Battlefield Bots
Legion Magazine sat down with the Canadian War Museum’s Second World War historian Dr. Jeff Noakes to learn more about the German’s Goliath Tracked Mine from the Second World War and its impact on the development of future remote-controlled devices.
The seeds of today’s military robolution were sown a century ago in the muck and mire of the front line, where soldiers fought to overcome battlefield barriers—trenches, barbed wire, shell craters—amid enemy bullets and bombs. What if a machine could do the dirty and dangerous work?
Remote-controlled weapons—tracked land torpedoes, pilotless aerial torpedoes, unmanned explosive motorboats linked to controllers by cables up to 20 kilometres long (before wireless controls were developed)—started to appear in the First World War, bu...