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| OSS Time Pencil Fuze. |
by Stanley P. Lovell
"I'm Colonel Donovan, Dr. Lovell. You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course. Professor Moriarty is the man I want for the OSS. You're it. I need every device and underhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese—by our own people, but especially by the underground in occupied countries. You will have to invent them."
I had never met a man of such magnetism. I heard myself say, "I will."
As soon as I could, I looked up references to the fictional Professor Moriarty. Most of them were discouraging to a chemist called to play the role. "Famous scientific criminal"—well! "The organizer of every deviltry." Come! Come!
I moved into a small office down by a brewery. My title: Director of Research and Development, OSS.
The first job was a plant for documentation. Spies or saboteurs would have short shrift unless they had perfect passports, ration books, and money to confirm their assumed status. These are the little things upon which the life of the agent depends. But enemy documents had security built into them, just so no one could imitate them. The paper contained special fibers, invisible inks, and trick watermarks so counterintelligence could expose a forged document.
Philippine money proved the toughest because the fibers were kudsu and mitsumata, to be found only in Japan. No substitute would give the "feel."
I learned that Japanese paper existed in the United States. We could rework it into currency. However, were we to buy it, someone would reason that we wanted it for counterfeit Japanese money. I turned to James Byrnes, then assistant to the President. How he did it I'll never know, but within a week the entire lot of Japanese paper was in a warehouse available to us only.
And in the nick of time. General MacArthur sent word that currency was vital in the Philippines. It was extremely difficult to manufacture the money, even with the proper fibers. The "banana-tree" engraving was most intricate, and there were several color engravings.
Even more baffling, Japanese money in the Philippines was overstamped to identify the district in which, alone, it was valid. This was an ingenious method of controlling travel. If a bill marked 'Davao' were offered in Manila, its possessor was forced to explain what he was doing in Manila. Each Filipino was frozen in his town.
We engraved money sufficient to fill a cargo plane, all overstamped in direct proportion to the population census. The fibers were crisp kudzu and mitsumata, the inks had identical fluorescence under ultraviolet light, and all secret marks were exactly duplicated. These bills would pass everywhere. The Japanese never realized that the OSS utterly destroyed their population currency control in the islands.
In Java and Sumatra little resistance could be encouraged with bribes of Japanese occupation currency. The money for which the Indonesians would do anything was the Maria Theresa thaler, a coin about the size of a 25-cent piece.
Accompanying this information was a note saying, "Nothing to be done: the last Maria Theresa thalers were made in 1870."
We located two or three authentic thalers from collectors. We studied the metal on an alloy-analyzing machine. Silver wasn't hard to get.
We made an excellent mold. The molten metal was poured, cooled, the flash trimmed off, and there were as fine thalers as Maria Theresa had ever seen. My group was not enthusiastic. They all felt a counterfeit of cheaper alloy would be more in their line. It was the most honest job we ever did.
I was not able to follow Maria Theresa beyond the shipping door. Did she contribute to the overthrow of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or was she added to the secret hoard of rascally Sumatrans? I'll never know.
A spy must never have a weapon. His job is to collect and transmit information. The transmission of information was a whole study itself.
One device originated when a spy told me he was all but trapped in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. "I would have given anything," he said, "if I could have created a panic in that lobby."
My answer was "Hedy," a firecracker device which simulated the screeching of a falling bomb and then ended in a deafening roar—all completely harmless. By activating Hedy the agent could escape in the turmoil.
One day the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked me to demonstrate our devices. I showed booby traps, our derailing system, incendiaries—and Hedy. As I spoke I activated one casually in a wastebasket. Hedy interrupted, shrieking. Then came the bang. I saw generals clawing to get out the single door. We were never again invited before the Joint Chiefs.
Unlike the spy, the saboteur is a man of violence. He must harass the enemy. One way is to derail a train. This is easy, we thought: take out one rail and the train falls over. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
Perhaps the perfect weapon for derailment was "Casey Jones." It consisted of a permanent magnet on a box. This magnet was to stick the box to the underside of railway cars. From the box an electric eye looked down on the track. Our electric eye was not affected by a gradual diminution of light, such as nightfall, but only by a sudden cutting off of light when a train entered a tunnel. This activated it instantly, and an explosive would blow a wheel off the car.
The resistance put Casey Jones first on repair trains. After that, men, women, and children placed them on any rolling stock.
A long line of cars would wind into a tunnel. Explosion and derailment followed. When the repair train crawled in, it, too, was derailed in the cramped tunnel. Now both wrecks had to be worked on by hand, and the through line was blocked for a long time.
Every Casey Jones had a decal in German: "This is a Car Movement Control Device. Removal is strictly forbidden by the Third Reich Railroad Consortium. Heil Hitler."
To attack an enemy automobile or tank, one could take two approaches—the fuel tank or the oil system.
The attack on the fuel tank was solved by "Firefly," a small plastic cylinder easily palmed by a filling-station attendant. It contained explosive which fired after the gasoline had swelled a rubber ring. This took hours, so the German vehicle was far away.
Fireflies were rushed to the French underground for the landings at Marseille. Two German divisions, ordered to repulse this attack, proceeded down the highways. All gasoline pumps en route were staffed by the Resistance. As the attendant inserted his hose in the filler pipe, he dropped a little Firefly into it.
The results were dramatic. Along the highways, off in fields, or smack in the roadway were abandoned vehicles. The success of the Marseille landings owed much to little Firefly.
The oil system was harder. All the time-honored tricks failed. Sugar? No result. Sand? Dirt? A little scoring of pistons, but the engine kept running. We tried fifty additives until my respect for the standard six-cylinder engine almost overcame any further work to destroy it.
A Harvard scientist suggested a compound to be put up in a small rubber sack and dropped through the breather pipe. After heat opened the rubber container, his compound became a dispersion. This hit the small mechanical tolerances of the bearings, and all seized simultaneously. The cylinder head burst into shrapnel.
Simple weapons were best. Suppose you knew a French girl who had access to a German officer's room. You'd give her your candle to replace his. It would burn perfectly until the flame touched the high explosive composing the lower two-thirds of the candle. The burst was as effective as a hand grenade.
The simplest weapon we made was a three-inch piece of steel so shaped that, however it fell, there were three prongs pointing downward and one erect. Thrown on a highway, it would cause a blowout. Too small for the driver to see as he bowled down the road, it destroyed any tire that ran over it.
One weapon the Germans or Japanese never did discover. Only the United States uniforms had a small "fob" pocket over the right hip. No enemy searching our people looked there. We evolved a gun to fit. The "Stinger" was a three-inch-by-half-inch little tube, innocent looking as a golfer's stub pencil. The tube held a .22 over-loaded cartridge. It was cocked by lifting a lever on the tube with the fingernail. Squeezing the lever down fired it.
One agent was picked up by the Gestapo. They frisked him and found no weapon, but put him in a staff car, in the back seat. En route to German headquarters for interrogation, the officer got out to telephone ahead. Our agent, left alone with the chauffeur, took out the overlooked Stinger, cocked it, held it near the back of the driver's head and fired. He pushed the body to one side, took the wheel, and drove to the American lines.
The Stinger not only saved the man's life but allowed our planes to destroy the German headquarters. By telling the driver what route to take, the officer had unwittingly given the OSS man priceless information.
Another simple weapon, the pull-type booby trap, had infinite applications. It was very effective against trains, for instance. A heavy bomb, called a "Spigot Mortar" was screwed into a tree on one side of a track. A wire crossed the track tautly fixed to a tree on the other side. The railroads had corps of trackwalkers, but our wire was over their heads and they were looking down. When the enemy train came along, the stack pulled the wire, and the bomb hit the engine and bowled it over.
One of our achievements was a high explosive that would act like ordinary flour, arousing no suspicion. It had almost the effect of TNT, but could be wet, kneaded into dough, raised, and actually baked into bread. I called it "Aunt Jemima."
We made Chinese flour bags and sent them, properly stenciled, to Chungking. Bags of this camouflaged explosive were laid against a bridge over the Yangtze River, destroying it completely.
My personal troubles with Aunt Jemima began when I found about 100 pounds in my office. I telephoned an expert to come take it away. He said, "Flush it down the toilet." It took some time to do that. When I returned to my desk the expert's boss was on the phone. "Don't flush that explosive down the toilet. The organic matter in the sewer will react with it and blow Washington sky-high."
I thanked him as calmly as I could. There was no point in his worrying, too. The sewer ran from our offices to the White House.
Every truck that backfired, every door that slammed, raised the hackles on our necks. In the morning we decided that the War College might blow up, but that the White House was safe. We knew, because we stood at its gates at sunrise.
A special weapon of the saboteur is the "Limpet," named after a shellfish which adheres to rocks. By means of a magnet or rivets, the Limpet anchors to a ship below the waterline. It holds a few pounds of high explosive. Although the hole it opens in the side of the ship is small, the result is devastating. The ship is promptly sunk because the recoil of the ocean upon that hole opens it up to a 20-foot aperture.
Our saboteur puts the Limpet against the ship's side with a long pole. Withdrawing the pole activates the tiny explosive. A magnesium window in the Limpet is slowly etched away by salt water and after several hours the explosion takes place.
In 1944 the Norwegian underground advised that the Germans might withdraw their army of occupation, and they needed Limpets to put on German troopships. The Torpex explosive we used was in Nebraska. Express, parcel post, railroads, or airlines were out. An Army captain and a sergeant offered to get it if I would provide an automobile. I gave them my own car and they were off. Their drive from Nebraska to Washington was an epic. The load of sensitive explosive weighed the small car down.
Were they to be stopped by police and their illegal load given publicity, the whole venture would have had to be abandoned. I thought of our Documentation Branch. Our letter, typed on White House stationery said:
"Captain Frazee and Sergeant Walker are on a secret mission for me as Commander-in-Chief. Any assistance given these officers will be helping to win the war. Any interference with their vital mission will be followed by disciplinary action. This is a Top Secret operation."
Franklin D. Roosevelt would have sworn that he had signed it.
Twice my men were stopped by local police and twice this letter evoked abject apologies.
The vital load was transported to Norway and encased in Limpets by the underground. Our timing was perfect. The Germans were recalling troops from Oslo, Stavanger, and Narvik. The British said that when Hitler most needed reinforcements to defend 'Festung Europa,' the fjords were in possession of many sunken German ships, with troops caught in that watery graveyard. The little Limpets from Nebraska had fulfilled their mission.
Some problems could not be solved. One was "Simultaneous Events," a means of activating high explosives that would be unaffected by any outside source except an air raid. The operator could secretly plant his explosives. Nothing would happen until an air raid. The target would blow up and the blast would be blamed on the airplane bombings. This would furnish an ideal alibi for the underground operator. Also, he could pinpoint the damage where it would hurt most.
We approached it from two angles; one was ground shock of a raid, the other a radio signal to be sent from the bombers. Nothing we invented passed our trials. The ground-shock devices would detonate prematurely from a passing truck. The radio signal depended on batteries, as well as an objectionable antenna. When Germany surrendered we were still working on Simultaneous Events.
My favorite attack on Hitler was a glandular approach. Gland experts agreed that he was close to the male-female line. A push to the female side might make his mustache fall out and his voice become soprano.
Hitler was a vegetarian. At Berchtesgaden, the vegetables had to have gardeners. A plant to get an OSS man there was approved. I supplied female sex hormones to be injected into 'der Führer's' carrots.
I can only assume that the gardener took our money and threw the medications away. Either that or Hitler had a big turnover in tasters.
One morning a radio message from one of our spies in Switzerland said: "French workman who swam Rhine last night told improbable story. Said he was guard for casks of water from Rjukan in Norway to Peenemünde."
A week before I had attended a discussion by scientists involved in atom bomb studies. Someone said, "Graphite would be a more efficient neutron arrester than heavy water."
The only water in the world worth guarding is heavy water.
I rushed to the maps. What was Rjukan? The biggest hydroelectric development in Europe and perhaps the only place where heavy water could be produced. I obtained air photos of Peenemünde. Dairy farms, thatched farmhouses. I didn't believe that!
In August 1943 the RAF staged a raid at Peenemünde that killed a thousand people and inflicted heavy damage—not on the atomic lab we thought was there but on the rocket station that was there. Dr. Martin Schilling, who was then chief of the Test Section at Peenemünde, recalls that it delayed the use of V-1s and V-2s until after the Normandy landings. Had those rockets landed on England prior to that date, the invasion of France would have been delayed.
The French workman was quite right, so far as he knew. For security, the guards had been told that the heavy-water shipments were headed for Peenemünde. Actually the load was sent to other destinations where nuclear research was really being carried on.
And so the strangest coincidence of all. The OSS message was incorrect, yet its interpretation helped implement the decision to bomb the headquarters of German rocket research.
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| Office of Strategic Services Insignia. |
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| OSS Escape Utility Knife. This is basically a Leatherman except instead of scissors and a useless saw, you get wire cutters and special blade for slashing tires. |
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| SOE Agents Assassination Pen Dagger. The name of this item pretty much says it all. It's a pen until you need to kill someone, and then the device comes apart to reveal a dagger with a 7.5cm blade. According to the auction house, "These were also given to resistance fighters." |
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| SOE Agents Concealment Key. Interesting iron key which the end screws off to reveal hollow center which could be used to smuggle out messages, conceal a compass or even used to conceal a weapon or poison. |
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| SOE / Commando Garrote Wire. This advanced version a Mafioso's piano wire is studded with razor sharp barbs, so that when you go to strangle the enemy, you can cut off their head at the same time. |
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| SOE Agents Assassination Lapel Spike. |
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| Biscuit Tin Radio. A radio disguised as a biscuit tin – simple yet ingeniously effective! During the war the Special Operatives Executive (SOE) had a team of spy gadget specialists dedicated solely to inventing radios that were made to look like everyday objects. One of the most effective has to be the Biscuit Tin radio, an ingenious way of communicating crucial messages to fellow spies. |
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| Footprints have long been amongst the most obvious methods for spies and detectives to discover someone's presence. In order to conceal their location, SOE agents would use these rubber soles. |
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| These overshoes would be slipped over military boots to hide their tread and fool the enemy into believing they were the footprints of barefooted locals. |
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| Bigot Pistol. a late-World War II experiment created by the OSS to take the place of a suppressed .45 pistol. A spigot-mortar-like guide rod was installed in the barrel of a standard 1911, onto which a big steel dart would slide. The dart had a .25 ACP blank cartridge in its nose, and dropping the hammer on the 1911 would fire that blank. The resulting pressure would launch the dart out at roughly 200 fps. Not very fast, but certainly fast enough to make it very unpleasant to get hit by. |
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| Lock-picking tools issued by the OSS. |
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| A Type B Mk II suitcase radio used by two World War II outfits: America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE). |
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| SOE wireless set disguised as a suitcase. |
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| B2 suitcase set designed by Major John I. Brown. |
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| An undercover ID for Office of Strategic Services director William J Donovan. |
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| Sleeve gun. It is not known whether the sleeve gun was actually used in the field. According to the SOE catalogue, the assassin lets the gun slide into his hand and presses the muzzle against the victim, whilst pulling the trigger with his thumb. As the gun is only a few inches in length, it can then once again be hidden up the sleeve. The bullet cartridge remains within the gun, so there is no tell-tale evidence left lying around. The gun had a range of up to three yards, but allowed only one shot. |
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| 'Sleeping Beauty' canoe. The SOE semi-submersible canoe was nicknamed the 'Sleeping Beauty.' It was battery powered, had a top speed of 4.4 knots, and could travel for some 30 miles at a cruising speed of 3 knots. It was designed to carry up to three and a half pounds of explosives and, if necessary, to be dropped near its target by a heavy bomber. The canoe was used in the disastrous Rimau Operation, which saw the loss of the entire SOE team for no reward. |
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| Amphibian breathing apparatus. The 'Amphibian' apparatus had an oxygen bottle with one and a half hours' supply. The SOE catalogue states that 'breathing should be quite normal.' |
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| Sten gun with silencer. The silencer for the Sten gun was first developed in 1942, and was put into action in 1943. It meant that the gun could be used without alerting the enemy to small-arms fire in the vicinity. Only someone who was within 200 yards of the firer would be able to recognize the sound as gunfire. Another advantage of the silencer was that it eliminated any muzzle flash. This was important when the SOE team was operating at night. The Sten gun silencer was an ideal weapon for assassination, and it is known that it was used to kill the Norwegian traitor, Ivar Grande, in 1944. It is also thought that these guns were used during Operation Ratweek, when the SOE targeted collaborators in 1943. |
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| Shaving cream tube with secret chamber. These chambers were used to conceal messages or objects. Toothpaste tubes were also used, but clearly the chamber would have been smaller. All the tubes were branded with the name of an appropriate manufacturer, and the top of the tube was filled with shaving cream or toothpaste so that it could be used normally, averting any suspicion. If the concealed object, such as a code printed on silk, required damp proofing, it was placed inside a balloon. This would be placed in the tube along with a bit of cotton wool to keep it in place. Instead of messages, glass-frosting ointment was also sometimes hidden in this secret compartment. The ointment could be used for sabotaging optical instruments. |
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| 'Exploding' rat. The idea for the 'exploding' rat - now immortalized as part of the SOE legend - was developed in 1941. The aim was to blow up the enemy's boilers by lying the rat on the coal beside the boiler, with the fuse being lit when the rat was shoveled into the fire. They were never used, as the first consignment was seized by the Germans and the secret was blown. The Germans were fascinated by the idea, however, and the rats were exhibited at the top military schools. Indeed, the SOE files show that the Germans actually organized searches for these rodent explosives. The source of the dead rats was a London supplier, who was under the mistaken belief that it was for London University. |
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| Plaster logs. The plaster logs were designed to smuggle arms and ammunition into enemy territory. The arms or ammo were packed into cardboard containers, and sealed to protect the contents from the damp. The sealed containers were then built into dummy logs, which were carefully modeled on actual common tree varieties of the place of destination. They were then painted and embellished with moss and lichen, to make them look even more real. |
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| Cork with hidden compartment. This normal bottle cork has had a secret compartment whittled out of it. It was used to conceal codes and micro-prints from the enemy. |
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| Techniques of disguise. The SOE used a range of disguise techniques. The illustration shows what the catalogue claims can be done with a 'little shading, a theatrical moustache and a pair of glasses.' These minimalist, but highly effective, disguise techniques were drilled home to the SOE recruits by their instructors. In the field, new disguises had to be quick and easy. For more radical disguises, some agents even underwent plastic surgery to change their appearance. |
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| Incendiary suitcase. These incendiary suitcases were intended to provide security for secret documents, and act as a booby trap for any snooping enemy soldier or secret policeman. They also came in the form of briefcases. To open the case safely, the SOE agent had to make sure that the right hand lock was pressed down and held to the right. If this wasn't done, the left hand lock would fire the charges when anyone attempted to click it open. The exploding cases could also be hazardous to members of the SOE. One briefcase exploded unexpectedly and injured an SOE agent, David Smiley, in Thailand. He was severely burnt by the explosion, but after treatment returned to active service. |
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| Sedgley OSS .38 AKA Glove Gun or Glove Pistol. |
