Flagship Series
The engineering disasters, desperate improvisations, and unlikely battlefield successes that rewrote the rules of war.
After the fall of France, Winston Churchill approved emergency production of glass spheres filled with adhesive explosives, intended for Home Guard soldiers defending against German invasion. The weapon stuck to operators as often as to enemy tanks.
British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis designed a spinning mine that would bounce across water and up dam faces, breaching Germany's industrial heartland in one of WWII's most celebrated raids.
The U.S. Army deployed a recoilless rifle firing a 51-pound nuclear warhead with such a short range that the minimum safe distance exceeded maximum firing distance. Yet nearly 2,100 were built and deployed to Europe.
Nazi Germany manufactured a gun so massive that it required 500 men and a general to operate, fired shells weighing 4.8 tons, and could devastate underground fortifications. Its sheer size made it a weapon of mythological rather than practical significance.
The British military's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development created a self-propelled explosive wheel designed to breach the Atlantic Wall. It was chaos incarnate.
A British inventor's proposal to build an enormous aircraft carrier from pykrete—wood pulp and ice—survived early testing and captured the imagination of Churchill, but logistical reality and advancing naval tactics ultimately defeated the project.
The pioneer of behavioral psychology trained pigeons to guide bombs with greater accuracy than some electronic systems, but technological progress rendered his living guidance system redundant.
A Pennsylvania dentist's observation of Mexican free-tailed bats at Carlsbad Caverns inspired one of World War II's most unusual weapons projects: incendiary bombs carried by hibernating bats to incinerate Japanese cities from within.
