The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  A refinement to this idea was Pyke’s “torpedo sledge”. The sledge was to be driven slowly up a slope to tempt the Germans into giving chase. Halfway up the slope, the torpedo was to be released to roll down on to the Germans and blow them up. Just in case the equipment fell into enemy hands, it was to be marked with a sign in German warning people to keep clear: “DANGER – SECRET GESTAPO DEATH RAY”. Alternatively, Pyke suggested, the sledge was to be marked: “OFFICERS’ LATRINE FOR COLONELS ONLY”. The Germans, Pyke explained to his patient employees, were a very obedient race.

  Just when Britain’s military chiefs thought that Pyke’s contributions couldn’t possibly get any madder, he came up with his most spectacular invention of all – the Habakkuk. This was a huge aircraft carrier, half-a-mile long, made entirely of ice and reinforced with wood shavings – a material he called “Pykrete”. This material had extraordinary properties, including remarkable strength, boasting a crush resistance greater than 300 psi – as strong as concrete but lighter. Pyke’s ship was to be fitted with self-refrigerating apparatus, to keep it from melting. As the hull was thirty feet thick, it would be virtually impregnable. Pyke theorized that huge ice ships, clad in timber or cork and looking like ordinary ships but much larger, could serve as transport and aircraft carriers, while smaller ships would be adapted to attack enemy ports. The plan was for them to sail into the port and capture enemy warships by spraying them with super-cooled water, encasing them in ice and forcing them to surrender. Blocks of Pykrete would then be used to build a barrier round the port, making an impregnable fortress. From there special teams would spread out into the countryside, spraying railway tunnels with super-cooled water to seal them up and paralyse transport.

  To the unscientific mind, Pyke’s latest idea didn’t seem at all mad. Ice is unsinkable and icebergs are known to survive for a long time even in temperate seas. Even Mountbatten warmed to Pykrete. In fact, he liked Pyke’s plan so much that he interrupted Churchill’s ablutions one evening by dumping a lump of Pykrete into the great man’s hot bath to prove it would not melt. Churchill was also surprisingly receptive to the idea. He fired off a memo to his War Cabinet stamped “Most Secret”, saying, “I attach the greatest importance to the prompt examination of these ideas. The advantages of a floating island or islands, even if only used as refuelling depots for aircraft, are so dazzling that they do not need at the moment to be discussed.”

  Mountbatten ordered Pyke to produce some samples of Pykrete for trials, which he did, in utmost secrecy, in a refrigerated meat locker in a Smithfield Market butcher’s basement. The invention was finally unveiled at a tense secret meeting of the Allied chiefs of staff at Quebec’s Château Frontenac Hotel in August 1943. Mountbatten demonstrated the strength of Pykrete in front of a group of unbelieving generals by drawing his revolver and firing at it. The bullet ricocheted off the solid lump and zipped across the trouser leg of a rather unappreciative Fleet Admiral Ernest King. Mountbatten had made his point; Churchill and Roosevelt quickly agreed that Pyke’s ship should be built.

  Its creator, however, was conspicuously absent from all of these high-level meetings, stunned to discover that he had been cut loose from his own project. It turns out that Pyke had sent a telegram marked “Hush Most Secret” to Mountbatten. It read simply: “CHIEF OF NAVAL CONSTRUCTION IS AN OLD WOMAN. SIGNED PYKE.”

  Although a prototype Habakkuk was actually built on a Canadian Lake and it lasted through summer without melting, the Allied invasion of Europe was already too advanced for it to be put to practical use. Pyke was later granted the rights to patent Pykrete, but he never got around to filing for them. In fact, very few projects inspired by Pyke ever got off the ground and he ended his war embittered and disillusioned.

  In 1948, aged fifty-four, he said farewell to an unappreciative world by overdosing on barbiturates. On his death, The Times described him as “one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century”.28

  Most Desperate CIA Cold War Ploy: Part 3

  In 1975, the CIA hired a psychic from California to “see” details of secret military installations in the distant Soviet Union, an activity the agency described as “remote viewing”.

  The psychic, codenamed SG1J, was given a rough description of a suspect site in Russia and then asked to visualize it and provide details. He got a few things right, including a few squat buildings and a crane, but most of the more telling details were completely wrong. A CIA researcher reported: “One explanation of this discrepancy could be that if he mentioned enough specific objects, he would surely hit on one object that is actually present.”

  The experiment, codenamed URDF-3, was declared unsuccessful.

  “No, it will make war impossible . . .”

  Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, in response to the question: “Will this gun not make war more terrible?” from Havelock Ellis, English scientist, 1893

  Most Flawed Use of Pets as Anti-Tank Devices

  In the Second World War, the Nazi Blitzkrieg was a revolution in warfare. German tanks were fast and powerful and very difficult for conventional weapons to repel. They rolled over Poland with little resistance and most of Europe soon followed. The Allies were forced into a mad scramble to figure out how to slow down the onslaught. The Soviet military machine thought it had the answer.

  Their plan was based on the work of a Russian, Ivan Pavlov, who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for his work studying how dogs could be conditioned to expect food. Using the example of Pavlov, the Russians starved some dogs then let them loose in a tank park. The dogs quickly learned that after being released from their pens they would find food under a tank. Once conditioned to make the connection between tanks and food, the dogs were then wired with pressure-triggered explosives. Having been denied food just before a tank attack, the dogs of war were to be unleashed into a field of oncoming German Panzers.

  The plan was a partial success, but not as the Soviets had hoped. The dogs had been trained under Soviet tanks so they would run to the familiar smells and sounds of their own tanks in battle rather than the strange smells and sounds of the German tanks. With hindsight, the Soviets might have also expected that in battle a four-legged bomb would run anywhere but towards a moving tank firing shells. At best, the dogs would spook at the rumble of a running diesel engine and run away from the battle. At worst, they became a potential threat to everyone else on the battlefield.

  The anti-tank dogs were pulled from service in 1942 when several packs of hungry hounds ran amok forcing an entire Russian division into a panicked retreat.

  ___________________

  1 Pyrrhus was recorded to have said reflectively, “One more victory like that and we’re totally fucked.” Or words to that effect.

  2 During one siege, William’s foes mocked him by hanging tanned hides from the battlements. Unwisely, as it turned out, because once he had captured the place, he chopped off the hands and feet of every member of the garrison.

  3 The first casualty was William’s jester Taillefer who rode out ahead, singing the “Song of Roland” while juggling a sword. He was promptly killed by an English warrior. The Normans probably omitted this detail from the Bayeux Tapestry out of embarrassment.

  4 William marched on London unopposed and was crowned King of England on Christmas Day in Westminster Abbey. A cheer went up in English and French as the crown was placed on his head. The Norman guards outside, thinking that something had gone horribly wrong, attacked the crowd outside slaying many innocent bystanders and setting fire to several buildings. Sales of commemorative tea towels were very slow.

  5 Where they would remain until 1961 when a salvage team brought the ship to the surface and dragged it off to a museum.

  6 The Roman legions, Il Duce reasoned, had survived on a diet of stodgy barley porridge and conquered the known world, while his own soldiers struggled even to defeat Albania on a diet of spaghetti. According to the fascist leader, flaccid tagliatelle was symbolic of the Italian male’
s lost virility.

  7 His net worth today has been estimated at £160 billion.

  8 i.e. “steal”.

  9 According to Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templar (1898-1979), British soldier and military historian.

  10 This may sound familiar – Ed.

  11 The sick and injured, who had been left behind as arranged, were massacred within minutes of the last British soldier leaving Kabul.

  12 Some accounts say forty-five minutes. Whatever, it was quick.

  13 The real killers in the Crimean War were typhoid and cholera – 20,000 deaths to disease as against 3,400 in actual warfare.

  14 Not that the British had a monopoly on useless generals. François Canrobert of the French Army was nicknamed “Robert Can’t” for his indecisiveness in the Crimea.

  15 While they sawed Raglan’s arm off, without anaesthetic, he remained stoically silent. The only comment he made was when they threw his severed limb into a basket. “You there, bring my arm back, there’s a ring my wife gave me on the finger.”

  16 You may have noticed the emerging knitwear theme.

  17 After the battle, Cardigan said his first emotion was anger at Nolan’s attempt to upstage him by riding to the front, not the loss of his men.

  18 Although his men were freezing to death, Cardigan had his little knitted waistcoat made especially for the cold Russian weather and it became a popular item of clothing.

  19 King Alfonso’s decision to arrive on a state visit to France wearing a Prussian military uniform, twelve years after the people of Paris had suffered horribly in a siege during the Franco-Prussian War, was straight from The Duke of Edinburgh Book of Tact.

  20 If the aim of the war was to grow impressive amounts of facial hair, then Burnside was the US Army’s most successful general. He allowed the hair along his cheeks and upper lip to grow, but shaved his chin, which gave him the appearance of a man who has a pair of squirrels stapled to each side of his face. His name was inverted to give these patches of hair the name “sideburns”.

  21 From the 1870s into the 1930s, over 200 people came forward claiming to be survivors of the Little Big Horn, most as Custer’s scout or a last messenger, but all were proven to be frauds. The only proven survivor was an injured US cavalry horse called Comanche. For years afterwards, he appeared in 7th Cavalry parades, rigged for riding but with an empty saddle.

  22 The Sioux Chief “Rain in the Face” claimed later that he had cut out Custer’s heart and eaten it. He said he didn’t much like the taste of human flesh, he just wanted revenge.

  23 Known to his troops as “Reverse Buller” because of his record of defeats. After one spectacularly embarrassing retreat, Buller boasted to his superiors in London that he had accomplished his withdrawal without losing “a man, a flag or a cannon”. When James Whistler heard about this, he added, “or a minute”.

  24 Although, surprisingly, Napoleon wasn’t particularly short for his time – about five foot six inches – but was often seen out and about with his Imperial Guard which, led to the perception of him being short because they were above-average height.

  25 The heroine celebrated in The Yellow Rose of Texas. There was an apocryphal story that she had been sent by Sam Houston to seduce Santa Anna to make him unprepared for the American attack.

  26 This event inspired William McGonagall’s tribute poem “The Loss of the Victoria” (see Appendix III: Selected Poems of William Topaz McGonagall).

  27 Not all of the plans hatched by the Government’s undercover “dirty tricks” department were quite as subtle as Pyke’s. Operation Foxley was the name of a plan to kill Hitler using anthrax. Scientists pondered ways of hiding the lethal agent; they suggested the assassin could wear glasses or false teeth, or perhaps should have a “physical peculiarity such as wearing a truss or a false limb”. The report noted: “Guns and hypodermic syringes disguised as fountain pens are usually not a bit convincing and are likely to lead to the death of the operator before he has had any opportunity of making his attack.” After much discussion, Operation Foxley was abandoned.

  28 There were actually two Pykes working for the British war effort. While Geoffrey was busily alarming the top brass with his plans for ice-sculpture aircraft carriers, his cousin Magnus was attached to another think-tank working for the Ministry of Food. Magnus Pyke was one of a team of young scientists asked to come up with ideas for feeding Britain’s population during a time of national food shortages. Noting blood donations were actually outstripping local storage for blood transfusions, Magnus suggested using the excess human blood to make black pudding. His idea was quietly shelved.

  5

  From Bard to Worse: Losers in Art and Entertainment

  In which a man writes poems about cheese; some theatregoers injure themselves laughing at a tragedy; an artist fails to see that less is more; and a bandage-wrapped paraplegic kicks a man dressed as a moose in the crotch.

  Hot Doggerel: the World’s Worst Poet

  “Dame Fortune has been very kind to me by endowing me with the genius of poetry.”

  William McGonagall

  No one followed their muse with quite the same heroic dedication as William Topaz McGonagall. His poetry was so unbelievably bad that some said his work was that of a clever hoaxer. But McGonagall’s life was that of a true starving artist, a more or less tragic and continuous battle with hardship, disappointment and poverty; the only thing missing was talent.

  McGonagall was one of five children born to poor Irish parents in Edinburgh in 1825. His father was a handloom weaver who travelled around Scotland to find work. The family eventually settled in Dundee where father and son became weavers in the local jute factory.

  Despite a very limited education William was a prolific reader of Shakespeare and he harboured a secret ambition to become an actor. In 1858, he and his workmates clubbed together to bribe the manager of the local Theatre Royal to let him play the leading role for a remarkable two-Act version of Macbeth. Determined to make the most of his big chance, in the combat scene, after being run through by the sword of Macduff, McGonagall stayed on his feet and brandished his weapon about the ears of his adversary with so much enthusiasm that the performance almost ended in actual bloodshed. The actor playing the part of Macduff repeatedly told McGonagall to “die or else” and eventually disarmed him with a well-aimed kick, but the weaponless McGonagall continued to duck and weave round Macduff like a prize fighter. Finally, Macduff threw his sword away, grabbed McGonagall by the throat and pulled him to the ground. The audience demanded seven encores of this death scene. Word of the show spread around Dundee and, at two subsequent performances, mounted police had to control the crowds. McGonagall’s career as a Tragedian had begun.

  In 1860, McGonagall and most of his workmates were laid off during a slump in the jute industry. This is where Australia had a very narrow escape. Most of the weavers took a ship to Queensland, but not McGonagall. He decided to take up acting full time. Travelling on foot to villages around Dundee displaying his special Shakespearean talent in halls and smithies, he scraped a living by earning sixpence here and there.

  McGonagall retired from the stage at the age of forty-seven (or possibly fifty-two, he was vague about his birthdate) when in his own words, a “divine inspiration” urged him to “Write! Write!” In his autobiography, he describes how he discovered himself “to be a poet, which was in the year 1877. During the Dundee Holiday week/ in the bright and balmy month of June, when trees and flowers were in full/ bloom, while lonely and sad in my room.”

  He set pen to paper with his first work which was published in a local paper with the following apologia from the editor:

  W. McG of Dundee, who modestly seeks to hide his light under a bushel, has surreptitiously dropped into our letterbox an address to the Rev. George Gilfillan. Here is a sample of this worthy’s powers of versification:

  Rev George Gilfillan of Dundee,

  There’s none can you excel;

  For you have boldly r
ejected the Confession of Faith,

  And defended your cause real well.

  The first time I heard him speak,

  ’Twas in the Kinnaird Hall,

  Lecturing on the Garibaldi Movement,

  As loud as he could bawl.

  He is a liberal gentleman

  To the poor while in distress,

  And for his kindness unto them.

  The Lord will surely bless.

  My blessing on his noble form

  And on his lofty head,

  May all good angels guard him while living.

  And hereafter when he’s dead.

  Over the next twenty-five years, McGonagall produced more than two hundred poems, never falling below the standard set by this first epic. His choice of subject matter was eclectic and often inspired by contemporary news events. Any rhyme is a good rhyme for McGonagall, although in the whole body of his work there is not one that actually works, always striking the wrong note at every opportunity. An example of his deftness of touch is shown in these lines from his “Calamity in London; Family of Ten Burned to Death”:

  Oh, Heaven! It was a frightful and pitiful sight to see

  Seven bodies charred of the Jarvis family;

  And Mrs Jarvis was found with her child, and both carbonised,

  And as the searchers gazed thereon they were surprised.

  And these were lying beside the fragments of the bed,

  And in a chair the tenth victim was sitting dead;

  Oh Horrible! Oh Horrible! What a sight to behold

  The charred and burnt bodies of young and old.

  McGonagall was prolific, often at the expense of his health. In “Tribute to Dr Murison”, he explains how his life was saved by a physician’s advice:

  He told me at once what was ailing me;

  He said I had been writing too much poetry,