20. The Great Panjandrum
As Allied commanders made their plans for D-Day, one of their major concerns was how to go about clearing obstacles on the invasion beaches. One British brainstorm to accomplish that task was The Great Panjandrum: a large drum stuffed with a ton of explosives, and affixed to rocket-propelled wheels. It was something straight out of Looney Tunes. The idea was to ignite the rockets from a platform at sea, and the angled rockets attached to the wheels would cause them to rotate rapidly. That rapid rotation would propel and launch the contraption at targets and obstacles on shore, blowing them up and clearing the way for follow-on troops, who would land hot on the Great Panjandrum’s heels.
The device was supposed to be developed in secrecy in order to spring a surprise on the Germans. However, testing was conducted on a beach popular with vacationers, so the trials were witnessed by huge crowds. The design’s flaw emerged at the first trial run in 1943: when the rockets were ignited and The Great Panjandrum was launched, it made its way up the beach before rockets on one of the wheels malfunctioned, causing the device to careen wildly off course. The problem persisted with additional trials, as it proved impossible to get the rockets on both sides to ignite at the same time or to keep firing simultaneously. Still, the device’s designers persisted.
