One of the reports I heard about the Invasion of Ukraine talked about Russian saboteurs sneaking into the capital Kyiv.
The word saboteur is French using a Dutch word for wooden shoes. The sabot was a wooden shoe worn by Dutch workers, either the single piece of wood as in the photo above or a wooden sole with various materials forming the upper part of the shoe.
Sometimes angry workers would throw these wooden shoes into machines and stop work at factories. One who breaks a machine by throwing a wooden shoe into the mechanism is a saboteur.
Long before I learned the source of saboteur, I learned about the Sabot armor-piercing cannon shell fired by all tanks in all armies to defeat enemy tanks. I was at Fort Knox in 1975 and was surprised to learn that the main round we would fire at enemy (Soviet) tanks was not explosive. The Sabot round travleed a mile-per-second to target and destroyed enemy tanks with impact, not explosion.
The way sabot came to be used as a name for armor-piercing cannon shells is that the wooden shoes were very easy to slip off. This characteristic led to calling a small armor-piercing round fired a big gun a Sabot round. Since the military always uses a long name reduced to an acronym, the technical description was Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS) round.
The simple, deadly design of Sabot rounds fires a 25mm projectile from a 120mm gun. With the full force of a five-inch cannon pushing a 1-inch projectile, the tungsten carbide round travels more than a mile a second to target. There is no explosive charge, the impact of a 5,700-foot-per-second round can punch through more than a foot of armor plate and destroy a tank.
The humble Dutch workers shoe has become a metaphor for very destructive weapons of war. Language can be so strange.
