NAZI SECRET WEAPONS
Danger, Large and Small
Another unlikely project was a proposal by Gottfried Feder, a Nazi official who was a civil engineer by training, to create what he called a “war crocodile” for use in the anticipated invasion of England. Feder’s brainchild, as described in Ronald Wheatley’s 1958 book Operation Sea Lion: German Plans for the Invasion of England, 1939-1942, was a an immense amphibious blockhouse of ungainly proportions – 90 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 12 feet high—made of concrete, which could move across the water under its own power and then crawl ashore on caterpillar tracks to disgorge either 200 soldiers or tanks and artillery. The German Naval Ordinance Office had serious doubts about whether the crocodile’s slender concrete body would withstand the vibration of an engine powerful enough to move it, but nevertheless, according to William Shirer’s 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the crocodile actually was discussed at length by Hitler himself before being discarded.
German arms maker Krupp dreamed up another immense vehicle, the Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster, by placing an 800 mm Dora artillery cannon—the sort normally towed on a railway car—atop a giant tank chassis powered by two to four U-Boat engines. The Monster, as described in My Tank is Fight! Zack Parsons’, Mike Doscher’s, and Josh Hass’ 2006 book on improbable World War II weapons, would have weighed in at 2,500 metric tons, served by a crew of 100, and plodded along the battlefield at six to nine miles an hour—making it a pathetically easy target for Allied aircraft. Albert Speer, the Nazi minister for armaments and war production, worried that the Monster’s sheer size would appeal to Hitler, and reportedly forbade Krupp to build a prototype.
But the German liked to think small, too. World War II-vintage files released in 2005 by MI5, the British intelligence agency, described captured plans for saboteurs to distribute small bombs concealed in chocolate bars, which would explode when an unwitting Briton broke off a piece. They designed similar devices secreted inside containers of plums, boots, car batteries, and even the carcass of a dead rat. This German scheme nearly came to fruition. According to the Daily Record, a British newspaper, British authorities actually apprehended three German agents in Ireland who were equipped with such bombs, hidden inside cans of peas.
In the end, none of these German inventions managed to change the war’s outcome, though Myhra notes that that the Germans’ wartime inventiveness—both actual and imagined—has helped promote a myth that Hitler might have been victorious against the Allies, if only a few of his Wunderwaffen could have been rushed into the fray in time. The reality, he says, is that American industry’s ability to churn out vast numbers of bombers and other weapons simply overwhelmed any innovations the Germans came up with.
“People hear about the technology, and tell me that we are so damned lucky that we won the war,” he says. “But I say, uh-uh. By 1944, Germany had no more pilots left and no fuel, so there was no way they could go up and chase after a B-17. They couldn’t get all these planes that they developed into production. They never had a chance to win.”
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