My breeze, my love and my raft, my old raft, trust me, fishing happiness awaits us on the wave, hurry on, my old raft …
Fly to your beloved breeze, fly
Tell Maria I'm on my way again!
(one of the translations of the "March of the Fishermen" from the film "Generals of the Sand Quarries")
After the publication of the material "Mortar … raft", some VO readers asked me to continue the topic of combat rafts, and it turned out that there was information on this topic, but the role of rafts in battles was mostly (except for mortar rafts in the USA) very secondary. The Assyrians made rafts from wineskins and even chariots were ferried across rivers. In India, they made rafts from clay pots and jugs, turned them upside down, tied them together with bamboo poles, and in this form they floated to … the bazaar to sell there! The Tamils sailed on rafts called kattu-maram, which meant “tied logs,” and this name was carried over to the catamaran. It is known that the Incas had such large balsa rafts that they transported their troops on them along the coast. Thor Heyerdahl crossed even the Pacific Ocean on a replica of one such raft, but this is perhaps all that the raft is capable of.
The modern gengada looks like this.
True, there is a known case when a raft, or rather a song about it, was used in an ideological war against the West, that is, it served as a kind of “ideological weapon”. And it so happened that when the film "Generals of the Sand Quarries", based on the novel "Captains of the Sand" (1937) by the American director Hall Bartlett, was released on the screens of the USSR in 1974, there was one very characteristic song. In the United States, the film did not receive this recognition, but in the USSR it became simply a cult, and I just really liked the song, although no one knew its words (they sang in Portuguese). The Generals were shown in the competition program of the 1971 International Moscow Film Festival, where they received an award, and the film appeared in wide distribution three years later, and Komsomolskaya Pravda named it the best foreign film of the year. And it was here that the song in Portuguese was turned into a “Song of a Homeless Boy”: “I started life in the urban slums …” Nobody says that this song is bad or that it is “out of topic”. It's just … the lyrics of the song itself from the movie are completely different! In fact, it was called "March of the Fishermen", and the words there were as follows:
“My zhangada will go out to sea, I will work, my love, if God pleases, then when I return from the sea, I'll bring a good catch.
My comrades will return too
and we will give thanks to God in heaven."
This is a literal translation, and there is also a more beautiful one - literary one. But be that as it may, everywhere we are talking about a raft - a zhangada - a very peculiar example of folk art of the inhabitants of Brazil. The raft is very lightweight, made of balsa. Equipped with a retractable keel. Therefore, you can even maneuver against the wind on it, but if you fell into the water from it, then you can immediately consider yourself a dead man. No swimmer can catch up with him, so easy on the go, especially in a good wind!
By the way, the great Jules Verne also decided to pay tribute to the Zhangada and immortalized its name in the novel “Zhangada. Eight hundred leagues across the Amazon. But only his raft is not at all like the raft of coastal Brazilian fishermen. By the way, the film “The Secret of Joao Corral” (1959) was shot based on the novel, which as a child I watched as something completely exciting.
Zhangada from the movie "The Secret of Joao Corral".
Yes, but what does all this have to do with the military theme? Yes, the most direct, as it turns out. But again, you will have to start from afar, namely from the Civil War in Russia and not just in Russia, but in the Caspian Sea. There it was decided to try to hang torpedoes under … fishing sailboats "Rybnitsa" and sink the White Guard ships with an unexpected blow. The torpedo should have been installed under the bottom and fired at the target from close range. Armed with torpedoes three Rybnitsa, and only one went into the sea. Rybnitsa with a crew of Reds dressed in sailor clothes approached the white ships standing in the roadstead, but was stopped for inspection. They found nothing suspicious, and the white officer had already given permission to withdraw. But here the boy, taken into the carriage to divert his eyes, had the stupidity to ask: “Why didn’t they let the mine go?”, Well, the whites heard him. The boat was thoroughly searched and a torpedo was found under the keel. After that, the "fishermen" were sent to counterintelligence, where they interrogated and hanged, and the fool-boy was repulsed and released.
Zhangada from the Maritime Museum in Barcelona.
And although this project was not crowned with success, the very idea of a covert strike from a camouflaged ship on the enemy is not bad at all. True, such camouflage is prohibited by international maritime law, that is, from its point of view, the same, for example, trap ships, which were widely used both during the First World War and during the Second World War - the "thing" is completely illegal. In accordance with it, it is impossible, for example, to disguise a missile carrier as a container ship, although technically there is nothing complicated about that.
However, for sabotage actions … such an experience is "the very thing" that is needed, and here it is just here that one could recall the zhangada. The fact is that these light sailing rafts can go very far from the coast. In the morning the wind blows from the shore and the zhangadas go out to sea. Towards nightfall, the wind changes, and the rafts rush home with their catch. So one can meet a zhangada very far from the coast, so far away that the coast itself will not be visible. And if so, then it may be quite close to the warships of different powers and … why not use the zhangada in this case to carry out some kind of "special operation". Well, and it will not be possible to arm it with a torpedo, no, since the torpedo is noisy, which means, one way or another, it will unmask the raft that launched it, but … with a homing gravity bomb that can turn this fast fishing transport into a truly formidable weapon.
In its shape, this weapon may well resemble a bomb with developed steering surfaces in the stern. You can attach it to the raft using ordinary ropes, so in the event of a search it will be impossible to find at least something reprehensible on it, well, but it is activated mechanically - pulled the cable and … that's it!
Well, and it is called gravitational because there are no engines in it, nothing that makes noise, and it moves exclusively due to the force of gravity! So, we saw an enemy aircraft carrier not far from our raft and, pointing the nose of our zhangada at it and activating the bomb, dropped it from our "bomb raft". Carried away by its own weight, the bomb began to sink and at the same time began to accelerate.
At a certain depth, the hydrostat will have to move the rudders to a position due to which the bomb will sink "at an angle", that is, it will begin to move towards the ship, sinking deeper and deeper. When it reaches its maximum depth, the same hydrostat will release it from the load, so that the bomb acquires positive buoyancy and rushes to the surface. But shifting the rudders, which is controlled by the bomb's homing system, will keep her on the course leading to the target. Its speed will increase all the time, so that it will be able to catch up with even a fairly high-speed target. Moreover, to catch up "silently", because no "engines" work on it, which means that there are no characteristic noises that can alert the "listeners" of the enemy ship.
As for the homing system, it can be of a very different type, it can work both by the magnetic field of the ship, and by the shadow that it casts from the surface, and aiming the bomb at the noise of the propellers. Even a television control system on a cable five kilometers long, and that can be used on this underwater projectile, because it has nothing but an explosive charge and a control system, which means that you can place a cable reel on it. Well, the control panel from the zhangada can be simply drowned in case of danger.
This jangada is a model made of paper and barbecue sticks. Made in the 4th grade at a labor lesson and … why not make such models in the classroom? Of course, there is no need to tell children about the "bomb", but why not just tell how brave ghangadeiro go to sea with them and fish to feed their family? The technology is such that it allows you to get a finished model in just one lesson. And even those children whose arms grow out of the "lower back", in general, can make this model at a sufficient level. Plus, she also swims! Thus, this is also … a "weapon", as it makes our children smarter, and the smart will always defeat the stupid!
Finally, at the very last stretch of the way up, the bomb actively "works" with its rudders in order to be exactly under the ship. Then comes the blow and the explosion! A hole appears in the most dangerous place - directly on the bottom, water hits the hole with a fountain, an extremely dangerous situation arises on board, well, and the raft that dropped this bomb continues on its way as if nothing had happened: what has it to do with it? You never know why there are explosions on board warships!
Another "silent weapon". However, he must be able to direct him to the target, he must be taken care of, fed, treated … And then he went out to sea on a raft and … balls-x-x!
It is clear that this weapon is not for every day, but just in case, something like the demolition dolphins from the novel by Robert Merle "Reasonable Animal". But it was there that the "ends" of how everything happened, still managed to be found, and in the end everything will end with a "happy ending". With a gravity bomb on a raft or, say, aboard a fishing felucca, everything will be completely different. Well, a flotilla of such "boats" can easily drown an entire aircraft carrier formation, dropping at it not one such, but many traceless shells. So … this fast Brazilian raft is not that harmless, is it?
