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The term ‘sabotage’ derives from the French word sabot, which means clog – a wooden shoe belonging to peasants. Clomping around in them was a loud, clumsy affair, and sabotage took on the sense of work that was performed poorly.
Sabotage also came to mean the deliberate harm caused to property, and this definition relates to its debut in English. During a 1910 French railway strike, workers severed railway sleepers, causing derailments. ‘We have lately been busy in deploring the sabotage of the French railway strikers,’ noted the Church Times on 11 November that year, marking the term’s first use in English.
Used both as a noun and a verb, the word subsequently expanded in its meaning, encompassing damage maliciously inflicted during industrial action, as well as that against the military or economic possessions of an enemy.
Sabotage was employed by both sides in World War II. The mission of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in 1940, was ‘to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’.
In 1943, Norwegian saboteurs blew up the hydroelectric plant of Vemork in Norway to keep its yield of heavy water, an ingredient for making atomic bombs, out of German hands. The French Resistance conducted significant sabotage operations, too.
The Germans themselves attempted sabotage against the United States. Operation Pastorius saw a team of saboteurs arrive by U-boat on Long Island on 12 June 1942. They, and a second team that came ashore in Florida on 17 June, had come bearing explosives to attack American industry.
However, the plan was immediately betrayed by one of its own agents, and all eight saboteurs were arrested within two weeks of their landing.
