A cat and bird wearing flaming packs attack a city under siege in this illustration from a 1584 artillery manual, or feuerwerkbuch, housed at the University of Pennsylvania.
A cat and bird wearing flaming packs attack a city under siege in this illustration from a 1584 artillery manual, or feuerwerkbuch, housed at the University of Pennsylvania.
This 17th-century engraving shows that the idea of using cats as arsonists had staying power and was widespread. PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT ROURKE
“... cats with flaming backpacks...”
The earliest Viking Kitties?!
“Here kitteh kitteh, I mean NOT here. Bad kitteh! Run away!”
They look more like Jet packs to me.
Maybe the cats and birds were used for high speed courier service.
Judges 15:4 (1611 King James Bible)
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and tooke firebrands, and turned taile to taile, and put a firebrand in the midst betweene two tailes.
Historical accounts of incendiary pigs or flaming pigs were recorded by the military writer Polyaenus[7] and by Aelian.[8] Both writers reported that Antigonus II Gonatas' siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs with combustible pitch or resin, set them alight, and drove them towards the enemy's massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of their own soldiers.
Everything old is new again.
A precursor of BF Skinner?
My guess is they attacked their enemies with flaming animals.
During WWII, we were gonna drop bombs over Japanese cities that were filled with bats that had little incendiary bombs strapped to them. They believe the plan was cancelled because of the Manhattan Project.
Not sure why they were testing such a thing. The incendiary bombs were were already using were doing one hell(literally) of a job.
Then again, they could have been using part of the technology given to them by “aliens” a millennium ago. I saw it on the History Channel!
"In 1862, during the New Mexico Campaign of the American Civil War a Confederate force approached the ford at Valverde, six miles north of Fort Craig, hoping to cut Union communications between the fort and their headquarters in Santa Fe. About midnight, Union Captain James Craydon tried to blow up a few rebel picket posts by sending mules loaded with barrels of fused gunpowder into the Confederate lines, but the faithful old army mules insisted on wandering back toward the Union camp before blowing to bits. Although the only casualties were two mules, the explosions stampeded a herd of Confederate beef cattle and horses into the Union's lines, so depriving the Confederate troops of some much-needed provisions and horses." link
The Soviets famously used dogs with bombs strapped to their backs in attempt to destroy German tanks in WW2. They applied Pavlov’s principles by feeding the dogs underneath tanks, then starving thems, so they would run under the panzers in search of food. It was not very successful. First the dogs would refuse to run under the tanks because of the noise of the engines and gunfire and return to the Soviet trenches with their bombs, killing their own handlers. After fixing that problem by feeding the dogs under running tanks, the Russians forgot that their own tanks ran on diesel, but the Germans’ ran on gasoline, so the bomb-dogs, with their keen sense of smell, would run under the same kind they were trained on - diesel.
Symbolic Science FIction perhaps?
Ouch—an idea borrowed from Samson?
No sharks with friken laser beams?
Horrible..
Scary. I have that as my screensaver on my Mac even as I type.
Shared it with someone at work about a year ago. :-)