The 'superweapon' that almost won Hitler the war!

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so while ago I asked you what this was and how it could win a war and I mean really win a war a truly decisive weapon so it's a really solid structure yeah top comes off yeah I mean top and inside you've got this thing that rocks around that's really heavy very mobile and on one side it's got a load of fairly primitive electronics so the question is what is it well the one many answers most thought it was some sort of v2 rocket guidance system and you can see why it's made of an aluminium to be light it's got these gimbals and so forth it's the sort of thing he might put in a rocket however no it's not a bit of it indeed arguably this was a far more potent weapon than the v2 at the potential to really stop world war two before it even started winning the war for Nazi Germany cuz this is the trigger for the German magnetic mine they found an aluminum dome set in a rubber diaphragm but under the dome a scale was revealed with the word gauss gauss is the unit of magnetic measurement the mine was magnetic the mechanism was slung on gimbals in an aluminium frame in these by the end of the war that's exactly what it was a war winner apart from not for the Axis powers but for the Allies now you gotta understand something about modern war without fuel you lose your ability to defend yourself incredibly quickly you can't send your fleets out you can't send your fighters up you can't leave your army around and then very shortly after that you lose the ability for mechanized farming and if you live on an island with a population of about 50 million and you can only grow enough food for about five million you don't have to do much math to realize you're screwed now Great Britain had known that for a long time in historically thought was primarily the reason why Britain was so big on naval power cuz to be able to block anything hland was to be able to defeat it in principle without firing a single shot to a very large extent Britannia had to rule the waves else she was already beaten now dropping contact mines to stop shipping had already had a long history by World War two the problem was that by World War two it was actually quite risky to go into foreign waters and lay these vines and they were quite easy to sweep now the Germans realized that typically a ship has a magnetic signature and that an explosion underneath the ship tends to be far more damaging than an explosion against the side and so a mine left in relatively shallow water such as say the coastal shipping lanes or in the river estuaries could quite easily destroy a ship and all of its precious cargo within sight of its home port and seeing us at the time such a mine was unsweet all if Britain could not work out how to sweep such mine before its fuel oil ran out England was in every significant fashion already beaten its Sun Tzu's ultimate victory to be able to win a war without fighting and this was the weapon to do it now bear in mind that this all happened in the year that France was defeated but actually before either the US or Russia entered the war Britain primarily stood alone against Germany Britain very quickly realized something funny going on but unless they could work out how to defeat this mine it was only a matter of time and so they put their highest priority on actually finding a way to counter this new weapon that was blowing up all their ships in coastal waters now by extraordinary luck quite literally deliverance fell from the sky the Luftwaffe the German air force had started dropping these mines from the air and a German plane had flown down the Thames to drop a magnetic mine it had been spotted and a wall of anti-aircraft fire went up and the crew panicked dropped the mine early and it landed on the mudflats and the British went out to disarm and recover the mine now disarming a mystery mine designed to blow up ships with an unknown triggering mechanism is a fairly ballsy activity yeah it's true everyone is a general after the battle but nonetheless it still seems incredible that no one had stressed the potential war winning importance of these mines to the German air force and the importance of the British not being able to get their hands on what all the Germans had to do was arm the mine and then if it landed on land rather than water it would explode and later mines even had a fail-safe such that if they were taken out of the water they would explode but instead rather than risking getting their aircraft hit with his munition designed to plug ships on board they in many ways quite sensibly jettisoned it but without even arming the failsafe ironically they're not just delivered the mine into the hands of the English they had done it safe however the air crew probably had no more realization that they just delivered the mechanism of not being blockaded into submission into the hands of their enemy and the poor guys marching towards this unknown ship killing mine had that they were in no immediate danger unless of course they ain't advertently took out the copper strips to arm the mine if the mine had gone off Wolverine and Warren who disappeared too and exploded like that in that mud would I should think make a hole about a cricket pitch in diameter and about six or seven feet deep once the British had taken apart mine and found out that it was magnetically triggered it was now a technology race simply knowing how a weapon works is a small comfort if you can't work out how to counter it if the British could not figure out a way to effectively sweep these mines it was still only a matter of time before defeat was inevitable and there are many cases like this in world war ii where the entire outcome of the war could have been very different but for a handful of inventions early methods involved just putting huge electromagnets in minesweepers to transyl off these mines well that was rather a dangerous form of minesweeping with the minesweeper frequently damaged by the mines they were sweeping Plus when the Germans worked out this was what was going to happen they just made some really insensitive magnetic minds specifically to blow up the mine sweepers but what really defeated the magnetic mind can be demonstrated on a kitchen table using up a magnetized needle a tub of seawater a 12 volt battery charger and a vintage ammeter now it all boils down what I've got underneath my valve at assault water here which is a little needle not little Dingles being magnetized very much like a compass needle such that it points along the Earth's magnetic field and what a lot of people worked out early honest that ships have a sort of residual magnetism to them that say if the ship goes over the top it really does mess with what the needle does and that this was something that you could use in a triggering unit for a mine that this needle on the bottom is basically the triggering mechanism for the magnetic mine so as the ship passes overhead there's a big perturbation and boom end of ship and it's valuable cargo what you really need is a way of making the sea magnetic well it turns out this is a simple trick that can sort of do that when you pass electricity around a loop it generates a magnetic field this is how solenoids work problem is though the dragging a whole loop like that behind a ship generates a lot of drag what would be better if you would just drag say two straight wires behind a ship and then just use the conduction of the salt water to complete the circuit and yeah it worked and so what I've got here is essentially a single L sweep setup so I've got a positive and negative wire which come down the side the tub they would actually be floating in the water in reality and then you've got them dipping into the saltwater on either side it's bickering on the bottom because I've been electrolyzing stuff stuff but that matter when I pass current through this now we are passing can't throw what you're fine is it electrolyzers the water there the bubbles at one of the electrodes yeah and pass about half an amp through here so let's see what effect actually pass that coming down here through the water and back up the other side house underneath you should find is my first can through this which is the new you think now obviously they would actually pass enough current through these to just sorta mine with a single loop so much more powerful power sources to prepare 12 volt battery charger or more appropriately it did work it saved Britain's ass now I know there will be many who will say that surely a weapon that you can demonstrate how to defeat on a kitchen table using a magnetic needle some salt water a few wires and a battery charger could never defeat a nation actually yeah the German magnetic mines was so good that they were copied by the Americans and used to devastating effect against Japan which had no method of sweeping the mines the operation I kid you not was called Operation starvation and it was hugely successful arguably a war winner in itself because just like England Japan is another one of those islands where to be able to blockade the island is effectively to be able to defeat it and this for me was one of the fascinating elements of World War two it really was the first technologically driven war with time and time again technology proving the decisive tipping factor in entire campaigns were the apex of this technology able to make even the stoniest uncomfortably in their chair yet from this technological race arguably the most iconic event in the entire of human history was born the second burn takes the crew of Apollo 8 where no men have ever been deep space there was no the first gravity could hold us back longer you

Info

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 575,810

Rating: 4.9217682 out of 5

Keywords: Adolf Hitler (Military Commander), War (Quotation Subject), Winston Churchill (Military Commander), World War II (Military Conflict), ww2, world, war, magnetic, mine, naval, Germany, science, magnet, bomb, super, superweapon, cool, two, ship, england, blockade, he115, influence, secret, sea, boat, coastal, coast, sweeper, us, russia, 1940, 1939, 1941, britania, double, single, sweep, ll, contact, air, airforce, luftwaffe, lost, won, win, winning, hitler

Id: Eht0sGmiyBM

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 11 2015

Reddit Comments

Plenty of badhistory going on. "...many times in the war a single invention could change the outcome.." nah bruh.

But as I understand the person doing the video is in chemistry or physics not history. Stay in your field.

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

Ah, the old "any given weapon would be rly rly gr8 if no one bothered to develop countermeasures" argument!

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/jonewer 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

It was found that "wiping" a current-carrying cable up and down a ship's hull temporarily cancelled the ships' magnetic signature sufficiently to nullify the threat. This started in late 1939, and by 1940 merchant vessels and the smaller British warships were largely immune for a few months at a time until they once again built up a field. Many of the boats that sailed to Dunkirk were degaussed in a marathon four-day effort by degaussing stations. The Allies deployed acoustic mines, against which even wooden-hulled ships (in particular minesweepers) remained vulnerable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/W_I_Water 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

Thunderfart is making WWII vids? I'm amazed he found the time to do something other than make "WHY FEMINISM IS KILLING THE WORLD" vids.

👍︎︎ 31 👤︎︎ u/uggmun 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

To be fair magnetic mines were very effective, more so than any other anti ship means except submarine torpedoes. They caused an awful lot of trouble for the Allies, in what was the (IMO) critical theatre of the war- the Atlantic. If instead of building Bismarck and Tirpitz (and the various cruisers) the Kriegsmarine had built more subs and mines (and assuming the Luftwaffe would have cooperated in laying them), the British would have had a much harder time in the Atlantic, and it would not be outlandish to assume they might actually have been forced to negotiate. It was rather close run as it was.

^{I haven't actually watched the vid}

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/N-L-M 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

Totally could have stuck onto all those B-17s!

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/buy_a_pork_bun 📅︎︎ Apr 13 2016 🗫︎ replies

Reminds of the scene in Top Secret! Where he turns on a magnet mine and pulls a submarine through the wall XD

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/skippythemoonrock 📅︎︎ Apr 14 2016 🗫︎ replies