The most effective weapon of World War Two

i'm going to talk about what i think is a very strong candidate for the most effective weapon of world war ii in this video which has been sponsored by audible but more of that later now you may make a case and i i can see it would be a very strong case for the most effective weapon of world war ii being well those those two bombs that were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki because just two bombs uh largely on their own forced an entire axis power that had shown up to that point very little desire to surrender to surrender and yes you would have a point but i'm going to limit the scope of this video and talk just about weapons used in battle by soldiers against other soldiers and the weapon i'm going to suggest it was was the crocodile no obviously not the animal i mean the flame throwing tank that the british developed using the as a basis the churchill tank now this was not the first flame throwing tank not by any means or even the first flame vehicle it wasn't even the first flame throwing churchill there was an earlier version of the flames throwing churchill called an oak oke after the commander who developed it and this was sort of tested in action in that three of them uh went ashore at dieppe in that ill-fated raid but in common with the other tanks um they didn't find their way up the shingle beach because shingle just loads and loads of round pebbles up in mounds uh it's it's not uh something that uh tanks can maneuver up a steep slope of and so they just dragged shingle towards the sea and gradually buried themselves and so they got nowhere so the weapon wasn't really tested so um that one never really saw action proper um an early weapon was the cockatrice uh this was a lorry-based flamethrowing weapon that ended up seeing some action it was issued to the raf for um protecting airfields now you may think why would you try to protect an airfield with a flamethrower i mean what good is that going to do against an aircraft although actually interestingly a bit of a digression here earlier uh um flamethrower development was uh developed for the anti-aircraft role which you might think is rather odd but think think of world war one aircraft made out of cloth very inaccurate bombers they have to come very very low and they're not going very fast so a flamethrower used against one of those might actually have been very effective but by the time world war ii came along um aircraft were flying much higher much faster and they weren't all made out of cloth and so flamethrowers were pretty useless against them but you could the raf thought usefully deploy the cockatrice in defense of aerodromes because what they feared was attacked by paratroopers german falcio jaeger might land actually on your your airfield and then try to secure it that way so what you want is a rapid response vehicle and it wouldn't have to be a powerful tank like a crocodile some reasonably fast lorry with a flamethrower on it might do the job because when the falchion jaeger first landed they were just armed with pistols in separate drop cans their rifles and heavier weapons landed so immediately on landing they were actually vulnerable and they had to get to their um those canisters and and arm themselves and if you could deploy a flamethrowing vehicle really quickly you could wreak absolute havoc it was the thought anyway um but that was an early weapon uh the the churchill was a very well one thing about the the church it was it was actually an up-to-date tank this was a frontline in-service tank they carried on using them in fact until 1955. um earlier thrower tanks were often converted out of obsolete stuff well what do we do with this captured rubbish tank well it could turn into a flamethrower yeah i could use it for that might scare the civilians a bit okay we'll do that uh but the churchill was an up to date still in service a proper main battle tech well i shouldn't call it a main battle tank it's a modern term but you understand and uh it was still a gun tank see instead of converting the churchill his main gun into a flamethrower which is what uh other flamethrowing conversions have had done they still had the normal turret on the tank with its normal 75 millimeter gun that could still fire armor piercing and very effective high explosive rounds and it still had the coaxial visa machine gun to rat tat away instead it was the bowel machine gun that was replaced with a nozzle for the flame thrower and it was fueled not from a tank that was in the tank or on the tank it was a separate trailer towed behind the tank which made a big difference because this trailer often referred to as a bowser well it was armored had about a steel uh about an inch of steel on it so it was proof against bullets and and strain water bombs and like um it could it could hold 400 gallons of fuel 400 gallons and it had five big big very high pressure gas canisters they used air early on but later they went over to using nitrogen which was very slightly better um and this thing had a hell of a range on it now uh to give you some sort of comparison you have to understand what a a man portable flamethrower was like now the standard uh man portable backpack type um flamethrower for the british army was called the life boy because it looked a little bit like a life you know like a donut shape and that had it four gallons of fuel and um the propellant took 10 seconds to squirt it out so you had ammunition of 10 seconds worth of flame and you had four gallons four gallons not 400 gallons so you had one percent as much fuel and you had 10 seconds of squirt time whereas the churchill had 80 seconds yeah one minute 20 seconds of squirt time and 400 gallons so every second of squirt was an awful lot more gallons so you had an awful lot more fuel going for an awful lot longer and an awful lot further now the standard german flamethrower of world war ii had a range of just and a half yards and carried only 2.6 gallons of fuel um so up against a a churchill crocodile um it is just not a fair fight now what was the range of the churchill crocodile some of you may be confused about this because like me you might have looked up in a few different sources and been given quite radically different measurements i think now having read lots of sources i've sorted out the maximum range was and 150 yards um but actually that's not a very useful figure so yes if you pointed it up and squirted it on on a flat field uh on on a calm day it would go 150 yards but you would never attack a target at 150 yards because at the end of that that uh rod of flame there would just be just just flames licking the target and that's not what you want you want to be deluging that target with with a burning liquid and to do that effectively you want to be at 120 yards so 120 yards in battle reports i have read that's the distance at which they they opened fire more literally than normal that's when they they started squirting at the enemy at 120 yards 80 yards gets quoted quite a lot and 80 yards so far as i can tell that was the ideal range so you get to 120 yards you'd start uh flaming the target but you'd carry on advancing up to 80 yards to get to your ideal range and from that range it was accurate enough to squirt into a trench flood the trench with with burning liquid you could squirt it through the the letterbox the slits on on a bunker very accurately um i read that it was usually the second squirt that did that the first squirt they would snake around a bit and find it and then okay the smoke would clear okay got it and the second squirt would go accurately straight through that slit and flame the enemy oh by the way this uh reminds me of something that um i used to hear as a child a lot there was there was a fact that i was told about flamethrowers uh i was told this so many times and it was one of those things that just was just accepted as true which was that uh flamethrowers didn't kill men in bunkers by burning them but by using up all the oxygen in the air and the men in the bunkers died of asphyxiation as an adult i have never read this anywhere in any source and i do find it a little difficult to believe um usually if you you burn up all the oxygen in the air this this creates a partial vacuum that sucks in more air through the firing slits and so forth and maybe the back door if you have the good sense to open it uh of the bunker and they weren't airtight things so um i don't think that's true i don't think men died of asphyxiation because of flamethrowers but i don't think it's impossible it's one of those things that got said a lot but i i know of no evidence to back that up anyway i'm getting off getting off the point so you you can squirt this fire for 120 yards effectively far further than anything the enemy is going to have at least as a flamethrower coming the other way now you may say well surely the germans had 88 millimeter flat guns and they would they could knock out a a churchill and yes you're right they did and and the 88 definitely could knock out a churchill um but the churchills were uh crocodiles were not attacking where there were 88 millimeter guns um for one thing an 88 millimeter gun is a very difficult thing to hide this is one of the big problems with it the flak gun version of it was very tall with a big square barn door-like shield on the front of it that was very difficult to hide and before an attack would go in the allies would have consulted aerial photographs they would have scouted perhaps sent out patrols at night they would have got information and and it's very unlikely that they'll be attacking somewhere that had an 88 millimeter and they didn't know about it so if there's an 88 millimeter you don't send tanks forward against it because they'll get knocked out but if you are the germans and you're defending and you've got a load of uh tank proof bunkers and the highly tank resistant trenches and loads of men with panzerfaust which are little just in case you don't know all the pants of house is there a little little hand-held anti-tank thing so um if you've got loads of men with panzerfaust you'll find against tank the tanks can't hurt you from a distance and the tanks try to overrun your position you've got panzerfaust and you'll blow them all up um but panzerfaust have quite a short range um uh but normally of course this wouldn't matter uh but if you are up against churchill crocodiles coming at you then the range on them is quite significant so if you've got one of the early panzer house that had a range of about 33 yards that would be fairly useless against the churchill anyway because it wouldn't get through its very thick and good armor but if you're using one of the later ones which in 1944 45 would have been much more common that had a range of 66 yards and yes could if you got a really good hit nice square on uh it could go through the front armor of a churchill just and still have a little bit of bump to do some damage on the inside so yes you could but how do you get to within 66 yards don't forget that's the maximum range you want to really want to get a fair bit closer than 66 yards so um how are you going to do that well you're not going to fire from your bunker are you because um you've got a that biconical shaped charge on the front and you've got a tube behind on the panzerfaust which is full of propellant and a little sight and trigger mechanism on the top so you tuck it under your arm and you point it looking at along the top of the site and on a little mark on the bomb itself which was the foresight and then you would trigger it and hope and the propellant would go off and the the uh the uh the bomb would shoot forwards and the little fins that were folded up on the inside of the tube they would flick out and guide it like a dart onto the target all going well uh you would not go flying backwards from the recoil because this was like a recoilless rifle the back end of the tube was open so it wasn't closed like the breech on a cannon it was an open tube so when the propellant went off it went shooting backwards and shooting forwards it would propel the missile to the target that way and that would then compensate for the recoil so the man wouldn't be thrown backwards but he would be in tremendous trouble with all his fellows in the bunker if he shot it from within the bunker because that back blast was powerful and wicked and if that the back blast itself didn't render everyone uh useless uh within the bunker including the operator then the whole bunker will be filled with choking blinding smoke that would render them all useless anyway so you don't fire one of these things from within a bunker and firing one from within a trench was pretty tricky so you'd have to get out there now did i mention that the uh the range of the crocodile was about 120 yards so you've got something with a range of 66 yards maximum range and it's got a good effective range of 120 how are you going to get to within range you're going to climb out of your trench go through your own wire stepping through that go tip through your own minefield and then just hope that they don't use the flamethrower against you if anyone's looking out the front of their tank and they see a man coming towards them with a panzerfaust they're bound to object oh well okay what you do is you go around the side go around the side okay well typically of course there won't just be one tank attacking you there'll be a few so the next one in the line that will get you but all right you you tank the one on the end of the line okay so you run right on the side of that um oh but wait a minute uh don't you think that it's likely to have some infantry escort support all those hedges and and trees uh back there don't you think this could be one guy with a bren gun who seeing a german running around the side of one of his tanks uh carrying a panzerfaust is going to object with a bren gun yeah okay good luck getting into position around the side of a of a crocodile as it's advancing on your position but let's say it's possible okay so you managed to get around the side of of the uh uh churchill so what are you gonna shoot well if you shoot it in the side of the hull that's not gonna do a huge amount of damage because it's got about that much of spaced armor but wait tempting target there's the bowser itself okay i'll blow that up a little spectacular explosion there's 400 gallons of fuel in that okay so you get with your explosive not particularly accurate device within not many yards of the bowser and you fire your high explosive device to make a hole in the near side of that bowser the other side of which is 400 gallons of sticky napalm like fuel and five very high pressure gas tanks if one of those ruptures what do you think's gonna happen next yeah you're not gonna want to be standing there are you okay so no don't shoot a panther house at the bowser that's a really really dangerous stupid thing to do so what does that leave you ah shoot the churchill in the side of the turret the panzerfaust could definitely go through the side armor of a churchill's turret so yes that's the thing to aim at the trouble is the turrets what does the turrets do oh yeah they turn don't they another the turret on a churchill was a fully operational normal turret and so it would if anyone was seen coming around the side they'd turn the turret and use the main gun and the machine gun and maybe another neighboring tank would help out and of course the supporting infantry i mentioned earlier so getting around the side of an attacking churchill was near suicidal and so it tended not to happen much so in fact you could in a well-armored churchill advance on a german position being reasonably sure that they don't have an 88 millimeter gun and that panzerfaust are not going to do you in either and then you can start flaming uh one thing they sometimes did was uh a wet squirt so they would squirt fuel uh into trenches and uh onto the slits of the the various bunkers and so the men in inside would then feel what's that smell ah i'm wet ah there's the smell of oh they're going to turn on am i going to run away now well i suppose it is my duty to stand and fight isn't it you know for the fatherland and that yeah yeah that's what i'm gonna i'm gonna carry on fighting and know that turning on the flag dude i've changed my mind you're gonna run if you are anything but insane you're gonna run yes even ss fanatics when soaked in fuel and given the options of burn to death instantly or surrender germany went for surrender because they weren't complete idiots um so uh the churchill flamethrower has got tremendous range it's got a tremendous amount of ammunition to call upon it's an extremely effective perhaps the most effective ever flame thrower and um i've read a report that looked at 31 attacks between june and october 1944 so that's a normandy landings and going inland from there and uh not only did it report an awful lot of success um but actually one thing uh one thing it reported that um if the front armor had been sloping rather than flat uh they they estimated that between four and six vehicles and eight to twelve lives would have been saved uh but on the other hand the same report said um that the casualty rate was actually i think not unduly high given that these were used right at the point of attacks against some of the toughest nuts they were fighting constantly heavy fighting close fighting for five months and that all said the casualties that they they sustained were actually pretty light um now one thing about the bowser was that it uh had very very interesting coupling actually the coupling had to be able to um uh yaw like that relative to the tank and pitch like that and roll relative to the tank as well so it could move in all three directions uh while still supplying fuel to the uh the tank um uh and the bowser could be jettisoned from within the tank you didn't have to get out the tank and uncouple it you could actually just pull a lever the inside of the tank and jettison the bowser now of course one of the reasons that this feature was installed was that they thought that people wouldn't want to go into battle permanently fixed to this this bomb behind them it might make them extremely nervous they might think if there's any possible threat to the the bowser them i just think this is abandoned chip in case it blows up and catches fire um now in fact uh when they were asked how often does this actually happen uh the answer was they were very seldom jettisoned actually and only there are only two reported cases of the bowser catching fire and when they did jettison the bowser it was almost always if you like for good reasons rather than bad it wasn't because they felt they were in danger it was because they'd used up all the ammunition they'd used up all the fuel in the bowser and thought well as well just jettison it now it'll be it'll just make us lighter and faster uh uh oh and it was generally also to carry on the attack they perhaps had cleared out all the trenches and they wanted to then cross the trenches and carry on keep the momentum going keep the attack going and just carry on as a normal gun tank and it might slow them down crossing the trenches so they jettisoned it in order to do more fighting um so yes the jettisoning ability was used uh but uh not not uh out of panic very often um now they were used uh in mainly in on the western front in places like france uh holland and belgium uh they were used a bit in italy they were destined to go to japan uh but that never actually happened because of those two atomic bombs i mentioned earlier ended the war before they ever got there they were used also not just in support of british attacks but they were sometimes loaned out to americans in support of their attacks um and this report that i was i was reading had loads of questions in which people were asking the people who knew who were there who'd been using these for a long time does this work should this be improved and most of the answers were yeah it's fine the ignition system they say yeah yeah reliably no one's reported any uh problems with the ignition system yeah the ignition system should tell you how the ignition system worked um you've got a second uh system you've got the main fuel that comes from the bowser that goes through the coupling then down the pipe that goes down the back of the tank then under the bottom of the tank and then pop pops up into the tank and then to the nozzle uh for squirting out of the front of the uh machine gun where the the whole machine sorry where the whole machine gun would have been that the bow machine gun position uh which got converted and then you had a separate system with another pump uh bringing a thinner line of petrol from the tank's own petrol tank to just above the the nozzle so that would then have a second nozzle spraying out petrol between two uh electrical contacts so there'll be a spark across there and that would be what in what ignited the petrol which then ignited the main fuel of the flamethrower extra detail from you here are some some pictures that i took of of the system in in bovington that aren't brilliantly clear so i'm not going to spend very long on them now um uh so the the yeah so does the ignition system work yeah it's just fine can the fuel be improved would this kind of fuel be better would that kind of feel be better would be better if it were fueled this way would this be quicker way of fueling it and usually to these questions they're saying i suppose it could be improved but you know it's fine the fuel is fine it works um there were just two things that they asked again and again for more range more range is good yes uh 120 yards effective is really really good much better than any other flamethrower but but more range would still be really good always anything to give you more range they were in favor of and the other thing is could we just use them in bigger groups now looking at the battle reports of the use in france and belgium in 1944 i saw one action where 12 crocodiles went in together uh several actions where just one went in but typically it was three to nine uh was the the the size of unit used three to nine crocodiles in support of an attack um now you could say that um that was a bad thing because if you're the local commander you want to just overwhelm the enemy so if you could have like 24 that would be great they sent in and the the british had enough crocodile conversion kits that the royal electrical and mechanical engineers the remy used to convert an ordinary uh churchill into a flamethrower tank they they sent over 550 kits they could have had three entire regiments plus loads of spares of crocodiles but instead they they parcel them out in these little penny packets and normally that policy gets presented as a very bad idea uh the the the more you tanks you use the fewer you lose is one of the maxims that general slim used uh and yes um it seems to be generally true that if you can overwhelm the opposition you you uh stand a bit a chance of winning but thinking it from not the the local commander's point of view but across the the whole of the of the front if you could penny peck it out these things and they were still working quite well even in these small numbers maybe this is an exception maybe it was actually a good policy to to use these in small numbers in many places rather than in a few places in large numbers uh there you go another one for the the military analysts um so they're always asking for that um reversing could they ask how difficult is it to reverse they said well it does slow you down but actually reversing with one of these things is easy so that if you i've ever wondered whether you can reverse in a churchill crocodile apparently you can it's a bit slow but yep that's fine um now did they use this is one of the questions did you use the uh the turret in battle at the same time and in the report it said in very bold large type yes always so as they were going forwards using their flamethrowers they they were using the turret to full effect that was tap with the machine gun and boom with the main gun as well as which is another reason why this tank was so flipping effective because you had two weapon systems it had almost the entire tank plus the incredible effect of this flamethrower now um i suppose i should say why using facts and figures this was so effective after i've talked to you a bit about my sponsor audible now if you don't know what audible is it's a huge online website that sells audiobooks and if you click on the link in description that's the easy way or go to www.audible.com strokelindybeige or text lindybeige to 500-500 then you can take advantage of an offer of a free 30-day trial and one free audiobook and once you subscribe every month you get another book and you get two audible originals audible originals are things exclusive to audible not available anywhere else which is why i use the word exclusive so that was a bit tautologist sorry and uh and i noticed that they're they're pushing quite big names stephen fry's name is on quite a few of these audible originals uh so that they're pushing that quite heavily on the site uh so these things um but anyway so books um now i was thinking what what book would be particularly suitable to get and it got me thinking about the format of books because how could you improve yourself i mean we read books in order to prove it so how can you make yourself a better you well you could be more familiar with the classics like charles dickens for instance now when i was at school uh i didn't do english but a lot of the people in the same year as me they did do english and the setbook was charles dickens's little dorit which uniformly the pupils referred to as big dorit it is a daunting book it's a huge chunky physical thing useful in hand to hand combat but it's not the sort of thing you think well i'll just read that this afternoon because you're not going to get through it but here's the thing charles dickens didn't write it to be a book when an artist creates a work of art he knows in in what form it's going to manifest how it's going to be consumed and so he creates the artwork to suit that manifestation now little dorit was actually written as a monthly serial it was meant to be read in in little little bite sizes it was consumed as a modern a person might watch a soap opera on television in episodes over a long time in britain we have eastenders and coronation street in australia they have neighbors and home and away and in and all around around the world they have these long-running successful soap operas now if someone even if you were a fan of one of these soap operas someone said to you here's the thing it's all of the soap opera from the start you just look at it i can't watch that it's just too big but you were never meant to charles dickens didn't write little dorit for someone to think oh cricket do i have to read all this no he wrote it as a monthly serial so what modern reformat because people today are not going to buy something as a monthly serial that's not going to happen again but what modern format suits these big classics well uh of course with a lot of things watch the film it's easier and there have been five yes count them five film adaptations of little dorit uh one which i had to go watching was the one they're starring derek jacoby or as the americans call him derek jacoby i think it's because they wanted to make him sound more like a jedi he does look a bit like alec guinness i suppose anyway that was astonishing uh five and three quarter hours long and i watched the first part of it it's cut up into two parts and i thought that was that was that was good but that was long that was long and i didn't watch the second half but wait audio book yes maybe this is the way to consume these things that were once these big classics that were once serials audiobooks you can you can listen at your convenience whenever you like uh for as long as you like yes it's a very it's a very easy way to break something up into into bite-sized chunks and you never have to get to physical grips with the the actual weighty tome itself um so uh there's an idea and there are five versions of the um of the full thing there are some abridged versions as well but you don't want another bridge version you want the full thing and there are five versions uh on audible available of little dorit and uh you can click on the little bits on the screen and they will play you little samples of the particular reader reading a bit from that book so you can hear what their accent like what their delivery is like and you can pick the one you like and if you later change your mind you can actually swap um and uh you may decide for instance you want to shanae dixon's version and she takes the time she spends 36 hours and one minute reading her way through a big dorit whereas anthony ferguson he fare hairs through it in just 31 hours and 48 anyway so you can you can pick the one you want so why not go to www.audible.comstrokelindybeige linear lindy beige or beige 2 500 500. okay now back to crocodiles so i was saying that it was super duper effective but wouldn't it be better if i you put some figures on just how effective it was right what imagine uh you might say that the most effective weapon was uh the machine gun in world war ii and yeah yeah the machine was an extremely effective weapon very very important but the thing is that actually both sides had machine guns so if this side's got machine guns and this side has also got machine guns then how effective they are cancels out if everyone's got it then it doesn't actually turn the tide of a battle now you could say oh but this side had slightly better machine guns than this side and maybe arguably some nations were using slightly better machine guns than others but again if they both got effective fit for purpose machine guns it's not really going to be the decisive battle winning tool um but what if one side has a weapon and the other side doesn't have that weapon or near equivalent of it how often does the side with the weapon win because if it's if it's skewed significantly away from 50 percent of the time you might think oh that's a significant result if you look at loads of battles then uh if it's 55 you know 60 chance of winning a battle if you've got this weapon and they haven't but everything else is equal then wow that would be a pretty effective weapon well in actions involving the crocodile oh and i should say just to make it even more amazing in action involving the crocodile they're almost always attacks uh it's not a defensive weapon really the crocodile this was used in attacks and attacks against particularly tough targets well-fortified positions that couldn't otherwise be taken easily attacking is always always more difficult for reasons which i hope are reasonably obvious but i'll give you a few reasons um well the defender just has to sit there doesn't have to move around which makes organization uh much more easy whereas the the organization of getting all your various units to move and support each other as they move forward in attack is more difficult the defender gets a victory even if the attacker um is is is rubbish and it still it still counts we if we are still in position uh at the end of the battle then the defenders have won uh now of course a lot of attacks they just dissolved because they were shambolic um someone arrives too late someone turns up but with the wrong ammunition someone else turns up but he's still insisting that he's his orders that he was given last night are the order he's going to carry out but everyone else understands that the battle has been changed since then and there's radioing back to brigade hq hang on which of us has got the correct orders and then someone's gone unsupported too early without the others it's just a shambles that's called it off that would be notched up as a victory to the defenders even the defenders didn't didn't even know they were being attacked they've just been smoking and playing cribbage the whole time um attacking you can't take your bunkers and your barbed wire and your mines and your trenches with you you have to advance over open ground drawing attention to yourself not in nearly such good cover um and if you're firing you're firing either in a hasty position or on the move so it's gonna be less accurate whereas the defenders are firing from prepared positions with a a big store of ammunition that they can have with them okay enough already defending's more easy than attack so they're attacking and they're attacking particularly tough nuts in actions where the one side had crocodiles the side with crocodiles won 90 of the time 90 of the time that is a staggering success rate and when i've uh read the action reports of the unsuccessful attacks uh never has the crocodile been blamed always it's bad organization oh and what i was talking about just a short while ago the confusion amongst the attackers uh some people have no we're in command of the crocodiles no you are no hang on who's coordinating with the crocodiles so who's supporting are we supporting from behind and they they they messed up and the attack got called off it wasn't the crocodile's fault it was that um the whole attack was just a shambles and they called it off so uh the the crocodile it seems was was innocent when the of the defeats and it won 90 of the time but i can go further i can go further 50 percent of the time it encountered little or no resistance there are accounts of uh times when the crocodiles were actually out of range and because of the particular lie of the land they couldn't get to within range but still the enemy surrendered anyway in one action 150 germans surrendered to a crocodile it was out of range um sometimes as soon as the flames get turned on uh white flags appeared across the the enemy lines now i've been reading this book here it's called war games it's uh by leo murray and i enjoyed it a lot and it's about military tactical psychology uh the things that increase uh soldiers effectiveness in the field and crucially this is a central argument uh decrease the willingness of the opposition to fight war as leo describes it is something which has the objective of getting the enemy to stop fighting whereas a lot of people get fixated on oh it's about taking positions or killing the enemy no no it's persuading the enemy to stop fighting and the best thing is well you could just all just go home and the war could just fizzle out that would be quite nice because peace is good but also surrendering that's good now if you've got a weapon that causes people to surrender rather than carry on fighting that's a particularly good weapon if you can get people to surrender then indirectly they persuade subsequent people to surrender because if if loads of men in your army were surrendered yesterday and the day before and the day before and then an attack comes and you use against you you sort of now got an excuse oh it's what people are doing these days they're surrendering oh it's an option apparently they treat her prisoners quite well and uh you know the food that our chef in this unit comes up with you know we can't really call him chef cook even the cook's a bit a bit of a bit of uh unwarranted praise uh it's not so good i i'd i'd rather uh try out their cuisine frankly and so i'm gonna surrender because it's it's okay other people are doing it so once once you get this momentum of large numbers of people surrendering then you know that the war the end of the war is coming so surrendering is great they don't you haven't seen them away from the position they haven't fled and routed so they can perhaps rally and fight another day they're now out of the war forever and by having surrendered they're sort of acting as ambassadors to other people in that army to surrender so surrender is good and oh boy was the crocodile good at getting people to surrender now in the uh in the between june and october the 31 actions that i was reading about um 154 men were burned to death by the crocodiles and that's nasty 154 men were burned to death that's at a grim end which is quite regrettable but the good news is 5425 men surrendered which is just good for all the reasons i've described plus of course people not getting hurt which is good in itself isn't it so getting the enemy to surrender is is terrifically good and there was a particular way that proved very very effective and it used what was called what is referred to in the in the book war games is advertising oh dear yes i did just do air quotes i'll try not to do too many of those now advertising in this con context means showing the enemy what you've got showing him the stick that you could beat him with so the best way to use a crocodile it turned out was to use it in a way that was actually contrary to doctrine what you were supposed to do was advance right up to within range and now that you're within range of your weapon you should start using your weapon because what's the point of using a weapon before you within range that's just a waste of ammunition and even with one minute and 20 seconds worth of fuel you've still got quite limited ammunition so you know so don't use it when you're out of range plus um the feeling was that sudden shock of a powerful weapon used nearby had a bigger psychological impact on the enemy but it turned out that maybe actually that sudden shock thing wasn't that effective and not in the case of a crocodile certainly as effective as long-range advertising so when you were still out of range you would turn the flame on and play it about a bit and show the enemy we've got this so that was if you like the stick and there was a carrot as well you could offer there is an alternative how about surrendering to these nice friendly escorting infantry so as long as you had uh the stick the flame and the carrot the people to surrender to it worked extremely well um and in terms of the number of people who surrendered it uh you you would get perhaps um five people surrendering per man who got injured if you didn't advertise so that's still a really good ratio but if you did advertise you got 27 men surrendering for everyone who got injured in the fight so it pays to advertise so show them what you've got and let them think about whether they you know want to reassess their priorities as you continue your advance um but sometimes there's something called weapon pull weapon pull is a psychological term used by a tactical psychologist military tactical psychologist which refers to the reluctance that someone will have to use his weapon if there's someone else nearby who's got a much better weapon so if your side is attacking with these terrifying flamethrowers who are also spitting machine gun bullets and high explosives and so forth if that's going in and you're an infantryman with a rifle you're actually less likely to shoot your rifle because you think wow what's the point there they're doing all the work i'm i'm superfluous really you know they're going and i can go you know who's even gonna notice my rifle i'll just stay here and the battle probably be won without me so sometimes um it was rare because they they knew to escort uh with infantry but the infantry were also a little bit scared of these tanks because they were scary fiery things and what if one blew up it might blow up in a more spectacular way than than normal so they didn't like getting too close to them um but if you didn't have those nice friendly visible uh infantry to whom you could surrender then you're actually probably not going to surrender because you can't surrender to a flame throwing tank how do you surrender to the crocodile itself uh this is a problem that they have with apache gunships in places like afghanistan today so you may think ah apache gunship brilliant brilliant weapon i mean it's so deadly yeah they were designed for knocking out russian tanks and they're really good at that but um in afghanistan against insurgents it's not so handy because you've got this weapon what do you want enemy to do you want him to stop fighting uh run away surrender one of those things that they're all good results yeah well he's not gonna run away if you're flying around with a an attack helicopter is he because he knows as soon as he starts moving you'll see him and you'll be very capable of shooting him dead um because you're a running guy with with a possibly armed you're dead you start running away with an attack helicopter so you don't you sit tight so the the unit that's gone forward on the ground and has encountered the enemy and is now pinned down and is whistled up for support from the attack helicopter attack helicopter doesn't shoot the enemy away it makes them go further to ground okay so you actually make them put more stubbornly in play in place and you can't surrender to an apache helicopter can you how do you do that so you've now got to carry on fighting so if anything you've made the the enemy more likely to carry on fighting not only in the short term because of this particular action but if you do shoot anyone dead then uh that's actually great for their recruitment drive and and two more insurgents get created for everyone that you shoot with an attack helicopter plus they actually think actually even worse of drones there's not even a man in the drone and the man piloting the drone might be back home eating a hamburger in an office in in america somewhere and he's going to be going home to his wife and kids later that day um a lot of the insurgents would see the uh the the the coalition the brits and the americans using these drones as cowards uh and that's actually makes them more likely to fight against you more likely to recruit more so as a war winning tool the apache helicopter is perhaps not actually all that good was a warning tool in coordination with friendly you can surrender to us uh plucky brits infantry escorting the crocodile was an extremely effective war-winning war-winning tool but if you got too close the psychology flipped here's the thing when you're right up close to the the tank the only rational thing that the guys in the tank can do is try to kill you because they don't want you getting around the side with the panzerfaust or stuffing grenades up the exhaust pipe or throwing bundles grenades onto the engine deck and that sort of thing so they've got to try to kill you in which case you flip into fight mode so when the the the the the crocodiles were right in amongst the enemy they would actually then fire fight a very tough bitter action uh still they tended to win uh i read of one for instance when a load of uh ss uh ambushed some uh crocodiles four crocodiles in a wood and the crocodiles had no infantry support so the crocodiles immediately went into we've got to fight as hard as we can mode and uh they killed 25 germans and took five prisoners um so it was still a victory chalked up to the the crocodiles but it was a much bloodier nastier more vicious action the carrot and stick technique was enormously more effective and i've talked about weapon pull so if you're being attacked by some weapon that's just bigger and more terrifying than anything you've got and you've got no direct reply to it you are 30 less likely to to fight at all so there you are in your slit trench with a rifle panzerfaust whatever grenades and some crocodiles come towards you there's a 30 greater than normal chance that you're not going to just fight at all you're going to sit tight and hope everything just goes away um but with the advertising with the showing them in advance this is what's coming at you now how how would you like to react there was a reported 90 percent weapon pool the the enemy troops were 90 percent less likely to continue the fight and actually use any of their weapons in a fight so this is a tremendously effective war-winning tool that skewed battles to an extraordinary degree um and uh they maintain momentum as well as i said earlier they would often then jettison the bowser and then carry on uh maintaining the momentum of attack they didn't take the position after a really hard fight and then think they're all so psychologically so exhausted they're just gonna have to just stop there and gather themselves together it was such an easy victory quite often that they could carry on and push the front much further back than otherwise would have been the case so it was a a very effective weapon absolutely across the board and there are a surprising number that uh still survive today uh just researching on the internet in the last couple of days i found that there are 13 crocodiles that still exist in the world and three amazingly enough that are still runners they still actually go i don't know if the flamethrowers still work i imagine it'd be quite difficult getting hold of all the the stickies of napalm-like fuel for them and to get permission to use one i imagine you probably have to fill in a form you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 949,686

Keywords: weapon, war, battle, soldiers, tactical, psychology, crocodile, flame, thrower, flamethrower, tank, churchill, british, world, two, ww2, wwii, WWII, effective, victory, winning, decisive, bunker, defence, defense, attack, army, panzerfaust

Id: GpIoqyjWvzI

Length: 44min 28sec (2668 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/StormtrooperDan]

I've always been confused by why the tank dragged that trailer around, and why I couldn't unhitch it.

[u/Der_Scoop]

And was a well known target bursting in flames when you hit it. Looking forward to the Universal Carrier with a flamer which also existed. Or with a mortar. There are so many variations possible with the transporters in the game already.

[u/Der_Scoop]

Never tried it out ingame but I really don’t think so. It was very vulnerable though. But so it didn’t damage the tank at least. Riding in a flamethrower vehicle these days was quite an adventure. You really had to come close to the enemy to be of any use which is never a good idea in a tank ... as we all know ;-)