Most Stupid Weapon of WWII

yup. the big difference is the Germans actually BUILT the gustav. but the landkreuzer would have been a total disaster...

 

Yes they did built that white elephant, and the Vortex Gun, the Sound Cannon, and the Wind Cannon too. Pretty weird, but the Japanese were working on a "death ray" using microwaves too, apparently hoping to "fry" the invaders as they stepped onto Japanese soil. That didn't work either.

 

Actually the wind cannon worked...

 

Functioning (working) is hardly the same as meeting expectations and having any effect on the war's outcome. In that I would put the "Wind Cannon" into the stupid realm as per wasted funds, material, and manpower.

 

See this post put you over the two grand mark Lou! Congrats.

 

The "sound gun" someone mentioned earlier actually made scientific sense, but the problem was obviously the fact that not only the enemy gets deafened so that is a pretty good candidtate for a stupid weapon

 

For my opinion, ust visit this website: 9 Absolutely Insane Weapons of War - Oddee.com
The majority of the weapons here were used or in development during World War II. To be honest, these are some crazy ideas

 

Here's a great one. This was actually seriously considered too!

The Allies shortly after London became a V-1 target started looking at ways they might stop the attacks. One proposed method was to jam the magnetic compass of the V-1 causing it to veer off course.

The proposal was made by Dr. Don Hare of the Airborne Insturments Laboratory (AIL) to use about 60 miles or railway around London to form a gigantic magnetic loop that would disrupt the V-1's compass. His team worked out that with some modifications to existing rail systems they could pass a 1000 amp DC current through the rails that would be sufficent to deflect the compass at up to alititudes of about 2000 feet. The power required was about 20 to 30 Megawatts.

The proximity fuze saved the day proving effective enough that AA fire was sufficently deadly to V-1's that this proposal was dropped before it was actually built.

 

Stumbled upon an interesting article on Soviet Dogs being used in WW2....


According to Soviet sources, the anti-tank dogs were successful at disabling a reported three hundred German tanks. They were enough of a problem to the Nazi advance that the Germans were compelled to take measures against them.

Military Technology / Videos | Anti tank attack dogs used in WW2 | Military technology and military videos

From the article they dont seem as useless as some have claimed....
Can anyone verify?

 

I have never seen anything like this before about the dogs. Everything I have seen relates to them not lasting in service due to them not being able to distinguish the German tanks from the Russian ones.

There appears to be no reference to it, so I doubt it is real. Also if they started mounting flamethrowers this would cause the need for every tank to be fitted with them and I think this is just a little far fetched.

 

Well a claim of 300 tanks killed doesn't mean that 300 were actually killed and if there were several hundred Soviet tanks killed as well ....
I'd heard that the Germans just took to shooting stray dogs. Although this may have been as much to supplement thier diet as to take care of bomb dogs.

 

Focke-Wulf Triebflugel


Check this aircraft out. The Triebflugel.

 

Yeah, I'll just bet the rotors didn't cause any torque problems! Maybe the Germans found a way to get around the laws of physics?

Can you imagine trying to land one of these things on it's tail? The pilot would be flying blind for the last hundred or so feet of altitude. That's what killed the postwar American VTOL projects, the extreme danger in landing them.

 

nothing that a well-designed smaller knife (like those in the present inventory) can't do.

 

The Luftwaffe started to get a wee bit irrational towards the bitter end.

 

Back on page 1 I mentioned these:

The Me 163 Komet had about a 1 to 10 kill to loss ratio. Not good. I think Komets shot down 2 bombers total if I recall correctly while losses to crashes, being shot down after running out of fuel, and just exploding for various reasons did in quite a few of them.

The "Sticky bomb" or officially the "Grenade No. 74" and unofficially called alot of other things that are unprintable... At least the British Army never actually approved it for use. That honor went to MD1 Britain's equivalent of the OSS. They manufactured these and then handed them out to the French resistance. The British must have really hated the French.....

The Nambu pistol and Chauchat machine gun have been discussed at length.

The UP projector. This fired a 3" rocket in a salvo. A wire unspooled from the rocket to hopefully entangle the target aircraft. I think explosives at the pointy end would have been a better bet....

The German Niger human torpedo. Obstensively not a suicide weapon but.... It did suffer a 100% casuality rate among the users and it never managed to torpedo a ship.

 

Don't forget the Japanese Baka rocket bomb. lol