mine-dogs and other bioweapons

'Lo folks; a couple of things about animal weapons; from the Zaloga book
"The Red Army in the Great Patriotic War 1941-5" (Osprey), the Russians
started working on mine-dogs in '41, and persisted "at least until
Kursk".
The load was about 10-12 kg.  The Germans claimed they were ineffective,
but the Russians claimed 12 tanks killed at Kursk by 16 dogs, which sounds
pretty good to me. The Germans did make a point of shooting dogs on sight just
to be on the safe side. Considering the minimal investment, the annoyance
value alone was probably worth it.

A partisan trick involving dogs was to sprinkle tiny fragments of explosives
along railway lines etc. German sniffer dogs would find these, be punished for
pointing at "nothing", and quickly learned to ignore demo charges.

        A British anti-submarine proposal involved using submarines to
provide fish for seagulls. The idea was that the birds would associate the
boats with food, and enemy boats could be spotted by watching out for clouds
of expectant gulls.

An American bright ideas department made a Viet Cong detector for use in
tunnel complexes. It relied on bedbugs, which among other charmless habits
shriek (ultrasonically) with delight when they smell a mammal. The bugs sat in
a box which would show a light when its electronics heard the shriek. The
geniuses failed to realise that American soldiers are also mammals...

Rob

In a message dated 98-07-04 12:06:59 EDT, you write:

<< 'Lo folks; a couple of things about animal weapons; from the Zaloga book
 "The Red Army in the Great Patriotic War 1941-5" (Osprey), the Russians
 started working on mine-dogs in '41, and persisted "at least until
Kursk".
 The load was about 10-12 kg.  The Germans claimed they were
ineffective, but the Russians claimed 12 tanks killed at Kursk by 16 dogs,
which sounds pretty good to me. The Germans did make a point of shooting dogs
on sight just to be on the safe side. Considering the minimal investment, the
annoyance value alone was probably worth it.
> [quoted text omitted]

The Russian don't like to talk about russian tanks blown up by dog mines. The
pups were trained using T-34s, so given a choice of a soviet tank or a
german tank, you can guess which seemed like the right answer to them.

In a message dated 98-07-04 13:48:40 EDT, you write:

<< The Russian don't like to talk about russian tanks blown up by dog mines.
The
 pups were trained using T-34s, so given a choice of a soviet tank or a
german tank, you can guess which seemed like the right answer to them.
> [quoted text omitted]

And after a couple of "mishaps" they learned not to use these dogs if both
German AND Soviet tanks were present, to avoid confusion. I am not sure how
much truth there is to this story at all, since the Soviet T-70 light
tank was
also gasoline-powered.

Rob wrote: [Big Snip}

> The geniuses failed to realise that American soldiers are also

Are we quite sure of the veracity of this last comment....?

[HEY GUYS, ONLY KIDDING!!!!!!!]

:)

Jon (GZG)

> Rob