This is another unique weapons that consist of blowing up an animal. This time, its not dogs that blows up, but rats. These rats are equipped with explosives. What makes this weapon capture my attention is that the application of this weapon seems to be very discreet. Explosive rats' main purpose is to destroy enemy's boilers. The explosive rats are put together with the coals to heat the boiler. When the rats are shoveled into the fire, it will explode, damaging the boiler. Effective for secret missions and also sabotaging missions. As brilliant as the weapon might be, it was never officially used.
I think you are confusing the rat bombs, used by the resistance in WWII and bombs disquised as lumps of common coal. The later was first used by the Confederate Secret Service (Actually the Signal Core for some reason) to an unknown extent in the US Civil War (1861-1865). The idea was resurected during WWII, but was not widely used. The bombs could be detected by a magnet as they were a steel shell filled with explosives and covered in coal dust and glue.
ReplyDeleteCoal powered boilers were either fed by hand shovel, in which case the stoker would notice the rat and likely not toss into the boiler, our they were fed by grider feed that would smash up the chunks of coal into much smaller pieces than the rat. The bomb would be destoyed in the process. As they were made with plastic explosives, they had to be set off with a detonator. Unlike more primative explosives, plastic explosives simply burn unless set off by a shockwave.
The rat bombs were used more as means of transporting and hiding explosives. Rats used to be incrediablly common before modern vermicides. Every city in the world produced literal tons of dead rats every day. Some of these bodies were harvested and filled with explosives. As it was common in the time for people to have dead rats around from traps and to have to transport the bodies to a disposal area, a resistance member found with a few dead rats raised no suspicion and nobody wanted to look to close.
If you want to see a really dodgy animal weapon, look into the bat-bombs developed by the US in WWII. Bats were fitted with small incindary bombs, then induced into hibernation and packed into cluster-bomb like containers. Before the bomb was dropped the bats were warmed and woke up. The bomb dropped to around 500ft were they popped open and the bats flew out and sought shelter under the eves of houses or buildings (the weapon was designed to be targeted against the wooden frame buildings of Japan.)
ReplyDeleteThe weapon worked, buring down a mock Japanese town, as well as accidentally about a third of base were the research was being conducted when only 12 bats escaped during development.
This weapon was, I think, cruel even during the last war in which animals were killed by the millions. The bats were alive when the incindary charge ignited. The charge did not explode, but erupted into flame like flares or matches, burning the bats alive.
The weapon was never deployed as conventional bombing proved far more effective than anticipated when the bat-bomb project was began in early 1942.