That’s little Sophia. – Chap. 6, Act 3, Strip 44

Well, obviously I couldn’t restrict the portfolio of the Professor’s work on the island to only that ridiculous chocolate cannon…so I had him also put in some hours working out the bugs in one of the more notorious faux-Wunderwaffen drifting around popular culture: Die Glocke.

The tendency to play up Nazi Germany’s secret weapons for not only all but considerably more than they’re worth has really reached new disreputable heights with this thing. It defies physics as much as any historical logic, and the primary evidence for its existence amounts to zilch. The secondary evidence, meanwhile, comes up to nada. On the level of tertiary evidence we have one guy claiming to have seen an old interrogation report. And yet they’re books and TV shows dedicated to this “mystery”.

Since the different interpretations of the thing’s purpose don’t agree with each other, I’ve felt free to come up with my own intpretation from whole cloth – which, incidentally, seems to be what everyone else has been doing, anyway. So, yeah, here’s the truth about die Glocke: It was developed by Germany’s Wehrmacht to serve as an ultra-high-strength dinner bell suspended by anti-gravity engines, capable of calling a whole infantry division to dinner at once. While there’s an obvious gain in efficiency involved in that, someone then realized that using die Glocke would leave the camp unguarded, because all of the sentries would also come in for dinner at the same time. Therefore, the device was never deployed and development halted.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation has precisely the same likelihood of being true as all of the other ones on offer, and that still leaves die Glocke considerably less likely to have existed than those chocolate guns on an island not called Toblerone.

More on Thurs…uh, Monday!





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