How exploding rats helped win the war

SECRET DEVICES INVENTED BY WORLD WAR TWO BRIT BOFFS

- by JAMES MOORE

SOMEWHERE in the depths of Nazi-occupied Europe a factory worker is loading coal into a boiler when they spot a dead rat lying among the fuel and chuck it into the flames.

Seconds later the boiler explodes, halting work. Soon more factories across the continent making munitions and supplies for Adolf Hitler’s war effort are succumbing to similar mystery blasts.

Little do the German authorities realise that vermin carcasses have been packed with explosives and placed in the coal by undercover Allied agents to be used in factory boilers.

The devices were designed by Britain’s real James Bond-style Q Branch, right which helped to secure victory in World War Two.

In a new book, miliary historian Craig Moore has revealed the full story behind the amazing inventions of the top-secret Camouflage Section, also known as Section XV.

It was part of the Special Operations Executive, tasked with promoting espionage and sabotage against the Nazis overseas and which PM Winston Churchill had ordered to “set Europe ablaze”.

While researching tanks, Craig stumbled across the only copy of a full 1946 report on the Camouflage Section’s work in the National Archives, now declassified.

He was stunned by the contents, saying: “Some of the stuff is quite unbelievable. I found it fascinating.”

Craig, left, believes the department's existence would have been known to James Bond author Ian Fleming, who also worked in wartime intelligence. And some of its spy kit could have come straight from a Bond movie.

He says: “These are real gadgets. There was lots of creativeness and it has since been carried on in spy departments around the world.”