careful and constantly keep large forces at each base, weakening that part of the army and navy that directly fought with Japan.
Japanese designers were able to develop a project for a huge 122-meter submarine aircraft carrier and put it into production. But out of the 18 planned boats, only 3 managed to lay down and finish building. The offensive of the Americans, who paralyzed the Japanese industry with bombing, prevented them. Left without fuel and ammunition, the new technology was unable to take part in the war.
According to the precepts of Princess Olga
It is difficult to say how widely known in America in the 40s was the Russian legend about Princess Olga and her revenge against the Drevlyans for the murder of her husband, Prince Igor. One of the most striking episodes in this story was the moment when Olga, ostensibly deciding to have mercy on the besieged enemies, asked for a tribute of several birds from each courtyard in the city. She ordered the tinder to be tied to the paws of the sparrows and pigeons brought in and set on fire, and then release the birds. They flew to the houses where they had nested before, and soon the entire capital of the Drevlyans was engulfed in fire. Perhaps someone from the American military really heard this legend or one of its versions from relatives who immigrated from the Old World, which were told, for example, in Scandinavia. But even if not, during the war with Japan, someone in the US Army came up with a very similar idea.
The entire war in the Pacific was a systematic movement towards Japan. The goal is to approach the range of strategic bombers, and then bomb the Japanese into the Stone Age. Japanese cities were then no match for the Germanic stone jungle. They were made almost entirely of wood and paper and burned magnificently. But a dropped incendiary bomb is easy to extinguish if spotted in time. How can you avoid this? Create the seeds of fires in many places at once so that fire brigades simply do not have time to react to everything. And how to do it? The Americans decided it would be best to use bats!
Bat Container Bomb
They were planned to be thrown out in whole containers by parachute. The creators of the “bomb” hoped that, leaving it, the mice would go to their typical habitats – to attics and sheds. Each animal would carry a 20-gram incendiary bomb – kerosene mixed with a thickener, plus a chemical detonator. It would all burn for a few minutes – enough to start a fire.
Of course, in relation to the mice, all this was cruel, but the military was worried about it in the last place. Moreover, in the forties in the United States, they had not heard of animal rights and animal protection. Not only that, the suffering of the unfortunate burning mouse was even beneficial from the point of view of the bomb’s creators. The animal rushing in horror only increased the area of the fire.
Some mice, however, avenged themselves. In May 1943, part of the incendiary bats accidentally broke free and “attacked” an army airfield near the city of Carlsbad in New Mexico. As a result, the fuel depot burned down, but for the project as a whole it was rather positive news.
Burning fuel depot at the airfield near Carlsbad
Deliberately, the Americans used this weapon only once – a few months later they built a mock-up of a Japanese town and dropped a “mouse bomb” on it. Everything passed as planned – the fire blazed bright. The effectiveness of the weapon was even higher than that of conventional “lighters”. But for real success, many such bombs were needed, and with this a problem arose: after all, simple bombs can be stamped indefinitely, and mice must be specially bred or caught. It was not possible to learn how to breed bats in the required quantities before the end of the war, and the project was eventually closed.
True, this still did not save the Japanese cities – they were fired with ordinary incendiary bombs, simply due to the number of aircraft and the relatively low bombing altitude – by 1945, there was still little left of the Japanese air defense.
People will come up with non-trivial weapons as long as wars are fought. Surely even today in some design bureau they are drawing a device, which after many years they will talk about in a similar collection: look, they say, what the ancestors thought of! On the one hand, the willingness to constantly come up with unusual ways to kill each other is a little intimidating. On the other – at least not boring.
