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Wired has a roundup of eleven of the strangest military programs you can imagine. Man made northern lights? Psychics? Nuclear weapons launched from a backpack? They’re all here, including the plan to use bats in warfare.
Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.
According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The bats eventually had a successful test, although the bats themselves wouldn’t consider it so. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Furryscaly)
How would Cracked commemorate Memorial Day? By posting a list of The 5 Most Badass Prison Escapes in the History of War. These escapes took imagination, intelligence, and nerves of steel, plus a fair amount of desperation. Henri Giraud was 63 years old when the Germans captured him during World War II and took him to “escape proof” Konigstein Castle. Giraud spent two years planning the perfect escape.
First, he addressed the part of prison escape that every other escapee forgets–what you’ll do once you’re outside the walls. The prison was right there in Germany, after all, and he didn’t even know the language. So, he convinced his captors to start classes in how to learn German.
Next, he needed to coordinate with somebody on the outside. His letters to and from his wife were read and censored by the guards, but they somehow developed a system of embedding coded messages that the captors never picked up on. Next, he got ahold of a map and memorized every detail of the surrounding geography.
All right, now there’s just the matter of the, uh, 150-foot drop outside the prison walls that had made escape utterly impossible for the last eight centuries.
He and a friend came up with some twine, thin stuff like they use to bind packages. They twisted it together, bit by bit, until they had 150 feet of it. It took a year.
Last, he got himself a Tyrolean hat.
Together, these preparations helped Giraud pull it off. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Almost every aspect of war spawns new words, and, over time, many of them slip into everyday use. Sometimes, they even become downright peaceful in the process. For instance, triumph used to mean a victory ceremony for Roman conquerers, and skedaddle signified retreat during the Civil War. And if you’ve ever had a snafu (“Situation Normal: All F’ed Up”), then you owe a debt to the WWI soldiers who invented the acronym to describe the trenches. With each passing conflict, the list of pacified war words gets longer and longer.
undermine: If your colleagues constantly undermine you, just be glad they aren’t doing so in the traditional sense. Undermine, a word that dates back to the 14th century, was once a military term for digging a clandestine passage under a building to sneak up on the enemy. The term quickly turned metaphorical, but in Shakespeare’s day, its literal meaning was still commonly known. He even playe with it in All’s Well That Ends Well , when the maiden Helena asks a soldier if there’s a way to safeguard her virginity. He replies, “There is none: man, sitting down before you, will undermine you, and blow you up.”
fleabag: Starting in the 1830s, a fleabag was a soldier’s bed. Although the word fleabag now seems wedded to hotel, it can be applied more broadly, as in the 1958 example for the Oxford English Dictionary, “God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea-bag.”
basket case: Today, a basket case is simply a neurotic person, but during WWII, it meant a living soldier who had lost all his limbs and was brought home in a basket. The United States military denies that real baskets were ever used to carry soldiers. Regardless, the original meaning of the word is still gruesome.
(Image credit: Flickr user drakegoodman)
flak:Celebrities catch a lot of flak for idiotic behavior, but contemporary flak isn’t what it used to be. When the term originated in the 1930s, it was short for fliegerabwehrkanone, the German word for anti-aircraft guns. After a generation, the meaning shifted so that catching flak now means absorbing criticism instead of cannonfire.
gung ho: You may be gung ho about collecting stamps, playing solitaire, or other individual pursuits, but originally the term was more applicable to teams. The U.S. Marines first used it a as a slogan during World War II, after general Evans Carlson adapted the Chinese kung ho, which means “work in harmony”. While the teamwork element of the definition has faded, the enthusiasm bit has certainly remained.
fobbit, hillbilly armor, and IED: The war in Iraq is contributing its own expressions. A popular word on the rise is fobbit, a term that combines FOB (forward operating base) with hobbit. The word is a derogatory term for soldiers who stay too close to base and help themselves to three square meals a day. Another expression gaining steam is hillbilly armor, a term for scraps used to bulletproof vehicles.
Some words have already entered civilian life. IEDS, or improvised explosive devices, refer to the homemade bombs created by terrorists and insurgents. A recent GQ article about inappropriate office-party behavior uses it like this: “The workplace minefield is hard enough to negotiate without planting your own IEDs.” So, what are the chances any of these new words will stick around? Who knows? The only thing that’s certain is that as long as there are new wars, new words will crop up, too.
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How Violence Increases Our Vocabulary was written by Mark Peters. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.
Presenting, in our humble opinion, our leading leaders of men and women at war.
Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Washington grew up under the guardianship of his eldest brother. After a spotty education, he became a surveyor and eventually inherited his brother’s prosperous estate, Mount Vernon.
He joined the Virginia militia in 1752, advanced to major, fought during the French and Indian War (1754-60), and made it to the rank of honorary brigadier general. Washington didn’t return to the battlefield until July 1775, after being appointed general by the Continental Congress. At Cambridge, outside Boston, he took command of the disintegrating Continental Army.
The American Revolutionary War-Washington energetically and skillfully revitalized the militias at Cambridge and organized them into Continental Army regiments. Using cannons borrowed from the colonies, he occupied Dorchester Heights and brilliantly forced Sir William Howe’s British army to evacuate Boston and retire by sea to New York City. Washington tried to drive the British from Ney York but failed, partly due to his own inexperience and partly due to untrained troops and clumsy subordinates. His masterful withdrawal from Long Island and Harlem Heights into New Jersey and Pennsylvania during the autumn of 1776 saved the army from extinction.
General Howe captured most of New Jersey and made the mistake of believing Washington’s army was militarily impotent. On the night of December 25-26, 1776, Washington’s forces crossed the Delaware River in boats, drove Howe’s Hessians out of Trenton, and on January 3, 1777, Washington learned that General John Burgoyne planned to invade the Hudson Valley from Canada. Though soon hard-pressed defending Philadelphia, the national capital, he sent many of his best troops upriver and, in October, defeated the British at Saratoga. Having weakened his forces defending Philadelphia, Washington abandoned the defense of the city on September 26, forcing the Continental Congress to move west to York. Not everything went well for Washington, but he managed to contain one British force in the north while sending forces south to fight another British force under General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. The strategy worked, and on October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered.
What Made Him Great?
Washington’s unorthodox military education kept him from becoming an orthodox 18th-century general, which led to his boldness. The Continental Army never numbered more than 35,000 men, and Washington never had more than a third of it under his personal command, yet he managed to subdue, with help from the French fleet, Great Britain’s professional army. Underrated by modern standards, Washington was a brilliant strategist and self-taught tactician. He also became a gifted statesman. He believed in civilian government and the rule of law, spurning attempts by his officers to make him a military dictator.
Known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Scott was born outside Petersburg, Virginia, and studied law until 1807, when he enlisted in a cavalry troop. At 6’5″ and 250 pounds, Scott could cripple a horse-and did-so he transferred to the light artillery as a captain. Suspended briefly in 1810 for making inappropriate remarks to his superior, Scott rejoined the Army as a lieutenant colonel when the War of 1812 broke out, and led more troops into more battles in that war than any other officer. He suffered two wounds at Lundy’s Lane on June 25, 1814, but 10 days later won an important victory at Chippawa, Ontario. Raised to the rank of major general for distinguished service, Scott became a national hero.
For the next 30 years, except for two trips to Europe to study military developments, Scott fought Seminole Indians in the South and Plains Indians in the West. In 1845-46, when General Zachary Taylor’s battles with General Santa Anna’s army in northern Mexico were inconclusive, Scott recommended to President James K. Polk an amphibious landing at Veracruz as the fastest way to conquer Mexico City. Scott planned the massive operation, and on March 9, 1847, landed near Veracruz and 18 days later captured the city. On April 8 he began the march inland, routed Santa Anna’s larger army on April 18 at Cerro Gordo, and occupied Puebla on May 15. He paused to collect supplies, resumed his advance on Mexico City on August 7, and after fighting decisive battles at Contreras, Churubusco, Molino Del Rey, and Chapultepec, captured the Mexican capital on September 14. He served as military governor there until April 22, 1848, when he returned to Washington.
Promoted brevet lieutenant general in February 1855, Scott became the highest-ranking officer in the Army since George Washington. As general-in-chief of the Army, he tried to prevent the American Civil War by counseling presidents James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln. He sadly became what his nickname implied, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” a man obsessed with strict adherence to Army red tape with the out-of-date habit of adorning his military headwear with feathers. Though physically infirm, his mind was still sharp, but he could no longer take the field and, on November 1, 1861, resigned.
What Made Him Great?
Scott left a remarkable record as a strategist, a diplomat, and a brave and skillful tactician. His Anaconda Plan for strangling the South by keeping it from its sources of supply during the Civil War was first sneered at by Union generals, but was later adopted by Lincoln, and turned out to be the overriding strategy that eventually won the war.
The greatest Confederate general of the Civil War, Lee graduated from West Point in 1829, second in a class of 46, and joined the engineers. A Virginian by birth, Lee claimed that he fought for his home state more than for the Confederacy.
The Mexican War-During the Mexican War, Lee served with distinction as a member of General Scott’s staff at Veracruz in March 1847, and at Cerro Gordo the following month. His eye for reconnaissance and tactical improvisations led to Scott’s victories reconnaissance and tactical improvisations led to Scott’s victories at Churubusco, Chapultepec, and eventually to the surrender of Mexico City. Lee worked a desk job from 1852 to 1855 as superintendent at West Point, after which he became colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry and served in the Southwest until shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Lee was offered but rejected a top command in the Union army and resigned when Virginia seceded. On June 1, 1862, he replaced wounded General Joseph E. Johnston and took command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The Civil War-Lee became one of those rare generals who thought strategically, broadly designed his tactics, and took chances. He understood the generals of the North better than those generals understood themselves. He came up with the strategy for Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall: Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign during the spring of 1862, making Jackson the most celebrated officer in the Confederacy-until he was later eclipsed by Lee. In late June, Lee’s smaller force bluffed Major General George B. McClellan’s army into withdrawing, and two months later Lee outmaneuvered Major General John Pope and defeated the Army of Virginia at the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 29-30. On September 17, with a force half the size of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Lee repulsed the Federals in a drawn battle at Antietam. After President Lincoln replaced McClellan with Major General Ambrose Burnside, Lee bloodied the massive Union army on December 13 at Fredericksburg.
Lee’s aggressive instincts were never more evident than at Chancellorsville. He ignored the maxims of warfare, divided his much smaller force, and on May 2-4, 1863, decimated the right flank of the Army of the Potomac with a surprise attack. But his greatest mistake occurred on July 1-3 at Gettysburg, when he was overly aggressive at a time when he should have fought defensively. He admitted the error and withdrew into Virginia.
By 1864 many of Lee’s best officers had been killed and there were no more soldiers to replace those who’d been lost in battle. Forced to fight defensively, Lee held off Grant’s offensive in the Battle of the Wilderness on ay5-6, at Spotsylvania on May 8-12, and repulsed the Union assault at Cold Harbor on June 3. Those battles cost Grant a third of his men, but Lee couldn’t withstand the pressure and withdrew to Petersburg’s trenches. It took Grant eight months to flush Lee out of Petersburg and force his surrender on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.
What Made Him Great?
Lee’s men adored him. In victory and defeat, they witnessed his great strength of character, his high sense of duty, and his humility and selflessness. Even Northerners accepted Lee as the greatest general of the Civil War.
more …
We’ve seen space wars fought in movies and TV shows for almost a hundred years now, but what would a real-life space battle be like? It wouldn’t be like the movies, that’s for sure!
In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt.
That’s just the beginning of the difference we would see between a movie battle and what would happen in the outer space we have. Read more at Gizmodo. Link -via Digg
The people who are making decisions about the internet are, fundamentally, deciding the access of all future generations to come. Forget Afghanistan and Iraq; these are the theaters of war where democracy will live or die. SherWeb has an overview of the most contentious battles over who controls the web.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
"The War to End All Wars" ended 91 years ago on the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month in 1918. This became known as Armistice Day, and later as Veteran’s Day. For many, especially Americans, World War I has been practically forgotten as it is overshadowed by WWII in history classes, but WWI had a great impact on the 20th century and that impact lingers to this day. The nation of Iraq was created in the aftermath of the war, for example.
World War I in many ways was the “War to end all Wars” in that it was every war past and future rolled up into one. There were Napoleonic charges, aerial bombardment, a few misguided cavalry charges with actual horses, tanks, machine guns, artillery barrages, air combat, poison gas attacks, flamethrowers, submarine warfare, and primitive hand-to-hand fighting that came down to knives, sharpened spades, and clubs.
The trenches were hell on earth – mud, water, snipers, artillery barrages, barbed wire, machine gun fire, and the rotting corpses of those who fell in No-Man’s Land, the deadly area between the opposing armies’ trenches. Plus there was rampant disease, lice, and rats grown fat from feeding off of corpses.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by samuraidave.
Robots that served in Afghanistan by remotely detonating explosives are now repurposed as “firebots” in London. These machines can safely get much closer to the source of the fire than human firefighters, which is particularly useful for gas fires.
The three robots are the Talon, a small, manoeuvrable machine with thermal-image cameras; the Black Max, which is similar to a quad bike and has a high-pressure hose, and the Brokk 90, which is a heavy-duty digger that removes debris.
The robots, manufactured by QinetiQ, went into service in London yesterday. Link -via Unique Daily
Some of the most notorious discoveries and inventions arose by accident, or more commonly, were developed for uses other than what they ended up doing. Listverse looks at ten such products, including trinitrotoluene, a chemical discovered by Joseph Wilbrand in 1863 and meant for use as a yellow dye. With the name shortened to TNT, the explosive was used to wage both world wars. Link -via the Presurfer
Chimps may be portrayed as mischieviously fun but largely harmless by Hollywood, but the truth is anything but. In the wild, chimpanzees are killers that engage in years-long war against one another, and their behavior may explain man’s propensity for violence:
It was a four-year "war" witnessed by Dr Jane Goodall, and Dr Muller’s PhD supervisor, Richard Wrangham, a professor of primatology from Harvard University, Boston, that put an end to our cosy ideas.
In the Seventies, Prof Wrangham and Dr Goodall watched a group of chimpanzees split into two factions. One group killed every male and some of the females in the other group. The victims had recently been their companions.
Although Dr Goodall was the first to suggest it, Prof Wrangham went on to develop a theory that would explain human violence based on the aggression he had witnessed. As he points out, we are hardly a peaceful species. In Britain, men are 24 times more likely to kill or assault another person, and 263 times more likely to commit a sexual offence than a woman.
Prof Wrangham’s theory is called the Demonic Male Hypothesis. He argues that human males and chimps share a tendency to be aggressive with our closest common ancestor. Chimpanzees and humans have many attributes in common: we share approximately 98.5 per cent of our DNA, we both hunt and males show a strong desire to form alliances against other males while jockeying for status. Male chimpanzees are hostile towards other groups of chimps; you don’t even have to go to Arsenal to know that men are not dissimilar.
It’s important to keep kids feeling comfortable and happy, even when they need to watch out for poisonous gas clouds -or at least, that must be the theory behind this Mickey Mouse gas mask sold in WWII. Paranoia and consumerism sure make for an interesting combination.
Link Via Consumerist
Remember when you were little and playing outside with your friends and someone said lets play ‘War’, ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘Cops and Robbers’? And using your imagination that stick you found turned into a weapon complete with sounds and recoil and the times when you’d argue with friends on whether or not they got hit by your weapon? Well, these kids are doing the same thing but are using their imagination at a much more prodigious level.
**Note: This movie has subtitles so please turn them on by following the instructions that pop up when you press play!
Here’s one gruesome way of avoiding a tribal warfare adopted by two villages in Papua New Guinea: kill every male babies born!
By virtually wiping out the ‘male stock’, tribal women hope they can avoid deadly bow-and-arrow wars between the villages in the future.
‘Babies grow into men and men turn into warriors,’ said Rona Luke, a village wife who is attending a special ‘peace and reconciliation’ meeting in the mountain village of Goroka.
‘It’s because of the terrible fights that have brought death and destruction to our villages for the past 20 years that all the womenfolk have agreed to have all new-born male babies killed,’ said Mrs Luke.
‘The women have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them.’
A bag belonging to a World War II soldier from Lancashire has been discovered in the Egyptian desert after lying there for more than 60 years. Alec Ross, from Burnley, lost the bag containing personal letters and photos, while serving with the 8th Army. Egyptian tour guide Kahled Makram found the bag in the Sahara desert and traced Mr Ross’s family through a BBC website on World War II. The bag is being sent to Burnley to Mr Ross’s sister, Irene Porter.
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