Booby Trap

One night last week, bushy-haired Hans Trippler, 31, a radio ham, made a hurried call to the Detroit police. Trippler had been dismantling a war surplus radio device (bought for $4.90*) to get parts for his transmitter. In the center of the.machine he came upon a 6-in. cylinder labeled "Destructor." The cylinder contained two dynamite caps and a tube of thermite. Trippler's little find fascinated Detroit cops, the Michigan state police, the War Assets Administration, the Military, Air Force and Naval Intelligence and the FBI.

The war surplus set was quickly identified as an I.F.F. transmitter (Identification, Friend or Foe), a highly secret wartime device used by ships and planes for broadcasting an identification signal. If the plane crashed, the "Destructor" exploded, making a molten mass of the wiring and preventing the enemy from reproducing either the wiring or the identification signal.

Government agents said that all war surplus wholesalers had been told to dismantle I.F.F.'s little bomb. But a check at just one store in Benton Harbor, Mich, revealed that over 1,000 sets had been sold with the detonators intact. Sounding nationwide warnings, the Government men admitted that they had no idea how many I.F.F. sets had been sold throughout the country. Only the skill of the individual buyers (probably most of them are radio hams) stood between them and maiming accidents, serious burns, or blindness from the dynamite caps and fiercely burning thermite.

* Original cost to the Government: $600 to $1,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.