HC Weird Weapons of World War II_1of2_The Allies
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00:00Between 1939 and 1945, the world was locked in a nightmare struggle of unprecedented ferocity.
00:11When the smoke finally cleared, stories emerged of an extraordinary array of new weapons dreamed up by both sides' most inventive minds.
00:21Weird weapons unlike anything used in warfare before.
00:25New ways of bringing destruction to the enemy, born of desperation and wild imagination.
00:33And when the world had gone mad, nothing seemed too strange to try.
00:39An unsinkable, indestructible aircraft carrier made from solid ice, floating in the middle of the Atlantic.
00:47American bats, trained to carry tiny incendiary bombs designed to set fire to entire Japanese cities.
00:55Bombs so unbelievably large and powerful, they could bury themselves in the ground and trigger earthquakes.
01:01On the Allied side, some of the most extreme ideas were born in the dark early days of World War II.
01:18From the beginning, through 1941 and 1942, Allied merchant ships carrying vital supplies from the U.S. to Britain were under constant attack.
01:31In 1942, German U-boats reaped a grim harvest.
01:37They were sinking an average of 33 merchant ships a week.
01:41The cost in human terms was enormous.
01:4430,000 U.S. seamen alone were killed or injured in the North Atlantic during the war.
01:51Hundreds of miles of open sea were a free-fire zone for the Germans.
01:56If you flew out from Great Britain, you could only fly so far to cover the convoys going across the Atlantic.
02:03You could only fly so far out of, say, Halifax and Nova Scotia.
02:07And there was this zone in between the air cover where the U-boats could operate and operate without having to fear air cover.
02:17What was needed was a mid-Atlantic floating platform to serve as an air base.
02:23What was needed was a mid-Atlantic floating platform to serve as an air base to defend the convoys.
02:30British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered his staff to put their minds to the problem.
02:38An eccentric scientist working for the British Combined Operations Department called Geoffrey Pike came up with an extraordinary and improbable solution.
02:48What Pike thought he had was a whole concept of winning the war using icebergs.
02:54It wasn't just as airfields.
02:56He even had the idea of building great 4,000-foot, 4 million-ton rams that would ram their way into enemy harbors.
03:07Pike's first idea was bold, simple and dramatic.
03:11Cut out a section of an iceberg and tow it to the mid-Atlantic to use as a floating airfield,
03:16large enough to support a landing strip, a fuel depot and anti-aircraft guns.
03:26In an increasingly beleaguered Britain, the idea was seized upon with enthusiasm.
03:32Churchill was so taken by the concept, he said,
03:35The advantages of a floating island are so dazzling, at the moment they do not need to be discussed.
03:44But when Pike and his colleagues looked at the idea in detail, they realized it wasn't that easy.
03:50The problem, of course, with any iceberg, if you have 10% above, you have 90% below.
03:56And the Admiralty had determined you needed a 50-foot freeboard to launch aircraft off of successfully,
04:01which means you have nearly 500 feet below.
04:03And that wasn't practical.
04:09Undaunted, Jeffrey Pike was still convinced that ice was the key to building some kind of floating platform for the mid-Atlantic.
04:18Pike saw another huge advantage in using ice as a building block.
04:24It floats and you can't sink it.
04:28Just above freezing, water suddenly begins to expand.
04:32And that crucial fact, the expansion of water in the last stages of its solidifying,
04:37means that ice is less dense than water and therefore always floats.
04:44So Pike came up with something even better.
04:47Maybe you could use ice with all its qualities to build a ship.
04:50He called it a Berg ship and produced drawings and plans to show what it could be like.
04:56The large cavernous hull would contain aircraft hangars, fuel tanks, stores, living accommodation,
05:02ammunition bunkers for aircraft and a refrigeration plant.
05:08It would almost have been a floating town.
05:10It would have been big enough to have 150 aircraft on it at any one time.
05:15An extraordinary structure.
05:18A regular engine would be too hot for an ice ship.
05:21Instead, it was to be electrically powered by a 32,000-horsepower generator
05:26driving 20 individual propellers.
05:32But above all, the ice hull would be 40 feet thick, rendering the ship unsinkable.
05:40A ship of conventional thickness would be, even of ice, would still sink.
05:44Or at least it would roll over and list and cause problems.
05:47So 40-foot thick walls could not be penetrated by torpedoes
05:51and they would be repairable while still at sea.
05:55Churchill figured this could be the solution to his greatest problem, the lethal U-boats.
05:59But to build something of this magnitude out of ice, he would need help.
06:04Across the Atlantic, Canada had both the climate and resources to build a frozen ice ship.
06:10Churchill approached the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie O'Brien,
06:14Churchill approached the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie O'Brien,
06:17and persuaded him to build a prototype one-tenth the size of the intended ice ship.
06:24Work began at the beginning of winter, late in 1942, at Patricia Lake in northern Canada.
06:33It was the mother of all ice cubes and it looked like a big boathouse.
06:36The Mennonites who worked on it told us that they called it Noah's Ark.
06:39Setting up the prototype was to just see if it was feasible.
06:42If you keep a block of ice that large frozen, would it in fact float at the level you wanted it to float at?
06:47And it worked. They kept the ice frozen with refrigeration equipment that they installed on board
06:53and it lasted all through the winter and all through the following summer.
06:59As they began construction, a serious problem emerged.
07:03In its natural state, ice is very tough.
07:06As a building material, it's not so good.
07:10It breaks.
07:13Back to Jeffrey Pike, researching by now New York, always thinking out of the box.
07:19He came across a new invention called macro-reinforced ice and it was stronger than concrete.
07:28Basically it was wood chips, wood shavings mixed in with the ice and then frozen.
07:34They could turn it on a lathe, they could hammer it, they could saw it and it resisted melting.
07:39This reinforced ice was developed at the Brooklyn Polytechnic.
07:42The inventor, a scientist called Dr. Herman Mark, called it Pikrete in honor of Jeffrey Pike.
07:52Pikrete turned out to have just the very properties you'd need for a floating airstrip.
07:58And because of the wood pulp, it tended not to melt as quickly as native ice would melt.
08:06Churchill's mind was made up.
08:08An indestructible ship made from Pikrete was a weapon which could win him the war.
08:15It was to be called Habakkuk, after an Old Testament prophet who had written,
08:20I will work the work in your days, which ye shall not believe, though it be told to you.
08:26This Habakkuk would be two million tons in weight and nearly a half mile in length.
08:31It would move through the water at a sedate seven knots,
08:34secure in the knowledge that any number of torpedoes would barely dent its 40 foot thick hull.
08:42What you would have done would be to blow little craters out of the surface,
08:46but it would have been quite impossible to significantly destroy it.
08:51Churchill was so excited, he wanted not just one ship, but a fleet of a hundred.
08:56And he wanted them soon.
08:58But just as this incredibly weird concept appeared to be in his grasp, it was snatched away.
09:03Late in 1943, Churchill was told the builders weren't even sure they could get one made within two years,
09:09let alone a hundred.
09:13I think there were several reasons why the project was abandoned.
09:16Firstly, it was bonkers, and I doubt whether it would ever have really worked.
09:20But I think secondly, and most importantly,
09:23the war was drawing to a close, aircraft technology was rapidly improving,
09:27and the need for a staging post halfway across the pond was beginning to disappear.
09:34Reluctantly, Churchill cancelled the project.
09:37Geoffrey Pike's grand vision of an ice ship was shattered.
09:43Today, the remnants of the prototype sit at the bottom of Patricia Lake,
09:47an object of curious curiosity.
09:49The remnants of the prototype sit at the bottom of Patricia Lake,
09:52an object of curiosity for local scuba divers.
09:55And for those who know the story of the Habakkuk, a reminder of what might have been.
10:03The Habakkuk was destined not to play a part in the Allied offensive against Nazi Germany.
10:08But many more weird weapons would.
10:11In 1944, they were primed to spearhead the largest invasion in history.
10:20June, 1944.
10:22An enormous force was amassing in England in preparation for the biggest military operation in history.
10:28The invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
10:35Under the command of General Eisenhower,
10:37American and British troops had been planning every detail of the operation for months.
10:42Armored tanks were to play a vital role.
10:45If the tanks could spearhead the beach landings, it would give the Allies a huge advantage.
10:50Conventional thinking was to cross the sea in a landing craft.
10:54But surprise was to be a vital part of the D-Day plan.
10:58The answer? Build tanks that could swim.
11:04The American army had been looking at ways to get tanks to move through water since World War I.
11:09The results were not always promising.
11:16One tank that could swim was the Duplex Drive.
11:20It was an adapted Sherman M4 developed at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland
11:25and tested in the Chesapeake Bay.
11:28This is one of the few survivors.
11:32This is a tank, the type that would have been used at D-Day.
11:36And as you come down the vehicle right here, you'll see that canvas was put right in here.
11:42And this was sealed. It had a covering here.
11:45And you can still see the remnants of the canvas that's right here.
11:49And this canvas would have come up onto this superstructure.
11:53And this superstructure would have been erected, and it would have come up and over the top of the vehicle.
11:59And by having that canvas there, you'd displace enough water to where it was buoyant.
12:07The tank was powered by two propellers which ran off the main engine.
12:11Its top speed was four knots.
12:14It could swim well enough in the calm waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
12:18But on D-Day itself, they had mixed fortunes.
12:23Of 32 tanks launched into the sea off Omaha Beach, just six made it to the shore.
12:29There was a cross current. The tide was coming in, and it swamped those vehicles.
12:35And they just couldn't get them into the beach.
12:39But many, launched onto the beaches and other parts of Normandy, did make it.
12:44Nazi gunners, thinking they were weird boats, left them alone until it was too late.
12:54Several other specially adapted tanks kept up the momentum of the invasion.
12:59This flamethrower could incinerate a German pillbox in seconds.
13:04A rhinoceros tank cut through thick hedgerows like a knife through butter.
13:09But most successful of all were the flail tanks.
13:16The flail tank was designed to clear a path through minefields.
13:20Each tank had a mechanical rotor built on the front.
13:23Attached to the rotor were six-foot chains with fist-sized balls to detonate the mines.
13:29Ian Hammerton commanded a flail tank on D-Day.
13:33There is a sort of heavy thump from an ordinary teller mine or a shoe mine, and the tank does a little bounce.
13:44Not only did these bizarre-looking tanks blow up mines, they often terrified Nazi soldiers into surrender.
13:51If you saw this apparition coming towards you with these strange whirling bits throwing up a huge cloud of dust,
14:03I would be inclined to get up and run myself.
14:08But not every weird weapon was a success.
14:11In the months before D-Day, the Nazis were steadily reinforcing their defenses.
14:16To breach this massive wall, the British Navy's Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development
14:21built an extraordinary thing called a pangandrum.
14:25That pangandrum was, I think, the only thing that we ever were associated with that could be described as a nonsense.
14:33The pangandrum was supposed to be the first weapon to hit the beaches on D-Day.
14:38It was to charge out of a landing craft, rush across the beach and explode into the sea.
14:43It charged out of a landing craft, rush across the beach and explode when it reached its target.
14:48Trouble was, it never quite got there.
14:53It consisted of two wheels and a drum filled with a ton of explosives.
14:58Eighteen cordite rockets mounted on the wheels provided the propulsion.
15:02But the problem was, they couldn't make it go straight.
15:06It was quite a frightening sight because it would be going at a fast speed
15:11and you would not know whether it was going to hit you or not if you were watching it from anywhere.
15:26To compensate, they added more rockets and fitted a third wheel.
15:32And still it didn't work.
15:34Although a stray rocket provided an interesting diversion for a curious dog.
15:42After a year of tests, the pangandrum finally reached the point of no return.
15:49It ran at a collection of staff officers who'd come down to watch it.
15:55And it stared off at them and they all fell over into a dike.
16:00When that happened, I think they rather changed their minds.
16:04The pangandrum cost hundreds of thousands of pounds before the British Navy finally admitted defeat.
16:12Yes, it appeared to be a daft thing, but the urgency and desperation behind it has to be borne in mind.
16:22But the same urgency and desperation was also producing astonishing and inventive ideas.
16:28In America, a Pennsylvania dentist was hatching a plan to destroy Japan's industrial base.
16:34Using bats?
16:42When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, their forces seemed invincible.
16:53Never before had Americans felt so threatened.
16:59From across the nation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inundated with novel ideas and offers of help.
17:05Some were very unusual indeed.
17:09Throughout the history of warfare, all kinds of animals have been used.
17:13And in 1942, a new species was added to the list.
17:18Bats.
17:21The idea sounds simple.
17:23Take a million bats, attach an incendiary bomb into each one, release them over Japan,
17:29and watch the massive conflagration and destruction of a city.
17:35The reaction of people who hear my story of the bat bomb is, what?
17:41The inference being, this guy is trying to pull my leg.
17:47A leg pull it was not.
17:49A leg pull it was not.
17:51But it seemed a crazy way to fight a war.
17:54Especially to those invited to work on the program.
17:58One was a 17-year-old biology student called Jack Cooper.
18:03One afternoon, I was in the lab, and this Santa Claus kind of looking man with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks
18:14came into the lab and told about his idea of using bats to carry incendiary bombs into Japanese cities.
18:25Crazy idea.
18:28The man with rosy cheeks was Doc Little Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist with a flair for inventions.
18:36There were four reasons why Adams thought this extraordinary idea might work.
18:40Bats can carry their young, sometimes two or three of them, suggesting they would be strong enough to carry a small bomb.
18:47They can be induced to hibernate, which meant they could easily be handled.
18:52During daylight hours, they seek out darkness, roofs and attics, cracks and crevices in which to roost.
18:59Above all, there were millions and millions of them freely available in bat caves across America.
19:06Doc Adams' theories were sound.
19:09But to progress the idea, he needed to persuade the government to provide the money and personnel.
19:14Not an easy task for a dentist with no military experience.
19:18What was needed was a contact in high places.
19:22By chance, Doc Adams was a good friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
19:27On January 12, 1942, Adams put his ideas down onto paper and took it to the White House.
19:35President Roosevelt was kind enough to look at his paper and wrote to his aide, who was William Donovan.
19:48He wrote on his note, have a look at this, Bill. This man is not a nut.
19:55Although skeptical, American military leaders, desperate for ways to strike back at the Japanese, could see the idea had some potential.
20:03Japanese buildings built primarily from materials like bamboo, wood and paper, would burn easily.
20:14If a million bats carrying incendiaries really could be released over Japan, the results could be devastating.
20:21One target was the city of Osaka in Japan's industrial heartland.
20:27The top secret plan, codenamed Project X-Ray, was given a cautious green light.
20:33General Hap Arnold asked Doc Adams to put the plan into action.
20:39Adams recruited a team of helpers.
20:43We had a staff as varied as an ex-Al Capone gangster driving Doc's car for him.
20:54It was just a crazy lot.
20:58The team headed for the bat caves of Texas and New Mexico.
21:02They needed to find out exactly what the bats could do and how to handle them.
21:06Which bat was best suited to carry a bomb?
21:14There were millions of bats in every cave, and they came in many different shapes and sizes.
21:19But there was only one that could be seriously considered for the project, and that was the Mexican free tail.
21:24It wasn't particularly big, but there were millions of them.
21:30So this is a Mexican free-tailed bat.
21:33This is one of the species that's so abundant at Carlsbad Caverns and most of the bat areas in the southwestern United States.
21:43Catching enough bats was easy.
21:46Inducing them to hibernate by cooling the air temperature was straightforward.
21:49But making an effective incendiary device that the bats could carry was much more of a challenge.
21:57The average Mexican free-tail weighed barely half an ounce.
22:01Tests showed that it could carry slightly more than its own body weight.
22:05But the smallest incendiary device available at the time weighed two pounds,
22:10a weight 30 times greater than the bat could possibly carry.
22:19One of America's top scientists, Harvard chemist Louis Feiser, was appointed to the project.
22:25His task? To design a device small enough for a bat to carry, yet powerful enough to set fire to a building.
22:33His idea was to apply something he'd invented called napalm, which is jellied gasoline.
22:38It's a mixture of gasoline and liquid soap, in effect.
22:42It's compact. It's relatively lightweight.
22:45It's reliable, and then once you set it off, it's going to burn very fiercely.
22:50But beyond that, once this jellied gasoline gets hot, it will also flow,
22:54which means you can get into crevices and under roofs and down partitions and so on.
22:59So for the bat bomb, it's the perfect explosive.
23:03To carry the napalm, Feiser developed a tiny celluloid capsule.
23:08It included a time-delay fuse, but remarkably still weighed less than an ounce.
23:15The bomb would be attached by means of a surgical clip, here, to the skin of the chest of the bat.
23:22So it would be just suspended under it, sort of like this.
23:26And that little bomb was so effective that you could lay it on a solid plank,
23:34like a 12 by 12 plank of wood, and ignite it, and it would start the wood on fire.
23:40No kindling required.
23:42Just how effective became apparent during tests at Carlsbad Army Airfield, New Mexico.
23:48Some bats carrying live incendiaries escaped, and within minutes the base was in flames.
23:55Wow. The Air Force took a very dim view of what we had done.
24:02We thought, well, at least we proved that the damn thing works, you know.
24:07But the biggest question remained unanswered.
24:09How to drop a million bats onto a Japanese city?
24:16For everybody's safety, the bats needed to be kept in a state of hibernation,
24:20while the incendiaries were attached and for the journey to the target.
24:24The sleeping bats couldn't just be dropped from a plane, because they would simply crash to the ground.
24:29For the bats to be delivered effectively, they would need time to emerge from hibernation
24:33and a safe platform from which to fly off and find a building to roost in.
24:38Doc Adams came up with the answer, by designing this ingenious purpose-built bat bomb.
24:471,040 bats stacked onto 26 trays were placed into a 5-foot bomb-shaped container.
24:55On each tray, there were 40 separate compartments, one for each bat.
25:00The bomb would be dropped from 5,000 feet with the descent carefully controlled.
25:05A parachute would open at 1,000 feet.
25:08Simultaneously, the outer casing of the bomb would fall away.
25:12The trays opened like an accordion, each tray joined to the next by cord.
25:19The bats dropped onto the tray below.
25:22The bomb would be dropped from 5,000 feet.
25:25The bats dropped onto the tray below.
25:28The trays then floated slowly to Earth, allowing the bats time to wake up.
25:35As they flew off, each bat pulled a hair-thin wire connecting the bomb to the tray.
25:41The incendiary was now primed to go off in 30 minutes.
25:46On December 15, 1943, the bat bomb was tested at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
25:52A Japanese-style village was constructed in the desert to see whether the bats would take shelter in roofs and attics as was hoped.
26:06The bats performed perfectly. The military were impressed.
26:11And here's what they wrote.
26:13It is concluded that the bat bomb is an effective weapon.
26:18Ta-da!
26:20The bat bomb was given official approval in December 1943.
26:25It was to be put into operation against the Japanese in September the following year.
26:30But on February 16, 1944, came news that no one was expecting.
26:36The project was cancelled.
26:39Nobody could explain why.
26:42Naturally, we were disappointed. We would have liked to have seen it happen,
26:45because we hoped it would have helped to end the war quickly.
26:51But a quick way to end the war had already been found.
26:55The atomic bomb rendered the bat bomb obsolete before it could be put into action.
27:01The war was over for Doc Adams and his team.
27:04But across America, the search for weird ways to gain an advantage over the enemy never stopped.
27:09In Minneapolis in 1942, a plan was hatched to train pigeons to guide a bomb to its target.
27:17Today's electronic smart bombs are the perfect weapon.
27:21You can sit miles away in complete safety and guide a missile with pinpoint accuracy to a distant target.
27:29Since World War I, scientists realized that remote-controlled bombs were the future.
27:34But they hadn't yet figured out how to do it with radio waves.
27:39One early idea was to use pigeons.
27:45American behaviorist B.F. Skinner came up with a plan.
27:49He'd studied animal behavior for years,
27:52and he believed that he could train pigeons to steer a bomb to its target.
27:58Skinner's idea was to use a remote-controlled bomb.
28:02Skinner's idea was to harness pigeons inside a missile.
28:07When the missile was launched, say towards a ship,
28:10a lens projected an image of the ship onto a screen inside the bomb.
28:15The pigeons were trained to peck at the ship on the screen.
28:19As long as they hit the image correctly,
28:22a link from the screen to the bomb's steering control kept it on course.
28:27Skinner trained his birds using food as a reward.
28:31He believed that if his pigeon-guided bomb could be launched within 2,000 feet of its target,
28:37the pigeons could ensure a direct hit.
28:42The U.S. military liked the idea enough to invest $25,000 to fund an experimental program.
28:49Exhaustive tests were carried out in laboratories.
28:55The birds passed every test with flying colors, but to no avail.
29:01When it was presented to the National Defense Research Council,
29:05they simply could not take it seriously.
29:08Project Pigeon was dropped.
29:11It probably would have worked, but it was just too weird.
29:18So now, scientists concentrated their efforts on remote control using radio waves.
29:24To most people at the time, it seemed the stuff of science fiction.
29:28But the principle is simple enough.
29:31The principle is a simple concept.
29:34You use a radio signal from the source, the transmitter,
29:38it goes to the receiver, and then it's converted into mechanical instructions for the device.
29:45Usually one channel per function.
29:47Make it go left, make it go right, make it go up, make it go down,
29:51make it go faster, make it go slower.
29:55In 1942, America launched its first radio-controlled missile, Azon.
30:01Azon guided a 500-pound bomb carried on an aircraft until it was in reach of the target.
30:09Once it was released, a bombardier controlled its flight.
30:13He could steer it by sending a radio signal,
30:16which adjusted the bomb's fins, moving it right or left.
30:24These were extraordinary weapons.
30:27They were a leap in technology.
30:28They brought an accuracy to the aerial bombing that no one had ever seen before.
30:37Azon was the basis for an even weirder wonder weapon.
30:41Codenamed Operation Aphrodite,
30:44it would push the technological boundaries of radio control to new limits.
30:49Operation Aphrodite involved both the U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces.
30:54It was considered so dangerous, they asked for pilots to volunteer.
30:59One who did was Ken Waters.
31:02They needed volunteers for a special mission,
31:05but if you did it, you'd get credit for five missions
31:10and get the DFC, the Distinguished Flying Cross.
31:16The plan was to turn an entire war weary plane into a flying kamikaze bomb.
31:22The aircraft would be packed with nine tons of explosives.
31:28Two daredevil pilots would then fly the plane to 10,000 feet.
31:33They would arm the bomb and bail out,
31:35leaving a mother aircraft nearby to steer the bomb plane by radio control.
31:42To take an aircraft off like that, that's rigged to blow up,
31:46you have to be a special person.
31:49Flight control was handed over to a bombardier in the mother aircraft.
31:53He would guide the explosive packed plane to its target.
31:58You had to control the throttles,
32:00you had to control the climb and the dive of the aircraft,
32:03so there had to be a lot of very innovative ways
32:07to control that airplane with radio control.
32:12The pilotless plane, known as the drone,
32:15trailed smoke to help the bombardier and the mother aircraft keep track of it.
32:20Two television cameras transmitted pictures of the instrument panel
32:24and the view from the flying bomb's cockpit
32:26back to the mother ship to help the bombardier's aim.
32:31The bomb and the mother plane between them were a whole technological revolution.
32:36Even those who flew them found it hard to understand.
32:40I think I maybe had heard about television,
32:43but this was the first television I ever saw in my life.
32:49Because the technology was new and untried,
32:52the whole operation was incredibly dangerous.
32:56Within weeks of the first flight,
32:59a pilot died when his flying bomb went out of control.
33:07Another lost his life when his parachute got entangled with the plane as he bailed out.
33:17The most dangerous part of this mission, I felt,
33:20was the jumping out of the drone.
33:25We were going at probably 160, 170 mile an hour,
33:29so the slipstream threw me up against the bottom of the aircraft.
33:35And the smoke tank flashed by my face,
33:39and it had a weld seam on it.
33:42I can still see that weld seam flashing by my face about this far,
33:47and then I was clear.
33:50Ken Waters was one of the lucky ones.
33:52Operation Aphrodite was the claimed life of more volunteer pilots.
33:57One of them was Joseph Kennedy, Jr.,
34:00the eldest son of America's most famous family.
34:04He volunteered for it.
34:07And without people like that to go out and risk their lives,
34:13you're not going to know whether this technology is going to work or not.
34:16On the evening of August 12, 1944,
34:19it was Kennedy's turn to fly the bomb-packed drone aircraft.
34:23Together with his co-pilot, Bud Willey,
34:26he took off from Firstfield Aerodrome, bound for a bombing mission in northern France.
34:31They flew a Navy Liberator bomber, loaded with 21,170 pounds of explosive.
34:40Kennedy was to fly to 10,000 feet before handing control to the mother ship.
34:45His last task before bailing out was to arm the bomb.
34:50To do this, a new piece of equipment had been installed,
34:54an electronic arming switch which replaced the existing manual system.
35:01At around 6.20, Joe Kennedy and Bud Willey started to throw switches
35:06and hand over control of the aircraft.
35:08Seconds later, there was a massive explosion.
35:12No one knows exactly what happened.
35:17The speculation is that when Kennedy flipped the switch,
35:21there was some kind of short circuit or something untoward happened
35:26and that airplane exploded and obliterated everyone aboard.
35:32The plane was completely destroyed,
35:35leaving precious little evidence to work out what had gone wrong.
35:37But one thing seems clear.
35:39The new technology had somehow failed.
35:47Radio-controlled missiles are now a standard part of the American armory.
35:51Those who use today's missiles owe a great deal to men like Joe Kennedy,
35:55Wilford Bud Willey, and all the others who died.
36:00In the early desperate days of World War II,
36:02Allied leaders were presented with a stream of weird ideas.
36:05Dropping bombs into Vesuvius to provoke an eruption to destroy southern Italy.
36:10Releasing poisonous snakes in Berlin to terrify the German people.
36:14Spraying Hitler's garden with a hormone to change his sex.
36:18Small wonder then that sometimes a really good idea was not immediately recognized.
36:23A bomb so powerful that it could destroy the whole world.
36:26Small wonder then that sometimes a really good idea was not immediately recognized.
36:30A bomb so powerful that it could set off an earthquake may have seemed improbable.
36:35But it wasn't.
36:40During World War II, most bombs dropped from aircraft ranged from 500 to 4,000 pounds.
36:46They exploded as they hit the ground and caused a lot of damage.
36:50But much of the force of the blast was lost, dissipated into the atmosphere.
36:57A British engineer had a better, astonishing idea.
37:01A much bigger and heavier bomb that would do far more damage and not just because of its size.
37:07Tallboy was an absolutely amazing, weird weapon used during World War II.
37:12It was 22,000 pounds worth of explosive.
37:16And such a bomb had never, ever been used before.
37:20What made this massive bomb truly weird
37:22was that it could destroy a target without even scoring a direct hit.
37:27The earthquake bomb was designed to bury itself 100 feet into the ground before exploding.
37:33The underground blast would trigger an earthquake effect big enough to register on the Richter scale.
37:40If you explode a bomb underneath a building
37:45and you hollow out an area, what you're going to do is you're going to pick that building up
37:49through the heave of the ground and then drop it.
37:53And it's not going to be able to survive.
37:56The earthquake bomb was the brainchild of British aircraft designer Barnes Wallace.
38:01Wallace knew that a giant bomb detonated underground would trigger an earthquake effect.
38:06But there was a problem. How to deliver it?
38:09There were two critical factors. Size and shape.
38:13This monster 22,000 pound weapon was to be dropped from 40,000 feet so it could gather maximum speed.
38:21Unlike any previous bomb, it had a sleek aerodynamic shape.
38:26The fins were slightly twisted so that the missile would spin like a bullet coming out of a rifle.
38:34By the time it hit the ground, it was traveling at the speed of sound.
38:39A specially reinforced steel nose cone, four inches thick, ensured that it would not disintegrate on impact.
38:47Everything about the bomb was new and untried. This was cutting edge thinking.
38:52No one had thought of it before and no one knew if it would work except its creator, Barnes Wallace.
38:58Barnes Wallace simply sketched it out on a piece of paper
39:02and knew that all you had to do was to get a big enough bomb traveling fast enough
39:08and it was simply bound to go deep. It really is as simple as that.
39:16But in 1940, a bomb like this took some believing.
39:21There wasn't even an aircraft big enough to carry it.
39:25Barnes Wallace was an aircraft designer, not a munitions expert. His ideas were untested.
39:31Unconvinced, the British government turned the idea down.
39:34The turning point for Wallace came with the success of another astonishing invention of his, the bouncing bomb.
39:42Wallace designed them not just to skip along the surface of the water,
39:46but also to be delivered with backspin, which would drag the bomb under the water
39:51where an explosion would cause maximum damage to the German dams.
39:55And it was when the bombs landed and these relatively slight weapons
40:00just burst the walls of the dams asunder that the British government was at last persuaded
40:06that confining a bomb inside some solid or liquid structure
40:12gave it far more power than just letting it go off in the air.
40:16The bouncing bomb gave Barnes Wallace an idea of what it would look like
40:21The bouncing bomb gave Barnes Wallace all the credibility he needed.
40:26In 1943, the British government finally saw sense.
40:30The earthquake bomb went into production.
40:33The biggest bomb in history was about to be unleashed.
40:36The first version was smaller than Wallace had planned.
40:3921 feet long, 12,000 pounds in weight, of which 5,000 pounds was Torpex high explosive.
40:45It was still the heaviest payload any plane had ever carried.
40:51The RAF 617 squadron carried out the first raids.
40:59One of the early targets was the U-boat pens at Brest on the northwest coast of France.
41:05Protected by 20 foot of reinforced concrete,
41:09it was hard to see how even the earthquake bomb would be able to disturb them.
41:13We studied photographs of these U-boat pens,
41:17which just looked like little squares or oblongs in the harbor.
41:23And we were told how important it was that we should destroy them if possible or damage them.
41:30They attacked on August 5, 1944.
41:34Even a tall boy could not drive right through 20 feet of reinforced concrete.
41:39But traveling at an incredible 600 miles an hour,
41:42the bombs made a 9-foot crater on the surface of the pens.
41:46Then the shockwaves from the explosions caused an even bigger crater in the ceiling below.
41:59How weird is that? A weapon that can actually destroy an object without ever breaking through into it.
42:06And coupled with the tidal waves,
42:08this sort of mini-tsunamis roaring in from the sea,
42:12you've got massive shards of high-speed concrete flying in all directions.
42:19Inspired by the success, Allied leaders decided to push ahead and develop the full-size earthquake bomb.
42:26Codenamed Grand Slam, it carried 22,000 pounds of explosive and stood 26 feet tall.
42:33Gun turrets and bomb doors had to be removed from the Lancaster just to get this massive weapon on board.
42:41On March 14, 1945, it was used for the first time.
42:49The target? The Bielefeld Railway Viaduct, a vital supply line for Nazi forces.
42:563,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on or near it.
43:00But it was still in use.
43:03From any kind of altitude, it was just like a thin piece of string.
43:09No matter how carefully you aimed a bomb, it would have been a very lucky hit to actually strike the viaduct itself.
43:18But Barnes-Wallis said, the Grand Slam is such an enormous weapon, it doesn't even have to hit the viaduct.
43:23All it has to do is to bury itself in the ground and set up these earthquake-like shockwaves, and it'll bring the viaduct down.
43:30Where 3,000 tons of bombs had failed, one extraordinary Grand Slam bomb succeeded in moments.
43:38Down it went, into the earth, exploded, shifted the earth, and the whole thing fell down like a pack of cards.
43:47In all, it was used 41 times during the war, wreaking incredible damage on each occasion,
43:54all due to the vision and the power of the Bielefeld Railway Viaduct.
43:59In all, it was used 41 times during the war, wreaking incredible damage on each occasion,
44:06all due to the vision, nerve, and determination of one man, Barnes-Wallis.
44:14What he didn't know, of course, was that the weirdest weapon of all was being developed in the U.S.
44:28What he didn't know, of course, was that the weirdest weapon of all was being developed in the U.S.
44:58What he didn't know, of course, was that the weirdest weapon of all was being developed in the U.S.