You are at war. Trains are key to keeping your army supplied with fuel, ammunition, food, and medical supplies. But, inexplicably, your trains keep blowing up. Sabotage? Enemy attack? There’s no evidence of a bomb or overt enemy attack. This is the situation the German military found itself in during World War II. As you can see in the video below, the hidden bomb was the brainchild of a member of Britain’s SOE.
The idea was to put plastic explosive inside a fake plastic lump of coal. They hand-painted each one, and the color had to match the exact appearance of local coal. Paint and coal dust helped with that. The bomb had to weigh the correct amount as well.
The coal was safe until it got quite hot, so resistance fighters could easily carry the coal and surreptitiously drop the bomb anywhere coal is stored. Eventually, it will be put in a boiler, and at the right temperature, it will do its job. There’s some actual footage of a test in the second video below.
As the CIA notes, the idea actually dates back to the US Civil War. [Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay] built coal “torpedos” in the 1860s. (In those days, a torpedo could refer to any kind of bomb.) Probably the biggest impact was to tie up soldiers to guard coal stocks. However, in 1864, the USS Chenango’s boiler exploded in New York, and although the Union denied it, [Courtenay] was convinced it was one of his coal torpedoes that had done the trick. Later that year, Greyhound, the personal steamer of Major General Benjamin Butler, exploded right after taking in fresh coal. The CIA also mentions how coal bombs were also produced by the OSS, and even the Axis powers had their own version.
While we are no fans of war, we have to admit we are always fascinated with war technology. Even if that means microwave death rays. Certainly, hiding explosives in coal qualifies as a wartime hack.
If only they could have figured out how to make plastic explosive look like oats, given how the Nazis relied on so many horses.
Not that I’d approve of blowing up horses in other circumstances.
Of course nobody wants to blow up a horse.
Even snide talking ones, of course.
Felines however, in their pursuit of world domination via mind control, need to be stopped by any means necessary.
agreed! cats are the WORST! i’ve tried to give my cat Lester away on NextDoor to a BAD HOME with a payment of $500 and i have NO TAKERS
Wouldn’t, say, strychnine be more straightforward?
Not really, as it tastes foul. Concentrated glyphosate would do the job though.
Seriously?
Lethal dose of glyphosate for a horse is around ten pounds.
I commend your good work.
I don’t know how you convinced a cat to ingest an ounce or two of the stuff. but I salute you for doing your part to rid us of the scourge.
You really killed your neighbor’s cats? You are a bad person.
It wasn’t the glyphosate that killed them. LD50 is 2,000-10,000 mg/kg depending on species. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
Pointer to another spy story: Operation Hamster
Someone (INSCOM, CIA?) buried a seismic detection device ammunition depot Schneeberg (GDR).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hamster
https://www.mdr.de/tv/programm/sendung-1090136.html
Both links in German.
Live in GDR was pretty crazy, during 1970s Stasi collected urine samples from sewage system to detect people who consume narcotics. In West Germany it was the era of Hippy movement, LSD, crazy music and tuning Volkswagen Bukhanka vans. Many people didn’t want but Honecker stayed in power all the way until the collapse.
What’s so crazy about that? The police still collect sewage samples to detect drugs in an area.
So does the environment agency. They’re pollutants. A wide variety of human and animal drugs have affects on other animals and cause problems when they’re released into the ecosystem.
Bukhanka’s were not made by Volkswagen, they are Russian, made by UAZ.
“so resistance fighters could easily carry the coal and surreptitiously drop the bomb anywhere coal is stored.”
We of course will happily ignore that there were civilians trains, and that coal was used as a general energy supply so who knows who or what would explode,or what age the victims were.
But hey, killing civilians was the thing those days anyway.
Nor do we question if train crews were volunteers, because in WW2 when the Germans took control they told the locals what to do rather than asking them. But yeah, you have to break eggs to make an omelet, it is true, so to disable a train you can’t avoid some unwanted deaths, but we do acknowledge breaking the eggs though if we are fair.
War sucks, for everyone. Hence world peace.
Unfortunately not for everyone, weapons manufacturers thrive and that can cause a boost to the economy which makes politicians in charge seem to be doing good to those no losing relatives, friends or property, unless they are convinced enough it’s a ‘acceptable loss for the cause’, which is where propaganda rears its ugly head.
I imagine you need to watch energy supplies anyway, I mean throwing in a plain igniter into a coal supply when there is no oversight would also be a bit of an issue, no fancy fake coal needed for such a sabotage.
That was a reply to [hartl] which went astray again.
I was too lazy so I didn’t watch the video but did they mention the rat bombs? A rat would be skinned/hollowed out and a bomb sown inside and the rat would be left near a boiler in a factory. In the factory the stoker sees a dead rat, thinks “Ew, gross!” and tosses it in the fire box, goodbye boiler!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_rat
I sometimes think one of the reasons the nazi’s lost was lack of imgination, as opposed to the British. See Operation Mincemeat.
I wasn’t expecting it to work as a musical but it absolutely does.
My understanding of boilers, especially on steam locomotives, is that simply making it hotter than expected is also a really good way of making it explode. I know the plastic explosives we have now would rather burn than explode, unless tickled by a detonator, but if it burns hotter and faster that could still create a hotspot that would give it a rapid unscheduled oxidation event.
Thermite notwithstanding, There are also all sorts of nifty high-energy solid rocket fuels that can burn very very hot indeed. There was a rash of arson in the Los Angeles area some years that was running so hot that they couldn’t do chemical analysis on it – self cleaning. This may have used some of the formulations.
So what freedoms do I have today that a post WWII American did not? I mean, wasn’t WWII about ‘freedom and democracy’ while allying with a murderous regime that starved 20 to 30 million people and then allowed to enslave half of Eastern Europe?
Enquiring minds would like to know.
Most unlikely they managed to pop 1000 trains, a few hundred at tops is more plausible. The number is insignificant compared to the amount of trains the allies started blowing up once they had air superiority over germany. This is the same kind of pointless weapon as the skipping bomb, seems really good on paper, but in the greater scheme of things, more of a moral booster than anything else.
I think this was pure propaganda and disinformation to tie up resources of the Wehrmacht. Getting soldiers to guard coal bunkers instead of having an eye on the tracks makes it easier to sabotage tracks and bridges.
I imagine you need to watch energy supplies anyway, I mean throwing in a plain igniter into a coal supply when there is no oversight would also be a bit of an issue, no fancy fake coal needed for such a sabotage.
(repost, because I’m like an LLM, I keep hallucinating the HaD comment system is working and putting replies in the right place. Simply based on the logical expectation that that is what a comment system would be doing.)