Lesser Known WW2 Midget Subs

[World B4]

Welfreighter

British SF water craft

MSC 'Sleeping Beauty' Motorised submersible canoe (MSC) first developed for SOE in WW2 and used in sabotage attacks similarly to X-Craft. T...

covertshores.blogspot.com

Welfreighter - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Welfreighter (1944); Service vessel; Submarine; Welman submarine | Royal Museums Greenwich

collections.rmg.co.uk

Gimik

Lost in Plain Sight: GIMIK and OSS Project NAPKO

This was one of World War Two’s longer-running mysteries, finally solved . This is one of a pair of two-man submersibles that were designed...

covertshores.blogspot.com

Napko Project plan, with related OSS Research & Analysis Branch reports on Korea

calisphere.org

 

[DWG]

Interesting. Sleeping Beauty and Welman I knew about, but Welfreighter is a new one to me and I thought I was reasonably well read on British WWII spec-ops craft. OTOH I already thought Welman was a ridiculous duplication of effort (SOE wanting to get in on the naval sabotage game), and now I find they not only had Welman, they had Welfreighter.

And GIMIK should probably be seen as another needless duplicate considering there was an entire flotilla of XE craft in Australia literally begging the US theatre commanders for operations. And indeed by that point US submarines had already landed freelance sabotage parties on the Japanese mainland from time to time using nothing more specialised than a rubber boat.

 

[Grey Havoc]

Pat Buxton, who has died aged 103, served during the Second World War on the secretarial staff of the Special Operations Executive.

Recruited in the autumn of 1940, she was posted to The Frythe (Station IX) at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, a secret SOE factory designing and making weapons as well as running agents and supplying details of resistance movements behind enemy lines. There she worked for Hugh Quentin Reeves, inventor of such devices as a Sten gun silencer and the “Welrod” – a pistol with a built-in silencer for use in assassinations.

As well as taking minutes at meetings, her job involved acquiring equipment for Reeves’s team, a difficult task during rationing. One notable coup was her acquisition of 25 miles of copper wire for his “Sleeping Beauty”, a one-man “Motorised Submersible Canoe” or MSC that would sabotage enemy ships without being discovered. Her response to requests for material – “we’ll muddle through” led her becoming known as “Welmuddlethrough Patsy”.

Pat Buxton, resourceful secretary at wartime SOE whose catchphrase was “we’ll muddle through”

At St Albans School, clouds of cigarette smoke greeted pupils seeking her signature on ‘white slips’ for minor misdemeanours

www.telegraph.co.uk