An exploding rat, developed by British secret agents during WWII. Rat carcasses like this would be filled with plastic explosives and planted in the boiler rooms of German factories. Factory workers would find the dead rats and shovel them into the fire, thereby triggering a major explosion.

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣Well that was the idea anyway.

The rat bombs never actually caused a single explosion…yet they were still considered a major success.

Why? Because the Germans intercepted the first rat shipment and got really paranoid that their country had already been infested with booby-trapped rodents. They then wasted a huge amount of resources fruitlessly trying to hunt down an army of exploding rats that never really existed.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

This particular rat was sold for USD $1875 at Bonham’s in 2017. It belonged to a French SOE agent named Maurice Ledain, who escaped from occupied France in 1940 and joined the Allied Commando upon arriving in Britain.

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