How we won war: garlic chocolate and exploding rats
New book looks at the weird and wonderful ways Britain defeated the Nazi threat
WHEN Britain fought for its very survival against the Nazis it required all the nation’s qualities of bravery, ingenuity and invention finally to vanquish Hitler’s forces.
But while the role played by the Spitfire and the Bren gun in achieving victory has been widely recognised, it’s surely time attention was paid to our deployment of garlic flavoured chocolate and exploding animal droppings.
Historians have discovered that among the technological advances used by Britain to defeat the Axis powers during the Second World War were also a number of apparently bizarre inventions designed to hoodwink and undermine the enemy.
These included bars of garlic flavoured chocolate developed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up in 1940 to create sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines.
The chocolate was distributed to SOE agents before they were parachuted into Spain, in the apparent hope that the smell on their breath would allow them to blend in with the locals. The existence of this previously little-known secret weapon – along with dozens of others – was discovered in the archives of the Imperial War Museum by one of its experts after he spent weeks trawling through dusty files and boxes along with agents’ autobiographies. Peter Taylor, the museum’s former publishing manager, also stumbled on capsules which when thrown at the enemy emitted a foul odour. The idea behind SOE’S S capsule was to embarrass enemy agents or even dignitaries. SOE displayed many of these gadgets to Allied dignitaries and VIPS in a room at the Natural History Museum and even produced a mail order catalogue of “special devices and supplies” for its agents. Included in the catalogue was a dead rat stuffed with explosives to be left on the coal near an enemy’s boiler, from where it would be thrown on the fire. Unfortunately the first consignment was intercepted by the Germans, though the resulting search for other similar devices is said to have produced as much disruption as the exploding rats might have done. Another technique used to hide explosives was to disguise them as animal droppings.
London Zoo supplied SEO with fresh dung from a number of its animals, which the outfit’s boffins could model in plastic, inside which they hid explosives. Explosive mule droppings were used to blow up cars in Italy and camel dung bombs were used in North Africa.
There was also ingenuity on the Home Front.
Mr Taylor came across archive photographs showing that some farmers painted white stripes on their cows in an attempt to prevent motorists hitting them during anti-raid blackouts. In 1939 the King’s surgeon wrote that accidents caused by the pitch darkness of the blackout enabled the Luftwaffe “to kill 600 British citizens a month without ever taking to the air”.
One safety measure was the invention of a “kerbfinder”, a wheel attached to the end of an umbrella or walking stick to allow its owner to detect steps or a sudden drop in the pavement in the dark. Mr Taylor has drawn his discoveries together into a book, Weird War Two. It also includes a number of ideas which, for understandable reasons, didn’t quite catch on, such as the Bishop of Chelmsford’s suggestion that the mournful wail of the air raid sirens be replaced by a recording of a “gay cock-a-doo-dledo”.
More successful were attempts by the Canine Defence League to encourage its members to knit stockings and socks for the troops using dog hair. Breeds that were said to provide good hair for knitting were Old English Sheepdog, Pekinese and Poodle.
“This book doesn’t promise to deepen your understanding of the Second World War or to make you a genius at pub quizzes,” said Mr Taylor. “But it does hope to amuse and baffle you, and to provide a tiny testament to the creativity, inventiveness and, above all, silliness that can flourish even in the darkest times.”