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Top 5 Second World War Weapons That Failed

Unfortunately, war can drive innovation. During World War II, the worlds major powers set their sites on advancing technology, medicine, and communications in order to be efficient and fearsome in battle. Some of the advancements made in WWII were fundamental to modern technology - others, not so much.
Here is a look at some of the most useless, and downright insane weapons developed on both sides during WWII.

1. Schwerer Gustav – the German railway gun

The Schwerer Gustav in front of its camouflaged railway cutting on the Eastern Front. The men nearby give an idea of its immense scale.

 

A giant railway-mounted gun had been used by the Germans to bombard Paris during the First World War. The concept was revived in the 1930s when the German army ordered the construction of a new range of railway artillery. The largest was Schwerer Gustav, a colossal 31.5in (80cm) weapon, weighing 1,350 tonnes and capable of firing a 7 tonne shell 29 miles. It was designed to destroy the French forts of the Maginot Line, but was not completed in time.

 

 Instead it was used against the city of Sevastopol in the Soviet Union, firing 47 rounds but also wearing out its barrel. A second gun, christened Dora, saw even less action. It was briefly used during the siege of Stalingrad before being transported back to avoid capture. The other major nations also had railways guns, but such weapons had become out of date in a war where aerial bombing was far more effective. 

 

2. Goliath – the robot demolition vehicle

 

A British soldier examines a damaged German Goliath captured in Italy, 12 April 1944.

 

The Nazis Goliath tracked mine was anything but Goliath-like in stature. Known as the " Doodlebug " by American troops, the Goliath was run with a joystick operated by a controller. It had coiled within its compartments 2,145 feet of cable leading back to the controller. The mini-tank was powered by two electric motors, later replaced by gas burners, and able to carry more than 100 pounds of high explosives.

 

The Goliath was meant to slide under Allied tanks and deliver its explosive payload to their vulnerable undersides. However, it proved to be susceptible to cord-cutting and later on radio-controlled models were introduced. The Germans built 7,500 Goliaths during the war, which suggests that they met with some success. 

 

3. Luftwaffe Heavy Bombers – a project abandoned

 

One of three Me 264 prototypes in flight. This was Messerschmitts attempt to build an aircraft capable of bombing the United States. Development was abandoned in 1943.

 

In 1936 the Chief of Staff of the new Luftwaffe, General Walther Wever, was killed in an air crash. He had been Germanys principal advocate of strategic bombing – defeating an enemy country through the systematic attack on its economy and population. It was an idea which had gained ground in Britain, where new heavy bombers were being designed for RAF Bomber Command. In Germany however, Wevers death – and a lack of resources – saw the abandonment of existing projects for a long-range bomber. Instead, priority was given to smaller aircraft, especially dive-bombers.

 

The Luftwaffes prime function would be to support the army over the battlefield. Germanys lack of a strategic bomber force to hit back at British and Soviet industry was keenly felt as the war progressed. Belated attempts to get a range of new four-engined aircraft into service failed, and only one – the Heinkel He 177 – saw action. There were even designs for an Amerika bomber that could reach New York, but that objective was also never realised. 

 

4. V-3 cannon

 

The extremely long German V-3 cannon.

 

The V-3 was the unnecessary younger sibling of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that pulverized London during the Blitzkrieg.

Devised in the summer of 1944, the V-3 was designed to fire 300 nine-foot-long dart-shaped shells every hour . A series of secondary charges positioned along the 416-foot barrel were meant to speed up the projectile, which would hypothetically be able to reach London from well over 100 miles away in the French town of Mimoyecques. But when the V-3 finally became operational, the velocity of the shell was a mere 3,280 feet per second, which was estimated to be about half what was needed to reach London.

 

Hitler had authorized the production of 50 of these weapons, but before the original plans for the V-3 could be implemented, Allied forces bombed and destroyed the gun, despite Germanys best efforts to hide the munitions under haystacks.

 

5."White Rabbit/Nellie" – the trench digging

 

Winston Churchill inspects Nellie at Clumber Park, Nottingham, 6 November 1941.

 

White Rabbit or Nellie were two of the nicknames given to a trench digging machine built by the Royal Navy and known officially as Cultivator No. 6. It was based on an idea first proposed by Winston Churchill during the First World War, which he revived in 1939, as First Lord Of the Admiralty. Nellie was intended to burrow towards the enemy line, excavating a trench wide enough for troops to advance behind. 

 

The huge 130 ton machine combined a plough and cylindrical cutter but carried no weapons. The device may have had some merit on the Western Front during the First World War, but was utterly unnecessary on the Second World War battlefield and the idea was eventually dropped after a handful of machines had been constructed. 

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