So I said to my wife, I say: This ginger wheat beer is making me write up Nazi tanks crewed by Capuchin monkeys. And my wife says That’s not the beer’s fault, dear.
…Truth.
kapuziner-1-list-e5-google-docs
Kapuziner-1 List E5
Weight: 3 tons
Length: 10 feet
Width: 4 feet
Height: 3 feet
Crew: 4 Capuchin Monkeys
Armor: 15mm
Main armament: 1 2cm cannon
Other armament: 2 7.92mm machine guns
Speed: 45 mph on-road; 35 mph off-road.
After a certain point, the Nazis were pretty much ready to fund anything. In this case, ‘anything’ was a modified, scaled-down Panzer I that had had a gun from a Panzer II slapped on it and stripped down of everything that wasn’t either armor, or needed to drive the tank. That included the crew, which is why somebody had the brainstorm of using trained Capuchin monkeys to act as the commander, driver, gunner, and loader for the Kapuziner List.
Alas, if the Nazis had managed to successfully train the monkeys then they’d have managed to build something that might have even been useful: an actual ‘stealth’ tank. Kapuziners were theoretically faster than pretty much all of the other tanks on the battlefield, and easier to conceal, thanks to their low profile and generally smaller footprint. Presumably the plan was to use these tanks to slip through enemy lines and wreak havoc in the rear in hit-and-run missions. And if the Russians and/or Americans caught one, so what? They couldn’t put any of their own soldiers into the tank!
Obviously, the limiting factor was the crew: there was no indication that the Nazis were ever able to properly indoctrinate the capuchin monkeys into being good, furry soldiers for the Third Reich. But that was the 1940s. In this modern day of 1966 we know so much more about how to control the actions of dumb beasts, through surgery and behavioral conditioning and the judicious use of mind-probes. Permit me to show you just what I mean, Mr. Bond…
What? Oh, the uniforms for the monkeys came with the looted documents. I simply could not resist.
On the other hand, I’m running short of ideas for my Achtung Cthulhu/Hellboy campaign, and that ginger wheat beer sounds like it might be just what I need.
What the heck, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
During WWII, our Navy experimented with using pigeons to guide ship-seeking bombs. To really good effect, actually. It’s kind of surprising the project didn’t actually go live.
.
Granted, crewing a tank requires a lot more independent thought than pecking the projected image of a ship on a pressure sensitive screen.