School of Dirty Tricks
Before and during World War 2, the countries involved all had covert operations in play led by some very creative folks. Germany had the Abwehr, a military intelligence organization whose purpose was defense against foreign espionage by gathering domestic and foreign information, most of it in the form of human intelligence. The Brits used the Special Operations Executive, formed by Minister of Economic Warfare to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. Japan fielded The Kempeitai (Military Police Corps) a military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was not a conventional military police, but more of a secret police.
The US, of course, had “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime intelligence agency and the predecessor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Few could top the OSS in the dirty tricks arena.
In 1942, the OSS recruited George Kistikowsky, a Ukrainian chemistry professor at Harvard University. There he developed an explosive powder for clandestine use. He created “nitroamine high-explosive” or HMX, that could be mixed with regular flour and cooked into innocuous baked goods.
The HMX would be blended with a popular pancake mix, packaged into ordinary flour bags, smuggled through Japanese lines, and delivered to Chinese resistance fighters. It was identical to your usual non-explosive pancake mix, and if necessary was safe to consume if forced by a suspicious Japanese border guard, with no ill effect other than slight stomach discomfort.
Once delivered, the weaponized mix was baked into muffins, and a blasting cap was added to give it the necessary kick.
Reportedly, some 15 tons were successfully delivered without detection.
Category: Politics
MOAM’s
Mother of all Muffins
If you are constipated, just eat one of these muffins for a real colon blow.
I’ve read about plenty of the OSS’s dirty tricks, but never this, so them muffins WAS DA BOMB, eh?
I believe they nicknamed the stuff aunt jemima, and that at the end of the war the washington oss office had a quantity of the stuff and someone told them they could flush it down the toilet, after they did so they got a call not to flush it, and there were worries that it might go off in the sewer system
You should see the results of their atomic burrito.
Was it any more explosive than an MRE bean burrito once ingested? Feed me one of those and I could flatten a forest.
Oh yeah…..I recall back in ’06….the MRE Burrito incident at NTC.
Young Spc by the name of Qwuire; He ingested 3 MRE Burritos on a dare when we were at a FOB near the whales gap.
Poor kid….he didn’t understand that two burritos, as dangerous as they are were considered “sub-critical”.
But three? Yeah…He achieved critical mass. Near as FEMA can tell, the blast was felt as far away as strawberry fields and Porta-potty Wadi…..John wayne pass was made uninhabitable from the fall out for nearly 4 rotations.
And Spc Quire? Well, no one knows for sure; some say he was rendered to subatomic particles at the moment of critical mass, others swear he was launched into high orbit and claim he was the reason the International space station went on alert in ’06.
Me? I was in the dustbowl when it happened…I saw the flash and the mushroom cloud…and that’s all I have to say about that.
Speaking of FEMA and MRE’s, those issued for Hurricane Katrina are still being sold on Ebay by some of the Southern Latitude folks.
They don’t call them Meals Rejected by Everyone for nuttin.
More like Meals Rejected by Ethiopians or Mostly Recycled Entrails.
Those place names….
Flashback time!
They stopped using “dolly parton” right? Would make certain folks heads explode.
Speaking of “John Wayne,” anyone remember the John Wayne chocolate bars that came in the SP packs in Vietnam? Had the same effect as the MRE burritos.
How about the John Wayne Toilet Paper? It’s rough, it’s tough, and it takes shit off of no one.
Let us not forget the Audie Murphy bar.
Did you call that guy exquire?
I think they left a memorial for that kid somewhere on painted Rock.
I heard HE was painted all over many a rock.
You guys crack me up, but never disappoint. I was fully expecting comments of this, err, quality. Thanks. Maybe Ex-PH2 can use HMX in her chocolate chip cookie recipe, in one of her stories?
*grin*
Those would be “da Bomb!”
That would be the one about how Babs ‘BoomBoom’ Busk got her name.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “make boom-boom”, doesn’t it? (smile)
Yeah, there’s a reason you don’t mix scouring powder and chlorine bleach together, nor do you mix rubbing alcohol and bleach.
Kitchen chemistry is just as dangerous as EOD chemistry.
I wouldn’t recommend mixing bleach and ammonia, either.
Seriously bad juju.
Yeah. learned all about that bleach and ammonia trick while in the Boy Scouts….. 🙂
I had trouble finding the story at the link in AW1Ed’s article above. But I’m pretty sure this is the direct link to the story in question:
https://www.military-history.org/articles/back-to-the-drawing-board-aunt-jemima.htm
That’s the link, thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZMB4Y9HMpE
Still is use in the 1990s by Major Benjamin Winiford Payne, USMC.
Japan actually had their equivalent of the OSS, these were men who attended the “Army Nakano Academy,” so-called because it was at the Nakano area of Tokyo. The school’s cover name was the “Rear Service Personnel Training Center” and its code name was “Eastern Unit 33.”
陸軍中野学校
Rikugun Nakano Gakko
Army Nakano Academy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakano_School
CIA report:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006122504.pdf
The most well-known of its graduates (to us non-Japanese) is Lt. Onoda Hiro. You will remember him as the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the Philippines in 1974.
A series of action films was made about the Nakano School beginning in 1966:
http://www.weirdwildrealm.com/f-nakano.html
JSF
Interesting bit of military/intel history I hadn’t previously run across, JSF. Thanks.
Turns out that, early on, the Abwehr had an interesting and almost foolproof way of detecting enemy agents. They would go to local cafes and restaurants and just look at how people were eating.
Seems that every culture tends to hold their flatware, cups, etc, in specific ways, and to eat their food in certain patterns.
Abwehr agents simply waited for, say, and English operative to forget and revert to holding his knife and fork in the English manner and then he was undone.
It was always the little things that tended to trip someone up.
Will never look at a stack of pancakes the same now. Biscuits either.
Admiral-san, the Comfort Girls have baked a cake in your honor. Look, they have even lit the candles!
Now where did they..
Hey now, don’t forget the Poles, who, among other things, designed a Molotov that ignited without use of a wick, (contra the joke) the first electronic mine detector, and the first effective IFF (“Huff-Duff”); commenced bio-warfare against the Nazis in Auschwitz by using typhus-infected fleas; perfected pipe-guns during the battle of Warsaw; and, of course, all but completely solved the Enigma.
Someday, someone in Hollywood will realize that the stories of Witold Pilecki, Irene Sendler, and beauty queen Christine Granville (née Krystyna Skarbek, a/k/a “Churchill’s favorite spy”) could be easily woven into “James Bond meets Oskar Schindler” Oscar bait and….
According to Felix von Luckner, there were some pretty nasty tricks in WWI as well – things like small bibles sized to fir in inside breast pockets of suits – when given to someone the giver would remove the ‘family heirloom bookmark’ which would start the fuse… several minutes later the explosive pages would go off. There were also cat-and-mouse games with submarine mines, acid injected into Russian railroad car bearing grease… a range of fun stuff.