Lesser Known WW2 Midget Subs

Interesting. Sleeping Beauty and Welman I knew about, but Welfreighter is a new one to me and I thought I was reasonably well read on British WWII spec-ops craft. OTOH I already thought Welman was a ridiculous duplication of effort (SOE wanting to get in on the naval sabotage game), and now I find they not only had Welman, they had Welfreighter.

And GIMIK should probably be seen as another needless duplicate considering there was an entire flotilla of XE craft in Australia literally begging the US theatre commanders for operations. And indeed by that point US submarines had already landed freelance sabotage parties on the Japanese mainland from time to time using nothing more specialised than a rubber boat.
 
Pat Buxton, who has died aged 103, served during the Second World War on the secretarial staff of the Special Operations Executive.

Recruited in the autumn of 1940, she was posted to The Frythe (Station IX) at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, a secret SOE factory designing and making weapons as well as running agents and supplying details of resistance movements behind enemy lines. There she worked for Hugh Quentin Reeves, inventor of such devices as a Sten gun silencer and the “Welrod” – a pistol with a built-in silencer for use in assassinations.

As well as taking minutes at meetings, her job involved acquiring equipment for Reeves’s team, a difficult task during rationing. One notable coup was her acquisition of 25 miles of copper wire for his “Sleeping Beauty”, a one-man “Motorised Submersible Canoe” or MSC that would sabotage enemy ships without being discovered. Her response to requests for material – “we’ll muddle through” led her becoming known as “Welmuddlethrough Patsy”.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituar...d-war-special-operations-executive-st-albans/
 

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