Standing Well Back
Command IED

Command-Initiated IED – 1809 – Peninsula War

I’m finding lots of interesting use of explosives by both sides in the Peninsula War (1807 – 1814) particularly the French who clearly had developed extensive capabilities with explosives. These engineering capabilities and the use of explosives in both attack and defence were, I think, largely developed about a hundred and fifty years earlier by Vauban, the famous French military engineer. I should write about him more in the future, but his writing and ideas were used extensively by the French through the latter part of the the 17th century, through the entire 18th and on well into the 19th – I certainly see his influence in French actions in the Crimean war in the 1850s, some 200 wars after the start of Vauban’s career. But this post is about a command-pull IED.

But this particular device in this post is attributed to the Portuguese who fought as allies of the British. It’s also an interesting “Assault EOD operation” by the French, based on careful observation, planning and intelligence.  Alas I have no imagery but nonetheless a good description provided by a famous French engineer, Captain Pierre Bouchard. In May of 1809, the Portuguese were defending a key crossing, a bridge over the Tampa river near Amarante. This was, in military terms, a “reserve demolition“. The Portuguese were defending the bridge but if it came to it they were prepared to destroy the bridge to prevent the French crossing.  Captain Bouchard had spotted through his telescope where the Portuguese “mine” had been placed on the bridge. The initiation mechanism was not a burning fuze but Bouchard could see a line running from the covering Portuguese positions to a wooden box placed adjacent to barrels of powder under one of the arches of the bridge. He assessed, correctly as it turned out, that this was a “pull mechanism” with the cord attached to the trigger of a flintlock mechanism in the wooden box. This in turn would initiate an explosive chain which would explode the barrels of gunpowder.

Bouchard (reportedly) came up with a plan. His engineers under cover of thick fog surreptitiously moved a large charge of their own as close as they dared to the command pull cord. Bouchard believed his counter charge would break the or snap the pull cord without initiating the Portuguese main charge, or at least disorientate the Portuguese long enough for an immediate assault to take their position. And so it was. Three barrels were placed close to the Portuguese redoubt and a battalion of grenadiers stood by to make the assault backed up by an entire brigade of infantry. Bouchards’s charge was lit with a burning fuze 30m long.  Whether it actually broke the pull cord or not is perhaps in doubt but the assaulting grenadiers were so quick in taking the position, the demolition charge was not fired.  Bouchard led a company of his sappers on to the Bridge alongside the grenadiers and doused the Portuguese charge with buckets of water, as an initial “render safe procedure”

I understand that the Portuguese had a habit of using pull cords rather than burning fuzes because of the volume of fire often experienced in such battles – which they felt may have caused initiation of the explosive charge by a hit on an exposed fuze.  As an aside, Captain Bouchard was also responsible , in Napoleon’s Nile campaign, of finding the “Rosetta Stone” ten years earlier in 1799. Captain Bouchard had the distinction of being captured three times by the British during his military career and spent considerable time as a prisoner-of-war. Here’s a pic. Cheerful looking fella, for a sapper, ain’t he?

I’ve written before here, about the principles of using flintlock mechanisms to initiate explosive devices and you will see that this idea wasn’t that unusual, but it’s the only occasion I can find a record of it being used in this war.

Uncategorised

Stealthy Explosive Attacks at Sea – 1805

Given recent explosive attacks in the Gulf, it’s worth remembering that stealthy attacks on maritime vessels with explosive devices isn’t exactly new.  In 1804 and 1805 Robert Fulton designed some IEDs for the British Navy. Fulton was something of a peripatetic bomb maker and inventor – making devices for the French, for the British and then for his home nation the USA. In 1805, his devices were used in a small number of British attacks against the French in the Channel ports.  Most of these attacks were failures or had limited effect.  However the French authorities recovered the devices, and examined them in detail.  So this is a lovely early example of Technical Intelligence and Weapons Technical intelligence regarding IEDs.  The French artist was fantastic and his diagrams of the devices have survived. Frankly they put many modern IED intelligence reports to shame. Here are the diagrams with some annotations (in red) by me.

The first diagram is a clockwork timer initiation device, used to detonate a floating explosive charge. The clockwork timer is connected to an adapted firearm lock, a flintlock in this case. You should recognise the flintlock mechanism in the device below:

This clockwork initiation mechanism was attached to a main explosive charge. The main charge was a large sealed canoe shaped pontoon, described as a coffer. Two of these were attached to make a barely buoyant twin raft with a rowing position in the middle.

Here’s the charge:

The coffer was filled with gunpowder and also, in effect, sub-munitions, described as “combustible balls” and other, larger “hogshead” explosive charges were , I think towed behind, but the initiation mechanism for these hogsheads I can’t quite make head or tail of.

Finally here

Finally, here’s a diagram of the “catamaran”. It was rowed into place not far from the French Imperial Fleet. The rowers then pulled a lever to start the timer, slipped into the water and swam to accompanying boats. The tide then took the just-floating catamarans (I think there were at least two) towards the anchored fleet, with the barrels designed to foul the ships and swing the larger charges alongside the ship. As you can see they were pretty large contrivances.

So… Here we have, 214 years ago, a stealthy IED attack on French Navy vessels, by the British, designed by an American, and with a superb Technical Intelligence report on the failed devices by the French. This stuff ain’t new.  I hope to have more (new) detail on Fulton’s explosive device design in coming months.

Rockets

The First Metal Cased Rockets

Over the past few months I have been in conversation with a new Indian friend, Mr Nidhin Olikara.   He has done some tremendous work with archaeological colleagues on some ancient rockets recently discovered from the time of Tipu Sultan, in the late 1700s in India.  These metal cased rockets predate any European metal cased rockets, and were, I believe a source of technology for Congreve’s rockets, developed at Woolwich in England in the early 19th century.  Congreve gave little or no credit to the Indian technology which he exploited, and no credit at all to the Dublin rebels’ rockets, which I believe were also inspired by the Indian rocket technology.

This is a complex story of industrial history, archaeology, munitions exploitation, technical intelligence, metallurgy and ordnance design.   For context, I have written before about European rocket development here:

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2018/5/2/the-history-of-metal-cased-military-rockets-an-investigation.html

and Robert Emmet’s rockets in Dublin in 1803 here:

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/28/the-mystery-of-the-the-man-with-no-history-other-spies-and-e.html

Mr Olikara and his colleagues came across many rockets which appear to have been disposed of down a well. They have been able to recover these and examine them scientifically and the results are fascinating. They have written a paper recently published in the Journal of Arms and Armour Society, Volume 22, No 6, dated September 2018. It is not yet available on-line.

Rockets were developed in India by the forces of Haider Ali and then his son Tipu Sultan in the late 1700s. They were used extensively against their enemies, including the British. Amongst Tipu Sultan’s allies, were the French, which may be relevant for later parts of this story. It appears that the British recovered some of these metal cased rockets to Woolwich Arsenal.

Some of the 160 rockets that Mr Olikara recovered have now been analysed and the results are fascinating. A quick summary:

  • a. The rockets are largely of a similar dimension to the (later) first of Congreve’s rockets, varying in diameter between about 35mm and 65mm
  • b. They appear to be made of what we would call today “mild steel”. ie relatively low carbon content. This would make the metal relatively malleable.
  • c. The assessment is that the cylinder components of the rocket were hot or cold forged on a cylindrical die or anvil, with two end caps (one with a vent) forged onto the ends. To be clear, the base material is a rectangle of sheet mild steel, hammered on a cylindrical anvil into a tube shape and two flat circles then attached to the ends, by hammering. One of these ends has a central vent acting as a venturi choke.
  • d. Remarkably the contents of the rocket were still largely present and chemical analysis gives results consistent with gunpowder/blackpowder.  In some rockets there is still a clear suggestion of a formed central combustion chamber formed in the propellant.
  • e. Perhaps most interesting of all, from a munitions design perspective is that the rockets appear to have been lined with a refractory element such as clay, providing a layer between the explosive/propellant fill and the steel wall of the rocket. Most intriguing. I can find no reference of a similar fabrication in later Western rockets

What is still unclear is the filling process in relation to the fixing of the end caps. What came first?  Fixing the end caps first makes sense from a safety perspective but makes the filling process tricky. I expect it will depend on the nature of the filling and how easy it was to load it in the cylinder. I suspect that the front end cap was fixed first, and the rear closing cap fitted “snugly” then removed, the rocket then lined with clay, dried, and the powder fill put into place. The combustion chamber would then be bored, the rear cap affixed in some manner (carefully) so as to not ignite the charge, and a fuse made of some sort of cloth inserted in the nozzle/venturi.

What is also is unclear is how the longitudinal seam of the rockets metal cylinder body was formed. I suspect it was “folded” in a “finger lock seam”. To do this, (and speaking as a very amateur blacksmith), the two sides of the rectangle to be joined would be first turned and folded back a few mm on the edge of an anvil into a lip. When the sheet is then formed into a cylinder these folded turns would interlock.  I will experiment in my own forge in coming days and try to post pictures.

I think the implications of these findings might be as follows:

  1. The Armies of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan had an industrial level production firstly of mild steel in sheet form.  I doubt this was “ rolled” steel but was probably very skillfully hammered. what is most significant,  I think, is that the steel was being produced for a “ disposable”, one-time-use system. That indicates that sheet mild steel which heretofore was perhaps an expensive luxury for body armour of the rich and wealthy was available in such quantities in its sheet condition to be economic to make into one-time-use discardable munitions. I think that’s quite significant.
  2. This was proper industrial scale production of steel components, albeit the rocket diameters seem to vary.  The skills in hot and cold forging mild steel are not dissimilar to the making of protective armour.   The history of technology of India in a broader sense has often been ignored or discounted by the West. India’s metallurgical developments of such things as pure wrought iron, mild steel, carbon steel and Wootz steel is fascinating and the technological processes associated with manufacture of items from these materials seems to have been often ignored in history.  This book  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Indian-Oriental-Military-History-Weapons/dp/0486422291 published originally in the middle of the 19th century gives some insights into the broad range of military metallurgy in India over a number of centuries.
  3. The technology is well in advance of European rocketry which did not use metal cases (apart from the Emmet rebellion in Dublin in 1803), until 1805. Congreve, a man of his time, was disinclined to give credit to India, Emmet the Irish Rebel or indeed others (a Scotsman also claimed to have sent him the idea of metal cased rockets.)  Congreve was driven of course by the opportunity to make a considerable fortune and reputation. Also, perhaps the role of technical intelligence from one’s enemies was, as it still is, always understated.

This development, like all good historical stories, prompts further questions:

  1. How did the French alliance with Tipu Sultan allow them to obtain metal cased rocket technology and pass such technology down to manufacturing instructions to Emmet in 1802/1803?
  2. Why did the French (at the time renowned for their scientific expertise in military matters) not develop rockets themselves until after Congreve had? French interest approved by Napoleon seems to have started in about 1809.
  3. What was the level of input into Congreve’s development from Irish rebel Pat Finnerty, Emmet’s rocket maker who ended up working for Congreve at Woolwich in 1804?
  4. What earlier (non-metal cased) rocket experiments at Woolwich by the British artillery general, General Desaguliers was Congreve able to draw on. He would have been aware of these experiments I’m sure, which had occurred some years earlier but were deemed a failure. But much would perhaps have been learned about propellant.
  5. Was there any technology transfer in the other direction?  Mr Olikara and his team found what I am certain is a rocket boring tool in their investigation, used to bore a combustion chamber in the packed rocket body – it is remarkably similar to tools used in European rocket making in the 1600s…also,   steel rolling mills were developed in Europe in the latter part of the 1700s… is it possible that this technology transferred to India, enabling the production of quantities of sheet steel for the rocket bodies? Or did Tipu Sultan simply reply on a large number of people involved in the manufacture, hammering out sheet steel with such skill?

Mr Olikara has also, interestingly and separately from the paper, found records of what I take to be a British military EOD operation in 1871. The operation involved the disposal (by an Ordnance officer) of cannon from the time of Tipu Sultan (70 years earlier) and mentions finding rockets that were still filled with propellant  from this time. One of the cannon exploded (still loaded from 70 years earlier) while it was being prepared for destruction, killing one man.  So in 1871, Ordnance EOD operations were dealing with dangerous munitions from earlier wars… Plus ca change!

The development of military rockets by Congreve and subsequently by quite a number of European and American nations continued throughout the 19th century, slowing when artillery systems improved, but there was certainly some sort of rocket arms race as Congreve, then Hale developed British rockets systems and the Europeans raced to get ahead.  Even today it is possible to see in very real terms the evolution from Mysorean rockets to Congreve, to Hale and all the way through to say a modern Russian 107mm rocket system – and such systems are being adapted for improvised systems in Syria  and Iraq today with much effect. Military metal-cased rockets are a staple of modern warfare, but now the nature of its origins in India is somewhat clearer. Those wishing more detail should obtain Mr Olikhara’s paper (I may be able to help), and also a book “The First Golden Age of Rocketry by F H Winter is a useful reference.

19th Century

The Horse’s Head and the Horse’s Hoof – VBIED Investigation in 1800 and 1920

I have posted before about the vehicle bomb attack in the failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1800, details here.  I have now uncovered some fascinating details about the subsequent investigation. This was an extremely high profile incident and initially focus was placed on “The Jacobins”, a political opposition to Bonaparte, or indeed the British. But I have found in the memoirs of a French dignitary details of a more thorough investigation headed by Fouche (who I have written about elsewhere).

The device used was in a container placed on a horse-drawn cart in the Rue St Nicaise.  The horse that was harnessed to the bomb vehicle had been killed on the spot, but apparently was “not in the least disfigured”. Fouche, the Prefect of Police, ordered that parts of the dead horse including its head be taken to all the horse dealers in Paris to see if they recognised it.  One of them indeed recognised the horse, and was able to direct the police to a specific house.  The woman who “kept the door” identified the occupants who were affiliated within a particular group  (the “Chouans” – a group of “Royalists” and not the Jacobins).  She was also able to detail how the leader of the group had worked on something placed in a “water-carrier’s barrel” over a period of six weeks.

The leader of the group, a man called St Regent, was still in the vicinity of the bomb when it detonated, and was thrown against a post, breaking his ribs. He “was obliged to resort to a surgeon”, and the surgeon betrayed him to the police.  He and an accomplice were guillotined.

In one of those fascinating parallels that I encounter occasionally on standingwellback, the VBIED attack on Wall St, New York City, in September 1920 also featured the remains of a horse as part of the investigation.

In this attack, 120 years after the Paris attack, outside the bank of JP Morgan, a horse drawn cart also exploded. In this explosion, however, the horse wasn’t left intact and was blown to bits, not least because the device contained dynamite rather than the gunpowder used in the 1800 device. The investigators were able to recover one of the hooves and took it to blacksmiths across the city.  The blacksmith was eventually identified a month later but by then the investigative trail had run dry.

We sometimes assume that modern day bomb investigators are a new breed of professionals in a new industry. while me way not see many horse drawn vehicle bombs these days, the modes of investigation go an awful long way back.

21st Century

Intriguingly Similar Designs of Improvised Munitions Over Decades

One of the most notable improvised weapons in the last 15 years has perhaps been the “IRAM”.  This “Improvised Rocket Assisted Munition” appeared in 2004 in Iraq, using the rocket motor of a 107mm rocket with a “bolted on” over-calibre warhead. This is a relatively short-range munition with more target effect than a standard 107mm, but quite difficult to range and target.  The IRAM munition came in various designs. Here’s one variant:


IRAMs 2004

Such munitions appear to be being used now by Syrian government forces and others in Syria. See this report from the excellent Brown Moses/Bellingcat website from 2013:   http://brown-moses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/is-syrian-military-using-another-type.html.  Sometimes the users seem to have not fired these from 107mm tubes (with the overcalibre warhead “left out the front”) but from tubes with a greater diameter. See: http://brown-moses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-syrian-national-defence-forces-most.html .  In this variant the rocket motor is “under-calibre”, in effect.

When the IRAM appeared in 2004 it was commonly thought to be a new type of improvised munition. But as readers of this blog might already suspect, it wasn’t new at all – the concept was used in the early part of the Vietnam war. Here’s the image of Viet Cong overcaliber warhead that was fitted to a 107mm rocket, just as they are today. The image provider suggests that the warhead was cast iron, but the welds in what is probably rolled mild steel are clearly present.  These early Viet Cong “IRAMs” were fitted with what were described as WW2 Japanese impact fuzes.

 


Viet Cong over-calibre warhead for 107mm rocket


Japanese WW2 impact fuze on Viet Cong warhead

Now here’s another interesting thing – probably coincidental. The design of the Viet Cong over-calibre warhead is remarkably similar to a Provisional IRA mortar bomb warhead. This image is from a de-fuzed Mk 12 mortar bomb taken in 1991.  The IRA warhead was of course not on a rocket but on a mortar, but the design structure of the mild steel welded warhead looks remarkably similar to the Viet Cong warhead, does it not and is of an almost identical construction. The Mk 12 mortar of course is a horizontally fired anti-armour weapon with a copper cone liner, but the outer form of the warhead is remarkably similar.

 


PIRA Mk 12 Mortar bomb with identical shaped warhead

Keen readers of this blog will recall too that Irish revolutionaries were firing rockets horizontally at the British Military as early as 1803, using a rocket designed in 1696. 

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