Elephant swords

[mahratt]

Originally Posted by kronckew

The Soviets in WW2 trained dogs to run under tanks with backpacks on, Their first test engagement against a line of German panzers they put anti-tank mines with a vertical contact fuse on the dogs, and released them towards the German tanks, they promptly turned around and ran under the Soviet tanks, which all blew up. They'd trained them with soviet tanks...Project sancelled.

Although this information is not related to the topic, I must note that this is false information.
Dogs destroyed up to 300 German tanks during the period from 1941 to 1945.
The German source mentions the destruction as a minimum of one German tank in October 1941 on the outskirts of Karachev.
In the summer of 1943, in the battle of Kursk, 12 German tanks were destroyed with the help of dogs.
Dogs were a problem for the Germans, because the tank machine gun was located high enough and hardly got into a dog moving quickly near the surface of the earth. The German command ordered every soldier to shoot any dog ​​that appears in sight. Killing dogs was prescribed even to pilots of Luftwaffe fighters - from airplanes.
Over time, the Wehrmacht soldiers began to use flamethrowers installed on tanks against dogs, this turned out to be a fairly effective countermeasure, however, some dogs still could not be stopped.