The Second World War saw an amazing leap forward in military technology. Such things as the assault rifle, one-shot anti-tank weapons, the general-purpose machine-gun, mass produced stamped submachine guns, aircraft carriers as the dominant naval platform, the jet fighter, and atomic weapons all came about during the conflict. However, there were plenty of missteps. Some were almost comical. I thought we might have a little fun and offer up the weirdest weapon to be fielded during the conflict. Cheers!
Using BATS as "weapons carriers". Common American S.W. bats were experimentally used to carry small thermite fire-bombs. As an experiment they sucessfully burned several Army post buildings. As far as I know they were never operationally used to fire-bomb Japanese cities, their intended targets.
DE 682 and AO 59, the USS Underhill and USS Mississinewa, both were the victims of Kaiten, the manned torpedos of WW2. The first of such operation, one may recall was Tamon. Few history buffs told me that Japan got this idea from Taranto, but I never get any written docs regarding this and thought as it was the Japanese own indigenous underwater attacking process!
The Japanese were not the first to come up with this concept of essentially manning a torpedo and attacking enemy shipping. The Italian, British, and German navies all employed manned torpedoes or miniature submarines with some notable success and equally notable failures. The Italians were operating and scoring (including two RN battleships, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth) as early as 1941. See, for example, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a328114.pdf The big difference was that the Japanese Kaitens were deliberately made for suicide attacks. Italian, British, and German efforts suffered horrendous loses, but were never intended to be out and out suicide missions . . . merely extremely high risk. Some carefully key-word searches in google will provide more info on western navies' employment of this type weapon and midget submarines.
Speaking of piloted bombs, I had a singular experience years ago of actually touching a version of the V-1 rigged to be piloted. As I understood it, the idea was that this was a test version to check the stability of the drone, not as an attack platform.
