The Coal Bomb: Britain's Ingenious Deception

19 February 1944. The Reichsbahn depot at Saarbrücken lies dormant in the pre-dawn darkness. Three locomotives sit idle on the rails, their boilers cooling, their fires banked for the night. The German driver of the nearest engine—a man named Klaus Richter, according to what few records survive—would not see the morning. But he would not die from gunfire. He would not fall to a bomb dropped from an aircraft. Instead, he would be killed by something that looked, to the untrained eye, exactly like the fuel his locomotive consumed. He would be murdered by a lump of coal.