WWII Secret Agent Special Guns

James Bond's invaluable support throughout all the films has been Q, the eccentric inventor of multiple spy tools that have always got 007 out of every scrape. Q stands for Quartermaster, and is another nod by Bond's creator Ian Fleming to his wartime experiences in British naval intelligence. One important branch of World War II Allied Intelligence Services was created specifically during the conflict. SOE, standing for Special Operations Executive, put together in 1940 on Prime Minister Winston Churchill's express order and told to, quote, set Europe ablaze. SOE would also serve as the model for the American OSS, the Office for Strategic Services, direct forerunner of the CIA. As well as training and parachuting into Europe, agents from a diverse variety of backgrounds to help indigenous resistance movements to battle the Germans, SOE went further with the creation of Station Nine, a special research factory based at Welling Garden City, just outside London. The SOE was known as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and the 13,000 SOE operatives could call upon a wide array of novel and deadly gadgets and weapons specifically designed at Station Nine for the peculiar requirements of the service. All weapons and machines invented at Station Nine carried the prefix Well, W-E-L, after Welling Garden City, and were easily good enough to have starred in Bond movies. In this video, we will concentrate on weaponry only. If one man at Station Nine deserves to Born in 1909 and educated at Harrow School and Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, he joined SOE in 1940 and became one of the most productive and gifted inventors at Station Nine. Naturally, SOE had a requirement for stealthy and quiet weapons, and initially had outsourced a weapons problem to the original maker to be resolved. The Sten submachine gun, a cheap, stamp-metal, welded and rather austere economy weapon, had been created in 1941 to supplement the limited numbers of expensive US Thompson submachine guns in British service, and the high-quality MP-28 clone, the Lanchester, used by the Royal Navy. Created at the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, Sten was an acronym, the ST part standing for the weapons, two designers surnames, Major Reginald Shepard and Harold Turpin, and the EN letters standing for Enfield. The Sten, a 9mm select-fire submachine gun, using a 32 round box magazine, that was interchangeable with both the Lanchester and the German MP-40, would see extensive service with resistance groups. It was cheap to make, costing $11 per gun in 1942, compared to $70 for a Thompson, and was rugged and very simple, and could be broken down fairly quickly and easily concealed. But it was as loud as any other submachine gun. And SOE asked the Royal Small Arms Factory to produce a suppressed version for clandestine use. Beginning with the Mark II S in 1943, it incorporated an integral suppressor, and had a lower muzzle velocity to below the speed of sound, but still used standard ammunition. However, the suppressor would rapidly heat when fired, and the Mark II S had a canvas cover laced around the suppressor. The operator generally only fired single shots, or short bursts, rather than full-auto. Major Reeves at Station 9 saw that SOE could also use a suppressed pistol, particularly for wet work, a euphemism for assassination. The formal name for his invention was the hand-firing device, and came to be called the well-rod, the well after Welland Garden City, and the rod part of the name from a slang term for a firearm. Reeves deliberately made the well-rod not resemble a gun, looking instead more like a bicycle pump, to aid concealment from prying German eyes on operational use. The well-rod is 12 inches long, and one and a quarter inches in diameter, and is a steel cylinder with a magazine well. The magazine slots into the well, and doubles as a pistol grip. The grip is covered with a hard rubber called ebonite, so gripping the weapon with nervous, sweaty hands is not a problem. It came in two calibres, a .32 ACP 8-round magazine, or a 6-round 9mm version. The weapon's barrel is just over three inches long, and contains a series of ports, but they don't actually slow the bullet down much. In Reeves' design, the ports decompress the combustion gases into an enclosed expansion chamber, which makes the well-rod really, really quiet. Following the ports were fourteen or eighteen steel baffles, interspersed with three rubber wipes. After fifteen or so shots, the rubber discs degraded, and needed replacing to maintain the well-rod's suppressive capabilities. The well-rod would be manually re-cocked after each shot, the trigger being a simple piece of folded steel. Grimly, the muzzle cap was slightly inset to provide a better seal when using the gun in contact with surface, such as the back of a German's head, for example, and luminous sights aided its use during night-time or low-light conditions. 2,800 were manufactured during the war that saw extensive service as an assassination tool in occupied Europe. So successful was Major Reeves' design, that post-war the British manufactured another 11,000 well-rods. They were last officially used by the SAS in the 1991 Gulf War, but are rumoured to still be in SAS service even in 2023. A variation on the theme of the suppressed pistol was the sleeve gun, another of Major Reeves' inventions. Codenamed the Well Wand, the wand name coming from its resemblance to a magician's wand, basically it was a well-rod without the pistol grip magazine. Some 150 to 200 of these peculiar weapons were made by the Birmingham Small Arms Company. A single-shot weapon chambered in either .32 ACP or 9mm, it could be concealed in the sleeve of a coat on a special runner and dropped into the hand like a magician's wand to dispense its own particular form of magic. A pure assassin's firearm, the Well Wand was described in SOE's own literature as, quote, a short-length silent murder weapon. The trigger was near the muzzle, and the agent would drop the well-rod into his hand, press it against his intended target, and discharge the weapon using the trigger near the muzzle. Afterwards, the gun could be pulled back up the sleeve, the empty shell case still inside the weapon, leaving no trace. Major Reeves also invented the Well Gun, a submachine gun designed from the outset to be used solely by SOE agents. The Well Gun was to be more reliable than the cheap Sten Gun, and after several competing submachine gun designs had been rejected, in 1942 the Well Gun was trialled. A 9mm blowback-operated open-bolt design, using a .32 round detachable box magazine, it was found to be more accurate and easier to use than the Sten, but was less reliable under field conditions. It was designed also to be shorter than the Sten, with a folding stock reducing its length to 16 inches for easier concealment. The Sten of course could also be concealed relatively quickly, though it would need to be broken down first, unlike the Well Gun which remained, even with the folded stock, a fully operational weapon. Improvements did result in a weapon that was as good as the Sten in muddy or dusty conditions, but in the end it wasn't formally adopted, though it did see some limited use by SOE operatives in Europe. Many thanks for watching, please subscribe and share, and also visit my audiobook channel, War Stories with Mark Felton. You can also help to support both of my channels at PayPal and Patreon, details in the description box below.