'Pookie' and Spider shotguns, Rhodesia
Rhodesia and South Africa in particular were major areas of IAV/ MRAP innovation, with vehicles like ‘Pookie’, also known as Leopard, being some of the first successful MRAP vehicles of any kind. Pookie was designed during the Rhodesian Bush War in 1976, and is a small one-man mine-clearing vehicle based on a heavily modified Volkswagon Beetle chassis with all the body except the engine and steering removed. It had a top speed of around 50-60 KPH even with its armour due to the extreme amount of weight stripped from the vehicle, making it resemble an armoured dune buggy. (1)
The wheels are replaced with Formula One tires bought second hand after the South African Grand Prix. The wide tyres prevented the detonation of buried mines by exerting less ground pressure than a human footprint and spanning the mines’ circumference. Pookie was so successful that 68 were built between 1976 and 1980, and they cleared 550 landmines, with the only death being due to an RPG-7 hitting a crew compartment and killing a driver, not from mine explosions.
The armament of these Rhodesian vehicles is very interesting as well, you can see it in black at the front of the Pookie vehicle and on the page above- it is a 24-barrel chain-operated 12-gauge shotgun designed by Hilton R. Walker, nicknamed the ‘Spider’ anti-ambush shotgun, and it was used for clearing brush or emergency protection.
As the shotgun was fired the barrels would ripple fire, meaning that it made a wave of buckshot on the vehicle's frontal arc, and you can see a second set of barrels underneath as well. A hand-crank and chain inside the vehicle operated the firing mechanism. (2) Not all the vehicles were armed with these weapons, only some, as Pookie’s primary purpose was mine clearing, not combat.
1- David Goran, ‘The Formula 1 land mine detector – The Pookie’, (2016)
2- Images of the ‘Spider’/Persuader by T Swearengen, Sunday Mail