After the fall of France, Winston Churchill vowed to “set Europe ablaze.” To that end, British secret agents were equipped with an assortment of disguised explosive devices, including soap, shoes, bottles of chianti, bicycle pumps, suitcases. But the most exotic was the rat.
100 rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion.
The device caused considerable trouble to the enemy, but not quite in the way that was intended.
The Germans intercepted the container of dead rats before they could be used for "operational purposes". But all was not lost. According to an SOE report, their discovery had an "extraordinary moral effect". The rodents were exhibited at all German military schools, prompting a hunt for "hundreds of rats the enemy believed were distributed on the continent". SOE concluded that the trouble caused to them was a much greater success than if the rats had actually been used.
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