Posts Tagged ‘Pearl Harbor’
“He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession”*…
The Descriptive Catalogue of Special Devices and Supplies, used by British spies sent to the Continent to track Nazi movements and aid resistance fighters during World War II, has been recently reprinted by the Imperial War Museum. These pages from the back of the two-volume catalogue, which was published in 1944 and 1945, show a few of the ways that the Special Operations Executive (the name for the secret British agency charged with training and deploying these agents) managed to sneak arms and ammunition to its operatives.
As historian-author Sinclair McKay writes in the introduction to the new volume, the Special Operations Executive trained many volunteers and recruits with no previous experience in the field. The recruits underwent crash courses, with SOE personnel bringing them quickly up to speed on the use of weapons and explosives, the maintenance of communications equipment, and the cultures of the places they were to infiltrate.
The two volumes of the manual are packed full of explanations of the many devices SOE operatives might encounter, or choose to use, in their operations…
More in the remarkable Rebecca Onion’s “Nifty Methods for Smuggling Contraband, From a Manual for WWII-Era British Spies.”
* Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
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As we dawdle at the dead drop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the “Infamy Speech”–the name deriving from the first line of the speech, in which Roosevelt describes the previous day as “a date which will live in infamy”– to a Joint Session of Congress.
Read Roosevelt’s original typescript here; and hear an except here.
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