Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Strange British Anti Tank Weapons of WWII

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

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Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode as well as years of other bonus content at www.patreon.com Slash lions led by donkeys. So the Sticky Bomb was the brainchild of Millece Jefferies and it started sometime in 1938. You said this is a British thing, right, Joe? Right. It just... Because I also just watched like, what was it? The Guy Ritchie movie, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And it just struck me that every time you hear anything about the British, it's always some guy named Millis who just is in a shed somewhere and comes up with this idea. And

they're just like, the War Department gives them a million pounds to go have at it, bud. And this is back when you could really innovate. Like none of us can innovate a bomb that would be bought by the United States government to use in warfare. But like in the 1930s, you'd be like, what if a bomb stuck to something and be like fucking brilliant militants? And not to mention the guys inventing it have just like been just tinkering on the weekends. They're not engineers It's just a guy who's really into explosives, you know if Timothy McVeigh was born in 1938 Britain they would have loved him. Oh

Man could you imagine the double the the double whammy they could have gotten with Kaczynski where they get a bomb expert and also somebody who could probably correct the enigma code? I mean, I also just like... I love the idea of like, none of us could invent a bond that the government would want to use or if we did, because I'm just thinking of like all the guys who essentially figured out how to make a nuke out of first principles from reading stuff from their local public library and then end up getting visited by the Department of Energy. My favorite example of that, of course, is Michigan's famed nuclear boy scout. His name is escaping me at the time, but he is a guy who successfully built a nuclear breeder reactor in his mom's shed based on the minuscule amounts of nuclear materials

in smoke detectors. And he turned his mom's house into a fucking super fun site. Dude, he had all kinds of problems. I think he died quite a few years back, mostly from just horrific radiation poisoning because he wasn't using any protection while he was doing this. But yeah, I mean, you can build horrific things with the books available at your local library libraries. We love them. Yeah.

Now, Jeffries believed in the idea that a weapon that infantrymen can carry and throw and kill or disable a tank. But it needed to be small, it needed to be somewhat lightweight, it needed to be handheld so you could throw it, something like a grenade because everybody knows what a grenade is at this point. And since an infantryman is throwing it, it has to have some way to stick to the target, right? Because if you just throw a grenade at a tank, it's gonna fucking bounce off.

So he's like, okay, I need to come up with a grenade that sticks, revolutionary idea. But it would also have to be, it would also have to have enough explosive inside to do damage to a fucking tank, right? These are all things he's gonna have to overcome. But the first thing that he thought he would need to overcome is come up with something that a man could hypothetically chuck at a tank and get it to stick.

So his first experiments were a length of bike tire filled up with a plastic material as supposed to simulate explosives because he's doing this effectively in his backyard. He doesn't have any explosives. And then coating that length of bike tire in bird lime. I had no idea what bird lime was, but apparently it is a bird specific glue that you coat on things to stick. Birds will land on them and get stuck. It's like a sticky rat trap, but for birds. I always wonder when you read about things like this, what his neighbors thought. Because

I know that Nate has talked before about the weird shit that his fucking neighbors get up to, where he lives. And I can only think, you're just standing out having a cup of tea in your backyard, and you look over and there's fucking Millis again with a bunch of fucking bike tires, yelling as he's throwing them at the fucking wall and his back patio. Surrounded by birds stuck to the wall like, it works. It works. In a better world, Millis is actually inventing frisbee golf instead. No, but he had to invent a bomb. He's getting notices from his HOA. Like Millis, man, we've been fucking talking to you. There's like a dozen dead pigeons stuck to the side of your house. You need to fucking stop this guy.

There's like tires being flung through the air left and right. It's becoming an issue. Yeah. All the kids in the neighborhood are complaining because you fucking stripped all their bike tires for your goddamn experiments. You fucking idiot. If you're wondering why he settled on bird glue, it's because he just happened to have a tin of it lying around. Of course he did because this sort of fucking weirdo would have bird glue lying around. As a person who does crafting and building things in my basement,

I 100% understand there's like, well, what do I have around here? So I don't have to order something off of Amazon. Yeah. This guy is very much a dad in a basement coded. Yeah, he is like this is in a different world. This is me except I don't want to blow up my own house. So I stick to cigar boxes. Well after this he enlisted help from two engineers from Cambridge to kind of work on his idea and they came up with like, well, it needs a handle. Otherwise you're going to get this fucking glue all over your hands and it's going to

blow up in your hands. So they kind of just attach a piece of broomstick to it at first. Like, OK, this is the handle. Yeah, you'll hook this monster in that direction and hope it sticks. And for a target, they picked trash cans because they were metal. And so you got these engineers from Cambridge and this dude just hocking lengths of sticky tire to the side of trash cans. And it worked. So like, all right, proof of concept.

This thing sticks to the trash can. This is this this is British cornhole. Like they're just inventing cornhole. This is this is the least bad kind of British cornhole. And the Ministry of Defense took one look at this and was like, yeah, we don't give a fuck about this. I mean, remember, it's 1938. They're not in a situation yet where they think

they're gonna be in like an emergency, right? But then Dunkirk happens. And I'm not gonna go too far into it because someday we'll do a series about it, of course, but the British were chased off the continent, which is bad, but what was worse for them militarily was the immense loss of material because they had to leave everything

that really didn't fly behind, right? But specifically for our show today, anti-tank weapons. Because after the panicked retreat from the continent, the British Army only could field 27 divisions at home and throughout the entire British Isles, they had 167 anti-tank guns and so little ammunition that they had to ban training because they didn't have enough of it to go around. They thought if they actually needed to fight the Nazis, they would run out if they trained anybody. Right.

We'll figure it out as we go. It's a gun. It's a big gun. You shoot it. How much training do you need? When in that direction, it'll be fine. If you're close enough to use this, you're probably already fucked anyway. So like, you're not gonna have a hard time hitting the sucker. And remember, the idea of a Nazi invasion of the British Isles is a very real possibility.

And it did actually happen. There was small islands off the coast of the Channel Islands, for example, which were invaded and occupied by the Nazis. The idea that British people might have to defend their home country was a very real fears. The British, like the British Ministry of Defense kind of spun around, looked at their like board with threaded and whatever it was like, give me the fucking bird glue guy again. I don't know. Because he already had talked to them. He worked for the Ministry of Defense.

He worked in this thing called the Churchill's Toy Shop, which is a nickname for this group of engineers within the Ministry of Defense that worked on weird shit. They worked on weird, strange weapons. And this checked all of the blocks for desperate Britain. The idea was kind of formed already. It would not need ammo, just some explosives, which they did have plenty of. And they kicked it over to a guy named Stuart McCray to flesh out the design and make it real. McCray then in turn, remember how I told you

these guys weren't exactly engineers? He turned towards a man named Gordon Norwood, who was, of all things, a printer. Though the source makes sure to point out, he was a master printer. I don't know how that helps in this situation. The man was a printer and they're like, I have to find a man to make a bomb him. Look, I've, I've worked in one of my previous lives.

I worked on large run printing machines and offset color machines and things like that. They're complicated. Now, none of them exploded. So I don't know. Important part. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you'd be a shitty printer if what you're working on exploded all the time, which I think he's, and I would normally say, why would you pick him? And you know, some people just have a mind for weird shit

because he nor would is like, I got an idea immediately, right? We gotta make a sticky bomb. Which also like, oh, we asked the guy who's good at type setting to make an explosive he immediately had an idea immediately, right? We gotta make a sticky bomb. Which also like, oh, we asked the guy who's good at typesetting to make an explosive, he immediately had an idea. It's like, if he survives the war, we'll put him on a list.

Yeah, yeah. He's cooperating. He's doing this to his boss. Yeah, he's like, oh, it's weird. He has a cabin up in the Scottish Moors and doesn't really like technology all that much. Weird. Giving him a position in the Ministry of Defense

just to keep everybody else safe because we don't know when this guy's gonna go off. Like if we just- Conscript him or put him in the ministry. And he's kind of old for conscription. If we put him on the payroll and put him out in the middle of nowhere and say, make us some explosives,

either A, we're gonna get some cool explosives out of it, B, he's gonna be kept busy and he's not going to be a problem to anybody. Or see, he's going to kill himself and also not be a problem to anybody. So we need, we need more jobs programs like this for the fucking weirdos in society where it's just like, we'll give you a cabin and some explosives. And as long as you stay on your 12 acres, we're good.