1683.

X-class midget sub hardly qualifies. The Germans had far more bizarre midget submarines, such as the Biber and Niger, while the Japanese had the Kaiten manned torpedo. Of all of these, only the X-class submarines can be considered successful, perhaps because they were the only ones not designed as suicide weapons.

Sonderkommando Elbe hardly qualifies as a weapon–it’s actually a military unit employing ramming tactics with conventional aircraft. A much better candidate would have been the German “Mistel” (Mistletoe) piggy-back aircraft, which consisted of an FW-190 or Bf-109 fighter attached by struts to the top of an unmanned Ju-88 twin engine bomber packed with explosives. A pilot in the fighter would fly both aircraft together to a target, where he would separate from the bomber, which then became a huge, remote controlled cruise missile directed by the pilot in the fighter. In some instances, the entire nose and cockpit of the bomber was removed and replaced with a two ton shaped charge warhead for destroying very heavily armored targets. A number of these were actually used late in the war, notably against the Remagen Bridge over the Rhine.

Almost as bad was the U.S. “Project Aphrodite”, intended to destroy V-1 launch sites in France and Belgium. It consisted of a war-weary B-17 or B-24 bomber packed with explosives and rigged as a remote controlled aircraft. It would be flown by a controller in another bomber, and directed into the target using a television camera in the nose. Unfortunately, the plane had to take off under manual control, with two real pilots inside it. They were to bail out over England once the plane reached cruising altitude. However, short circuits in the control panel sometimes caused the plane to explode when the pilots turned on the remote control switch. This type of accident resulted in the death of LT Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., brother of the future president. Needless to say, his body was never found.

The anti-tank dog mine was not successful, because the Soviets made the mistake of feeding the dogs under Soviet tanks–and, apparently, the dogs could tell the difference. So, once released, they immediately sped for the closest Soviet tank, resulting in an “own goal”. Obviously, these were counter-revolutionary capitalist running dogs.

Right up with the Bat Bomb should be its Japanese counterpart, the balloon bomb. Late in 1944, the Japanese released thousands of paper hydrogen balloons which were carried up into the jet stream and carried to the Pacific Northwest. Each carried a small incendiary bomb, which was supposed to set the forests in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia ablaze. As it was, several hundred made the trip, and may have started a few small fires. The only casualties were a family that discovered one of the balloons sitting in a tree, and accidentally detonated the bomb getting it down.

Several interesting weapons were overlooked, such as the “Great Panjandrum”, a huge double wheel made of wood, with a dozen rockets mounted around the rim for propulsion. Released from landing barges off a beach, it was intended to detonate mines and destroy wire entanglements. It was quietly cancelled when it almost wiped out a contingent of Allied officers watching a test run–an even captured on film.

One highly successful but unusual weapon not shown is the famous Barnes Wallis “bouncing bomb”–actually a cylindrical mine carried laterally below a British Lancaster bomber. When spun up to several hundred RPM by an electric motor, and released at precisely the right (and very low) altitude, the mine would skip across the water like a flat stone. Impacting against the side of a dam or a ship, the mine would sink to a predetermined depth before being detonated by a hydrostatic fuze. The bomb was used successfully against the Rhur River dams in 1942, a mission popularized by the movie “The Dam Busters”.

If I had to pick one naval battle as the single most important in history, it would have to be Salamis. The destruction of Persian naval power by the Greeks prevented Xerxes from supporting his massive army in Greece. Most of the Persian force returned home, allowing the Spartan-led Greek army to defeat the remaining Persians at Plataea the following year, thereby ensuring the survival of an independent Greece–and with it, Western civilization.

A close second would be the Battle of the Capes, fought off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay in 1781. In the one French naval victory over the British since 1690, Admiral le Comte de Grasse prevented the Royal Navy under Real Admiral Graves from relieving Lord Cornwallis’ besieged forces at Yorktown, thereby ensuring American independence (and the survival of Western civilization).