Standing Well Back
19th Century

Rockets – a reassessment, a mystery and a discovery

In my recent posts about the Irish rebellion in 1803, I suggested that the crucial development seen at the end of the 1700s and early 1800s was the introduction of a metal rocket casing to increase the internal pressure and hence range of the rockets.   This assessment is stated as a fact in a number of sources, discussing the development of Congreve’s rockets and their metal bodies. I also assumed that the reports suggesting that it was Emmet’s rockets that were a new development and inspired Congreve were right.   There are many historical textbooks which suggest that the designs that emerged in the first few years of the 1800’s were significant developments from the Indian rockets of Tipu Sultan the Indian leader of the Mysore wars. Well, it seems the textbooks, and I were wrong, but in finding this out I encountered something remarkable.  Bear with me as I tell the tale.

Firstly, read my last post about how Emmet in Dublin 1803 manufactured his newly invented rockets. Note that the rockets were described as being two and a half inches in diameter, how the maker, Johnstone “consulted a scientific work respecting the way such materials should be prepared” and that “An iron needle was placed in the centre of the tube around which the mortar was tempered, and when the needle was drawn out, the hole was filled with powder”. Also it describes Johnstone using the written instructions which gave the number of blows used to tap the rocket propellant into place with a mallet.

I then went searching for more historical documents relating to rocket development, and found a copy of this document, dated 1696, a hundred and seven years prior to the Dublin rebellion. This is a book written by Robert Anderson, a researcher in ordnance and artillery working for the Earl of Romney, then “Master General of his majesties Ordnance”. All of a sudden things got interesting very quickly.

On page A4 of the document, here, it says halfway down, “I have given easie, plain and ready Rules for making of Rockets to two Inches and half diameter.”

I sat up. Two and a half inches? Could that be a coincidence? I dived deeper.

The book first describes how to make the rocket motor moulds.  Then on page B2 it describes “the bottom of the Rocket-Mould with the Needle to be put in and taken out:”

Then on page B3 it describes filling the rocket composition with charges and tapping the charges into place “and to every Charge  10, 12 or 14 blows with a Mallet”

So, it is very clear to me that Emmet and his rebels were not making newly developed rockets, learned from the experience of the East India Company’s battles against Tipu Sultan – they were making rockets to the specific design of a two and a half inch rocket design of Englishman Robert Anderson, written over a hundred years earlier in 1696, and using the same document I have in front of me now.  Remarkable.  I’m not aware of anyone realising that link before now.

I then went a couple of pages further on and found this diagram. The adjoining text clearly states that the rocket body (AFEB) is made from a piece of gun barrel, and is metal, not pasteboard. Thus the English (and Anderson specifically) had already designed metal rocket bodies over a hundred years before Emmet and subsequently Congreve used the same concept. Many references (incluidng Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipaedia) have this wrong ascribing such development to Tipu Sultan a hundred years later.

So, I think this changes our view of history. Emmets’s rockets were not his own development – they were explicitly built from instructions from an English developer over a hundred years old by 1803. Also, Congreve’s rockets were not new in using metal bodies to increase the internal pressure of the rocket motor – that too was achieved by the same developer, Anderson in 1696.

I find it fascinating that rebels today are making their own versions of these munitions, in hidden rooms in Syria, 300 years since Anderson, and 200 years since Emmet copied his designs, constructed them in hidden rooms in Dublin and first used them in a rebellion. Of course today’s rockets have changes in design and in the rocket composition – but in effect, frankly, they are pretty darned similar.

Technology Development

Inventing Detonators

I’m intrigued by the chain of historical inventions that led to the modern detonator.

Detonators for explosive charges evolved from firearm trigger mechanisms and I see these as an invention continuum, with one leading to another. Alongside these mechanical inventions, chemical discovery runs as a parallel track, particularly the discovery or primary explosives and high explosives, which detonate by shock (gunpowder being a low explosive which explodes by deflagration)

Initially, I guess the first “initiators” were simply burning fuzes which transmitted a flame to gunpowder. However there is some early mention of a some victim operated mechanisms perhaps using friction devices or steel and flint levers.   See Chinese IEDs here.  

To help undertsand the chain of scientific, chemical, physical and mechanical inventions that took us down this path the folloing rough time line might be useful:

Pre 1400 – Burning fuzes of various types, igniting gunpowder by burning.

Early to mid Mid 1400s – Invention of the matchlock mechanism to initiate firearms. Note that this was definitely a European invention – the Portuguese took matchlocks and introduced them to China and Japan.  (The story of how the Japanese obtained and reverse engineered the matchlock will be the subject of a future post) .

About 1500 – Invention of the wheel-lock, possibly by Leonardo Da Vinci, which introduces a new mechanical action to apply a burning fuze to a specific point.

1540 – The snaplock was invented, using a flint initiator. This was a precursor to the more sophisticated flintlock

1558 – The snaphaunce was developed which incorporated a mechanism for keeping the gunpowder covered until the flint fell, when the cover is opened automatically.  The cover is called the frizzen.

1588, a time initiated system used by Giambelli to explode the “Hoop”, with a timing mechanism causing ((I’m guessing with a snaplock or snaphance) to initiate the charge.

1602  Gold fulminate (the first primary/high explosive) discovered by John Tholde of Hesse.

1610 – The first flintlock initiation system developed The flintlock mechanism is an evolution of the snaphaunce whereby the frizzen is not only a cover for the pan of gunpowder, but also the steel face on which the flint strikes to cause sparks.

1659 Robert Hooke and Thomas Willis discover the primary explosive characteristic of Gold hydrazide

1745  Dr Watson of the Royal Society showed that an electrical spark from a Leyden jar could initiate a small blackpowder charge.

1750  Benjamin Franklin initiates gunpowder with an electrical spark and makes small paper tubes of  powder with two wires inserted and a spark gap created.

1788  Silver fulminate was first made by French chemist Berthollet.

1776 – American revolutionaries used adapted firearm mechanism to make contact mines consisting of “kegs” of gunpowder which were floated down rivers.  The kegs have fastened to the lid a wooden arm which when it touched a target ship connected to an iron pin, engaging a flintlock device from an adapted firearm, causing the main charge to explode.  Note the similarities in principle to much later IED initiators here.  I’ll post some images of these “kegs’ in future posts.

1777 – Italian scientist Alesandro Volta, describes how he had fired pistols, muskets and a ”mine subacquee” (underwater mine) electrically – it appears he used a hot wire to initiate a glass bulb full of a flammable gas.

1782 – Another Italian scientist, Cavallo, described detonation of a charge of gunpowder, electrically, using an incandescent wire embedded in the powder

1795 – Cavallo uses another method, using gunpowder mixed with steel filings, with two electrical probes embedded in it.

1799 – Fulminate of mercury, a primary explosive later used in detonators was first prepared by Charles Howard. Interesting reports on his experiments are here and I think its very significant indeed that Howard actually tested electrical initiation of mercury fulminate. I note also that Howard refers to French scientists electrically initiating some form of potassium chloride based explosive in the late 1700s.  Howard’s description of the experiments he conducted with mercury fulminate are fascinating – clearly he hoped he had invented an alternative to gunpowder, but initiating mercury fulminate within a gun caused some catastrophic damage to his equipment!  There is a great description of how Howard measured the volume of gas produced from a specific quantity of the explosive.

1812 – The Russian military scientist Pavel Schilling developed an electrically initiated IED, as a mine.  My apologies, in earlier posts I credited this to others later in the 19th Century, and I have only recently discovered Schilling’s  (and Volta’s, and Howard’s) technologies.  Schilling gradually improved the associated technologies, insulating wire with tarred hemp and copper tubing, and devising a carbon arc initiator.

Also in 1812 – Prussian scientist Sommerring improved the insulation of electrical wire, using rubber and varnish, allowing further capabilities to be developed in initiating explosives.

1820 – American scientist Robert Hare, worked on electrical initiation of flammable gases. Hare also developed a “plunger” type galvanic machine for producing electrical charges for this purpose.

1822 – Hare used  a hotwire embedded in a pyrotechnic mixture to initiate a blackpowder charge.  In the 1830s Hare also produced a tin tube container packed with powder and with an ignition wire for rock blasting but foresaw the military importance of command initiated explosive charges.

1829 – A young Samuel Colt initiated an under water charge electrically perhaps using a tarred copper wire.

1831 – The Bickford burning fuze was invented, taking away the guess work about time delays for burning fuses.

1837  Colonel (later General) Pasley of the Royal Engineers developed chemical then an electrical initiation mechanism to explode gunpowder charges under water. Pasley’s work appears to have been prompted by reading a  newspaper report of an “ordnance accident”, in Russia, when Tsar Nicholas I narrowly escaped death when viewing a demonstration of electrically initiated gunpowder charges used to blow up a bridge, presumably developed by Schilling. Pasley read the article and then sought the advice of English scientist Charles Wheatstone to consider how he might use the same concept.  Pasley’s contributions to military engineering are huge, and his explosive related inventions are very significant if only a part of that broader work.  I have yet to find details of Pasley’s chemical fuzes, but his electrical initiation mechanisms used electrically heated platinum wire, with the electricity provided by early galvanic cells. Pasley solved the problem of insulating the wires so they could be used under water, by coating wire with gutta percha. The platinum wire (or foil) provided enough heat to initiate the gunpowder it was embedded in.  However some reports state that the electrical system caused a detonation by a “galvanic spark” so the actual mechanism is still a little unclear.   I’m very intrigued by the chemical fuzes and how they worked, given the nature of the underwater tasks that Pasley developed the explosives for. I think it likely that there would have been some form of command pull to initiate the chemical reaction once the divers were clear and safe.  Chemically the reaction may have been similar to Nobel’s (later? ) designs.

1830s  –  Immanuel Nobel developed chemical initiation mechanisms to initiate gunpowder. The mechanisms used a glass vial containing suplhuric acid, which when broken (usually by an enemy) caused the acid to fall by gravity onto potassium chlorate, which ignited and caused surrounding gunpowder to initiate. These were confusingly called “Jacobi” fuzes after the Russian scientist for whom Nobel worked.  Jacobi led the Russian “armed services committee for underwater experiments” between 1839 and 1856. It is clear that Jacobi’s secrecy prevented international publication of the scientific achievements he made in electrical initiation. Jacobi’s work  from 1839 seems to have been prompted by both Schilling and Pasley.  What is significant is a reference I have found to Jacobi developing “mercury connecting devices” which probably mean some form of mercury electrical switch to initiate contact mines in the 1850s.

1830s, Mercury fulminate was used in copper caps used as firearm initiators taking the place of flint, and making the process of initiating a firearm much less dependent on flint and the weather.

1839 – Other British Royal Engineer salvage operations in Bermuda and in Bengal on the Hoogly river used electrically initiated charges.  I have a great piece of reseacrh to blog about with regard to the Hoogly river operation.

1840s – Samuel Colt conducted extensive work on highly complex electrical initiation systems for sea and river mines.

1848 – Werner von Siemens developed electrically initiated sea mines.

1863 – Alfred Nobel (Immanuel Nobel’s son) published his patent for a practical detonator to initiate nitro-glycerine.  Note that this was four years before his patent for dynamite.  In modern parlance this was a non electric blasting cap, itself initiated with burning fuse.   The detonator consisted of a small blackpowder charge, a wooden plug and a small quantity of nitroglycerine held within a metal cylinder. The black powder is initiated by a burning fuze, which pushes the wooden plug down the cylinder, which then strikes the niroglycerine with kinetic energy.

1865 –  Nobel refined his detonator design significantly, with a small metal tube containing mercury fulminate

1868. H. Julius Smith produces a detonator that uses a spark gap and mercury fulminate.

1875 The electrical detonator using a hot filament was developed independently by Gardiner and Smith

1580-1590

Alchemy and High Explosives

Alchemy is the pursuit of chemical and occult methods to turn base metals into gold, and was an activity pursued with vigour in the 1500s and beyond, into the 1800s even.  As proto-chemists evolved so the boundary between “occult magic” and “chemistry” started to emerge.  At this time the first ever “high explosive” and  indeed the first primary explosive was developed, what we call today fulminating gold or gold fulminate. The German alchemist Sebald Schwaertzer first mentions fulminating gold in literature in his “Chrysopoeia Schwaertzeriana” in 1585.   Other texts add more detail in the early 1600s.

 

For those readers not familiar with explosives, gunpowder is a low explosive, where the explosion propagates through the explosive material, in effect, by heat and flame. In high explosive the chemical reaction occurring is propagated by a shock wave, and fulminate of gold was the first chemical compound isolated which exploded in this manner.  Fulminate of gold is also the first inherent explosive compound (gunpowder being a mixture of fuel and oxidizer). As it is ‘sensitive” it is also the first primary explosive.

Gold is one of the most stable elements – it doesn’t react with very much and by implication a compound of gold is easy to turn back into elemental gold, meaning the compounds are unstable.

For obvious reasons alchemists experimented with gold compounds. They mixed gold with other materials and sometimes accidentally produced compounds that surprised them. It’s tricky to make sense of the archaic descriptions, and the peculiar mixture of occult spells (barking mad) and real chemistry.

Fulminate of gold is created by dissolving gold in “aqua regia”, a three to one mix of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid.  This creates gold hydroxide. When this is mixed with ammonia, gold fulminate is precipitated.  But there are other recipes, which as someone who has a slightly limited expertise in chemistry I simply don’t follow. Real chemists feel free to correct me!   This sensitive explosive is then dried, and can be exploded by heating, crushing or scratching.  This must have been a remarkable thing when first experienced by alchemists who expected the weird and the wonderful.  The chemistry is quite complex and there are a number of related compounds, including (ClAuNH2)2NH and (OHAuNH2)2NH.  Essentially though, fulminate of gold is a mixture of various compounds of ammonia and gold, each of them technically a high explosive.

Fuliminate as a term simply means “exploding” . So gold fulminate can be a mix of a number of complex gold compounds including gold hydrazide.

A number of alchemists and later chemists were injured as a result of experiments with fulminate of gold.  Even in recent years, the research into exotic gold based catalysts has occasionally caused accidents in modern laboratories where gold fulminate was created.

Here’s the diarist Samuel Pepys describing a conversation on the subject in 1663:

Up and to my office all the morning, and at noon to the Coffee- house, where with Dr. Allen some good discourse about physique and chymistry. And among other things, I telling him what Dribble the German Doctor do offer of an instrument to sink ships; he tells me that which is more strange, that something made of gold, which they call in chymistry Aurum fulminans, a grain, I think he said, of it put into a silver spoon and fired, will give a blow like a musquett, and strike a hole through the spoon downward, without the least force upward; and this he can make a cheaper experiment of, he says, with iron prepared.

Note that “Dribble” is the inventor Cornelius Drebble, who invented the submarine and coincidentally mercury fulminate. Drebbel had died about 30 years prior to this Pepys reference. Some sources suggest that Drebble was using fulminate of gold as a detonator in IEDs (“petards”) he made for the British at the siege of La Rochelle in 1628. Drebbel was thus perhaps the first man to use high explosives in munitions. Drebble’s father-in-law was an alchemist who lost the sight in one eye from an alchemical explosion. (Pepys had other discussions with Drebbel’s son in law, Johannes Kuffler who was trying to sell an explosive device to sink ships – more on that in a future post.)

The gas produced when fulminate of gold explodes is largely nitrogen. Accompanying the gas is a characteristic violet/purple plume of gold aerosols.

1580-1590

The mystery of Ralph Rabbards and strange historical munitions

While researching some historical stuff for another post I came across a letter from an alchemist, chemist and inventor called Ralph Rabbards writing to Queen Elisabeth I some time in the latter half of the 1500s.   In the letter Rabbards offers the Queen a series of military inventions, many of them associated with explosives.  Some of these may be bluff on the part of Rabbards, but some will raise your eyebrows, I guarantee. Stick with the archaic language and plough through it, it’s worth it.  These are some extracts from the letter listing the inventions he is offering. My comments in bold

Speciall Observations concerninge the preparations for fireworks

An excellente kinde of salt-peter of great force

Saltepeter  might be so refined that the powder made thereof mighte be of double the force, so that one pounde maye serve as manye shotte, and as stronge as two pounde of that is comonly used, and lesse chardge in cariage and many other wayes apter and better for service

 (Improved gunpowder)

 A strange kinde of flyinge fire many wayes serviceable

A flyinge fire which shall , without ordynance, and farre of, wonderfully annoye any battayle, towne, or campe, and disperse even as if it did rayne fire; and the devydinge fires, being coted and made flyinge, may touch many places, and leave them all burninge; very terrible both to men and horse.

 (Napalm?)

Balls of mettle serving to many purposes

Balls of mettle to throwe into shippes, to enter in campes in the nightes, likewise in streights or breaches, especially in battayles; and to have said balls of all heightes diamiters and quantities, of a righte composition to devide in as many partes, and of such thickness as it should; and to delyver a thousand at once amongst the enemyes with small charge of ordynance, or other instrumentes, and to powre as much fire as your Majestie will upon any place.

(Carrier shells? Cluster munitions?)

A shotte to fire in passinge

A shotte for greate ordnance to pierce deeper then any other shotte, and sett on fire whatsoever it strike throughe or sticketh in.  A moste noble ingen, specialy for sea service.

(Armour piercing incendiary rounds)

A firy chariott to be forc’d by engine of great service

A firy chariot without horses to runne upon the battaile and and disorder it, that no man shal be able to abide or come nighe the same, and wil be directed even as men will to tourne, to staye, or come directly backe upon any presente danger, or elles to followe and chase the enemye in theor flighte.

(An Armed ROV?)

A rare invention

A musket of calyver, with dyvers strange and forcible shotte, which no armor will holde out, at three quarters of a mile or more; and will also become a most forcible weapon in the hande, as good as a pollox, and with a teice, become a perfitt shotte again.

(An anti- armour sniper rifle with a hand to hand capability?)

There’s a manuscript with diagrams by Rabbards of his military inventions in a collection at Yale University – I can’t wait to find a way to see that.

Ship-Borne IEDs

Big IEDs in Ships

As promised, a quick “connections’ commentary on some pretty remarkable IEDs on ships and boats in history.

“Fireships” in terms of boats and ships loaded with incendiary material go back in history – I have found reference to them as far back as 413 BC.  With the invention of gunpowder, fireships occasionally contained gunpowder. Sometimes in massive quantities.  In an earlier blog here, I wrote about the “hellburners”,  two explosively laden fireships used by the Dutch defenders of Antwerp in 1584 against the invading Spanish – one of these the “Hoop” (Hope) detonated against a temporary Spanish bridge, killing 800 – 1000 soldiers. If this is true, it is still probably the most lethal single IED in history. I have now found a diagram purporting to the the clockwork timing mechanisms of the device manufacturer by Bory. The Hellburner itself was designed by the Italian Giambelli, who possibly at the time (and certainly later) was an agent of the British.

References I have found recently suggest that Giambelli mounted a series of earlier attacks , floating explosive objects down the tidal river, with limited success. These IEDs were generally floating objects and rafts which carried barrels of gunpowder on a burning fuse.

After these earlier attacks failed Giambelli “thought big” and amidst a fleet of regular fire vessels sailed two explosive vessels (the “Hoop” and the “Fortune”) down the tide towards the target bridge. My earlier post has more details.  The “Fortune” had a burning fuse (which I have also fund an description of, but it is too complex to post details here).

The Hellburner incident and the use of explosive ships (described by the Italians as “Maschina Infernale”, and by the British as “Machine Vessels” became well known among the navies of Europe for several hundred years.

Just over a hundred years later in 1693 the British Navy led by Admiral Benbow used a ship, imaginatively named the Vesuvius, laden with 300 tons of explosives, (other sources say 20,000 pounds of gunpowder) during an attack on the French port of St Malo. The vessel was sailed in by a Captain Philips. The ship did not quite reach its target, became stuck on a rock and exploded “blowing the roofs of half the town”. But causing little loss of life.  The capstan of the “machine vessel” was thrown several hundred yards and landed on an Inn destroying it.


Machine ship “Vesuvius”, 1693

The following year in a raid on Dieppe, again led by Benbow a machine vessel was sent in to the port to destroy it. The ship, skippered by a Capt Dunbar was placed again the quay – and the crew and Capt Dunbar left it quickly. Unfortunately the fuze went out – but Dunbar re-boarded the vessel, re–lit the fuze, and evacuated a second time.


The Dieppe Raid, 1694

Similar machine vessel attacks were mounted on Dunkirk in the same year.

(Note: There were a number of vessels developed in parallel at the time , known as “bomb vessels” but these should not be confused with machine vessels. Bomb vessels were essentially ships built to mount and fire mortars.  To confuse matters the Vesuvius was a bomb vessel converted to a machine vessel)

A little over 100 years later in 1809 Captain (later Admiral ) Cochrane used an explosively laden ship in the Battle of the Basque Roads on the Biscay Atlantic coast of France.  Cochrane used two explosive ships and twenty-one fire ships to attack the French fleet moored off Ile d’Aix.  Here’s Captain Cochrane’s description (who personally set the fuses on one explosion vessel himself)

 “To our consternation, the fuses, which had been constructed to burn fifteen minutes, lasted little more than half that time, when the vessel blew up, filling the air with shells, grenades, and rockets; whilst the downward and lateral force of the explosion raised a solitary mountain of water, from the breaking of which in all directions our little boat narrowly escaped being swamped. The explosion-vessel did her work well, the effect constituting one of the grandest artificial spectacles imaginable. For a moment, the sky was red with the lurid glare arising from the simultaneous ignition of fifteen hundred barrels of powder. On this gigantic flash subsiding, the air seemed alive with shells, grenades, rockets, and masses of timber, the wreck of the shattered vessel. The sea was convulsed as by an earthquake, rising, as has been said, in a huge wave, on whose crest our boat was lifted like a cork, and as suddenly dropped into a vast trough, out of which as it closed upon us with the rush of a whirlpool, none expected to emerge. In a few minutes nothing but a heavy rolling sea had to be encountered, all having again become silence and darkness.”

Cochrane went on , in 1812, to design even bigger machine vessels, but never got the political support needed to build or employ them. His 1812 designs used a hulk, rather than a rigged vessel.

“The decks would be removed, and an inner shell would be constructed of heavy timbers and braced strongly to the hull. In the bottom of the shell would be laid a layer of clay, into which obsolete ordnance and metal scrap were embedded. The “charge,” in the form of a thick layer of powder, would next be placed, and above that would be laid rows and rows of shells and animal carcasses.   The explosion ship would then be towed into place at an appropriate distance from anchored enemy ships, heeled to a correct angle by means of an adjustment in the ballast loaded in the spaces running along each side of the hulk between the inner and outer hulls, and anchored securely. When detonated, the immense mortar would blast its lethal load in a lofty arc, causing it to spread out over a wide area and to fall on the enemy in a deadly torrent. Experiments conducted with models in the Mediterranean, during his layoff, convinced Cochrane that three explosion ships, properly handled, could saturate a half-mile-square area with 6,000 missiles–enough destructive force to cripple any French squadron even if it lay within an enclosed anchorage.”

In 1864, during the American Civil war an explosively laden ship, the USS Louisiana was used to attack a Confederate fort, Fort Fisher, guarding Wilmington, North Carolina.  The ship was meant to be run aground adjacent to the fort walls and then detonated.  The ship was carrying “215 tons of explosives”. The attack failed as the Louisiana detonated too far away from the fort walls to cause damage.

Here’s a diagam of the ship. Note the huge amount of explosives. I have obtained a detailed description of the numerous initiation systems and fuzes but it is too complex to post here easily.  Suffice to say there were 5 independent firing systems.


USS Louisiana, 1864

Just over a fifty years later the Zeebrugge raid of 1918 saw the British Royal Navy again use an explosive vessel, this time the submarine C-3, under Lt Cdr Sandford. Sandford was subsequently awarded the Victoria Cross.

“This officer was in command of submarine C3, and most skillfully placed that vessel in between the piles of the viaduct before lighting his fuse and abandoning her. He eagerly undertook this hazardous enterprise, although well aware (as were all his crew) that if the means of rescue failed and he or any of his crew were in the water at the moment of the explosion, they would be killed outright by the force of such explosion. Yet Lieutenant Sandford disdained to use the gyro steering which would have enabled him and his crew to abandon the submarine at a safe distance, and preferred to make sure, as far as was humanly possible, of the accomplishment of his duty.” After pushing the submarine under the piles of the viaduct and setting the fuse, he and his companions** found that the propeller of their launch was broken, and they had to resort to oars and to row desperately hard against the strong current to get a hundred yards away before the charge exploded. They had a wonderful escape from being killed by the falling debris.


Damage caused by the detonation of the C-3 – Zeebrugge 1918

The final one from this series is Operation Chariot, aka “the Greatest Raid”, the British Navy and commando raid on St Nazaire in 1942.  I won’t repeat the story, other than provide this link to the Wikipedia article – not many Wikipedia articles make the hairs of my neck stand up, but this one does. In this raid, HMS Cambeltown was converted into a massive IED and rammed into the docks in St Nazaire to prevent their use by the German Battleship Tirpitz.


HMS Campbeltown rammed onto the dock gates in St Nazaire, before she exploded. 1942.

One big concept – massive IEDs in ships, woven through history.

I have much more to post on historical naval IEDs. Be patient!

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