11 Old War Photos You Won't Believe Aren't Fake (Part 2)

Apparently, COBRA was instrumental in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

The nefarious contraption in that photo is most likely the Soviet Progvev-T, a gas-dynamic minesweeper. Weighing in at 37 tons, it consisted of a tank with a MiG-15 jet engine strapped to its roof, which would superheat a kerosene flame that, when pointed at the ground, would ignite and detonate any mines lying in wait. Yes, the Soviets built a tank for the specific purpose of shambling across the countryside and blasting superheated jet flame at the ground until it exploded.

Really, though, this was far from the most ridiculous-looking vehicle on tank treads. Take the German SdKfz 2, for example:

2nd Armored Productions
"Did someone weld two bikes back to back? HOGAN!!"

The SdKfz 2, or Kettenkrad, was an armored motorcycle that saw extensive use on the Eastern front, because it was one of the few things that didn't sink into the gray oceans of mud the Russians called roads. However, this probably didn't stop the Russians from making fun of the Germans for riding around on golf carts like a bunch of assholes.

German Federal Archives
"Ignore them. They're just jealous."

Actually, those guys in the photograph are two German Feldartillerie (field artillery) soldiers, which means that what's strapped to their heads is most likely some kind of device meant to detect the approach of enemy planes (while risking serious hearing damage should someone happen to fire artillery in their immediate vicinity).

Nowadays that job is performed by radar, but up until World War II, enemy detection was done entirely by sight and sound, meaning soldiers had to try to spot approaching planes, tanks, and infantry with their eyes and ears and nothing else. Sure, you may spend most of the day looking like a cartoon character, and it would immediately become completely useless the moment any fighting started, but a tenuous, unreliable advanced warning system is still better than getting bombed out of the blue.

Despite appearances, this is not Doc Brown trying to hit 88 miles per hour in a budget time machine, nor is it Clark Griswold steering his family into well-intentioned-yet-calamitous oblivion. No, this is a photo of the USS Enterprise dumping old cars off the coast of the Philippines in 1978, which is a sentence that somehow manages to make even less sense.

In the days before the environment was invented, it was apparently business as usual for servicemen to get rid of unwanted automobiles by casting them into the sea. The car in the photograph appears to be a Plymouth Savoy, and the reason it's leaving behind a trail of white smoke is because it's being launched by the steam catapult system normally used to assist jet fighters during takeoff. Slapping Captain Planet in the face has never looked so spectacularly awesome.

One of two things is going on here: A) it is the winter of mankind's doom, and Mary Poppins has managed to scavenge together enough bottle caps and copper wire inside that old pram to make a decent trade with Mohawk, the leader of the local cannibal tribe, or B) that child is in serious trouble.

Well, the thing about war is that even though things may be exploding all around you, shit still needs to get done. People's lives don't stop just because there's a war going on -- they still need to buy cereal and go to the laundromat. No picture captures those realities of war better than this photograph of a woman in a gas mask taking her baby out for a walk in Berlin after a 1943 Allied bombing raid. That baby's not going to walk itself, after all.

The British also understood the need to carry on with everyday life despite the constant threat of deadly gas attacks, and they demonstrated this in the most noble way possible -- leggy girl shows:

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Giving girls an excuse to go days without shaving their mustaches.

Of course, gas masks weren't exclusive to World War II. They also had them during World War I, as evidenced by this photograph of Austrian sailors demonstrating the oft-held belief that everything about that war had to be bizarre and/or terrifying:

Mansell/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
"'Sup?"

Those masks look like they were designed by a team of scientists forced to consume nothing but expired heroin and the movie Scream for 17 straight hours. Amazingly, Austria still managed to lose that war, despite the fact that they had an entire navy dressed up like Batman villains. Historically, gas masks were not necessarily seen as instruments of intimidation, even though this 1937 photo by Viktor Bulla, showing off a patriotic group of young fighters from Leningrad ready to defend their homeland, seems to indicate the primary theater of battle was their enemies' nightmares:

Viktor Bulla
Russia's casualty statistics often fail to count the restless undead.

The terrifying truth of that picture is that it's of the control room of a submarine. Now, we know submarines are complex pieces of machinery, so much so that a German U-boat was once sunk when someone pushed the wrong button on the toilet and managed to flush the entire thing to the bottom of the ocean. The room you see in the picture is from a German SM U-110 submarine that was sunk by depth charges in 1918 along with its 39-person crew.

The borderline absurdity of its control valves, meant to regulate the flow of air in the vessel while the sub's operators prayed every second that they didn't turn the wrong valve and kill everyone on board, goes along well with the rest of the submarine, which looks like somebody put the blueprints into a blender before sending them off to the builders:

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
Terry Gilliam directed Germany's sub program.

We know that battle elephants were used for thousands of years, but that had to have gone out of style since the advent of rifles and gunpowder, right? Surely these gentlemen are merely riding that elephant on their way to the battlefield, and have no intention of trying to pilot that lumbering earthquake machine during a firefight.

Well, the Thai people love them some elephants. So while the rest of the world stopped using nature's bio-tanks as instruments of war once the implementation of rifles reduced them to giant bullet sumps, the Thai army kept right on using them until the 1893 Franco-Siamese War.

The elephants were mostly used for transporting artillery (because that stuff is simply too heavy for people to carry), but the Thai also outfitted them with swivel muskets called jingals, so that they worked like four-legged attack vehicles that the Galactic Empire would be proud of. The elephant's crew would guide the animal into position and then fire the jingal, sending both bullets and psychological trauma toward the enemy (because the guns could only be fired over the animal's rear, making it look like the elephants were shooting bullets out of their assholes).

Tevaprapas Makklay
Real missed opportunity, not sticking cannonballs in the trunk.

But obviously, Japan wasn't the only country that went on to inspire the invention of the Photoshop clone tool. Here's an impossible number of Allied jeeps from the invasion of Japan, abandoned in Okinawa in 1949:

Life Magazine
Pearl Harbor explains most of this decision as well.

Then there were the so-called Liberty ships. Hitler's U-boats sank hundreds of cargo ships supplying the Allied war effort in Europe. To replace them, the British developed designs for a ship that could be built for about $2 million in 40 days, which was relatively cheap and absurdly fast. Appropriately, the U.S. government then built enough of them to fit two of every animal on Earth:

Life Magazine
Because God had told them to destroy every man, woman, and child.

Finally, in case you thought the sky was safe from this game of military flexing, we want to bring to your attention the number of aircraft the Allies were pumping out during World War II, which resembles a hangar holding all of your extra lives in a game of 1942:

US Air Force
Our initial plan for defeating Japan was to blot out the sun.

Eric Yosomono spends hours scouring the darkest depths of the Internet in search of images. You can check out other photo essays of his on Gaijinass.com or be good boys and girls and like their Facebook page.