“Unbelievable Inventions: The Bizarre Secret Weapons That Almost Changed the Course of WWII!”
As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, history held its breath with an audacious audacity. Picture this: a colossal Allied invasion force, a staggering amalgamation of 5,000 ships, 1,200 aircraft, and 160,000 troops, embarking upon the treacherous shores of Normandy—a gamble of epic proportions known as Operation Overlord. Yet, in this high-stakes drama, what most people might not realize is the sheer array of fantastical and downright quirky weaponry that went into the planning stages.
Amidst the meticulously strategized chaos was the Great Panjandrum, a bizarre contraption that could’ve been ripped straight from a comedy sketch instead of a military manual. Imagine a massive, rocket-propelled Catherine wheel designed to roll up the beaches and unleash explosive havoc. It’s almost hard to believe this was all part of a serious military campaign against the formidable Atlantic Wall, a veritable fortress of concrete and barbed wire. But that’s the twist—what seems absurd often disguises the brilliance of wartime innovation. So, let’s dive in and explore this hilariously absurd secret weapon of World War II, reminding ourselves that sometimes the quirkiest ideas can lead to the most memorable moments in history. Ready to roll? Because this tale is a wild ride! LEARN MORE
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive Allied invasion force comprising some 5,000 ships, 1,200 aircraft, and 160,000 troops steamed across the English Channel towards the beaches of Normandy. It was the opening act of Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious invasion in history and the battle that would finally secure an Allied foothold in western Europe and mark the beginning of the end for the German Third Reich. The challenge facing the planners of Overlord was enormous, for the European coast was defended by the Atlantic Wall, a formidable chain of concrete bunkers, gun emplacements, minefields, and beach obstacles stretching from the tip of Norway to the Spanish Border. If Overlord was to have any chance of succeeding, these fortifications had to be overcome. To this end, Allied engineers came up with a variety of weird and wonderful ‘secret weapons’, from specially-modified tanks designed to swim ashore, clear minefields with whirling chains, and defeat bunkers with powerful mortars and flamethrowers to giant floating harbours called Mulberry. They even had an undersea oil pipeline called PLUTO to supply fuel to the thirsty invasion force. But perhaps the most outlandish device proposed for Overlord was a giant rocket-propelled Catherine wheel designed to roar up the invasion beaches and deliver a ton of explosives against the enemy defences. This is the story of the ‘Great Panjandrum,’ the most hilariously absurd secret weapon of the Second World War.
In a previous video, we covered the development of Hajile, a failed wartime scheme to airdrop cargo more quickly and accurately by using rockets rather than parachutes to slow its fall. Like Hajile, the Great Panjandrum was the brainchild of the British Admiralty’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development or DMWD, a collection of eccentric scientists and engineers nicknamed the “Wheezers and Dodgers” tasked with developing creative solutions to tough wartime problems. Among the DMWD’s members was Sub-Lieutenant Nevil Shute, an aeronautical engineer later to gain fame as the author of novels such as On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. When, in early 1943, the DMWD was given the task of developing a weapon capable of demolishing a reinforced concrete wall 10 feet tall and 7 feet thick, Shute calculated that it would take an explosive charge of at least one ton to blow a hole wide enough for a tank to roll through. Actually getting such a charge to the wall, however, was another matter entirely, for the abundance of land mines, barbed wire entanglements, machine gun nests, and other defences on the invasion beaches would make a manned demolition mission near-certain suicide.
The answer came in the form of RAF Wing Commander C.R. Finch Noyes, who had previously designed an early version of the “bouncing bombs” used in the famous Dambusters raid of May 16, 1943. Noyes presented the boffins at DMWD with a sketch of a truly outlandish device: a pair of gigantic steel wheels 10 feet in diameter and 1 foot wide, connected by a cylindrical drum containing 4,000 pounds of high explosive. Arranged around the rims of the wheels was a battery of cordite solid-fuel rockets, which would propel the device off a landing craft and up the beach at 60 miles per hour, skimming effortlessly over landmines and through barbed wire before crashing into the target, whereupon the wheels would collapse and the explosives would detonate against the base of the wall. Amazingly, Noyes’s proposal was taken seriously, and within a month a prototype was constructed in great secrecy at Leytonstone in Northeast London and transported under cover of darkness to Appledore in Devon, headquarters of the Combined Operations Experimental Establishment or COXE. The site was specifically chosen to test secret weapons for the Overlord invasion as the beaches in the area closely resembled those of Normandy. Shortly after arriving at COXE, Noyes’ weapon was dubbed “The Great Panjandrum” after a famous piece of nonsense verse by 18th Century writer Samuel Foote, which ends with the line “…till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots”.
The first test of the Great Panjandrum was scheduled for September 7, 1943 near a seaside resort town with the absurdly British name of Westward Ho! Despite the great secrecy which had attended the weapon’s construction, the test was conducted in plain view of the public beaches, and soon attracted a large crowd of curious onlookers. As such a device had never been constructed before, the DMWD team replaced the explosives in the central drum with the equivalent weight of sand, and fitted the wheels with only 18 rockets. As the intrigued holidaymakers looked on, the ignition switch was thrown, the wheels erupted into brilliant rings of flame, and the Great Panjandrum trundled down the landing craft ramp, across the surf, and up onto the beach. At first all went well and the strange weapon rolled straight and true, but soon rockets began failing and flying off the wheel and the whole device veered off to the right and flipped over onto its side, ending its inauspicious first run stranded and wreathed in thick flame and smoke.
Concluding that the Panjandrum was underpowered, the DMWD team doubled the number of rockets to 36 and moved the test site to Instow Beach near the Torridge river estuary. But while this upgraded version travelled twice as far up the beach, it also suffered from rocket shedding and wound up on its side. To improve stability, the engineers added a third central wheel and tried again, this time launching the Panjandrum from a wooden ramp mounted at the low-tide line rather than an actual landing craft. Unfortunately, when the firing switch was thrown, nothing happened, and as the engineers struggled to find the fault in the firing circuit, the tide washed in and engulfed the Panjandrum, causing the middle wheel to collapse. It was a pathetic but appropriately absurd end to the third test.
3 weeks later, the engineers returned once again with a new version of the Panjandrum, which dispensed with the central third wheel and increased the number of rockets to 70. To the team’s delight the weapon initially roared up the beach at its designed speed, but a moment later rockets once again began to fail and shear off, sending the Panjandrum careening back into the sea, where it overturned and the remaining rockets exploded, sending up a giant column of spray. Realizing that the original unguided concept was unworkable, the engineers next added a system of steering cables mounted to spools on the landing craft, which could be differentially braked to nudge the Panjandrum left or right. Nevil Shute was placed in charge of operating these brakes, and as the new design roared off the launch ramp, it seemed as though the system just might work. However, after a few seconds the Panjandrum began to veer off-course, prompting Shute to tap the brakes to correct its trajectory. In response, the cable simply snapped, sending the Panjadrum careening once more into the ocean.
At this point, the team’s growing pessimism was relieved somewhat by DMWD’s announcement that absolute accuracy was no longer deemed necessary; Panjandrum just had to be capable of travelling in the general direction of the enemy. And so, in January 1944, a group of high-ranking military officials gathered at Devon to observe what would turn out to be the final test of this troublesome weapon. As author Brian Johnson recounts in his 1978 book The Secret War, the results were…less than surprising:
“At first all went well. Panjandrum rolled into the sea and began to head for the shore, the Brass Hats watching through binoculars from the top of a pebble ridge. Then a clamp gave: first one, then two more rockets broke free: Panjandrum began to lurch ominously. It hit a line of small craters in the sand and began to turn to starboard, careering towards [cinematographer Louis] Klemantaski, who, viewing events through a telescopic lens, misjudged the distance and continued filming. Hearing the approaching roar he looked up from his viewfinder to see Panjandrum, shedding live rockets in all directions, heading straight for him. As he ran for his life, he glimpsed the assembled admirals and generals diving for cover behind the pebble ridge into barbed-wire entanglements. Panjandrum was now heading back to the sea but crashed on to the sand where it disintegrated in violent explosions, rockets tearing across the beach at great speed.”
But perhaps the most memorable episode of the whole spectacle was when one army officer’s Airedale dog – appropriately named Ammonal after the high explosive – chased after one of the careening rockets, nearly being killed in the process. Amazingly the whole debacle was captured by Klemantaski’s camera and is now preserved online for posterity.
Unsurprisingly, this spectacular failure marked the end for the Great Panjandrum, which, along with dozens of other weird and wonderful proposals, never made it to the beaches of Normandy. As with Hajile, Panjandrum’s failure lay mainly in the limitations of contemporary solid rockets, which were based on the gun propellant cordite and were difficult to ignite simultaneously. Indeed, in 2009, the town of Appledore celebrated the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings by building and launching a 3/4-scale replica of Panjandrum. Powered by modern solid-fuel rockets and packed with fireworks instead of high-explosives, the recreated Panjandrum functioned exactly as Wing Commander Noyes had intended, rocketing 50 metres up the beach in a straight line.
Strangely, however, it is possible that Panjandrum was actually intended to fail right from the start. A great deal of Operation Overlord’s ultimate success was thanks to a massive deception campaign called Operation Bodyguard, which convinced the Germans that the target of the invasion was not Normandy but the Pas-de-Calais – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Bizarre Story of the Massive Fake Army That Defeated the Nazis and Helped End WWII. According to some historians, The Great Panjandrum was nothing more than a hoax, carried out in service of this overall deception. This theory makes a certain amount of sense, given that a weapon like Panjandrum would have been more useful against the heavier defences of Calais than those of Normandy. The fact that the weapon was tested in plain sight of the public also calls into question the seriousness of the overall project. But as Canadian chemist Charles Goodeve, who headed the DMWD for much of the war, later revealed:
“We did much more unlikely things than panjandrum.”
And given the many, many weird and wonderful WWII weapons and operations we’ve covered on this channel so far, that isn’t difficult to believe at all.
Moving on from the rocket powered wheel bomb, during the war, Britain was taking a beating from the German ships and submarines and were looking for something to build a ship out of that couldn’t be destroyed by torpedoes, or at least could take a major pounding without incurring a fatal amount of damage. With steel and aluminum in short supply, Allied scientists and engineers were encouraged to come up with alternative materials and weapons.
A scientist named Geoffrey Pyke was the king of absurd inventions (as you’ll hear about in the Bonus Facts in a bit, along with his hilariously absurd but nonetheless effective method of escaping a German prison camp, which he did successfully using said method). But for now, the king of all of his countless alternative ideas was to build a 2,000 foot long, 300 foot wide and two million ton carrier. Pyke named his project Habbakuk, a biblical reference that seemed to mirror the project’s goal: “…be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” (Habakkuk 1:5, NIV) Unlike in the Bible though, the ship’s name was spelled with two b’s and one k, which is thought to be simply a spelling error that was repeated so many times that it became official.
