Shock and paw – kamikaze cats of war
UNITED STATES
WHEN the University of Pennsylvania digitised a 16th-century illustration showing a cat strapped to a blazing missile, the image proved almost as incendiary as the poor creature in the picture.
Librarians, amateur historians and cat lovers all pondered the same question: had early modern warfare featured rocket cats?
The illustration, from a treatise on gunpowder and explosives, showed a cat bounding towards a walled city, bearing what appeared to be a jetpack on its back. A bird, wearing the same device, was streaking through the sky.
Commentators wondered why ‘‘the jetpack’’ was attached to the bird. ‘‘It’s like attaching an outboard motor to a dolphin.’’
Mitchell Fraas, a scholar of manuscripts at the university’s library, has now provided an answer. He found similar illustrations of cats and birds. ‘‘These fiery animals were more than just the fancy of one illustrator,’’ he wrote in an article. Though he could see no clue in the text, a link amid ‘‘the torrent of tweets’’ on the subject led him to a Heidelberg University manuscript, which contained an explanation of the ‘‘rocket cat’’ diagram.
Fraas identified the
author
of
both
An illustration from a text by Franz Helm, a 16th-century artillery master who served German princes and probably fought against the armies of the Ottoman Empire. texts as Franz Helm, a 16th-century artillery master who served German princes and probably fought the Ottoman Empire.
Helm advised readers who wished to capture a castle to ‘‘obtain a cat from that place’’ and bind to its back ‘‘a small sack like a fire arrow’’. They should ‘‘ig- nite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself. Where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.’’
Thus were an enemy’s cats made into kamikaze pilots. It seems no one spared a thought for an enemy’s felines.