10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

4. Cat Bombs (USA, World War II)

They probably looked like this when they were dropped out of the planes.

Okay. Weaponising the camels, the dogs, and the bats had some merit but this takes the biscuit. In fact, to hell with the biscuit. This plan is so unutterably stupid that it takes the entire Fox's Classics tin. Cats don't like water and have a tendency to immediately jump out of large areas of water. So somebody at the American Office of Strategic Services (an early incarnation of the CIA) extrapolated that trait of cats to develop the idea of strapping bombs to cats and dropping them in the sea close to enemy ships so that the cats would instinctively jump out of the water towards the nearest ship and act as the world's cutest fluffiest bomb. Until somebody tries to strap a stick of dynamite to a Red Panda. I'm going to sum up the main problem with this weapon in four words: It's a bloody cat. Admittedly using a suicide bomber with no way of knowing it's about blow itself to bits is a positive but dropping a cat attached to a bomb into the sea is a plan riddled with problems. Depending on the size of both the bomb and the cat, there's the question of whether or not it can actually carry the bomb. Unless it's somehow been crossbred with a kangaroo, it's incredibly unlikely that a cat could jump from the surface of the sea to a large naval vessel. Cats aren't aquatic or particularly robust so being dropped into the sea from a dive bomber would probably knock it unconscious if not kill it outright. The cats used during testing all passed out during the drop. If a cat strapped to a bomb suddenly jumped onto your ship during manoeuvres, you'd either immediately punt it into the sea before it could go off, or shoot it and then punt it into the sea. Unsurprisingly, this mindmeltingly stupid weapon never went beyond vague tests before its development was scrapped. Presumably with a memo that said "Please stop smoking so much weed while designing weapons". Literally the only logic behind this idea was that cats don't like water. That's like me deciding to fell trees by strapping bombs to monkeys because some monkeys happen to climb trees. Except that one's slightly more plausible.