[Dan narrating]
[energetic music]
- What are the most shocking weapons ever created?
How about one that transforms animals
into cold-blooded killing machines?
[bats flying]
- This is absolutely a stroke of genius.
Bats can carry more of their body weight than birds.
They fly faster than birds.
- And then when the timer goes off, the napalm is ignited
and then kabam!
[napalm exploding]
They explode.
- Or a device that breaches enemy lines
with some rather unconventional ammunition.
- They filled a trebuchet with their most foul-smelling,
worst looking, rotting, bloated corpses
and launched them into the city.
- They're exploding on impact.
[energetic music]
Just stuff is just oozing from all sorts of gaps
and crevices in these bodies.
- What about a gun that gives its user a real headache?
- An inventor decides that guns have a major problem.
- He thinks that he can take the firearm to the next level
by making it a hands-free device.
- And thus the gun helmet is a recipe for disaster.
- These are the weapons so wild,
they are truly unbelievable.
[energetic music]
[video whooshing]
In 1941, after suffering an unprecedented attack
on home soil, the United States knows
it must retaliate, but how?
The answer lies in a secret weapon so unusual,
it is the last thing anyone expects.
[ammunition exploding]
- The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor,
the United States enters World War II.
And we're trying to come up with any, any clever idea
to end the war as quickly as possible.
- In Pennsylvania, this dental surgeon by the name
of Dr. Lyle Adams thinks that he has the ideal remedy,
the ideal weapon for the United States.
[bright music]
- Adams is a part-time inventor,
and he is also a man who enjoys exploring caves.
And one day he's touring around caves in New Mexico
and he sees bats hanging everywhere,
and he thinks, what if we weaponize them?
- [Dan] His idea, strap explosives to bats
and release them into enemy territory.
- This is absolutely a stroke of genius.
Dr. Adams knows that bats can carry more
of their body weight than birds.
They fly faster than birds.
- The way this can work is that you can chill the bats down
to around 40 degrees and they enter a hibernation state.
- Each hibernating bat is fitted
with a little incendiary device of napalm.
These hibernating bomb-laden bats could then be loaded
into a canister and that could be carried up aloft.
In a B25.
Once released, the bats would naturally wake up
when they hit warmer air.
- They will then flutter off
and find whatever building they possibly can and roost.
- So these bats make their way into the eaves of buildings,
into attics, into crawl spaces,
and then when the timer goes off, the napalm is ignited
and then kabam!
[napalm exploding]
They explode.
- Exploding bats may sound wild,
but Adams has friends in high places.
[bright music]
- Adams knows the first Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
He writes her a letter describing what he wants to do.
She then shows that letter to her husband, the president
of the United States, the commander in chief
of the American military.
- FDR hands the idea over to the US Army Air Force, along
with a $2 million check and says, "Go develop bat bombs."
- To pull this off,
Dr. Adams needs bats, and a whole lot of them.
- Adams chooses the Carlsbad Air Base
because it's right near a system of caves
that have a population of roughly 9 million bats.
So it's perfect.
They'll be able to have an unlimited supply
of bats and be able to test them using Air force airplanes.
- [Dan] There's just one question now,
do these flying mammals have
what it takes to win a war?
- The day arrives to do the first test
without incendiary devices.
So they take thousands of bats
and then drop them over a farm.
They fly down to the ground and they fly into the barn.
They fly into hay bales, fly into the house.
They're doing exactly what they hoped that they would do.
- After the successful test with the unarmed bats,
the army gets a little bit ambitious
and that same day decides to do a mini test
with six armed bats.
- [Dan] Six unlucky bats strapped
with timer rig napalm capsules.
Again, what could possibly go wrong?
- They're getting ready to put them into the casing
when suddenly the bats wake up, they come out
of hibernation mode and they fly away.
These bats fly all over the Air Force base.
They get into a control tower, they get into a hangar,
they go under a fuel tank.
Some of them fly into an automobile nearby.
Turns out it's the general's automobile
and they detonate.
- The test of the bat bomb is such a success,
it demolishes the military base, but it means it works.
It works perfectly.
- [Dan] Unsurprisingly, there is one person
who is not very happy with the outcome.
- Our army Air Corps general is pretty much fed up
with this project because it blows up his car, sort
of puts a blemish on his record.
So it's handed off to the United States Navy,
but the US Navy has other priorities,
and the Navy, uninterested in developing
this program further
turns it over to the United States Marine Corps.
- When the Marines take over this project,
they move the operation eventually to Utah
where they build a model Japanese village,
and they're able to destroy this model village
using these incendiary bats.
- [Announcer] Despite this initial success,
the Marines quickly learn bats aren't always cooperative.
- Sometimes they don't wake up from hibernation,
so when they're dropped out of a plane, they just kind
of fall and land wherever.
- They find that when females are pregnant
and males are in the vicinity of the pregnant females,
that the males become agitated to such a degree
that they're no longer predictably capable
of delivering the explosives as intended.
And there's really only about a five-month period
in the calendar year during which the bat
can be reliably used for the delivery of explosives.
And the big problem there
is that the war goes on 12 months a year.
- As the team is working through all these difficulties,
in parallel, there's another effort underway
to shorten the war, and that is the atomic bomb project.
So eventually the bat bomb is simply discarded.
- As one unconventional idea is shelved,
another is just taking flight, this time with wings
of a very different kind.
[ammunition exploding]
- We're in the midst of World War II
and all the missiles that we used are not guided.
They can't be directed to hit a specific target.
They can only be flown over an area and then dropped.
If we had a way to have that bomb go precisely
to that location, it could be a game changer.
- [Dan] Noted Harvard psychologist
and inventor B.F. Skinner has an epiphany one day
while out for a walk.
[pigeons flying]
He happens to see a flock of pigeons and it occurs
to him, I could use their natural innate honing abilities
to direct the bomb.
- Skinner approaches
the National Research Defense Committee with this plan.
He code names it Project Pigeon.
- [Dan] Using pigeons to hone in on the enemy
sounds crazy, but is it crazy enough to work?
The defense committee certainly thinks so.
- Skinner receives $25,000,
or roughly half a million dollars today, to figure out
how to make a pigeon-guided bomb work.
But Skinner has a plan,
and he thinks that in order
to create a pigeon-guided missile,
you need a pigeon-guiding cockpit.
So Skinner creates a little cone that'll go on top
of a glide bomb and in the cone will be a video screen.
- Skinner places a gold electrode on the pigeon's beak.
He then shows the pigeon video of targets like buildings
and battleships on the screen.
- Skinner's theory is this.
If you train a pigeon to peck at an image of a battleship
or a building and you reward them for it,
they'll continue pecking at it.
And after a while, they will no longer require the reward.
They'll just keep pecking.
- The images on the touch panel are linked
to the guidance mechanism of the missile.
So the pigeon actually is guiding the missile
towards its particular target.
- [Dan] The system works almost perfectly,
except for a slight issue with focus,
- It can get distracted, it might get something wrong,
it might send the bomb to the wrong target.
So Skinner comes up with a great idea.
Let's add democracy to our pigeon bombs.
And thus Skinner uses three pigeons.
If two out of three pigeons pick the ship,
the bomb's gonna steer in that direction.
Turns out that pigeon democracy works every single time.
[bright music]
- [Dan] All they have to do now is stick a camera
on the missile and let those pigeon pilots fly, right?
Not so fast.
- The system Skinner creates works very well,
but the army thinks it would be a little bit embarrassing
to have pigeons guiding their missiles.
So they choose not to go with the pigeons,
but it's not a total loss.
The screens that the pigeons were pecking on
are the precursors
to the screens we use every day in our cell phones.
Interestingly enough, the pigeons are ahead of their time.
[energetic music]
- If you think bat bombs
and pigeon-driven missiles are weird, wait
until you see what's next.
- In times of war, protecting lives becomes
just as important as destroying enemies.
This holds especially true for new parents in London in 1939
whose worries go from diaper duty
and nap time to shielding their little bundles
of joy from lethal chemical threats.
[suspenseful music]
- From the first World War,
there were 100,000 deaths from mustard
and chlorine gas.
So you have the military
and scientists trying to develop technology
to keep the population safe from gas attacks,
and baby gas masks are invented.
- Gas mask is probably the wrong word.
This is like a full body suit.
This is like a helmet with a visor
and a metal grate over the kid's face.
- [Dan] In an effort to make them seem less scary,
the government names them the Mickey Mouse mask.
Not sure how much that helps.
- Getting a baby into these gas masks
isn't exactly the easiest thing.
You have to load them into this metal visor thing
and then wrap canvas around them like a diaper
with their little legs hanging out from the bottom.
But then it is actually convenient for the parents
because you can wear your gas masked baby like a backpack,
like a gas masked Baby Bjorn.
- This suit is meant to be airtight
and you as the parent have to keep pumping air into it
so your kid has enough fresh air to survive.
It's not hard to imagine
this isn't gonna work well.
- So the bridge start testing out this brilliant idea,
but then the nurses notice a little problem.
The babies are falling asleep.
- [Dan] And it isn't because the babies
are so warm and cozy.
- So it becomes rather clear
that they aren't actually getting as much air
as they're supposed to
and ultimately the project is scraped
because of course, better to run the risk of a
gas attack than inadvertently wipe out a generation
by suffocating them in baby gas masks.
- [Dan] But it does inspire
yet another bizarre idea for armor.
- As the British people are facing the prospect of war,
we also have the baby gas mask stroller,
for the parent on the go who wants
to make sure their child's protected
in the event of a mustard attack.
Basically it looks like a coffin with a visor over it
so you can see the baby,
make sure everything looks good there.
- [Dan] And like the baby gas mask,
the gas stroller is also airtight
with a cute little pump,
just don't forget to give it a squeeze now and then.
- You put your baby
in this airtight coffin-like metal container
that has an air filter that you have
to consistently pump oxygen into,
and you go for a stroll in Piccadilly Circus.
- [Dan] What happens to the person walking the baby
isn't quite clear, but the intent behind it
somehow makes sense.
- During wartime, you still want to go to the park
with your baby even though you're under threat.
So people are just grasping at straws
to maintain their sense of normalcy.
- And luckily, London
and the rest of England we're not attacked
with chemical weapons,
and so the baby stroller was never needed.
- As the fear of chemical threats subside,
a different kind of terrifying attack takes aim
during World War II.
[ammunition exploding]
- After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese essentially are ruling
the entire Pacific, but by 1944, the tide is turned
and the Allies are getting closer to Japan,
and as a result, desperate times call
for desperate measures.
Enter the kamikaze.
[ammunition exploding]
[suspenseful music]
- These planes have a pilot.
They're loaded with bombs and extra fuel,
and they're designed to slam right into American ships.
- So the Japanese Navy is looking around
and they see these kamikaze planes
and they think, well, that's a good idea.
What if we had something like that?
- [Dan] Japanese Navy lieutenants, Hiroshi Kuroki
and Sekio Nishina, come up with a daring design,
the Kaiten Torpedo, which roughly translates
to the heaven shaker.
- The Japanese have long relied on torpedoes as one
of their main weapons for naval engagements,
but it's very difficult
to get a torpedo on time and on target.
What they develop is essentially a suicide submarine.
- They take their standard type 93 torpedo,
and in the center right behind the payload,
they add a cockpit for a pilot.
- It's got rudimentary controls, it's got a steering column.
It also has a button to detonate the warhead.
The torpedo is 30 feet long, but the real importance comes
with its speed.
It can reach 60 miles an hour, which is almost twice as fast
as any ship afloat at the time.
- [Dan] While it seems like
a pretty straightforward single use vessel,
it still needs to be tested.
- The first tests that are done are done without a payload,
but it's still dangerous to ram a target under the water.
[suspenseful music]
During these trials, 15 men die,
including one of the inventors, Hiroshi Kuroki,
who was killed in one of the tests.
- So now with testing complete, there's only one thing left
to do, and that's to put it into battle.
And who's gonna run that first mission?
None other than the other inventor,
Lieutenant Sekio Nishina.
- He wants to pay tribute to his best friend who died
during training, and as such, he brings a box of his ashes
that are going to ride like a co-pilot with him into action.
- [Dan] On the morning of November 20th, 1944,
the Kaiten sets out on its first mission,
to ram the USS Mississinewa.
- Nishina drives it across the harbor
and slams into the side of the US oil ship.
[suspenseful music]
The explosion blows a massive hole into the starboard side
of the Mississinewa.
It rolls over and 63 sailors
on board are killed.
- Although it appears that the Kaiten is going
to be a revolutionary weapon,
as a matter of fact, when they put them into operation,
there's very little success.
At the end of the day, 179 American sailors
lose their lives in Kaiten attacks,
but nearly 1,000 Japanese are lost
either on the Kaitens themselves or in the mother submarines
that are sunk on the way to deliver their cargo.
- The Kaiten torpedo stands as one
of the war's most harrowing inventions.
A grim reminder of just how far some are willing to go,
but when brute force won't do, some turn to brain power.
- Protecting your head in battle is crucial,
but a century ago, someone turned
that safety gear into something far more offensive.
- Prior to World War I,
an inventor Albert Bacon Pratt decides
that guns have a major problem.
[gun firing]
You actually have to hold them in your hand,
point them and pull the trigger.
- He thinks that he can take the firearm to the next level
by making it a hands-free device.
- So Pratt goes into his Vermont workshop
and tinkers away with what he thinks will be the solution
to modern warfare.
It's called the gun helmet.
- The design is a steel shell,
and integrated into the steel shell is the weapon.
And from the barrel, there's also a site that falls down.
So all the marksman has to do is look at his enemy
and boom, hands-free shooting.
- [Dan] This of course begs $1 million question.
How does one fire a handgun without their hands?
- The marksman has a rubber hose in his mouth,
and he blows into that hose, which is routed up
above his face into the helmet, which ignites a bulb,
depresses the trigger, and now you have hands-free firing.
[gun firing]
- His patent illustrates
that the helmet has another function.
On the top, there's a spike,
and it's actually a cooking utensil.
The wearer can tenderize meat, stir stew,
maybe even butcher a bear.
- [Dan] Cooking stew notwithstanding,
there is one glaring flaw in Pratt's design
that is a real headache to move past.
- At this time in history, guns have serious recoil.
When they fire that gun,
that sucker's gonna kick his head back.
[gun firing]
The neck can snap, the skull can crack,
and even teeth can be broken.
- And thus, the gun helmet is a recipe for disaster.
- Apparently, the US military agrees
because the gun never makes it to the front lines,
but there's another way to use your head in battle
and it won't give you whiplash.
- Conventional espionage is although a very successful way
of gathering intelligence about a potential foe,
it's also very difficult.
So during the decades of the Cold War,
the government comes up with a plan.
The US military establishes Operation Stargate,
and this is a program by which 10
or 15 men are trained at Fort Meade in Maryland
in a psychological exercise that's called remote viewing.
- What is remote viewing?
Well, simply put, it is psychic spying.
The principle of psychic spying is that people use the power
of their mind to
locate all the usual intelligence targets,
missile silos, military bases,
ballistic missile submarines,
that sort of thing.
- [Dan] Incredibly, this unique form
of espionage seems to actually work.
- Turns out the results are way better
than chance alone should allow.
Some of the estimates about the success rate
of this program put the figure at 70, 80%
- From these experiments,
the Army identifies six, quote, star performers.
One of these star performers is named Joseph McMoneagle.
- During his remote viewing session, he begins
to sketch out what he's seeing.
- McMoneagle claims that he's capable
of seeing deep into the Soviet Union,
and he observes the construction of a large submarine.
And what McMoneagle describes ends up being the
Typhoon class of Soviet ballistic missile submarine
six months before their existence is made public.
But while McMoneagle is seen as a star performer,
he's not even the best one of the group.
That would be his colleague, Pat Price,
who is deemed a psychic treasure.
Pat Price is supposedly successful in being able
to infiltrate an underground Soviet nuclear research site.
- Price claims to remote-view the development
of a particle beam weapon that the Soviets are going to use
to shoot down satellites.
- [Dan] Despite its promise,
Operations Stargate never really takes off,
and the CIA shelves the program.
- But there's a suspicion that it's only in public
that the plug has been pulled.
Some people believe these programs continue to this day.
There is a theory that this is a classic black op.
It's still going on,
but it's buried somewhere in the private sector perhaps.
- It may sound like a strange Cold War footnote,
but Operation Stargate
stands out as one of the most groundbreaking
military intelligence experiments ever.
- When used wisely, spite can be a very dangerous weapon,
especially if you are a professional welder
with a passion for DIY projects.
[video whooshing]
- It's June of 2004,
and the town of Granby, Colorado,
has descended into panic,
[building rumbling]
because there is a homemade armored vehicle laying waste
to local buildings in the community.
It is a absolute wrecking machine.
[building collapsing]
The local law enforcement have no idea
how to stop this thing.
It seems to be armor-plated.
It's knocking down buildings, running over vehicles.
It seems to be retrofitted to be more
of an armored fighting vehicle than an actual bulldozer.
As a matter of fact, it's quickly nicknamed the killdozer.
[video whooshing]
- But what the scared citizens of Granby
don't realize is that the man driving
the steel-clad behemoth is a neighbor
they know [video whooshing] and like.
[gentle music]
- Marvin Heemeyer is the local man behind the wheel.
He is known as an expert welder,
and in fact, he runs a very successful business in town.
Outwardly, he seems to be living a happy life.
- [Dan] Life should be good for Marvin,
but there's something sticking in his craw.
[video whooshing]
- For years, Marvin has been in a battle
with the Granby Town Board due to a land dispute.
- [Dan] The trouble starts in the early '90s
when Marvin outbids the concrete company next door
for a prime piece of land.
They allegedly retaliate by using their connections
with the board to get Marvin slapped with costly fines.
- Marvin grudgingly pays the fines,
but when he's making out his check, he uses the memo section
to insult the town board, calling them cowards and frauds.
- [Dan] As the town finds continue with no end
in sight, Marvin's rage builds.
[suspenseful music]
- One night, Marvin claims to hear the voice of God.
That voice tells him to get revenge on all of the people
that are involved in this scandal.
[video whooshing]
Marvin gets himself a bulldozer at a local auction,
and while he is running his business
during the day, at night,
he's spending his time creating
this impenetrable armored attack vehicle.
- [Dan] Marvin reinforces the killdozer
with steel plates and concrete,
making it virtually impenetrable.
Instead of windows, he mounts cameras
behind bulletproof glass
and navigates using internal monitors.
On June 4th, 2004,
Marvin's rampage begins.
- The first thing he turns into rubble
is the concrete factory next door owned by the family
who he had the problems with.
- Law enforcement shows up
and they start firing 50 caliber bullets at him.
They even try to use concussion grenades,
but not a scratch on the killdozer.
- [Dan] Marvin takes to the highway
to visit everybody on his long list.
- Next, Marvin hits the propane company owned
by a town board member.
Then he moves to the town hall itself
and runs it completely into the ground.
- He turns the killdozer towards the hardware store,
also owned by a board member.
But Marvin makes one massive tactical blunder.
He fails to realize the building
does have a basement.
The killdozer wedges into the basement
where it gets stuck.
- [Dan] The dozer starts overheating,
and finally shuts down.
- Marvin does not survive the ordeal,
but he does become a folk hero of sorts
for the people in the area, people who feel
that taking matters into their own hand
is the only act they have left.
- Decades earlier, the British military rolled out
something just as unstoppable and far more explosive.
[tank firing]
- It is 1943 and World War II is at a stalemate.
The Germans have built a massive fortification
along the entire French Coast called the Atlantic Wall.
It's nigh unimpenetrable.
- So this is a big conundrum for the Allies.
How do you get troops on the beach
and circumvent the obstacle of the Atlantic wall?
- [Dan] What they come up with
is something straight out of a "Road Runner Cartoon".
[video whooshing]
[gentle music]
- The weapon is the brain child
of British Wing Commander C.R. Finch Noise,
and he comes up
with what he thinks will be a war-winning weapon.
- Picture, if you will, two 10-foot tall steel wheels
upon which are 70 slow burning cordite rockets.
In the middle, a canister stuffed
with 4,000 pounds of high explosive.
- [Dan] The idea, get up close to the beach
with the panjandrum,
spark up the rockets and let her rip.
- They wanted to send 12 panjandrums up
to the beach at Normandy to blow channels in the wall
so that the troops could just walk on through.
That's an insane idea
for this rocket powered wheel of death.
- [Dan] In late 1943, Finch Noise decides it's time
to take the panjandrum out for a little test spin.
- Finch Noise invites the military's top brass
to witness this war machine in action.
- This being a test, they decide,
we're not gonna actually blow something up.
So its payload, rather than being 4,000 pounds of explosive,
is 4,000 pounds of inert sand.
This turns out to be a very wise decision.
- When the test begins, they light the rockets
and the panjandrum comes off the landing craft.
Everything looks good for the first 20 or 30 feet,
then it starts losing rockets and all hell breaks loose.
- An officer's dog starts chasing the panjandrum
down the beach like it's a chew toy.
Then the panjandrum turns and starts going after the dog.
Rockets are firing irregularly.
The things flipping from side to side like a wagon wheel.
It's an unmitigated disaster, and for that reason alone,
the panjandrum is not included in the plans
for the D-Day invasion.
- We are happy to report
that no dogs were harmed in the making of the panjandrum.
- In times of war, a necessity breeds not just innovation,
but sometimes unspeakable acts of resourcefulness.
One such example comes from the Mongol Empire
while running low on soldiers and ideas.
- So it's the early part of the 13th century,
and the Golden Horde, a mighty massive military force led
by Genghis Khan, overtakes most of Asia, is on their way
to Europe and takes over the Crimean Peninsula.
- [Dan] In the newly conquered Crimean Peninsula,
the Mongols strike a deal
with Genoese merchants in the walled City of Caffa,
keeping the peace for now.
- All goes really well for some time
until we have a new Khan, Janibek.
Janibek Khan wants Caffa back.
- [Dan] For two brutal years,
the Mongols batter the city.
Just as victory seems within reach,
something unexpected turns the tide.
- Suddenly, men in the Mongol army are dying in droves.
- Janibek is seeing his soldiers fall left and right.
He's thinking, how are we gonna continue
a siege like this?
- At the same time, the Genoese look over this wall
and they're starting to see this powerful Mongol army
writhing in pain on the fields, vomiting, just bleeding.
And they think to themselves, we've won.
They're too sick to fight.
There's no way that they're gonna be able
to take over the city from us.
We get to keep it.
The day is ours.
Hurrah.
- [Dan] That's when the golden horde
of Mongols fearless leader devises a plan
that is both unbelievable and well disgusting.
- They filled a trebuchet
with their most foul smelling, worst looking, rotting,
bloated corpses and launched them into the city in the hopes
that the smell alone will drive the residents out.
[energetic music]
- They're bloated bodies, they're corpses.
So when they hit,
[bodies falling]
they're exploding on impact.
Just stuff is just oozing from all sorts of gaps
and crevices in these bodies.
- The Genoese are inside going, man, we know we have
to do something with all these dead bodies.
So they start loading them into wagons
and carrying them to the river and dumping them in.
- [Dan] Problem solved, right?
Nope.
Turns out the Genoese
are victims of a new form of warfare.
- As they're collecting these bodies
and starting to dump them, they're noticing
that they're also starting to get sick,
and they're also starting to have the same symptoms
that the Mongols did outside of the city.
They are now writhing in pain
and they realize, oh my God,
we've got the same thing that they got.
- [Dan] What the Genoese got
is none other than one of the most infectious diseases.
- The disease that Janibek
and the Mongols have hit the Genoese with
is the bubonic plague.
- So Janibek Khan's original idea
was to just stink these people out.
But now he's realizing, oh my God,
I can get them just as sick as my men.
So the bodies keep coming over the wall.
He has no shame in throwing these men,
flinging them over the walls,
just watching them explode on impact
and getting these Genoese people sick.
[suspenseful music]
- The Black plague trebuchet is easily the weirdest example
of biological weaponry in human history,
and its impact will reach far beyond the walls of Caffa.
- The Mongols retreat south of Caffa,
and all the Genoese abandon the city,
board boats towards Europe.
And what they begin to do in their retreat
is spread the black plague through Europe.
- We can't say for certain
that Mongols are solely responsible
for this infamous pandemic.
What we do learn is a valuable lesson,
when launching hazardous ammunition,
it's best to keep a safe distance,
but centuries later, that gets a lot harder
when the payload is nuclear.
[bomb exploding]
[gentle music]
- At one of the peaks of the Cold War,
the US Navy and the US Air Force are the two services
leading the way in America's nuclear arsenal.
But the Army wants to find some way
to use nuclear devices in its own activities,
notably in the field.
- What if on the battlefield, a confrontation
with Soviet Russia, we have a portable nuclear weapon?
A nuclear bomb attached to the end of a bazooka?
That is a battle winning idea.
[video whooshing]
- [Dan] They call it the Davy Crockett,
and it packs a potent punch.
- The Davy Crockett weapon system fires
a 20 ton nuclear warhead.
Anything in its immediate vicinity is gonna be reduced
to ash, rubble.
[bomb exploding]
- It's great at eradicating your enemies.
It's also great at eradicating your allies.
- [Dan] Therein lies the king
of the wild frontier's little problem.
- It uses radioactive material,
and the men who are deploying this device are going
to be very close to it,
so they're at risk of radiation poisoning.
- What they actually tell them
to do is safely fire the weapon, hide behind cover.
Don't look at the bright flash, get away
as quickly as possible.
That way you don't suffer from nuclear fallout.
- [Dan] Believe it or not, friendly fire radiation
isn't the only issue.
- Deploying nuclear weapons on a battlefront
is a guaranteed way to start an escalation
to global nuclear war.
It won't just stop with the Davy Crockett.
- The army starts recalling the weapon.
The official reason
is that they are not accurate enough for combat.
[bomb exploding]
- Well, I think the threat of possibly ending civilization
as we know it merits a change of pace.
- There's no shortage
of bizarre World War II weapons, from baseball grenades
to a wind cannon that shoots puffs of air at the enemy.
But these pale in comparison to one British engineer's idea
to bounce the Nazis out of the war.
- In World War II, Britain comes up with this idea
to attack Germany within.
We're gonna destroy their infrastructure.
So the idea that they come up with is destroying dams.
They will terrorize the population,
but they'll also take out hydroelectric power,
and it should have a negative impact
on their manufacturing capacity.
- An easy way to take out the dam
would be to shoot a torpedo at it,
but the Germans actually have torpedo nets.
So that's off the table.
- Dr. Barnes Wallace is an engineer,
and he's got a plan to get something past the torpedo net
and below, which would ultimately cause them to fail.
- [Dan] To Dr. Wallace,
the answer is as easy as skipping stones.
- You bounce the bomb across the surface of the water,
it hits the dam, then drops down and explodes,
and just the right point to create maximum damage.
- But a key element is that the bombs must have back spin.
So backs spin helps in several ways.
One, it helps with the skipping off of the water,
but also when it finally hits the wall of the dam,
the back spin has the English effect,
and it brings it down to the base of the dam,
so it settles there.
- [Dan] With no idea on how to create the backspin.
Barnes Wallace does what many of us do when stumped at work.
He hits the golf course.
- He realizes something about the golf ball
that may actually help with the bouncing bomb,
and that is is that the golf ball has these dimples.
- Because a golf ball, the way the dimples work on it,
it actually helps create the backspin.
- Barnes Wallace and his designers
actually incorporate this
into their bouncing bomb, even to the point
where they're calling them the golf mines.
- [Dan] By July of 1942, it's test time.
Will Dr. Barnes Wallace's dimpled bomb have what it takes
to take out a dam?
- They find a place in Wales called Nant-y-Gro Dam,
and that's where they first test the bouncing bomb.
The RAF bomber takes off
with the bouncing bomb slung underneath.
You have to spin it at exactly the right speed, 500 RPM.
You have to be exactly the right height over the water,
60 feet, and you have to be traveling
at exactly the right speed, 232 miles per hour.
This is a very narrow window that these teams have to hit.
- It skips across the river, hits the dam, sinks.
90 seconds later,
[bomb explodes]
the bomb works.
- [Dan] The Confident Royal Air Force readies a fleet
of bombers eager to bounce havoc on the Germans.
Enter the dam busters.
- Just after midnight on May 17th, 1943,
the dam busters go into action,
and the raid is led by a 24-year-old wing commander
by the name of Guy Gibson, with 133 men from Britain
and their allies flying in 19 bombers.
The plan calls for them
to hit three dams in Germany's Ruhr Valley,
their industrial heartland.
[suspenseful music]
- Gibson is the first to release his bomb.
It bounces three times on the surface of the water,
but then falls short.
One plane's bouncing bomb even bounces clean over the dam.
The first four planes miss, the fifth plane coming in
is Flight Lieutenant David Maltby.
He's approaching the reservoir.
Gibson circles back around
so that he takes the fire on his plane
so that Maltby can make it through,
and Maltby releases his bouncing bomb.
[suspenseful music]
- And then suddenly the bomb explodes,
concrete is crumbling.
A huge column of water goes into the sky.
Complete success.
- [Dan] By the end of their mission,
the dam busters take out two of the three targets,
but they pay a high price.
- Out of 133 men, 53 are killed on this raid.
Three of them end up in the hands of the Germans,
but the dam busters go down in history as one
of the most legendary squadrons ever to take to the skies.
[energetic music]
- Whether it's handheld nukes or bomb dropping bats,
these are not only the wildest weapons ever created.
They are the very best of the unbelievable.