rocket cats!

[thatguy]

From wikpedia today: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Helm">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Helm</a><!-- m -->

'Rocket cat'

(Two illustrations (from 1584 and 1607) of Helm's concept of a 'rocket cat' and dove)

One method described by Helm has attracted attention for its illustration of what has been dubbed a 'rocket cat' – a feline with what appears to be a rocket on its back propelling it towards a castle or fortified town. The same illustration also shows what appears to be a rocket-propelled dove. The illustration appears in various forms in different manuscript versions of Helm's book, as well as in the 1625 printed edition. The images appear in a section titled "To set fire to a castle or city which you can't get at otherwise," in which Helm describes ways of using incendiary devices strapped to animals to set fortified places on fire.[6] He writes:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow ... if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.[6]

Mitch Fraas of the University of Pennsylvania, which has a copy of Helm's manuscript, writes that "there is no way to know if Helm himself ever employed this method of pyrotechnic warfare."[6] He describes it as "sort of a harebrained scheme. It seems like a really terrible idea, and very unlikely the animals would run back to where they came from. More likely they'd set your own camp on fire."[7]

Helm was not the first to propose or use incendiary animals; the Biblical figure Samson is described as attaching torches to the tails of three hundred foxes, leaving the panicked beasts to run through the fields of the Philistines, burning all in their wake.[8] Early Sanskrit texts, Russian and Scandinavian sources mention cats and birds bearing incendiary devices,[9] while the 10th century Chinese manual Hu Chhien Ching and its 11th century successor Wu Ching Tsung Yao describe and illustrate a series of "fire animals". These include "apricot-stone fire sparrows" carrying burning tinders attached to their legs inside an apricot stone, with the hope that they would fly into the enemy's granaries and set them on fire, and "magic-fire flying crows", artificial birds powered by four rocket tubes.[10] The 10th century Kievan ruler Olga of Kiev is described in the Russian Primary Chronicle as using flaming birds to wreak revenge on the Drevlyans for killing her husband Igor:

Olga requested three pigeons and three sparrows from each household [of the Drevlyans]. Having gathered these birds Olga gave to each soldier in her army a pigeon or a sparrow, and ordered them to attach by a thread to each pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the sparrows under the eaves. Thus the dove-cotes, the coops, the porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once.[11]

--tg