Angry Planet - Weird weapons of Vietnam: Combat tree houses, a nuclear rifle and more

Episode Date: August 18, 2015

This week War College looks at some of the weirdest weapons that the U.S. military came up with for use during the Vietnam War. While the nuclear rifle didn’t go anywhere, another invention can be found at raves around the world. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Almost exactly the same kind of thing you see at parties. Gloucsticks came out of a Navy development program that started during the Vietnam War as a way of creating a target-marking aid.

I'm Reuters' opinion editor Jason Fields, and I'm joined today by Matt Galt and Joe Trebethic of War is Boring. This week, we're talking about some of the most weird weapons that the U.S. military came up with for use during the Vietnam War. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your hope.

The U.S. Marines are finally facing out one of the Vietnam War's most iconic weapons, the M16, in favor of the M4. The Marines were the last branch of the military to take up the M16, and they're the last branch to drop it, years after the others. The M16 was a troubled weapon during the Vietnam War. So, Matt, can you start us off by telling us why? Well, like you said, the M16 is the iconic weapon of the Vietnam War. Vietnam War. The rifle, it's the longest-serving, generally issued small arm in American military history. It's been used for over 50 years. Special forces first began using it in its AR-15 model. In 1962, other branches adopted it in 1963. During its first few years, there were a lot of problems. A lot of

this is anecdotal evidence, but right from the start, soldiers were complaining that there were a lot of jams. The worst of these were a failure to extract, meaning that when a cartridge was spent, it stayed in the chamber after the gun fired, which is terrible and deadly if you're in the jungle fighting. The problems were so bad that Congress investigated the issues in 1967. The investigations found the army largely at fault for the problems. The Pentagon hadn't properly trained troops on the new gun and failed to issue cleaning kits to help clear the jammed cartridges. This is a very brief explanation of a very complex issue that's saddled by 50 years of studies, anecdotes, and strong emotions. We could sit here and talk all day about the M-16 just in Vietnam, but why we adopted a new rifle at that time,

why the American military adopted that rifle at that time is kind of more interesting. It was a time of weird change, and Joe, I'm going to kick it over to you to explain that to us. Yeah, when you look sort of at the development of weapons and military technology in the United States after the end of the Second World War, there's a certain amount of stagnation. The military is drawing down and everybody's planning on sort of moving on with their lives. Then the Cold War really kicks off with Korea and the Korean War happens. And suddenly there's this sort of outburst of energy and the need for new gear and new equipment to hold off the Soviets and their allies around the, the world, but there's also a focus on nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons is still the big thing, and everybody believes that nuclear weapons are going to rule the day. Any war is going to be

fought on a nuclear battlefield, and, you know, nuclear weapons up down sideways on the food chain, including a nuclear arm recoilous rightful that would have lobbed a very small nuclear weapon at very short ranges by just, you know, infantrymen on a tripod or something. Joe, can I ask you, was that something that actually got built? Oh, yes, and fueled it. There were units that were preparing to use that in combat, and it was cable being set up on a tripod or on a Jeep, and a relatively short range, relatively low yield,

and probably if somebody could have, they would have built a nuclear hand grenade. I mean, if they could have found a way, they would have, I mean, nuclear everything. It was the rage. The problem is that by the end of the 50s, it's becoming increasingly close, clear that that kind of, you know, nobody wants that kind of nuclear war. The Soviets don't want that kind of nuclear war. The Americans don't want that kind of nuclear war. Nobody wants that kind of nuclear war. And then you have a series of insurgencies cropping up. The Soviet Union basically declares itself the sponsor of leftist insurgencies around the world, and suddenly

the United States finds itself the sponsors of regimes fighting those insurgencies. It becomes painfully obvious that nuclear weapons just do not help in those situations. And suddenly, there becomes this sort of outburst to take all of the advanced science and technology that have been sort of brewing in the background and apply it to sort of painfully low-tech problems, really low-tech problems,

and deal with the fact that these insurgents are operating with very limited means and yet are beating up American allies all over the place, you know, dealing with armies with tanks and with standing armies and conventional weapons and suddenly none of those things

seem to matter as much as guys who can hide in caves or scurry into the mountains or drag their artillery pieces around. The French and Indochina being a great example of this. The French thought that their freestanding army with a significant amount of combat experience actually would be able to take on a very limited Vietnamese insurgency

and that doesn't work. That doesn't work very well at all. the French public eventually becomes very disenchanted with this, and France's allies become relatively disenchanted with this, and more or less push France into accepting a deal, and the French eventually happily washed their hands of the whole thing, and then the Americans find themselves stuck in Vietnam. If the Americans move in to become the primary benefactors

of the new independent states of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and North Vietnam, becomes basically a client state of the Russians. They are fiercely nationalistic, and the United States views them as a client state of the Soviet Union. And when they start sponsoring an insurgency in South Vietnam, it becomes the duty of the new sort of American military that will be taking on these kind of missions to roll in and back up our allies,

and suddenly we find ourselves directly in the same position, where American troops are fighting a very low-tech insurgency that still seems to have all the advantages. So what did the U.S. military look like when it rolled in? I mean, is it immediately recognizable? Does it look like closer to the World War II Army? Does it look more like the soldiers of today? It looked very much like the army that came out of Korea,

and that army did in many ways look like the army that came out of World War II. It was starting to get new weapons. It had new infantry weapons and new armored vehicles and such. But a lot of that was actually left behind. The U.S. Army especially spent years debating about just exactly what would be useful in the jungles of Vietnam and told a lot of units to leave their tanks behind and other sort of heavy weapons behind, figuring they just wouldn't be useful. And there was something to be said for that.

but of course the units that did bring those vehicles along and other heavy weapons along found ways to sort of crowbar them into what was a sort of a fight that the United States probably didn't have a significant amount of experience with, at least not in that time frame. I mean, the U.S. Army, for instance, loves to talk up its first counterinsurgency campaigns being against Native Americans in the American Southwest especially, but really hadn't been doing the kind of counterinsurgency against a modern guerrilla group really at all and the experience of fighting in Latin America in the 19th century and in the Philippines at the turn of the century and all that was pretty dated by the time

the United States rolled up in Vietnam and found themselves fighting a communist insurgency that had had decades of experience in combat already at that point. So what were some of the innovations. Well, I mean, to jump in from the rifle thing, the M16 really had a lot of these problems

to begin with, and as Matt said, we really don't have time to get into the long and sordid history, political and mechanical of that rifle. But it did generate desire for a more reliable and easier to maintain infantry weapon.

And one of the first, well, not necessarily one of the first things, but eventually there was a program called the low-maintenance rightful that the army started, and they contracted out to the TRW Corporation to create a bare-bones painfully simple, no fuss, no-must, rightful, and TRW came back with this thing that looks sort of like a rectangular pipe with a magazine attached to it and a pistol grip, and it is bare bones, it is painfully simple. And this was supposed to be America's answer to the AK-47, a painfully simple, extremely reliable, you know, reliable, almost, you know,

it's mythological, its reliability, you know, the idea that you can bury the Kalashnikov for years on end with no protective ceiling and you dig it up, you know, in a decade and go off, and it works just fine. And this was supposed to be the American answer to it, but of course, with the benefits of American technology and American innovation and good old Yankee ingenuity. And unfortunately, it just didn't work. It's heavier than the M-16, which was already a problem. Yeah, it was actually heavier because it wasn't, it was made to be extremely rugged.

And so you didn't have these light aluminum components and plastic components. It was made out of sheet steel. And so it was actually heavier. It fired slower. It was awkward to use because, basically to keep the frame and the shape of it condensed and simple. It had this weird arrangement by which the magazine stuck out of the left side of the weapon rather than what you might otherwise think of out of the bottom or out of even the top.

And actually we wrote a piece on War is Boring about the low-maintenance rifle because I had the opportunity to see some of these weapons stored at the Washington Navy Yard of all places. And they are fascinating and awkward. and just do not look like they would work very well. We'll throw a photo of it into the show notes so people can go take a look at it when we're... They're fascinating. Yeah. And this development continued into the mid-70s after America's involvement in Vietnam and ended.

And I still don't know why they ended up at the Washington Navy Yard. It's quite possible that the Navy SEALs were interested in testing these weapons out because of their increased reliability. They were slightly more reliable, but with all these other faults, of basically the weapon breaking down because of its own over-engineered components and because of its low rate of fire and because it was heavier, it just wasn't attractive. There were only six of them ever made.

I've had the pleasure of seeing three of them all at the same time. And it was pretty impressive to see them sort of lined up because you know that the other three were probably destroyed in testing. So it's, you know, these are rare and odd rifles. And we ended up with the M-C-6. So, okay, well, then if we're talking about weird stuff, Matt.

All right, so my kind of favorite weird weapon from this era are the silenced revolvers of the military created. So South Vietnam dug a lot of tunnels, right? They were, like Joe said, they were an insurgency. They had a lot of ambushes and moved a lot of stuff through the tunnels. So soldiers would, American soldiers would go into these tunnels to clear them out. often alone or in small groups. That presents a problem because it's hard to get, it was hard to get the M16s in there. And the handguns, when fired in a small space like that, I don't know if you've ever been on a firing range, but it can be deafening.

And in a small enclosed space like that, it can really just destroy your ears. So for that reason, and for the reasons of sense, stealth, the army or the military, rather, wanted silenced weapons, silenced small arms. Now, the way most silenced weaponry works is through a suppressor, right? It's something that goes on the end of the barrel. When the explosive bullet comes out, that suppressor captures the gas. But it's not as silent as you would think it would be based on what you've seen in movies. There's still a very loud noise.

So the Army's answer to this through a company called AAI, AAI developed piston ammunition. And this piston ammunition had a shell casing that was completely solid and self-contained. And the way normal bullets work is they've got a shell casing that's full of powder, firing pin hits the back of the bullet, there's an explosion, bullet flies through the barrel. These silenced ammunition shells were solid, and they kind of had a plunger. in them, that pushed the powder all the way down to the bottom, and there's a long piston on top of it. And so the firing pin would hit the back, there'd be the explosion, and then the piston would

shoot out and hit the bullet, and that would fire it. And so all of the explosive gases, the flash, and even the smoke was contained inside that case, and it was incredibly silent. it worked. And they developed these in 30-caliber rifle ammunition, 38-caliber pistol rounds. And some of the concept art for the weapons that they developed around this ammunition

were very strange-looking. There's one that's the back end of it looks like a revolver and the front of it looks like an M-32 grenade launcher because the bullets were so large and kind of unwieldy. They refined the design. they eventually got a 44 caliber revolver with silenced ammunition and shotguns by the way

they had silenced shotguns that they were able to test in the field the kind of ammo that they were ined up they ended up using was a little bit different same kind of thing you imagine an upside down cup

that's filled with the blasting powder and that cup moves forward shoots out pellets that are inside the shell casing and it's all self-contained and completely silent because that cut moves forward and seals off the top of the shell casing. The problem is that because there's something in between the blast and the bullet, whether that's the plunger or the upside-down cup, it slows down the ammunition a lot. It doesn't move as fast and it doesn't go as far, and it's just not deadly. In fact, after 25 feet, it wasn't really effective at all.

We've got reports from the Vietnam era of people being down in the tunnels and firing on an enemy as far as 10 feet away and it being completely ineffective. How quiet were they, though? Did this really succeed in bringing the noise down to zero? From the reports that we have, when you fire a weapon, there's three different sources of sound. There's the actual mechanical sound of, you know, the clicks and whirrs of the pin striking. There's the explosion from the gases. And there's the bullet. If it goes at a high enough velocity will cause kind of a little sonic boom noise.

These eliminated those last two sources of noise. So, yeah, they were silent. Even with the silence shotgun, we have in special operations reports. These guys said that the only noise they heard when they fired these silenced shotguns were the noises of the firing pin. That's it. So they were effective at eliminating noise, but not effective at killing people, which is the whole point of a gun. And I would also like to point out that the Soviets took this technology to heart and developed some pistols that were basically used the same kind of ammunition. but they use them for very close range assassination and that kind of thing.

And when you say close range, you really mean close close range. Yeah, I mean if you put, if you get it right up on top of somebody, it's going to kill them very effectively. But after 10 feet or so, it really starts falling off. Oh, as weird as that is, though, it's not the only thing. So, Joe, you were saying something about the glowsticks? You mean, is the kind of thing at parties? Almost exactly the same kind of thing you see at parties. Glow sticks came out of a Navy development program that started during the Vietnam War

as a way of creating a target marking aid, something that would illuminate targets in the dark, but would also not be hot, wouldn't be burning. Because what you had at that point were flares. magnesium or some other very brightly and hotly burning chemical compound, or you had a similar burning arrangement that created a smoke marker, and the smoke wasn't visible at night, so that doesn't help you at night anyways. And these are the two options you had for target marking or for signaling in general, let alone at night, and so there was a desire for a marking item of some sort that would illuminate targets, friendly troops needing to be pulled out by a

helicopter or something like that in the dead of night, and better living through chemistry. You know, putting that, all that American ingenuity to work, the idea was to come up with some sort of chemical compound that will glow at night without any fire being involved, basically. And the first compound that they came up with was called PB 155. And this was just a chemiluminescent chemical, which just means that it glows without, it glows spontaneously on contact with air without the need for any fire. And so it's just a chemical compound.

I don't know the exact composition of, oh, sorry, PR-155, misspoke there. and you could do almost anything with it because you could combine it with other binders and you could fill up a spray paint can with it and you could spray the glowing material or you could blend it down with wax and make a crayon basically that would have the same effect.

You could write in glowing crayon. The problem with PR-155 was that it was caustic apparently. It may or may not have eaten away at the detonators in grenades that it was contained in. There was also a concern that it was carcinogenic tests during the Vietnam era, actually, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the forerunner of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA that we're familiar with today, concluded that it could possibly be causing cancer

in small lab animals. Wow. The people... So, in other words, Agent Orange, they used, right? but this was dangerous. Yeah, I mean, it's also, you know, it's Dow Chemical and DuPont. These are the, you know, these are the companies also behind. Oh, and sorry, I said Dow Chemical before.

It's actually DuPont Chemical, and that's my mistake again, because both companies were involved in chemical production for the U.S. military at that point. And these are the same kind of companies that produced herbicides and other deadly chemicals that were used, I guess not deadly at the time. You know, they're not poison gases or anything, but turned out to be deadly or otherwise dangerous chemicals. And so the Navy stops development of PR-155. ARPA stops development of PR-155.

After some limited testing in Vietnam, there's very little reports of any PR-155 being sent overseas. There was some suggestion that it was used, during tests of chemical and biological weapons and that it would be a simulated filler. You would fill cluster bombs or other bombs with the material, and then you could see how far the agent would disperse

by tracking where the glowing material ended up to give you a better sense of where your deadly chemicals would actually be going. But the Navy never stops being interested in the idea of a chemo-luminous and chemical, and you end up with siloom, which is what we have today. It's one of the siloom company, it's a trademark, I believe. It's still making glow sticks.

There are other manufacturers that use similar compounds. I'm sure they make it just mildly different from whatever siloom's proprietary mix is. But these are understood to be only mildly toxic. Basically, poison control centers do offer warnings, but basically they warn about, skin and eye irritation and just to wash yourself off and you'll be good to go. You know, not understood to be carcinogenic or anything like that. And these are readily available, you know, they're children's toys. You see them all the time, parties, raves, whatever, what have you.

But it is a product of U.S. military development. And, you know, you can thank them for the glow sticks you have today. Speaking to that same problem, Joe, we also, or, America also developed combat flashlights, right, for painting targets and illuminating ambushes and that kind of thing. Yeah, I wonder if all the listeners will be familiar with the climax of the movie rear window in which the protagonist finds himself in a wheelchair trying to stop a murderer by repeatedly setting off the flash bulb in a camera he has. that's basically the logic behind the pyrotechnic ambush light, which is basically just a giant flashlight. You would set it off, it would burn at over 100,000 candle power, which is basically providing more or less broad daylight in the middle of the night. And you could blind people, you could illuminate ambushes, you could set it up to you be.

combined with other traps. You know, it could be set up on a trip wire. It could be set up to a hand trigger, the same hand trigger actually used with the M18 Claymore Mine, which is a directional landmine that basically sends out a cluster of steel fragments. And these are exactly the kind of things that you see all time when you research the weapons of the Vietnam War are sort of problems. And then various research and development entities hiring private companies to come up with a solution.

It's actually one of the sort of an interesting side note is that this is a war where you have serious defense contractor participation, both in the United States and in the field. Contractors were in the field as part of various research and development entities showing off these devices to troops. they were demonstrating how they were supposed to be used. They were collecting information and going back and making improvements based on those reports. And there was a whole U.S. military research and development structure in Vietnam to support this. The big three services, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force all had their own research and development arms. The Army had the Army concept team in Vietnam. The Navy had the Naval Research and Development Unit Vietnam,

and the Air Force had the Air Force Development Unit, Vietnam, as well as ARPA's Research and Development Unit, all under this joint research and development entity run by the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. And all of these groups were trying to cook up new programs and new weapons and new gear to solve any problem anyone could think of. And that's something that continues to this day, really. It's the same model.

You know what I want to hear about, Joe? I want to hear about our combat tree house. Well, that's this sort of, this segues really well into the combat tree house. There's a lot of trees in Vietnam. There's this triple canopy jungle in Vietnam, and it's really hard to see through. And we have these newfangled helicopters, and we'd love to be able to land them in there, but that's not going to work. And somebody said, okay, we have a solution.

We have this solution. We're going to put a landing pad, a helicopter landing pad, on top of the jungle, just on top of the jungle. And we will have this fully-fledged landing pad that you can literally drop on top of the jungle. The tests, actual tests, they actually built some of these things and actually sent them to Vietnam. They were testing in Hawaii and in Vietnam. And the idea was that a helicopter would fly in the components and would lay this mesh netting on top of the trees and then put the pad on top of the trees,

and then guys would jump out and tie it up to the trees, and then you'd be ready to go. You'd have a what is effectively a combat tree house, and there would be a motorized winch that would raise and lower people to the jungle floor. There were plans to turn this into a listening post, turn this into a mortar platform where you could just set up a mortar and fire a mortar at people.

Anything you could imagine. they were basically thinking of how they could make use of this of this platform. And they were also talking about whether they were going to make a system by which fixed-wing aircraft flying at higher speeds could fly over and just drop these things into the trees. They look so sketchy too. If you look at the picture. Yeah, we have a video. We have a video.

We'll link to our piece on that too because there's a video online that we found of, of the test and of this thing being set up. So the idea is that you'd actually get in there and set it up very, very quickly, right? I mean, even, would it be in combat conditions even? Right. I think, you know, I would imagine it'd be difficult to do it while being shot at, but I think the hope was that eventually you get to a point where this could be set up relatively quickly and would provide a little mini base wherever you needed it. Did they, and you said they tried them, but they never.

Yes, they sent them to Vietnam. They tested this out. The reports are conflicted about what exactly. happened. The report says that they sent them to Vietnam, and then nobody could figure out who had wanted them in the first place. So they had them, and they had the company representatives, and they had the Army representatives, and they were waiting to demonstrate them to people, but nobody was interested in the demonstration. And so they were actually getting ready to ship them back to the United States and put them back in storage when representatives of the

1st Cavalry Division and the 25th Infantry Division apparently woke up one morning and heard about these things and said, no, no, wait, wait, we need you to come, we need you to come back and show us. And they actually said, okay, great, you know, we actually haven't shipped them back yet. And they apparently demonstrate, I don't, I don't know exactly what they thought, but they apparently demonstrated them for members of First Cavalry and 25th Infantry. Those guys provided feedback, and they improved the, they improved the design. There was actually a second model of this thing based, apparently, apparently on these, you know, this customer feedback, so to speak, in the field, and then it just finally died.

The epilogue to this thing is pretty inglorious. It completely falls off the map. The U.S. military comes up with a way, way simpler plan. And that's just blowing everything up. As part of, the Air Force comes up with something called, a program called Combat Trap. and combat trap is basically just to figure out how many bombs you need to drop into a jungle area to knock all the trees down and then after combat trap they sort of new program called Commando Vault which leads to the development eventually of the daisy cutter that people are familiar with the giant 15,000 pound BLU 82 bomb which is specifically designed for this purpose

and that is the solution. The solution is to build 15,000 pound bombs filled with an industrial explosive slurry and dropped them out of C-130 transports with a parachute attached to them and blow up a giant circle in the middle of the jungle. Bombs so heavy jets could not carry them at the time. And it was actually apparently accurate enough that by the time the United States invades Cambodia in the 70s, they're actually using these things in a tactical sense in that basically because the

C-130s are so accurate and where they can put the bombs, they will drop them on enemy units instead of just using them to create helicopter landings. And this is something that then we continue to do in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Well, I mean, I guess it just sort of shows character of the war and the desperation to win in a war that I guess we didn't end up winning. So before we wrap up today, we have a couple of things. We just want to clean up a couple of small messes we made in previous podcasts.

So Matt, can you take us through the corrections? Absolutely. So during our August 5th conversation about drones, we mistakenly described the loadout of America's Reaper, saying it could carry four hellfire missiles or four laser-guided bombs. In fact, it can carry up to eight hell-fire missiles, four laser guided bombs or a mixture of both. During our initial podcast on July 28th, we talked about the F-35.

When describing the embattled jets weapons systems, we said it could carry aim-9 sidewider missiles in its cheek bays, and compared it to the F-22, we were wrong. The F-35 doesn't have cheek bays just for internal hard points, meaning it can carry even less than we initially assumed. So, well, we just want to make sure that we get these things right. And so if there are any further corrections, you'll be hearing them at the end of the podcast. But for the most part, I think we're doing pretty well so far.

And I want to thank Joe, Matt, I want to thank you both for joining us. Thank you for having us. And, yeah, fascinating conversation. Next time on War College. One of the things the Cold War was very good at was squeezing out the little guys off the big stage. If the Cold War were still on it, there were still a Soviet Union, I'm pretty sure that North Korea would never have developed a nuclear weapon, because no one would have let them.