When it comes to winning wars, conventional wisdom usually wins the day. Yet history is peppered with ideas that are anything but conventional – think armies of cats, bat‑filled bombs, or even a river turned neon yellow. Below are 10 totally bizarre plans that were dreamed up, proposed, or even tested in the name of victory.
10 The OSS Almost Dyed An Entire River Yellow
When Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist attached to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Ceylon during World War II, learned that the Burmese attached great symbolic weight to the colour yellow, he saw an opportunity. A local legend claimed that if the Irrawaddy River – Burma’s most vital waterway – ever turned yellow, it would herald the end of foreign domination.
Bateson believed the prophecy could be turned against the Japanese occupiers, sparking a popular uprising. The OSS approved his daring concept and secured several barrels of bright yellow dye. Just before the operation was to be launched, Bateson decided to trial the dye in his own bathtub. To his astonishment, the dye sank straight to the bottom instead of floating. The mixture only worked in salt water, making the plan unworkable in the river’s fresh‑water flow.
9 Sicilian Separatists Asked To Be Annexed By The US
Who wouldn’t fancy becoming part of the good‑ol’ U S of A? After World II, a group of Sicilian separatists – a mix of nationalists, landowners and even the Mafia – felt short‑changed by the Italian state and feared a looming communist takeover of their island.
Led by the charismatic bandit Salvatore Giuliano, the separatists actually drafted a petition for President Harry Truman, pleading to turn Sicily into America’s 49th state. Giuliano’s letter argued that a Sicilian‑American buffer would keep Soviet influence out of the Mediterranean. He even sent a propaganda leaflet showing himself cutting a chain that bound Sicily to Italy while another hand linked it to the United States.
Internal disputes among the separatists and political concessions granted to Sicily by Italy ultimately quashed the dream of joining America.
8 The Suggestion To Start A Foreign War (And Avoid A Civil One)
Secretary of State William Seward was a pivotal member of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. During the Civil War, he helped defuse a potentially explosive confrontation with the British.
However, Seward was also known for his impulsive temperament. In April 1861, as Confederate secession threatened the Union, he penned a letter to Lincoln urging the United States to launch a foreign war against European powers – specifically France and Spain – as a pre‑emptive move to keep the Union intact. He argued that recent French and Spanish incursions in Europe and the Caribbean offered a perfect pretext for American action.
Some historians contend Seward merely wanted to protect the U.S. from foreign interference, but Lincoln politely declined, rejecting the notion of a world‑wide conflict.
7 Numerous Plans To Project Propaganda Into The Sky
Before the first Gulf War, Air Force planners reportedly toyed with a holographic projector that could display an image of Allah across the skies of Baghdad, hoping the sight would incite the Iraqi populace to rise against Saddam Hussein.
The notion sounds straight out of a sci‑fi flick, but the idea of sky‑borne propaganda dates back to World II, when the British attempted, unsuccessfully, to create a projector for anti‑German messaging. In the 1960s Arab insurgency in Yemen, the British tried mounting a projector on a helicopter, only to be foiled by a dry season that left the sky cloud‑free.
During the Vietnam War, the United States experimented with a projector mounted on a C‑47 cargo plane. Although they achieved modest success, the project was abandoned because the aircraft had to fly dangerously low, making it an easy target for anti‑aircraft fire. Friendly Vietnamese forces also reportedly stole the generator that powered the device.
6 The Nazis Attempted To Make Gold
We’ve already noted that the Nazi regime dabbled in occultism, but few know they also entertained an alchemist. Shortly before World II erupted, a British‑born man named Karl Malchus approached SS chief Heinrich Himmler, claiming he could transmute ordinary material into gold.
Malchus asserted that substances hidden beneath Munich’s Isar River could be harnessed to produce limitless gold for the war effort. Himmler funded the venture, providing Malchus with quarters and a laboratory within the Dachau concentration camp. For a time, Malchus fooled his patron by smuggling gold nuggets concealed in his cigarettes and presenting them as proof of his success.
Eventually the ruse was uncovered, and Malchus spent months imprisoned in the camp. He was later released, but only after being threatened with death should he ever reveal the deception.
5 The Bid To Bomb Japan’s Volcanoes
As the tide turned against Japan in 1944, geologist Harold Whitnall wrote an article in Popular Science proposing that the United States bomb Japan’s volcanoes. He argued that the Japanese revered their volcanoes as sacred, so destroying them would shatter morale.
Whitnall went further, suggesting that detonating bombs on volatile volcanoes could trigger massive earthquakes and eruptions, forcing the Japanese to surrender. He believed that American air‑power at the time was capable of executing such a daring operation.
A similar proposal had reached President Franklin D. Roosevelt two years earlier, urging the bombing of Japanese volcanoes to convince the populace that their gods were angry. Roosevelt ultimately rejected the idea.
4 The Use Of People Sniffers By US Forces In Vietnam
Vietnam’s dense jungles made it notoriously hard to locate enemy combatants. In response, U.S. forces deployed a “people sniffer” – a helicopter‑mounted sensor that detected the ammonia scent of urine and sweat, theoretically indicating human presence.
Initially the device proved useful, but it soon backfired. Once the Viet Cong learned of the technology, they began spoofing it by placing buckets of urine in trees. One infamous incident saw an artillery strike ordered after the sniffer signaled enemy troops, only for soldiers to discover the target area contained no bodies – just buckets of urine.
Colin Powell later linked the failure of the people sniffer to the American over‑reliance on high‑tech gadgets in a war where low‑tech ingenuity often prevailed.
3 Both the Allies and Axis Turned Nostradamus’s Prophecies Into Propaganda
The vague quatrains of Nostradamus proved fertile ground for wartime propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, hired astrologer Karl Kraft to publish Nazi‑tailored versions of Nostradamus’s predictions, inserting verses that foretold England’s doom and Hitler’s inevitable domination of Europe.
The Nazis found the approach effective enough that the Allies quickly co‑opted it. The British released editions that predicted Allied victory and Hitler’s downfall, while the United States published books and even produced films featuring Nostradamus to boost morale on the home front.
2 The Plan To Defeat Hitler With Hormones
Desperation can breed the most outlandish ideas. As World II dragged on, British intelligence concocted a scheme to neutralize Adolf Hitler by subtly altering his hormone balance. The plan called for covertly adding estrogen to Hitler’s food, hoping the hormone would temper his aggression and make him more docile – perhaps even more like his sister Paula.
At the time, scientific understanding of sex hormones was rudimentary, and estrogen was considered easier to smuggle than conventional poisons because it would be undetectable to Hitler’s food tasters. Although spies were trained for the mission, the operation never moved beyond the planning stage.
1 Anti‑Submarine Seagulls
During World I, the British explored a series of eccentric tactics to combat the rising U‑boat threat. One especially odd concept involved training seagulls to locate submarines and then either perch on or defecate upon their periscopes, effectively blinding the vessels.
The idea wasn’t merely a doodle on a napkin; it was seriously considered. A private inventor named Thomas Mills even patented a dummy submarine equipped with a food platform at the top to train the gulls, hoping repeated exposure would teach them to hone in on real subs.
Eventually, advances in acoustic detection rendered the avian approach obsolete. The British could have pursued sea‑lion pilots instead – and indeed they did, but the gull scheme remains a quirky footnote in naval history.