Simple Sabotage Field Manual — Key Ideas to Explore

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Authors: United States. Office of Strategic Services Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2008 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Sabotage Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 12,066

Reading time 53 min

Text sections 6

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #26184

A 1944 OSS manual instructing ordinary citizens in low-risk acts of obstruction, from mislabeling luggage to spoiling crops, using household items and deliberate inefficiency.

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File: pg26184

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Simple Sabotage Field Manual

Office of Strategic Services

OSS REPRODUCTION BRANCH SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL Strategic Services (Provisional) STRATEGIC SERVICES FIELD MANUAL No. 3

Office of Strategic Services

This Simple Sabotage Field Manual Strategic Services (Provisional) is published for the information and guidance of all concerned and will be used as the basic doctrine for Strategic Services training for this subject.

The contents of this Manual should be carefully controlled and should not be allowed to come into unauthorized hands.

The instructions may be placed in separate pamphlets or leaflets according to categories of operations but should be distributed with care and not broadly. They should be used as a basis of radio broadcasts only for local and special cases and as directed by the theater commander.

AR 380-5, pertaining to handling of secret documents, will be complied with in the handling of this Manual.

1. INTRODUCTION 2. POSSIBLE EFFECTS 3. MOTIVATING THE SABOTEUR 4. TOOLS, TARGETS, AND TIMING 5. SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE

The purpose of this paper is to characterize simple sabotage, to outline its possible effects, and to present suggestions for inciting and executing it.

Sabotage varies from highly technical _coup de main_ acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially-trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform. This paper is primarily concerned with the latter type. Simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.

Where destruction is involved, the weapons of the citizen-saboteur are salt, nails, candles, pebbles, thread, or any other materials he might normally be expected to possess as a householder or as a worker in his particular occupation. His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, the trash pile, his own usual kit of tools and supplies. The targets of his sabotage are usually objects to which he has normal and inconspicuous access in everyday life.

A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the “human element,” is frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal conditions. The potential saboteur should discover what types of faulty decisions and the operations are _normally_ found in this kind of work and should then devise his sabotage so as to enlarge that “margin for error.”

Acts of simple sabotage are occurring throughout Europe. An effort should be made to add to their efficiency, lessen their detectability, and increase their number. Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizen-saboteurs, can be an effective weapon against the enemy. Slashing tires, draining fuel tanks, starting fires, starting arguments, acting stupidly, short-circuiting electric systems, abrading machine parts will waste materials, manpower, and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war effort of the enemy.

Simple sabotage may also have secondary results of more or less value. Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police. Further, success may embolden the citizen-saboteur eventually to find colleagues who can assist him in sabotage of greater dimensions. Finally, the very practice of simple sabotage by natives in enemy or occupied territory may make these individuals identify themselves actively with the United Nations war effort, and encourage them to assist openly in periods of Allied invasion and occupation.

3. MOTIVATING THE SABOTEUR

To incite the citizen to the active practice of simple sabotage and to keep him practicing that sabotage over sustained periods is a special problem.

Simple sabotage is often an act which the citizen performs according to his own initiative and inclination. Acts of destruction do not bring him any personal gain and may be completely foreign to his habitually conservationist attitude toward materials and tools. Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature. He frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.

(1) _Personal Motives_

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The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, issued by the Office of Strategic Services in January 1944, treats sabotage not as a specialist's domain but as a civic duty open to any householder. Its opening pages define two parallel tracks: one relying on everyday materials—salt, nails, candles—and another on what it calls the “human element,” where faulty decisions and a noncooperative attitude become weapons. The manual’s tone is brisk and procedural, yet its examples reveal a peculiar intimacy with domestic and workplace routines, from the kitchen shelf to the railway switchboard.

The Household Arsenal and the Human Element

The manual explicitly distinguishes between physical destruction and psychological obstruction. For the former, it lists “salt, nails, candles, pebbles, thread” as legitimate tools—items a citizen might “normally be expected to possess.” The latter requires no tools at all: “making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another.” This duality recurs throughout. In transportation, for instance, the saboteur can either spread salt on electrical switch points (short-circuiting them when it rains) or simply “make mistakes in issuing train tickets.” The manual frames both as equally valid, and it repeatedly stresses that the second type—bickering, surliness, deliberate stupidity—is “frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal conditions.”

Small Frictions on Rails and Roads

The manual’s most detailed instructions concern railways. It advises attendants to “take up tickets after midnight, call all station stops very loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible.” Engineers should “run trains slow or make unscheduled stops for plausible reasons.” The cumulative effect is a portrait of sabotage as a series of petty annoyances: misrouted luggage, switched address labels, loosened couplings. On roads, the manual recommends changing signposts at intersections and removing danger signals from curves. These acts require no explosives or specialized knowledge—only a willingness to exploit routine access. The manual’s phrasing—“see that cars are put on the wrong trains,” “see that the food is especially bad”—casts the saboteur as a quiet orchestrator of inconvenience.

Crops, Livestock, and the Logic of Surplus

A brief section on agriculture notes that crops and livestock “probably will be destroyed only in areas where there are large food surpluses or where the enemy (regime) is known to be requisitioning food.” The manual suggests feeding crops to livestock, letting harvests spoil by soaking grain in water, or leaving fruit and vegetables in the sun. These instructions are terse, almost afterthoughts, but they reveal a strategic calculus: sabotage is not indiscriminate but targeted where it will strain supply lines. The parenthetical “(regime)” hints at the manual’s intended audience—occupied populations—and the assumption that even small acts of spoilage can accumulate into meaningful disruption when multiplied across many citizens.

Readers should note that the manual is a period document, shaped by the specific conditions of World War II and the OSS’s need to train resistance networks. Its recommendations are not a blueprint for modern action but a historical artifact of how state actors once imagined civilian participation in conflict. The emphasis on everyday materials and minor frictions offers a counterpoint to high-tech warfare, revealing a belief that ordinary people, armed only with household items and a stubborn attitude, could erode an enemy’s efficiency from within.

That old manual made me think about how ordinary people quietly shape history, not through grand acts but through small, stubborn choices. It reminded me of those earnest notes on the History of the United Netherlands, 1586c — Reading Notes. There’s something tender in watching people just keep going, day after day, even when the outcome feels far away. That feeling stays with me.