We're Americans, and we never used to do things halfway. If you don't believe that, just ask Adolf Hitler. Now, these days, our military seems to have fallen on hard times. The current administration is using our armed forces as a jobs program for the neurotic instead of following the original mission of blowing things up and making bad guys un-alive.
Twasn't always thus. There was a time, not all that long ago, when our armed forces were not only focused on closing with and destroying the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect but when we also were pretty creative about coming up with new devices to help that mission take place. In our recent history, say, during and after World War 2, we've come up with some creative, interesting, and effective weapons systems that would give today's wet-pants brigades a case of the heebie-jeebies, and what's better, in a time when we're accustomed to our government racking up debt upon debt upon debt, some of these are actually cost-effective.
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So, without further ado, here are five unusual or just plain odd weapons designed for the U.S. armed forces.
The Mark 19 Automatic Grenade Launcher. Let's face it: It was an American who invented the machine gun, and while that inventor later moved across the pond and became a British citizen, it took another American to perfect the concept. Not only did John Browning, the Leonardo da Vinci of guns, invent the best martial sidearms ever made in the Colt/Browning 1911 and its offspring, the Browning Hi-Power, but he also designed the .50 caliber M2 machine gun, adopted into U.S. military use in 1933 and which is still in use today because nobody has ever made a better heavy machine gun than this American genius who was born in 1855. But while the U.S. armed forces love them some machine guns, leave it to the Marines to take it to the next level, with a belt-fed machine gun that burps out 40mm high-explosive grenades at the rate of 325-375 rounds per minute — because when you're really serious about making bad terrorists into good terrorists, there's just no reason to mess around with something that only shoots bullets.
The Bat Bomb. During World War 2, in the Pacific theater, it occurred to some great American leaders, like Curtis LeMay, that Japanese cities were largely made of wood and paper, and that wood and paper burn easily. This led to the firebombing of Japanese cities, with one raid on Tokyo resulting in more deaths and damage than in both atomic bombings. But leave it to a dentist from Pennsylvania to come up with an improvement on the standard incendiary bomb by proposing to strap miniature napalm bombs to bats and dropping them out of airplanes over Japanese cities. The drop was intended to take place at sunrise, so the bats would scatter, head to the ground, and find places to roost, say, in attics or under eaves. Then a timer would set off the napalm bomb, and then you have a city that is suddenly bursting into flame at thousands of different locations all at once. The National Defense Research Committee supposedly concluded that the Bat Bomb was effective; there is an apocryphal report that whereas a regular incendiary attack could cause 167 to 400 fires per bomb load, the Bat Bomb could cause 3,625 to 4,748 fires. That's a lot of fires and a lot of barbecued bats.
The Ginsu Missile. Because we are civilized people, our armed forces do try to minimize civilian casualties and property damage while we're un-aliving the bad guys. While precision munitions help with that by localizing the side effects of dropping a smart bomb or a GPS-guided missile through the roof of a guy's car while he's on his way to pick up some tea, American weapons developers upped the ante further by taking an AGM-114 Hellfire missile, removing the warhead, and replacing it with ninja katanas that spring out of the sides of the missile when it hits the target, transforming the missle into a flying Cuisinart. While the use of swords has a long, long history, going back well before King Leonidas defended Sparta from the Persians, leave it to Americans to think of strapping swords to a laser-guided missile and using it to slice and dice bad guys.
The M65 Atomic Cannon. The message sent here to the bad guys is, "Screw you and everyone within a one-mile radius of your position." This gun, known as "Atomic Annie," was loosely based on the German K5 railroad gun of World War 2, but kicked things up several notches by upping the bore diameter to 280mm and having it fire a 15-kiloton nuclear warhead, about the same power as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The problem with Atomic Annies was that it wasn't too portable, as it was 85 feet long, weighed 172,000 pounds, and required two semi-tractors to move, one in front and one in the back. It also took a crew of 7 men to load, aim, and fire the beast, but if you had a few gazillion Red Army troops headed your way, firing an atomic cannon at them would surely ruin their whole day. But the consensus of U.S. military planners in the 1950s seems to have been that you shouldn't have to work that hard to nuke someone, so they came up with an alternative.
The M-28 Davy Crockett weapon system and the W54 nuclear warhead. Because there's just no good reason why two guys in a Jeep shouldn't be able to go out and fire a nuke at the bad guys. While the W54 was the lowest-yield nuke ever developed by the United States, with a yield of from 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT, that was made up for by the fact that two guys in a Jeep could literally run up with within a couple of miles of the bad guy's lines, throw a micro-nuke at them, and be well on their way out of Dodge before the nuke even goes off.
Most of our rank-and-file military is still pretty effective, despite the attempts by the current administration to transform the U.S. armed forces into a "Feelz-R-Us" franchise for the neurotic. While our troops these days are more likely to be armed with precision stuff like flying sword-missiles than with man-portable tactical nukes, that doesn't make any of these weapons systems any less impressive. And one never knows when we may need to scale up again, and it's just as true now as it was in the '50s that a 20-kiloton nuke will ruin a bad guy's whole day, as well as the days of everybody around him. And sometimes, that's worth doing, American style.
