Winston Churchill's Ministry of Destruction

Due to technical difficulties in the Real World™ there will be no Infrastructure post this week. But in response to everything going on in #Ukraine, I thought I would dredge this up from The 357 Archives 2.0 - Section D

Section D: D for Destruction.

There is a good book, that I recommend heartily, especially if you are likely to have uninvited Russians coming to call. That book is Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat.

It was known as Winston Churchill’s Toyshop. (One of the chief designers could have been the role-model for Q from the James Bond series.) It seems to have been fluid in 1940. Some of it remained in the War Department, some became part of the Special Operations Executive.

When Churchill saw the Germans rolling across France, he was convinced that there would be an invasion. The SOE was building weapons that they thought would be needed on the home front in Great Britain. Delayed fuses for bombs. Ways to blow up trains. They built all of that and stockpiled arms in secret caches around the country. Just in 2019 a cache of Self-Igniting Phosphorus (SIP) grenades was found buried in a field in Britain.

But back to the book...

It is not a British version of The Anarchist Cookbook, but it does describe the mentality of some of the British. (The military was mostly preparing for Napoleon to come tea.)

When the expected invasion of the UK didn't materialize, the SOE started deploying agents to Europe, to blow up trains, to sabotage power plants, and set up communications for the Resistance.

They created everything from sticky bombs, for attacking tanks (1 million were produced over the objections of the supply division. "It broke the rules.") They built limpet mines that could be delivered by a single diver that were originally built from steel mixing bowls.

As the D-Day invasion was taking place, large numbers of resistance fighters blew up railways, bridges, etc. to keep the Germans from reinforcing the coastal areas.

This kind of preparation won't do much for the Ukrainians, but everyone else should decide if they think Putin will be the first empire builder in history to say, "That's enough."