During World War II, the British and Americans developed a handful of new weapons and technologies, in a race against time to get ahead of the enemy. Some worked and others were abandoned. There were weird and weird ones, like the idea of using pigeons to guide bombs. But surely none as unpleasant as the so-called Who Me (Who, me? ), intended to humiliate and demoralize the enemy.
Who Me was the name used to designate a compound developed by the North Americans, which contained sulfides and whose smell resembled in an intense way that of human feces. The plan, devised by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), was to distribute it in small spray bottles to members of resistance groups, both French and Chinese, for use against the German and Japanese enemy as stink bombs.
Spraying soldiers and officers with the spray managed to humiliate and embarrass them, while undermining their morale. The spraying had to be done, obviously, in such a way that the victim did not notice, so that his shame would be effective.
For two weeks the plan was put into practice in Paris and in China, where many officers suffered from one of these fetid attacks. But there was a problem. The Who Me compound had an extremely volatile concentration of sulfides that was very difficult to control, so the person using the spray ended up smelling just as bad as the enemy, which ultimately allowed them to be identified.
To solve this problem a second version, called Who Me II , began to be developed. As Mary Roach tells in her book Grunt:The Curious Science of Humans at War, it would never be used. When it was ready to be distributed to the resistance in 1945, the Hiroshima bomb made it no longer needed.
With the end of the conflict the compound Who Me it was abandoned, although research into smelly weapons did not stop, and even continues to this day.