The effectiveness of the use of insects is very ambiguous. On the one hand, they can cause serious epidemics and kill a lot of people, and on the other, they can be terribly scary. This most likely happened about two thousand years ago, when the Romans threw the fortress of Hart in Mesopotamia with clay pots with scorpions. In other sources, scorpions were used not by the besiegers, but by the defenders. There was certainly a psychological effect, but there is no mention of scorpion victims. Capable of sowing panic in the ranks of the enemy and honey bees - they have enjoyed success as a "biological weapon" for many centuries. So, fighters from the Nigerian nation Tiv shot bees from air wooden tubes at the enemy.
In medieval England, bee colonies were settled under the walls of castles, creating a reliable defensive shield in case of an assault. Embittered bees, protecting the hives, stung both ordinary fighters and knights in steel armor. The latter had more problems with poisonous insects - several bees or wasps that fell under the armor were able to take the knight out of the battle for a long time. Insects were also used during the siege of castles. Several thousand wasps and bees, capable of disorganizing the defense of the townspeople, were often launched into a dug-out tunnel. Legend has it that the German city of Beyenburg (Pchelograd) got its name during the Thirty Years War, when a gang of deserters approached this village. In the convent of the town there was a large apiary, which the resourceful nuns turned over and hid in the chambers of the monastery. The failed robbers and rapists came under a massive bee attack and left the city untouched.
Jeffrey Lockwood, in The Six-Legged Soldiers, writes about the bee troops:
“It is known about the throwing of bee hives during the wars of the Spanish Reconquista. In the XIV century, even a special throwing machine was developed, resembling a windmill. Its crosspiece rotated, and each of the connected bars served as a throwing lever. With the help of such a machine, it was possible to launch a lot of stones at the enemy in a short time - or hives with bees, as was sometimes done."
The author also mentions hives on ships (hornets' nests), which were fired at the enemy. In general, bees are not only useful honey, but an effective tactical weapon.
Surprisingly, but in the XX century, bees were used to wage war. In East Africa, on the territory of modern Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, during the battles of the First World War against the Entente soldiers, "bee mines" were used. A string was stretched across the path, attached to an earthen pot with bees or wasps. What happened in the event of a "blow-up", I think, is understandable. But the bees were capable of much more. In the war between Italy and Ethiopia, local natives threw packages with bees into the hatches of Italian tanks. As a result, several tanks fell off the cliff, and many tankers left their vehicles in panic.
However, much more serious consequences from the use of entomological weapons occurred in 1346 during the siege by Khan Janibek of the Genoese city of Kaffa (modern Feodosia). A plague broke out in the Khan's army, and the commander ordered the bodies of the dead to be thrown into the besieged city with catapults. Obviously, together with the corpses, plague fleas got to Kaffa, which later became the cause of a deadly epidemic in Europe. Janibek, after unsuccessful assault attempts, left the city walls, thereby saving his army from the plague epidemic. According to Jeffrey Lockwood, it was this incident of the unconscious use of entomological weapons that caused the deaths of many millions of Europeans from the black plague.
Insect vectors
In the XX century, entomologists and epidemiologists joined forces to transfer insects to a qualitatively new level of combat use - infecting the enemy with infectious diseases. We will not retell the story of the well-known Japanese "Detachment 731", whose specialists became famous for their hellish work with plague fleas and cholera flies. Modern historians believe that the Japanese killed at least 440 thousand people with the help of artificially caused epidemics in China. Significantly, Shiro Ishii, the squad leader, received immunity from the US authorities and continued to pursue "science" at Fort Detrick. He became one of the masterminds of the United States entomological warfare program in the 1950s and 1970s. In accordance with it, installations were developed for the reproduction of 100 million mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, aimed against the Soviet Union. The fact is that there was no vaccination campaign against the causative agents of this serious disease in the USSR, and this fact was taken into account in the USA.
The Americans devoted an important place in this work to the practical part of their research. In 1954, at the Daguey Range, they organized the Great Itch exercise, during which they used the uninfected flea Xenopsylla cheopis. The insects were packed in E86 and E77 cluster bombs, which were dropped over experimental animals at the test site. Despite the fact that during the next flight the fleas were bitten by the crew. The tests were deemed successful. A year later, tests were carried out on civilians in the state of Georgia. For this, about a million female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were bred, which, in the event of a conflict with the USSR, was to become a carrier of yellow fever. More than 330 thousand uninfected mosquitoes were sprayed with E14 ammunition from aircraft flying at an altitude of 100 meters. Further, we examined the viability of the individuals, their "appetite" and the dispersion distance, which was about 6 km. In general, the outcome of the operation was positive. Later, almost every year, the military dropped uninfected mosquitoes in different parts of Georgia, increasingly honing the art of biological warfare. With the emergence of a deeply echeloned air defense in key areas of the Soviet Union, such tests became absurd. Therefore, in 1965, they initiated Operation Magic Sword, during which mosquitoes were sprayed over the sea several kilometers off the southeastern coast of the United States. Evaluations of the effectiveness of such an entomological war have shown that it can lead to real genocide - one massive discharge of mosquitoes with yellow fever can kill more than 600 thousand people. Data on such studies over time became irrelevant, and in 1981 the US Department of Defense partially declassified the information.
During World War II, the Germans tried to cause food problems in Britain by dropping containers of Colorado potato beetle on potato fields in 1943. According to some reports, in the Frankfurt area, the Germans carried out mass tests to infect potatoes with the Colorado potato beetle. The French also planned to use their striped beetles against the Germans, but did not have time - potential victims occupied the country. After the war, the countries of the Eastern Bloc accused the Americans of biological sabotage with the Colorado potato beetle. Polish newspapers wrote about this:
“American candidates for criminals of atomic warfare today have shown a model of what they are preparing for humanity. Only murderers can resort to such horror as the deliberate destruction of peaceful human labor, the destruction of the crop by the Colorado potato beetle."
USSR Agriculture Minister Ivan Benediktov wrote to Suslov in 1950:
“Creating favorable conditions for the mass reproduction of the Colorado potato beetle, the Americans are simultaneously carrying out villainous acts of dropping the beetle in massive numbers from aircraft over a number of regions of the German Democratic Republic and in the Baltic Sea region in order to infect the beetle and the Polish Republic. Every day the USSR Ministry of Agriculture receives information about the massive influx of the Colorado potato beetle from the Baltic Sea to the shores of Poland. This is undoubtedly the result of sabotage work by the Anglo-Americans."
The Germans worked with malaria mosquitoes in concentration camps, and in the fall of 1943 near Rome, previously drained swamps were deliberately flooded, into which the larvae of an malaria mosquito were launched. The work was supervised by the German entomologist Erich Martini. They planned to infect the Anglo-American troops, but because of the vaccination of the military, civilians were hit. More than 1,200 cases of the disease among 245,000 people were recorded in 1943 and almost 55,000 in 1944.
In the modern world, insects are becoming weapons in the hands of terrorists and genetic engineers. But more on that in the next article.
