![]() ![]() As rockets dislodged, the Panjandrum spun, and shock replaced the confidence of those attending. “The Panjandrum hurtled from the sea at wondrous speed, sparks flying from its rockets. Then things got wild, according to James Moore and Paul Nero in Pigeon-Guided Missiles: And 49 Other Ideas That Never Took Off: Rockets ablaze, it started off well, rolling in a straight line and picking up speed. The Directorate kept tinkering with the design throughout the autumn of 1943, and in January 1944 felt it was ready for a high-profile test run before the military brass. And the rockets never stopped detaching from the outer wheels, especially when the Panjandrum reached its intended speed of 60 mph. His team tried a steering system using huge cables, which showed promise, but couldn’t compensate for the effect of changing rolling resistance on the beach, which inevitably meant one wheel would spin faster than the other, making the whole thing turn. In an effort to solve this problem, project lead Nevil Shute Norway (an aeronautical engineer and novelist) had a third wheel fitted to the Panjandrum, for stability. Everyone thought it would be a quick, efficient way to storm the beach, saving the lives of countless soldiers facing land mines, obstacles and machine-gun fire. In theory, the Panjandrum would shoot across the beach at highway speeds, hit the concrete wall, and blow a hole big enough for a tank to roll through. Point it at the Germans, fire the rockets and get the hell out of the way. Concocted by the British as a means of breaking through formidable German defenses on the beaches of Normandy, the engineering brief reads like something out of an Acme catalog: Install a bunch of rockets on two huge wheels joined by a drum-like axle packed with explosives. The Panjandrum has to be one of the craziest, most explosively unsuccessful flops in modern military history. The list of failures is long, but must surely be led by a device whose test ended with a dog chasing an errant rocket and generals running for their lives alongside members of the general public. But while many of those ideas change history-the bayonet, aerial combat, the nuclear bomb-there are just as many that flop. ![]() War has a long history of sparking and accelerating invention. ![]()
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