10 Insane Secret Weapons From WWII

The Second World War saw the introduction of hundreds of cutting-edge weapons, many
of which became famous in the post-war period. But there are lots of weapons that didn’t
receive the same kind of infamy. Stay tuned as Alltime10s brings you 10 Insane Secret
Weapons From WWII.
10 LANDKREUZER P. 1000 “RATTE”
If the Germans had finished building the Landkreuzer, the 1,000-ton Ratte would have been the largest
conventional tank ever built.
Its name, ‘Landkreuzer’, implied that the Nazis had envisioned the Ratte as a kind
of battleship for land.
In fact, the tank’s two massive 283mm cannons were to be taken directly off the deck of
a Scharnhorst-class battleship, and would have been capable of hammering hard targets
up to 27 kilometers away.
If that doesn’t sound threatening enough as it is, with armor 36 centimeters thick
in some places, the Ratte would have been almost invulnerable to all but the biggest
bombs in the Allied arsenal.
Despite approval and interest from Hitler, the project was canceled by Albert Speer in
early 1943, with no prototype tank ever built.
9 EARTHQUAKE BOMBS
Invented by the British engineer Barnes Wallis early in World War II, the purpose of the
earthquake bomb was exactly as you would expect: to wreak catastrophic havoc.
Wallis came up with the idea when he noticed that explosions were diffusing a great deal
of force into the air, wasting much of the explosive payload.
So his drastic solution was the earthquake bomb, a heavy explosive device with a super-hard
pointed tip that would sink deep into the Earth before detonating, producing what basically
amounted to a controlled earthquake.
Wallis made bombs based on the "earthquake bomb concept", such as the 6-ton Tallboy and
the 10-ton Grand Slam. The earthquake bombs had the ability to disrupt
German industry while causing minimum civilian casualties. They disabled the V2 factory,
sunk the battleship Tirpitz and attacked many other targets, which had been impossible to
damage before.
The British weren’t the only ones inventing insanely powerful bombs during WWII though.
The US and New Zealand militaries worked together in a program called Project Seal to create
the tsunami bomb. The concept was deemed feasible, but the weapons themselves were never fully
developed or used.
8 KU-GO DEATH RAY
It wasn’t just the Nazis and the Allied forces building secret super weapons throughout
the second world war, the Japanese were actively working on projects too.
One of their most deadly was the Ku-Go death ray, a concentrated beam of energy that could
take down aircraft hundreds of kilometers away.
According to documents confiscated by the US military after the war, work on a Japanese
death ray began as early as 1939 at laboratories in Noborito.
Physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga's team developed a magnetron that would generate microwaves
measuring 20cm in diameter, with an output rated at 100kW.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, it’s doubtful that this technology could have worked like
it does in science fiction movies.
In fact, calculations suggested that the beam, if properly focused, could have killed a rabbit
over a distance of 914 meters, but only if the rabbit stayed perfectly still for at least
5 minutes.
Meanwhile, the Nazis attempted to develop their own death ray, but in April 1945, as
the war was coming to a close, the device was taken into custody by the US Army and
the designs have remained a secret.
7 GOLIATH
The Nazis' Goliath tracked mine was anything but Goliath-like in stature.
The mini-tank was 30cm tall and 120cm long and was remotely operated to scale the walls
of trenches and battlefields, carrying between 50 to 100 kg of high explosives to deliver
its payload to defensive positions. It was controlled via joysticks connected
by three 640cm cables - one each for steering, throttle, and load detonation.
The Nazis built more than 7,000 Goliaths during the war and these little vehicles paved the
way for radio-controlled weapons.
Unfortunately for the Germans, Goliath tanks didn’t come cheap, costing 3000 Reichsmarks
in 1942. In today’s money, that’s around $17,000 a pop, so the motors proved far too
expensive and maintenance was very intensive for use.
So the electric motor was quickly swapped out for a cheaper, simpler, and far louder
gas engine. This turned out to be a blessing for Allied forces, who could now easily locate
them and deactivate them before the bombs went off.
6 FUKURYU SUICIDE DIVERS
During WWII, the Fukuryu were a vital part of the Japanese Special Attack Units who were
enlisted to resist the invasion of the Home islands by Allied forces.
Around six thousand men were trained and equipped with diving suits that contained 15kg of explosives
attached to a 5-meter bamboo pole.
The divers, weighed down by 9kg of lead, would walk underwater for as long as six hours and
at depths of 5-7 meters.
Upon reaching the hull of an enemy ship, the kamikaze frogmen would detonate the explosives,
blowing up the ship and killing themselves in the process.
It's not known if this suit was ever used in combat, but there are accounts of US infantry
landing craft and a surveyor ship being attacked by suicide swimmers.
5 VORTEX CANNON
The Nazis loved building super weapons and the Vortex Cannon will go down in history
as one of their most insane inventions.
Developed in an underground lab in Stuttgart, the purpose of the Vortex Cannon was to shoot
down planes with tornadoes. We shit you not.
The gun would shoot large shells composed of slow-burning explosives and coal dust into
the air. So, when shot into the clouds, the shell would create a vortex that could incapacitate
planes and even make small tornadoes.
Fortunately for the Allies, the Nazis had difficulties with targeting the shots, so
they never had the chance to use one in combat.
4 SUN GUN
If you thought the idea of the death ray seemed insane, wait til you hear about the sun gun.
In a nutshell, Nazi scientists wanted to harness the very power of the Sun itself to destroy
anyone who dared get in the way.
The so-called "sun gun" would be part of a space station 8,200 kilometers above Earth.
German scientists calculated that a huge reflector, made of metallic sodium and with an area of
9 square kilometers, could produce enough focused heat to make an ocean boil or even
burn a city.
In post-war interrogations, it was revealed that Nazi scientists were not only working
on this idea, but fully believed that such a device could be operational within 50 years.
3 EXPLODING RATS
Following the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill promised to “set
Europe ablaze”.
To that end, British secret agents were equipped with an assortment of highly experimental
weapons, gadgets and bombs that were made to look like soap, shoes, suitcases - and
even rats.
Around 100 rodent carcasses were filled with plastic explosives and due to be distributed
near German boiler rooms. When Nazi guards spotted them, they would immediately be thrown
on to the fire, causing a huge explosion.
At least, this is what the British hoped would happen. Instead, the Germans intercepted the
container of dead rats before they could be used for "operational purposes".
But all was not lost. Their discovery prompted a hunt for thousands more of the rats that
the enemy believed were distributed on the continent, taking up enough German resources
that the operation was deemed a success by the British.
2 BAT BOMB
Rats weren’t the only animals used to disguise bombs during WWII, bats were experimented
with too.
The bat bomb consisted of a casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a
hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached.
The kamikaze bats would be dropped from planes at dawn and the casings would deploy a parachute
in mid-flight and open to release them. They’d then roost in roofs in a 30-60 km radius.
Each bat would gnaw the string that attached it to the bomb and take flight again, leaving
the structures riddled with mini-bombs.
The incendiaries would then start fires in inaccessible places, the belief being that
the bat bombs would cripple the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities.
Tests were carried out and many proved successful - in one instance a mock up Japanese village
burned to the ground. However, in 1944 the project was side-lined, not for sheer lunacy,
but because all resources were being redirected to that great destroyer: the atomic bomb.
1 I-400 AIRCRAFT CARRIER SUBMARINE
Of all the secrets revealed at the war's end, very few came as a bigger shock to Allied
forces than Japan's two fully operational, aircraft-carrying submarines.
Absolutely gigantic for the time, the I-400 class submarine carried three Seiran light
torpedo bombers, each capable of delivering 907kg of bombs more than 480 kilometers from
the submarine itself.
The I-400s were built specifically for surprise attacks on American west coast cities - and
could potentially have blasted as far inland as Las Vegas.
However, technical issues, wartime shortages, and the death of Admiral Yamamoto, who was
the brainchild of the aircraft submarine, kept Japan from using them in large numbers,
but the two that did exist were completely operational and prowling the Pacific.
In fact they were en route to their first combat mission when the war ended. Los Angeles
avoided bombs on Hollywood Boulevard by mere days - and only because of the bomb on Hiroshima.
Thanks for watching 10 Insane Secret Weapons From WWII, which of these weapons do you think
is the most insane? Let us know in the comments below and while you're here, why not check
out 10 Bizarre Wars History Completely Forgot.

10 Insane Secret Weapons From WWII

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