The Strangest Military Weapons Ever Built

Armies are usually conservative about their weapons. They want reliable, simple, and proven. And then, every so often, someone in a uniform signs off on an idea so strange you have to read it twice to be sure it was real.

These are the strangest military weapons ever built, the genuine ones, dug out of patent offices and wartime labs. Some were issued by the thousand. Some never made it off the drawing board. All of them make you wonder what the meeting was like.

1. The Puckle Gun and its square bullets

Back in 1718, a London lawyer named James Puckle patented a tripod-mounted, hand-cranked revolving flintlock, an early stab at a machine gun meant to repel boarders on a ship. So far, so reasonable.

Then it gets strange. The patent specified round bullets for Christian enemies and square bullets for Turks, on the theory that square projectiles caused nastier wounds. A satirist of the day quipped that the only people injured by it were the investors. As few as two were ever built.

2. The duck-foot pistol

Imagine a flintlock pistol with three or four barrels splayed outward like the toes of a duck, all firing at once from a single trigger. That’s the duck-foot pistol, and it was built for a very specific problem: facing down a crowd.

A ship’s captain worried about mutiny, a prison warden, or a bank guard could point one weapon at a mob and throw several balls into it at once. It was useless against a single duelist, but that was never the point.

3. The Apache revolver

The Apache revolver tried to be three weapons at once: a small pinfire revolver, a set of brass knuckles, and a folding knife. Made in Belgium and carried by Parisian street gangs around 1900, it’s a masterpiece of doing several jobs badly.

It had no real barrel, so it was wildly inaccurate. To fire it, you had to pull your fingers out of the knuckle grip and rotate the gun first. As a knife it was clumsy, and as knuckles it was awkward. But it folded up small, and it certainly looked menacing.

4. The FP-45 Liberator

In 1942, General Motors built roughly a million single-shot pistols in about eleven weeks, each one assembled in seconds and costing around two dollars. The FP-45 Liberator was a crude, stamped-metal .45 with a range of maybe eight yards.

The plan was to air-drop them by the thousand to resistance fighters, who would use the one shot to kill an enemy and take his better weapon. It’s a brilliant, grim idea. The catch is that very few were ever actually distributed, and there’s no documented case of one being used the way it was meant to be.

5. The pigeon-guided bomb

The famous behaviorist B.F. Skinner spent part of World War II trying to build a missile steered by pigeons. Trained birds sat in the nose cone and pecked at a target on a screen, and their pecking nudged the bomb toward it. Three pigeons voted, for redundancy.

The military funded it, then cancelled it, then the Navy revived it for a few years after the war. It never flew in combat, but the nose cone sits in the Smithsonian, and the pigeons reportedly did their job unnervingly well in tests.

6. Bat bombs

The United States genuinely tried to win the war with bats. The plan, approved by Franklin Roosevelt, was to strap tiny napalm capsules to thousands of bats and release them over Japanese cities, where they would roost in the wood-and-paper buildings and start fires everywhere at once.

The most telling moment came in 1943, when a batch of armed test bats escaped and burned down a chunk of the airfield they were being tested at, including a general’s car. The program was eventually shelved as the atomic bomb pulled ahead.

7. The Krummlauf: a barrel that shoots around corners

Late in the war, Germany built a bent-barrel attachment for its StG 44 rifle, complete with a periscope sight, so a soldier could fire around a corner or out of a tank without exposing himself. The idea is genuinely clever.

The physics, less so. Forcing bullets through a sharp bend stressed them so badly that they often shattered as they left the barrel, spraying out like buckshot. A barrel lasted only a few hundred rounds. Only the mildest 30-degree version was made in any numbers.

8. Soviet anti-tank dogs

The Soviet Union trained dogs to run under German tanks with explosives strapped to their backs, detonated by a tilt lever. Tens of thousands of dogs served the Red Army in various roles during the war.

How well it worked is genuinely disputed, and the Soviet tallies are treated by many historians as propaganda. The traditional account holds that the dogs were trained using diesel Soviet tanks, so in the field they ran toward the diesel smell of their own side instead of the gasoline German tanks. True or not, it’s the kind of story that sticks.

9. The Great Panjandrum

Britain’s contribution to this list is a giant rocket-propelled wheel. The Great Panjandrum was a pair of ten-foot wheels with a drum of explosives between them, driven by dozens of rockets, meant to roll up a beach and blow a hole in the German Atlantic Wall.

It never once ran straight. In its disastrous final test in 1944, the rockets tore loose and the whole contraption veered wildly, scattering brass and sending the observers, including a photographer, diving for cover. It never saw battle, which is probably for the best.

10. The Nazi sun gun

The strangest of all was never built, and that is the only reassuring thing about it. The Sonnengewehr, or sun gun, was a proposed orbital mirror, miles wide, that would focus sunlight into a beam hot enough to boil oceans and burn cities.

It started as a peaceful idea from a rocketry pioneer in the 1920s and was reportedly twisted into a weapon concept by German scientists. When American investigators asked about it in 1945, the scientists figured it would take 50 to 100 years to build. It was always more nightmare than blueprint.

Why armies build the strangest military weapons

Desperation is the mother of most of these. A nation losing a war, or scrambling to win one, will fund almost anything that might tip the balance, and the stranger ideas tend to come from the most desperate moments.

And the strange ones are not always wrong. The Krummlauf’s dream of shooting around a corner lives on today in the modern CornerShot, which pivots a camera and a pistol around an obstacle instead of bending the bullet. Sometimes a ridiculous idea is just an early one. For more, see the most famous guns in history and the biggest guns ever built.

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