Standing Well Back
19th Century

Confederate IED organization

Careful reading of the excellent book “The sinking of the USS Cairo” by John Wideman, has allowed me to piece together some of the Confederate “IED” organization in the US Civil War and pull together some threads of incidents I’ve previously blogged about. Here’s a simplified summary with a series of links to the relevant posts

The leader of many such IED activities was Brigadier Gabriel Raines. Raines’s interest in IEDs went back to the Second Seminole Indian war in Florida, where he deployed IEDs against the Seminole Indians in 1840.

Gabriel Raines

Later, when the US civil war began he rapidly proposed the use of similar devices, and used them successfully in the retreat after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862.

This book is a reprint of Raines technical notes about a number of munitions and IEDs.

Raines oversaw the Confederate use of such devices from the Confederate War department’s Torpedo Bureau (“Torpedo”) being a term that then covered a range of land and sea explosive devices).  At the beginning of the war, Raines’s devices were very much improvised, but eventually volume requirements and industrial processes evolved such that eventually many can be considered manufactured munitions.  Within the confederate forces the use of explosive devices was broad ranging and what follows is not the sum total, but there appear to have been two units.

The first was the Confederate States Navy submarine Battery service, under Hunter Davidson which appears to have been responsible for coastal defence sea mines and the like, often electrically initiated.  In  particular this unit had significant success on the James River. Later in the war attention turned to spar torpedo boats (boats with an explosive charge attached to a long spar which were used to ram enemy boats) . Hunter Davidson is an interesting character who I’ll write about in the future.  Here’s an angry letter he wrote in 1874 when some impertinent Brirtish Engineer officers claimed to have invented electrically initiated sea mines

The second unit, was commanded by the one-armed perpetrator of the sinking of the USS Cairo on the Yazoo River, Zere McDaniel

Zere McDaniel was responsible for

  •  Riverine IEd operations such as the sinking of the Cairo
  •  “Land torpedoes” in defence around Richmond, that used artillery shells adapted to detonate when stood upon (designed by Raines)
  •  “Behind the lines” IED and associated sabotage and intelligence operations.

The latter enterprises were as head of a Confederate secret unit “ Company A, Confederate secret service. The unit was formed in 1864 according to instructions that can be seen on this web page – a lovely document!

Some examples of the “behind the lines” operations included the explosion at City Point by Maxwell who reported directly to McDaniel and who used a time bomb or “horological torpedo”

Attacks on trains by Zere McDaniel himself using an IED which I’ll discuss in a future blog once I have found more detail.  Suffice to say that the initiation mechanism appears to have been an improvised wire hook which protruded from under the track and “hooked on” to the front of a passing train, probably pulling a friction initiator.

The confederate use of IEDs appears to have been positively encouraged and a secret law was passed awarding a bounty to confederate supporters who designed IEDs and used them to attack Union forces, awarding the designer 50% of the value of the target. McDaniel himself tried to claim for his attack on the Cairo, but failed in his appeal.   In 1864 McDaniel reported that his unit were engaged in continuous active operations , with elements operating “behind enemy lines” in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere

I see interesting parallels between the innovative use of munitions and explosive devices in the US civil war and the remarkable inventiveness of Syrian opposition forces in today’s Syrian civil war.

1840-1850

Pull Primers

In my chronology of initiation systems, a couple of posts down, I omitted the evolution of the “pull primer” as a means of initiating charges, including artillery pieces.  I think it’s worth a look at, especially since they were clearly used to initiate the IED used to sink the USS Cairo, below.

  • Originally in cannon, bags of gunpowder were stuffed in the muzzle and pushed to the far end of the cannon.
  • The bag was then pricked so the priming fire could reach the main charge, by inserting needle like device through the vent hole into the bag charge. The vent is a small hole drilled at the rear of the cannon that led to the inside of the barrel where the bag of gunpowder sat.
  • Then loose gunpowder was poured in to the vent.  That loose gunpowder was then ignited with a slow burning fuse, red hot iron, or other flame like a portfire to the touch hole, or top of the vent. At one stage a paper tube was inserted that held a preloaded quantity of powder to allow a pre-loaded quantity of powder.
  • That method was a little crude, and in 1765 an improvement was developed, which was to insert a tin tube containing blackpowder into the vent.  This ensured that the end of the powder train in the tube was in the right physical position to ignite the main charge, increasing reliability.
  • Later the tin tube was replaced with a goose quill.
  • In the late 1700s a flintlock mechanism began to be used to initiate the vent powder.
  • In 1846 a Hanoverarian artillery officer invented the pull primer. This consisted of a tube (usually copper) which contained blackpowder as before, but also a friction sensitive match compound. Inserted into the tube was length of flattened, serrated wire, which when pulled through the match compound created enough heat from friction to cause the match compound and then the powder to ignite.  This became a reliable, weatherproof, initiator for artillery pieces, and the post on the sinking of the USS Cairo below demonstrates how such a mechanism can be used for IEDs as a command initiation system from a distance, or as a component of a booby trap pull switch.

 

In typical pull primers the base of the tube is closed by varnished paper, and the top by shellac putty and varnished paper. A ring is attached to the top of the wire that protrudes through the shellac putty.  The operator used his “lanyard” to clip onto the ring and pull from the side – lanyards now are an archaic part of a lot of military uniforms.   The match composition was usually a mix of potassium chlorate and another compound.

Friction primers were eventually replaced by percussion primers, which essentially were a percussion cap fitted to the top of the tube, which a mechanism on the gun struck.

1860-1870

USS Cairo Gunboat Sunk by an IED Euring EOD Operations by a One-armed IED Maker

The USS Cairo was a quite magnificent gunboat, part of the Union fleet in the American civil war that operated on the Mississippi and its tributaries.  She was built in 1861 and in January 1862 became part of the Union Army’s Western Gunboat Fleet and then in October 1862 was handed to US Navy ten weeks prior to the incident described below.

Please note that there are several versions of this story, some of them contradictory. I’ve dug quite deeply through a number of sources including Official Naval Records, to summarize key aspects, and highlight some interesting questions.

In December 1862 the Cairo became the first gunboat to be sunk, according to Union forces, by an electrically initiated under water mine, in combat.  The Cairo headed a small flotilla of four boats tasked to clear the Yazoo river, a tributary of the Mississippi. The commander of the Cairo, LTC Thomas Selfridge, was tasked with conducting a complex operation to clear the Yazoo of explosive devices.  A few miles upstream of where the Yazoo meets the Mississippi the flotilla encountered an area where Confederates had placed a number of under-water mines.

The flotilla’s EOD technique is worthy of some analysis.  It appears they pushed forward the shallow draft boats along the banks. These were tasked with looking for evidence of the mines underwater (some of the floatation elements of the devices were apparently visible, suggesting poor emplacing technique) and more importantly looking for the ropes that led from the bank to an anchor under the mine, and by which the Confederate forces could raise or lower the mine in the water.  Render safe procedure then involved shooting at the mines in the water (not an hugely effective technique I would suggest), or releasing the anchor ropes and pulling the mines in to the shore where they were dismantled.  Bearing in mind that the devices could have been command initiated, then this should have required clearance on foot up the banks of the river by a well supported ground unit, and that the mines could have been movement sensitive, then careful stand off and remote hook and line technique would be required, it is not clear that either aspect of the IED threat had been fully thought through by the flotilla, given the reports available.  However I may be applying 20/20 hindsight of modern IEDD theory.

The flotilla had found and made safe five of the mines when it appears that one of the boats started firing at what they thought was a floating torpedo. Selfridge, on the Cairo went forward to assist. It was at this point that an explosive charge detonated on the port bow of the Cairo.  According to Selfridge there were two explosions, one shortly after the first. A large hole was blown in the bow of the Cairo. The crew were rescued but the Cairo sank in 30ft of water in about 10 minutes.

Eventually all that was left was the two smokestacks and flagpoles protruding from the water – these were removed to prevent Confederate forces identifying the spot and salvaging the big guns. The location of the Cairo was then forgotten in history until it was found in the 1960s, raised and renovated as a museum piece.

Most press reports and personal reports of the time suggest the explosive was electrically initiated. But that may not be the case. Time for some detective work, which involved looking at other sources, including official naval records which provides a fairly hasty investigation by Selfridges commander, Rear Admiral Porter. Certainly such electrical initiation technology existed and was used by Confederate forces, notably on the James River and at Columbus, Kentucky.   I then found an excellent book “The sinking of the USS Cairo” by John Wideman who has gone much deeper into this investigation and exposed a fascinating legal process undertaken by the Confederate perpetrators to claim ownership of the underwater mine design.

Firstly in Brigadier Gabriel Rains’s documents, (Rains being the leading designer of explosive “torpedoes” for the Confederates and head of the secret Confederate Torpedo Bureau), he suggests the device was a “demijohn torpedo” and his description of the manufacture of demijohn torpedoes makes clear that it was a movement sensitive initiation switch, which functioned as the charge was tilted – which fits the description of the device functioning as it touched the port bow of the Cairo. Rains’s device used an inverted demijohn, which had a 6lb ball of metal in the recess at the base of the demijohn. When the charge was disturbed the weight falls off the indentation at the base of the inverted bottle and pulls a striker mechanism.  A full description of its construction and operation is in the re-print of Rain’s book, page 37.  These demijohn mines could contain 50lbs of explosives.  The Rains’s description is given added credibility as he even names the Confederate officer  (Capt Zere McDaniel) who emplaced it.  Perhaps the assessment by Union forces of the electrical initiation was used to lessen the blame on Selfridge and his EOD operators who perhaps had carried out the incorrect EOD drill for dealing with this design of infernal machine?  However an alternate source suggests that McDaniel had been trained by a confederate officer, Lt Beverley Kennon, who had developed an electrical initiation system.   A full description of its construction and operation is in the re-print of Rain’s book, page 37.  The key thing here, however is that the EOD technique of dragging the mines to the shore would have caused them to initiate… and the EOD troops had successfully dealt with 5 devices without a detonation when the attack occurred.  So I’m going to rule out a Rains design for the demijohn mine.

The second alternative is based on other reporting.  This reporting suggests that Zere (or Zedekiah) McDaniel, along with a Francis A Ewing, members of the Confederate Submarine Battery service, were busy manufacturing torpedoes up river in Yazoo City. They obtained their demijohns from Yazoo city merchants and begged for powder from Confederate artillery units. According to one report the devices were pull initiated using friction primers pulled by “wire”. Those artillery units would have also been equipped with friction “pull” primers, which makes me inclined to think these devices could indeed be pull initiated. If I were responsible for laying and operating such a device, frankly such a mechanism would appeal to me as being probably safer to emplace, and more reliable to use than a new fangled electrical method.  If McDaniel was begging for demi-johns and begging for support from artillery units, it would appear he was under-resourced, and “making do”. Porter’s investigation suggests wire to the banks were found and cut but I think he is making an assumption that the wires were electrical, as we know of reports that McDaniel was using wire as a pull mechanism.  Porter’s report and judgement on Selfridge is here.

Of particular note is that the commander of another gunboat, Lt Hoel, of the Pittsburg was ordered to sweep the banks for evidence of the initiation mechanism. He did so but only reported magazines and material from which the torpedoes were manufactured, and makes no mention of any galvanic batteries.  Here’s a diagram provided by one of the officers responsible, Fentress, found in the Official Naval records.  This is interesting, because it shows the demijohn vertical rather than inverted as in Rains’s design.  Note that the diagram shows “wires” at (D) but these could just as easily be pull wires rather than electrical wires. However I think we should take Fentress’s diagram with caution as it doesn’t really make sense, and misjudges the issue of floatation and negative buoyancy.

Wideman in his book has found some remarkable documents which include affidavits from McDaniel and Weldon regarding the design of the torpedoes, their claim for “ownership” of the design and their operations on the Yazoo river. Indeed another man, Francis Ewing also claimed responsibility for the design, and each pursued those claims in the hope of a secret bounty from the Confederate Government.

The more I find out about McDaniel the more interesting his story becomes. McDaniel was a Kentucky born engineer, who lost an arm while fighting with the Raymond Fencibles (the 12th Mississippi Regiment.) He fought on for a while with a specially rigged Maynard carbine, despite the loss of his arm. He then came up with ideas relating to submarine mines and won support from those in authority on the Confederate side. Working in the Mississippi backwaters he sickened from malaria, but continued his work.  It would appear that McDaniels first designs (which failed) used a pull mechanism to a gun trigger and percussion cap mounted in a box on the top of the explosive charge.  McDaniel was then provided with friction primers by Weldon, who himself procured tham from the Confederate artillery unit stationed a few miles upstream.  Wideman has found a specific description of the improvised explosive device by one of McDaniel’s torpedo crew. I won’t steal Wideman’s thunder – buy the book!

So, all in all I’m inclined to support Wideman’s research to think that “simplicity” wins out and that these were “pull switch” devices, and not electrical devices, or even “Rains” demi-john designs. This is corroborated by the most important evidence, in my view, a letter from McDaniel to his sponsor, Governor Pettus where he talks of the Cairo which “came into contact with a torpedo made to explode by striking & which exploded and tore the boat fearfully”   It seems that the mines could have been placed in pairs with a wire lanyard running between the two – thus any gunboat passing between them or getting caught in the link wire would cause the mines to initiate – but the EOD technique used by union forces would have caused detonation rather than recovery.  In piecing all this together it is clear (I think) that there were  a mix of command initiated pull devices, and pairs of booby trapped mines, also working on a linked pull primers.

A total of 22 union vessels were sunk by Confederate infernal machines during the Civil war and a number of others were damaged.

As for McDaniel, he went on to manufacture and deploy a number of submarine devices for the Confederates in a number of places. in June 1863 he destroyed two Union trains by blowing them up with an ingenious trigger system, while operating behind enemy lines – tales for a future blog post, as is the remarkable bounty enacted by the Confederate Congress for using infernal machines to destroy Union targets. Watch this space.

1860-1870

Timed IED, 1864, City Point Virginia

Here’s a good report by an undercover Confederate operator, John Maxwell, in the American Civil War, describing an operation in August 1864 where he was able to deliver a “horological torpedo”  (a timed IED in modern parlance) to a Union munitions barge named the “J E Kendrick” in City Point, Virginia.

The IED detonated and caused a large quantity of munitions aboard the barge, and neighboring ships and barges to explode, killing at least 43 people.  The device had a clockwork timer and 12 pounds of explosive, but with the munitions also detonating it would have been several tons of explosive that went up.  Some reports suggest that Maxwell himself designed and built the device. he watched the explosion from about 3/4 of a mile away.

Sir: I have the honor to report that in obedience to your order, and with the means and equipment furnished me by you, I left this city on the 26th of July last, for the line of the James River, to operate with the Horological Torpedo against the enemy’s vessels navigating that river. I had with me Mr. R. K. Dillard, who was well acquainted with the localities, and whose service I engaged for the expedition. On arriving in Isle of Wright County, on the 2nd of August, we learned of immense supplies of stores being landed at City Point, and for the purpose, by stratagem, of introducing our machine upon the vessels there discharging stores, started for that point. We reached there before daybreak on the 9th of August last, with a small amount of provisions, having traveled mostly by night and crawled upon our knees to pass the East picket line. Requesting my companion to remain behind about half a mile, I approached cautiously the wharf with my machine and powder covered by a small box. Finding the captain had come ashore from a barge then at the wharf, I seized the occasion to hurry forward with my box. Being halted by one of the wharf sentinels I succeeded in passing him by representing that captain had ordered me to convey the box on board. Hailing a man from the barge I put the machine in motion and gave it in his charge. He carried it aboard. The magazine contained about twelve pounds of powder. Rejoining my companion, we retired to a safe distance to witness the effect of our effort. In about an hour the explosion occurred. Its effect was communicated to another barge beyond the one operated upon and also to a large wharf building containing their stores (enemy’s), which was totally destroyed. The scene was terrific, and the effect deafened my companion to an extent from which he has not recovered. My own person was severely shocked, but I am thankful to Providence that we have both escaped without lasting injury. We obtained and refer you to the enclosed slips from the enemy’s newspapers, which afford their testimony of the terrible effects of this blow. The enemy estimates the loss of life at 58 killed and 126 wounded, but we have reason to believe it greatly exceeded that. The pecuniary damage we heard estimated at $4,000,000 but, of course, we can give you no account of the extent of it exactly.

 There is an interesting description here of the effects of the explosion.

Initially the explosion was attributed to an accident, but Maxwell’s report came out some time later.  I have also found a good diagram of the device, and in particular of the initiation system which I have annotated.

Timed IED containing 12 pounds of explosive in a box with a clockwork timing initiator

The timer works like this:

1. A piece of wire holds the the balance wheel of the clockwork mechanism. the wire protrudes from a hole in the wooden box.  At the appropriate time the wire is withdrawn, feesing the clock and “arming” the device.

2. As the clock mechanism operates the clockwheel is rotated.

3. Eventually the lever, which has a stud protruding at its rear, falls into the slot.

4. The action of the lever falling into the slot releases hold of the hammer.

5. The hammer is forced by a spring to act against the percussion cap.

6. The percussion cap initiates the main charge.

1840-1850

Some of my best friends are Sappers… (Sappers, Doctors, explosives and smoking dope)

My last post about the evolution of detonators involved digging around in some interesting history. I came across two fascinating reports about a British military engineering operation on the Hoogly River in Bengal in 1839 and 1840. The crucial piece about this story is that it straddled the invention of sub-aqua electrical initiation of gunpowder charges as used by Pasley with the earlier much less reliable igniferous technique, in this case using tubes of lead filled with gunpowder, soldered together.  The reports are found in the professional papers of the Royal Engineers, 1840 and Volume 8 of the Journal of the Asiatic society of Bengal, 1840. Go google if you want to read the originals.

The circumstances were that a ship, the Equitable, had sunk on a sandbank and was posing a hazard to shipping. So a young British military engineer, Captain Fitzgerald serving in the Bengal Engineers and some colleagues decided to blow it up, as is the wont of young Engineer officers.  In this case (and not for the last time), they were accompanied, encouraged and assisted by a young medical officer

So, this was a complex operation in a fast flowing and murky river. The Equitable had sunk in October 1839 in the middle of the shipping channel.  It was decided to use large gunpowder charges to break up the vessel.

Attempt 1, Igniferous – Failed.

The first attempt used a large waterproof cylinder full of gunpowder, ignited by means of a linen hose protected by lead piping.  The charge was an enormous 2400 pounds of powder.  The cylinder was an oak cask, bound with iron hoops, and plates of lead were carefully soldered onto it to seal it. The lead pipe protecting the powder train in the hose was made from four 15 feet lengths, soldered carefully together. The hose, one inch in diameter and containing gunpowder was then inserted into the pipe.  I have a description of the explosive chain between the main charge and the gunpowder hose, but have not yet found an associated diagram. so I can’t yet make head or tail of it.  The characteristics of a loose filled gunpowder hose clearly gave rise to challenges, in terms of transmission of the igniferous process in a vertical pipe. To manage this the hose was knotted every 6 inches, and held in place by fastening to a pewter wire inserted down the length of the pipe.

The seal between the powder hose in the pipe and the “primer cylinder” appears to have been achieved with brass fittings and leather gaskets.

The first attempt took place on December 6 1839, and the charge was lowered from a boat onto the deck of the sunken ship.  A “portfire” with an estimated burning time of 10 minutes fastened to the top of the gunpowder filled pipe, and the boat rowed away.  However the portfire failed to ignite the gunpowder train. A second portfire was set, and after a few minutes a muffled small explosion was heard, which was assessed as being the pipe rupturing. The main charge failed to ignite, and the pewter wire was ejected from the lead pipe. The pipe was raised and the rupture found at 25 feet from the top.

Attempt 2. Timed, electrical, using a watch – Successful

For the second attempt the Egineer team, encouraged by a medical doctor William O’Shaugnessy, and no doubt hearing of the success of Pasley, used an electrical initiation method.  O’Shaugnessy “read up” on electrical theory and designed and built his own galvanic battery, a description of which can be found in the reference. O’Shaugnessy conducted several experiments with his battery and platinum wire or platinum foil filaments, making the foil white heat with its electrcial resistance.  Working the physics, O’Shaughnessy established that with some careful design he could initiate the platinum filaments through bare un-insulated wire, under water, provided he kept the “legs” sufficiently far apart and the battery powerful enough.  He also designed a highly ingenious system for holding the filament in a sealed container using a breech of a gun.  Furthermore O’Shaugnessy then designed a remarkable timing initiation using a simple watch, copper “arms” and mercury filled tubes that the copper arms of the watch swept through that automatically “made safe” the firing circuit four minutes after initiation, so it would be safe to recover if the initiation failed.  It is clear from O’Shaugnessy’s report that he had no actual reports of Pasley’s successes other than newspaper reports, and so was working on first principles.

The second attempt took place on 14 December 1839, using this electrical mechanism, the battery and timer being in a small fishing boat above the charge. After setting charge, the demolition party consisting of Capts Fitzgerald and Debude, and Lieutenant Smith, accompanied by O’Shaughnessy and his assistant Mr Siddons, rowed quickly away.  Here’s O’Shaugnessy’s description of the subsequent explosion:

At the thirteenth minute a slight concussion was was felt in our boat, a sound like that of a very distant and heavy gun at sea was heard, and a huge hemispherical mass of discoloured water was thrown to the height of about 30 feet. From the centre of this mass there then rose slowly a and majestically a pillar of water, intermingled with foam and fragments of wreck , and preserving a cylindrical form till it reached an elevation of at least 150 feet. The column then subsided slowly, a wreath of foam and sparking jets of water following its descent, and rendering the spectacle one of indescribable beauty.

O’Shaughnessy later also significantly improved the manner in which the heated platinum filament ignites the charge. Previously the heated filament was embedded directly into gunpowder but O’Shaughnessy found that by embedding the filament in cotton which had been soaked in a solution of “purest saltpeter” effectively lowered the temperature that the filament was required to reach to cause ignition.

Attempt 3, Electrical using an improvised timing mechanism involving portfires and “string” – Failed

A third operation occurred a month later to remove a large part of the sunken wreck still remaining, and this too used a timing mechanism and electrical initiation, however the system failed to initiate due to damage to the priming charge where it was fastened to the main charge.  The sapper officers revised the mechanical timing mechanism of an adapted watch used by O’Shaughnessy and used portfires burning string at timed intervals to make and then break a circuit if detonation had not occurred – I see in the different reports of Capt Fitzgerald and Dr O’Shaughnessy a little irritation from the good doctor as to the contrived nature of this measure, which he regards as crude an unreliable, but which the sapper officers are very proud of (it saved the expense of a watch).

Attempt 4. Electrical using an improvised timing mechanism involving portfires and “string” – Successful

A fourth operation took place on 28th January 1840.  A successful explosion took place, breaking up the remaining part of the wreck and also killing two porpoises.

O’Shaughnessy went on to an interesting career where he was involved in pharmacology, the electric telegraph, encryption and most famously the introduction of cannabis to the UK for “therapeutic use”.

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