During the Second World War, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE)—a secret organization whose job was to conduct espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe, as well as aid local resistance movements—devised an ingenious plan to blow up Nazi factories.

A SOE officer posing as a student, procured about a hundred rats under the pretext of conducting laboratory experiments. The rats were killed, and their carcasses were filled with plastic explosives. The idea was to get French Resistance fighters and Special Operations Executive agents to infiltrate German armament factories and leave the dead rodents in or around the boiler rooms. It was hoped that the Germans would throw the dead rodents directly into the furnace causing a huge explosion.

A rare surviving example of a rat bomb.