10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

9. Anti-Tank Dogs (Soviet Union, World War II)

He may drink out of the toilet but when he's carrying a bomb, everybody's willing to let that go.

As moronic as it is, you have to admire the perverse genius behind this one. In the war on the Eastern Front, the German tanks played merry hell with the Russian emplacements so a solution was devised. A solution that walked on four legs and wouldn't realise it was being sent to its death. Russia just so happened to have a healthy supply of dogs. Animals that are relatively quick, fairly small, and can be easily trained. So the Russians followed the obvious path of logic set out by those facts: train dogs to search for food under tanks, starve them for a few days, strap pressure activated bombs to them, and then set them loose on the battlefield. It may be distasteful but the Russians were in a tight spot and, in the middle of an ongoing siege, one dog in exchange for a German tank is a pretty good deal. And on the whole it seemed to work with these canine bomb mules destroying around three hundred German tanks (although that number was released by the Soviet Union so make of it what you will) and being such a problem that the Germans ordered that all dogs be shot on sight. But although the Anti-Tank Dogs had a certain degree of success, there were a few not so tiny drawbacks. First of all, quite a few of the dogs were easily spooked by the battle raging around them and ran back to the Russian trenches with the bombs still attached. Also, the dogs couldn't tell the difference between Russian and German tanks. Well, actually the problem was the exact opposite. The dogs were used to hiding under Russian tanks, usually rely on their sense of smell, and were trained with Russian tanks which ran on diesel while the German tanks ran on petrol. It's no wonder this little scheme was eventually phased out.