Saboteurs working for Nazi Germany plotted a World War II bombing campaign in Britain involving exploding cans of processed French peas, according to secret files made public on Friday.
The three-man team, including two Germans and a resident of what was then British-ruled India, were nabbed after they landed on Ireland’s southwest coast in July 1940 and jailed in Dublin.
Security agency papers released to the National Archives in London said they had three or four metal boxes of explosives with them — including a number of cans labelled ”Prepared French Peas”, which contained small slabs of nitrocellulose.
An informer detained with the trio at Dublin’s Mountjoy prison told the Irish authorities that they were en route to England with a ”definite plan” which he thought included an attempt to ”blow up Buckingham palace”.
MI5, Britain’s internal security and intelligence agency, which kept close contact with counterparts in neutral Ireland, apparently had its doubts about the canned pea plot.
”This seems a little fantastic, when it is known that the explosive materials in their possession were of the most primitive kind,” one of the MI5 reports noted.
Nevertheless, MI5 said there was sufficient cause for concern because the two Germans in the trio were members of the ”notorious” Lehr Regiment, a special unit used by German intelligence as a pool of spies and saboteurs. — Sapa-AFP