WILDLIFE AT WAR

Even the animal kingdom wasn’t safe from WWII’S strangest ideas

ANTI-TANK DOGS

This is a pretty famous one as the Soviet Union first trained dogs to approach tanks and drop bombs beneath them, then turned to a triggered device that detonated a bomb strapped to a dog when the original plan didn’t work. Trained dogs did this from 1941 to 1942, but were not terribly effective. Some were killed before reaching tanks, some detonated returning to the Soviet lines and some went towards Soviet tanks since that is what they originally trained with.

PIGEON MISSILE

Could pigeons be trained to recognise a target and use their natural homing abilities to direct ordinance on target? That was the question asked by B. F. Skinner in the US. With screens that projected images from outside into compartments in the missile, the pigeons were expected to peck on the screen when they saw the correct location, moving when the image left the centre and in so doing keeping the missile on target.

BAT BOMBS

Another US concept was using bats with incendiary devices attached to them to start fires in Japan. A shell casing with over a thousand compartments would be filled with hibernating bats, each strapped with a timed bomb. As the shell fell, a parachute would eventually deploy, opening up the outer casing and releasing the bats from their compartments, where they would then seek shelter in the woods or eaves of buildings. Tests suggested it might prove effective, but the project was canned when it became clear it wouldn’t be ready until mid-1945.

EXPLODING RATS

A rather devious concept conceived by the British Special Operations Executive, the idea was to fill dead rats with plastic explosives and leave them around boiler rooms in Germany. The hope was that they would then be disposed of in the furnace and explode. That alone might have proved rather small, but if it in turn caused a boiler explosion then the damage would be extensive. The scheme didn’t get far though, as the first shipment was intercepted by the Germans, but their continued hunt for booby-trapped rodents meant a lot of wasted resources.