World War II was a period of great innovation. And by "innovation," we mean "some really weird, wacky stuff." The war years were full of bizarre missions, ideas, and gambles that prove that fact truly is stranger than fiction.
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00:00World War II was full of bizarre missions,
00:03ideas, and gambles that proved that fact is truly stranger than fiction.
00:07Counterfeiting money is typically associated with organized crime,
00:10that Leonardo DiCaprio movie, or North Korea. But in World War II, Nazi Germany saw forging
00:16currency as a potential boon to its war effort, and had even planned a mission that would put
00:20it into practice — Operation Bernhardt. The plan was reportedly to flood the British
00:25economy with fake currency and enrich the Nazi war effort by using the forgeries to buy gold and
00:30to pay off Nazi spies in Britain. And of course, Nazis being Nazis, they used Jewish concentration
00:35camp prisoners to carry out the forging. Though many fake bills from Operation Bernhardt did
00:40indeed make it into the British monetary system, the scheme was detected by the Bank of England
00:44early on, and the British government just removed the high-value bills from circulation.
00:48With a game afoot, the Nazis just dumped most of the counterfeits into a lake in Austria,
00:52along with abandoned printing plates.
00:55"...throw it away!"
00:56Two words. Weaponized pigeons.
01:00"...they're gonna blow up!"
01:02Okay, well, not like that. B.F. Skinner wasn't just famous for putting rats in boxes. He was a
01:08bit of an inventor, too, and obviously wasn't stuck on one species, either. So he figured
01:13he'd put the two together and try to win the war. You see, there was a problem of accuracy in newly
01:18developed long-range missiles, so Skinner came up with what became known as Project Pigeon,
01:23a bonker scheme to train pigeons to pilot missiles toward enemy targets. Yes, you heard that right.
01:30"...what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard."
01:36The researcher had experimented with the birds in his work before,
01:39because man does not live by rat alone. So he was convinced that a team of three Kamikazes
01:44could together be trained to peck in the direction of a target,
01:47guiding the missile on the correct path as they did so.
01:51"...the birds! They just birded a man to death!"
01:55Research into Skinner's plan received a generous amount of funding,
01:58leading to a successful Project Pigeon missile test. The military command,
02:02however, eventually decided it was a bird-brained idea.
02:07And it was never put into action in the field.
02:10If you think that idea was batty, well, we've got more puns for you.
02:14The U.S. Navy was also working to exploit the flying abilities of wild bats,
02:19specifically the Mexican free-tailed bat, found all over Texas and New Mexico.
02:23The mission involved developing a specially designed bat bomb that could be dropped over
02:27Japan to attack military targets on the ground. The play for Project X-Ray was to drop bat bombs
02:32with a bunch of bombed-up bats in a canister, have the canister deploy, and then the bats
02:37would fly into the wooden Japanese structures nearby, and chaos and explosions ensued.
02:41There were issues with trying to keep the bats awake at the time of deployment,
02:45and there was one time when the bats accidentally burned down an airbase in New Mexico.
02:49But that didn't mean it worked, so the bat bombs were ready for deployment in 1944.
02:54But at the last minute, resources were reassigned to the Manhattan Project.
02:58Turns out that an atomic bomb was trusted a bit more than firebats.
03:05"...some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
03:08Controlling the oceans was key to World War II,
03:11and people were willing to try anything for naval superiority. The so-called Project Habakkuk
03:15sought to make future British battleships more resistant to torpedoes and aerial bombardment
03:20than ever before — by making them out of ice. The project was the brainchild of scientist
03:26Jeffrey Pike, who planned to create an ice-based aircraft carrier some 2,000 feet long,
03:31dwarfing other carriers of the era. If you're thinking that this is the craziest idea ever,
03:36not so fast. Tests mixed water with sawdust and wood chips and resulted in ice that was
03:41as strong as concrete and resistant to attack. So basically, an iceberg is the anti-Titanic,
03:47truly unsinkable. Eh, that might be too soon.
03:51Anyway, Pike even managed to get Winston Churchill on board with the idea. Drawbacks
03:55in the design, however, including an over-reliance on cork and the vulnerability
03:59of the vessel's enormous rudder, eventually sank plans.
04:03— for one of the war's most outlandish projects.
04:08The Atlantic Wall represented a major problem for the Allies,
04:11and all the iceberg boats in the world couldn't defeat it. That led to some additional creative
04:16ideas. One of these was the Panjandrum, a fanciful invention that could have played a role in the
04:21D-Day landings. As you can see, the massive contraption looks kind of like a cannon without
04:26the barrel, and it would be propelled by rockets and loaded with explosives. The plan was to launch
04:31them toward the Atlantic Wall in the hope of blowing through the concrete fortifications.
04:35Turns out, there's no steering wheel on those, so in terms of maintaining direction,
04:39they were unreliable. Plus, the rockets were often faulty. The planned deployment
04:43was shelved indefinitely. But was the bizarre idea nothing but a hoax?
04:47There's a theory floated by a few historians that the development of the Panjandrum may have
04:51been part of a grand deception. In this theory, the bizarre contraption was potentially leaked
04:56to the Nazis to divert their forces from other sections of the Atlantic Wall. As if bat bombs,
05:01weaponized pigeons, and ice boats weren't enough,
05:04spinning wheel of rocket chaos was enough to get their attention.