WW II'S WEIRDEST INVENTIONS
Take a closer look at some of the strangest things the Allied and Axis powers came up with to take on their adversaries
WORDS JONATHAN GORDON
Throughout human history, wars have been a cauldron for invention. In fact, hardship of any kind can lead to new concepts and ways of thinking to emerge. World War II had no shortage of hardship or inventiveness, some of the latter being as devastating and diabolical as the planet had ever seen. Here, however, we thought we would concentrate on some of the stranger concepts. Whether successful or not, the tools and weapons we have chosen display a kind of outside-of-thebox thinking or disregard for convention that can so often lead to great ideas.
More often than not, the things that stood in the way of these inventions really making an impact was a lack of resources or being slightly too far outside the realms of possibility for technology at the time. From giant weapons that dwarfed the battlefield to funny ways of rethinking the tank, even the ideas that were failures have gone on to be adapted or reborn as entirely new devices and innovations that continue to affect our lives and have a massive impact on modern fields of battle. Let’s take a look at some of World War II’s stranger contributions to military tactics.
Did it work?
It certainly packed a punch, but it was used sparingly and wasn’t actually built in time to do the job it was meant to
GUSTAV RAILWAY GUN
The biggest gun ever made
MADE BY: GERMANY DATE: JULY 1942
The thinking behind the Gustav gun doesn’t appear to have been too sophisticated. It was big… very big. The barrel alone was over 47 metres long and the whole machine weighed around 1,350 tonnes. The reason it was so big was that it was needed to break through the defences of the heavily fortified Maginot Line, and that meant munitions of a size and weight previously unheard of.
The gun itself was originally commissioned in 1934 by the German Army from Krupp AG, a leading arms manufacturer. It was requested to be completed by the spring of 1940 to launch an assault on the Maginot Line and begin the invasion of France. However, complications in its construction meant it wasn’t ready for test firing until 1941, and it was first deployed in Sevastopol in early 1942.