The Invisible Arsenal

In the workshops and laboratories of the secret war, the most dangerous weapons looked like nothing at all.

A chemist in Washington built explosives that could be baked into bread and carried across enemy borders in a flour sack. In a Nazi concentration camp, Jewish prisoners forged millions in British banknotes - and quietly sabotaged their own work to slow the machine that was killing them. A seventeen-year-old in Paris calculated that sleeping cost lives, and chose not to sleep. And on a rain-slicked London street, an umbrella fired a platinum pellet smaller than a pea into the thigh of a man who was dead three days later.

These are not the stories of the spies. They are the stories of the people who made the spies possible - the bombmakers and forgers, the tailors and chemists, the engineers who worked in secret and were never thanked and never named. Drawing on declassified files, survivor testimony, and decades of historical scholarship, The Invisible Arsenal brings together twenty gripping true stories of the craftsmen who armed history's most dangerous secret war.

History gave the medals to the spies. This book is about the people who built the weapons.