5 of History's Weirdest Military Vehicles

We love a good military vehicle on this channel. Over the years, we've seen big vehicles, slow vehicles, great vehicles, terrible vehicles, and today… we're gonna look at weird vehicles. So, let's get into it. Many of you are no doubt already aware of this. The Goliath tracked mine. And for those of you who are not already in the know, it was a German remote-controlled bomb from World War Two. A lot has been written about it over the years. But did you know that while the Goliath may steal the limelight, it was far from the first vehicle to have a crack at that concept, with a particularly interesting earlier example being this. Sims's Land Torpedo. It was designed by Frederick Sims, hence the name. A Briton who had something at his disposal that would inspire fear in any enemy. A shed, within which he kept tools, which he could use to make things. And if you know anything about British military history, you'll know that it is a long-standing tradition that when Old Britannia finds herself in jeopardy, middle-aged fellas, blighty over, will retreat to their sheds and begin tinkering away on various wacky, Wallace and Gromus-esque contraptions that they aren't sure will bring about victory. The Land Torpedo was far from the first contraption to emerge from Sims's shed, too, with him also having made the Quadricycle Motor Scout, the first internal combustion-powered armored vehicle, the Sims Dracine, an early armored rail car, and the War Car, the first armored car ever built. These were all built in response to the Bar War of 1899-1902 and didn't really affect things at all. But nonetheless, when World War One broke out in 1914, Sims returned to his shed, ready to try and do his part for King and Country once again. His shed had grown a bit since the Bar War, however, as it had now become Sims's Motor Units Limited, a reasonably-sized supplier of dynamos and magnetos to the automotive industry. As for the Land Torpedo that emerged from this, design work on it was finished in May, at which point he submitted it to the Patent Office under the title Improvements on Motor Propelled Vehicles. In stark contrast to his earlier Marshall contraptions, and very much in line with the vogue of that war, it made the use of tracks and a quite clever propulsion system that made use of mechanical gearing that was powered by a dynamo drawing power from a petrol engine, so it was, in essence, what we would today call a hybrid. As for the Warhead, we don't know exactly how big Sims intended it to be, as he failed to tell us on his patent application, but we do know that he envisioned it being detonatable both electronically by remote and on impact. We also don't know exactly how armoured Sims intended the Land Torpedo to be, because he answered such questions by stating that it would be bulletproof. As you've likely ascertained already from the tone of this chapter, the Land Torpedo was never actually built and was only ever a machine on paper. Chiefly, this was because he received a total lack of enthusiasm from the War Office when he pitched it, with them being worried that its reliance upon a control cable would make it easily disabled as it trundled along to its target, and that the need of the operator to remain hidden behind something solid would complicate effective deployments. Sims, for his part, although disappointed with the lack of interest in his Land Torpedo, would live on until 1944, just long enough to at least see his core concept vindicated by the Goliath-tracked mine that we mentioned at the start of the chapter. Now, let's have a look at this. The oh-so-snappily-named 40 RBL-78MA Field Gun, which was, in essence, an industrial crane that had a whopping great cannon plonked on top of it. It was devised in the early stages of WWII, just after the Austrian armband enthusiast had delivered a firm shooing to the British Army in the Battle of France, who then had to scarper back to his home double-quick in the face of an ever-advancing army. A scarper that proved so hurried, in fact, that he had to abandon insane quantities of vehicles because there was simply no time to get them out. 64,000 of them, to be precise. Everything from motorbikes to tanks, just dumped and abandoned. This, naturally, wouldn't have been ideal even at the best of times. But at that time specifically, with the full might of the Wehrmacht, now poised a mere 30km away from Blighty, on the other side of the English Channel, and seemingly about to strike at any moment, it was really not ideal because, if they did indeed make the leap, the Brits would have basically no vehicles to send to their defence. Faced with this rather underpant-browning situation, the British government did the only thing it could do while it waited for replacement vehicles to be made. Turn around to the civilian sector and beg them for anything they could throw together. This led to things such as the Bison lorry, which used concrete for its armour, the standard Beaverette, basically just a standard-flying 14-car chassis that had some armoured plating quickly bolted on top of it, and, of course, as you have no doubt guessed by now, the .40 RBL.78 MA Field Gun, which we will just call the MA Field Gun for now on because I just don't want to say that again. It came from the Ruston Vickers Company, a Lincolnshire-based manufacturer of earth-moving and excavation vehicles, and the effort to make it saw them take their 10RB model of crane, a then very popular model that was widely used in both the commercial and military sectors, and modify it by replacing the normal cab with a 10mm thick armoured box, which in what was actually quite an advanced move at the time, fully welded together rather than riveted. This armour happily gave enough protection to fend off small arms fire. And in another smart move, its cannon, the exact model of which is unclear, was also fully enclosed within said armour rather than having an open cabin as many self-propelled guns of the era did. Examples of which include the German Vesper and the British Archer. It also retained the full 360-degree traverse of the original 10RB crane, giving it a degree of flexibility in firing that could only be matched by turreted, self-propelled guns such as the Soviet KV-2. They were not exactly the norm at this time. Unfortunately, however, while it might have had some serious pluses to its design, despite what its frankly ridiculous appearance may have originally led you to believe, it also had many downsides. For example, an early upgrade with its gearing saw it speed rocket from a pedestrian 4km per hour up to a much handier 24km per hour, and this made it borderline impossible to steer. And what's worse, it was also rather prone to falling over, as its weight and height gave it quite the high of gravity. All in all, then, a noble effort from the Rust and Bucharest company to be sure, but one that was a complete swing and a miss, as unsurprisingly, the MA Field Gun was never adopted. On to something a tad bigger now, the mighty P1000 Land Cruiser, which, had it ever been completed, would have weighed in at a simply mind-boggling 1,000 tons. It was a design of the interwar period. A very special time in tank design when, to be blunt, no one had any idea what the future of armoured warfare would look like, and so all manner of merch ended up being flung at the wall to see what stuck. This led to tiny tanks such as the Polish TKS and the Italian L335 tankettes, and big tanks such as the Soviet T35 and the French Char II C, as well as all manner of everything in between. The P1000 was an effort to see the latter end of that spectrum taken to its most extreme. To create not just a proverbial fortress tank, as the Soviets referred to their T35, but a real fortress tank. Literally a tank which was just a rolling, mobile fortress. It was devised in the Soviet Union, where Edward Grote, an ethnic German who had relocated there on account of his communist sympathies, had been tasked with developing a heavy, breakthrough tank capable of rivaling the 2C, which had been in service with France since 1921. His initial design work, which began in April 1930, resulted in the creation of the TG-1 tank prototype. Certainly it was a mean looking thing, especially by 1930s standards, but unfortunately there is more to quality tank design than just looks, and so the TG-1, which was shaping up to be ungodly expensive to mass produce, and had a really weird track design that never quite worked properly, was cancelled. Set back, but undeterred, Grote continued to work away on new designs. He did this in his own free time, however, rather than within the limiting confines of a project. And so, with no one to rein his ideas in, he got a bit carried away, which led to him drafting the design of the P-1000 come March 1933. As for how carried away he got… Well, put it this way. The final tank design envisioned a tank that was 34 meters in length, 10 meters wide, 11 meters tall, and was armed with a fearsome array of weapons, including two 305mm naval guns on rotating turrets, and a whole lot of smaller turrets that housed various 152mm, 76mm, and 45mm guns. As for power, that was to come from 12 2,000hp diesel engines, with the cumulative 24,000hp producing enough power to push the 1,000 ton vehicle up to speeds of 60kmh. When Grote took a step back to have a look at his finished blueprints, he was pretty chuffed with what he saw, somehow, and so he confidently marched into the office of Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, slapped them down on the desk, and uttered words to the extent of, what do you reckon to that, bad boy then, comrade? Unfortunately for Grote, however, Tukhachevsky's answer to that was that he thought it looked utterly ridiculous, and so, dejected by yet another rejection, Grote let the Soviet Union return to Germany, where he continued plying his trade as a tank engineer. Bizarrely, and in stark contrast to how you no doubt are imagining this went, however, he actually proved to be rather competent, and built up quite the list of innovative patents to his name for everything from transmissions and hydraulic couplings to track designs. It seems like he was an absolute champion at designing the smaller minutiae of tanks, but the second he was let loose to combine it all into a single design, madness apparently ensued. There has probably never been a more do-it-all vehicle than the original Jeep, or to use its proper name, the Willys MB. Just in WWII alone, the venerable little 4x4 was used as a personnel carrier, a self-propelled gun, an ambulance, a meteorological vehicle, a radio car, and a very light artillery tractor. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Its most peculiar iteration, however, saw it used as a helicopter. Yep, you heard that right. Allow me to explain. It all began in 1942, when British Air Ministry specification 10-42 called for a special rotating wing glider. Essentially, a kit of sorts that could be used to make regular ground vehicles capable of aerial insertion through temporarily and, above all else, cheaply converting them into rotary wing gliders. Many vehicles were considered for use as the testbed, but the tiny Jeep, which weighed a little over 1,000 kilograms, fully road-ready, and was known to be able to survive drops of up to 2.35 meters and be able to keep on driving, soon became the obvious and really only choice. With that foundational choice made, the project was handed to Raoul Hafner of the Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment, who immediately contracted the help of R. Malcolm & Co. Ltd., who specialized in making miscellaneous aircraft components and later would become pioneers in ejector seats to help bring the idea into fruition. The result of their cooperation was the Rotor Buggy, an otherwise normal Jeep made abnormal through the addition of a 12.4 meter diameter rotor, a tail fairing and fins, although it lacked rudders and any sort of power for the rotor, which instead operated purely on autorotation. The first trial occurred on the 16th of November, 1943, and involved towing the Rotor Buggy behind a Diamond Tee lorry. This did not go well at all, as said lorry just didn't have enough get-go to get the Rotor Buggy off the ground by even an inch. Not to worry, however, because from there, one of the very well-heeled RAF types assisting with the project lent his own Bentley to the effort, which, thanks to its whopping great 4.5 liter supercharged engine, had more than enough power to get the Rotor Buggy into the sky. It only went up a few feet, however, as this was just a basic test of its aerodynamics and stability, nice and low, so that the pilot wouldn't be killed if the test ended up going a little bit wrong. This proved that, while not a flyaway success, it wasn't exactly an abject disaster either, and so, soon enough, the Rotor Buggy was hooked up behind proper aircraft, and being towed at ever greater heights and ever greater speeds. This revealed that it suffered from excessive and dangerous vibrations at speeds over 72 kilometers an hour, but with slow and steady tinkering, as well as ever more tests, its performance was soon deemed highly satisfactory, with it being figured out that it could withstand a maximum speed of 241 kilometers per hour and achieve a nice and steady descent rate of 5 to 10 meters per second, although some of this was only figured out on paper, with its peak speed during testing being only 113 kph. Despite how promising things were looking for the Rotor Buggy, however, it would never get the opportunity to be pushed to the max. As come September 1944, it was all over, and the project was cancelled. The reason why? That would be because the successful deployment of vehicle carrying gliders, such as the General Aircraft Hammelcar, had rendered it totally obsolete, as the Hammelcar could carry everything from a jeep right the way up to a tetra-like tank, and since it just chucked them in the hold, it was obviously the far superior choice. A question, dear viewer. What happens when a half-track and a motorbike decide that they so very much love each other? Well, they have a special hug, and they create this, the SDKFZ-2 Kettenkrad. Developed by Germany during World War II, this bizarre motorbike half-track was designed as a very light artillery tractor for airborne units, as it could happily be chucked in the hold of a Junkers 52 transporter or a Goethe 242 glider. It was designed by Heinrich Kneickamp of one of the leading technical bigwigs in the Army Weapons Office, with production being handled by NSU-Motorwerker, a forerunner to the modern Audi brand that had a long-established history of making quality motorcycles. As for when all this happened, it was designed in 1939, and was mostly produced from that same year through to 1945, with a few more being cranked out after the war for agricultural needs. And all in all, despite its utterly bizarre looks, the Kettenkrad was actually a properly clever bit of kit. Take its steering, for example. Small adjustments could be made purely through input from the handlebars. But for sharper turns, it used the same Klettrag differential steering system as most German half-tracks, which automatically responds to steering input, and in hard turns applies the brakes to the corresponding side of the tracks, allowing anything fitted with it to make really sharp turns. As for the rest of its design, it was absolutely tiny, being the smallest half-track ever made, with its specific dimensions being a length of exactly three meters and a width of exactly one single meter. Power came from a pretty normal, water-cooled, four-cylinder petrol engine that produced 36 horsepower. This afforded the Kettenkrad a top speed of 70 km per hour on road and a towing capacity of 450 kilos. Not bad for a small little thing that was meant to be chucked in the back of a glider, as a something-is-better-than-nothing type of vehicle. In terms of service, despite being designed for airborne troops, it was actually mostly used by the regular infantry because it turned out that the need for an artillery tractor among airborne troops, while by no means nil, wasn't exactly pressing. But the need for a handy little thing that could laugh off thick mud as though it was barely even there was very pressing among regular troops, especially when fighting in the Soviet Union. As a result of this, it ended up being used as everything from an artillery tractor as originally intended, to a personal transporter, scout vehicle, cable layer, and medevac vehicle. Some were even used by the Luftwaffe as an airplane tug. All in all, come the war's end, at least 8,300 of them had been produced, with a further 550 of them being made by 1949 for that later agricultural use we mentioned earlier.