A Panjandrum was a giant firework built to break Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in the first assault on Normandy’s beaches in World War II, or was it just an elaborate ruse to confuse the Germans about where the landings would actually take place. The Panjandrum was based on the design of a firework which we know as a “Catherine Wheel”. This story is so bizarre, I couldn’t resist sharing it – it could have been a Benny Hill skit!
To make D-Day a success, the Allies thought they might have to break through the formidable German defences. After conquering much of Western Europe in the first few years of World War II, Nazi Germany then diverted a huge effort into protecting what it had invaded. Once the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies in late 1941, the threat of invasion from the sea went from a distinct possibility to certainty. To prevent it, hundreds of thousands of forced labourers – some of them Russian prisoners captured on the Eastern Front – were set to work. They built walls, tank traps and reinforced-concrete emplacements. The fortifications stretched around 5,000km (3,105 miles) from France’s border with Spain all the way to the northern tip of Norway. Adolf Hitler called it the “Atlantic Wall“, and there are still many traces of it, littering beaches from the Bay of Biscay to the sub-Arctic fjords.
Allied military planners had many challenges to wrestle with during their long preparations for the liberation of Europe. Seizing a port made the most sense – it would be easier to get vital supplies to the troops on the beachhead by unloading ships more speedily on the docks. But the ports on the English Channel coast had been heavily fortified by the German defenders.
The Allies established the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, which was known informally as the “wheezers and dodgers”. They drew bookish, lab-bound, talent from the U.K.’s universities and research institutes, and challenged them to come up with new weapons that could be used in the war. No idea, however outlandish, was discouraged.
One of the weapons the British armed forces needed was something that could be deployed from a ship and was powerful enough to breach the strong concrete sea wall now in place across much of Europe.
A naval research team, lead by Nevil Shute Norway, turned to an unlikely inspiration: a firework known as the Catherine wheel. The firework uses part of the energy of a rocket, which is usually pinned to the structure, to spin it. Enough rockets, the team calculated, could generate enough energy to propel a one-tonne bomb all the way up to the beach to hit the concrete wall.
Obviously, to be able to hold a one-tonne bomb, the device would need to be a very large Catherine wheel, one that could be controlled remotely. The device they came up with looked like a large film reel, with two wheels 10ft (3m) high, on either side of a large steel tank that contained the explosive charge. Spaced around either side of the two giant wheels were a series of rockets containing cordite (gunpowder) which could be controlled remotely and would propel the device forward once the rockets ignited. The contraption might reach speeds in excess of 60mph (100 km/h), giving it enough momentum to push through any obstacles until it hit the wall. Norway and his team called their device “the Panjandrum”. This is a true story, believe it or not! The picture above is a Panjandrum.
The Panjandrum comes before the age of miniaturised electronics, but in a way it presages the age of the drone – a weapon that can be sent into battle without a human needing to pilot it. The Panjandrum was built in secret in east London and then transported to the west of England for testing. The first test took place at Westward Ho! in Devon in September 1943. The need to test it on a beach completely scuppered the project’s secrecy. The team had to test it in front of a crowd of curious civilians, who ignored military warnings that the machine was possibly hazardous. The Panjandrum was successfully launched from a landing craft, but as it moved up the beach rockets on one of the wheels detached, and the lumbering machine quickly blundered off to the side. One video, which has been preserved by the Imperial War Museum in London, shows the weapon careering over the beach throwing up a huge spray of sand and seawater – all the while being chased by an excited dog. Benny Hill again!
In 1977, the BBC produced a documentary series called The Secret War, and producer Brian Johnson described the final Panjandrum test: “At first all went well. Panjandrum rolled into the sea and began to head for the shore, the brass hats watching through binoculars from the top of a pebble ridge. Then a clamp gave: first one, then two more rockets broke free: Panjandrum began to lurch ominously. It hit a line of small craters in the sand and began to turn to starboard, careering towards photographer Louis Klemantaski, who was viewing events through his telescopic lens. He misjudged his distance from the device, and continued filming. Hearing the approaching roar, he looked up from his viewfinder to see Panjandrum, shedding live rockets in all directions, heading straight for him. “As he ran for his life, he glimpsed the assembled admirals and generals diving for cover behind the pebble ridge into barbed-wire entanglements. Panjandrum was now heading back to the sea but crashed on to the sand where it disintegrated in violent explosions, rockets tearing across the beach at great speed. The project was quietly scrapped.
In the end, success on the D-Day beaches came partly due to another unconventional weapon – modified tanks collectively known as “Funnies“. Led by the eccentric Percy Hobart, normal tanks were modified to do everything from swim to shore using canvas floatation devices, clear minefields with whirling chains, lay steel matting over soft sand or lob dustbin-sized shells at concrete emplacements. They played a massive part in making the landings on 6 June 1944 a success.
As for Nevil Shute Norway, Panjandrum was a failure, but other projects he masterminded during his time in the Navy – such as an anti-submarine depth charge system called “Hedgehog” – were far more successful. But engineering was just one of his callings. Since the 1920s, he had been publishing stories and novels, writing under a pen name because he worried his fiction could detract from the seriousness of his engineering. His pen-name? Nevil Shute. In the years after the war, he became one of the world’s most popular novelists.
There is no doubt that the Panjandrum was actually built – we have the pictures, footage and testimony of confused onlookers to corroborate it – but there remains a tantalising hint that the Panjandrum may have been an elaborate ploy to fool the German defenders into thinking that the Normandy landings were to take place far closer to one of the fortified ports than actually happened. Was the Panjandrum ultimately an intelligence tool, rather than something that would have been used in anger? “I think it was a trick, to be honest,” says Christie, of the British War Museum, “they were very open about testing it. In the cases of a lot of the other secret weapons that they built, nobody got to see what they were, or knew anything about them. It was supposed to roll up the beach and hit certain defences. When you look at the Normandy beaches, there was barbed wire and things like that, but there wasn’t anything for them to actually crash it into.”
Perhaps the Panjandrum was not intended to be a secret weapon at all?
