Standing Well Back
20th Century

US C-IED and counter booby-trap efforts on the Battlefield – 1918

Further to my earlier post about German booby-traps on the battlefield in 1918 and the similarities to today’s IED threat, I’ve found the following typed document, a briefing paper, of sorts, from the office of the Chief Engineer of the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918. The document is titled “GERMAN TRAPS AND MINES” and describes the booby traps being encountered by American forces as the Germans retreated. Those of you with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan will recognise some of the phrases.

The document is a little faded, but I’ll make it as big as possible. It’s worth reading.

 

Sabotage During World Wars

Booby trap IEDs on the Battlefield – 1918

Readers may recall that I have blogged before about German IEDs and sabotage devices in the US during the period 1915- 1918, focused on munitions plants and shipping on the US East Coast.  I’ve been doing some more research on German IEDs of the period in general and found a remarkable number in Europe right towards the end of the war. A significant number were being left behind when the German army retreated in 1918 and others were being transported from Germany via Norway and Switzerland  Some of the IEDs were sophisticated and used some dastardly (love that word) initiation systems.  Here’s some examples:

In October 1918, because so many “infernal machines” had been found, US forces adopted a strict policy of clearance of  facilities vacated by retreating Germans. Therefore they must have by implication had a significant search and EOD capability. US forces discovered a temperature initiated IED in one dug out left behind by retreating Germans.  US ordnance specialists defused the device and assessed that since there were no houses in the area, the Germans expected the advancing Americans to occupy the dug out , and that when they warmed up the space, the switch would have initiated the device.   In the dug out they found the temperature switch under a “cot”, with ten large artillery shells buried nearby connected to the switch.   On at least one occasion a device left in a bed in a house vacated by German troops detonated killing an allied soldier who lay on it.  There are reports of a booby trapped pair of binoculars.  As one quote of the time said

There are unsubstantiated reports that the Germans realized how popular their spiked helmets (pickelhaube) were and so frequently booby trapped them.

Another report (written by Col Joseph Hyde of the US 105th Engineers) reported a 300 pound device in a church steeple, connected to a pressure plate where a man might kneel in front of the altar.

In April 1918 , Norwegian authorities discovered one hundred and seven IEDs that had been smuggled into Norway by German agents, with a view to attacking Norwegian shipping. Also recovered were:

104 incendiaries

9 IEDs disguised as lumps of coal

133”strikers”

269 detonators

470 tubes of acid (for delay fusing)

33 pieces of explosives disguised as chewing tobacco

some fountain pens filled with acid as delay initiators

95 large rectangular bombs in iron cases, initiated with a clockwork mechanism

Also in 1918, Swiss authorities discovered a similar plot, which involved German diplomats smuggling sabotage devices and explosives through Switzerland and on to Italy.  In a similar manner to the way in which IEDs were manufactured in the US, so the Germans established two bomb making facilities in Switzerland at this time.

Here’s a couple of press clips about the devices,  one in a piano in 1916 and one from 1918.

 

I have found some interesting official US Army documents detailing how common booby traps and other IEDs were towards the end of WW1 – they bear remarkable resemblance to documents detailing the threat in Afghanistan today –  I’ll post them in a few days time.

Railway IEDs

IED Triggers

In two earlier posts I wrote about how Lawrence of Arabia and Bimbashi Garland used rifle trigger mechanisms to blow up Turkish trains in World War 1, and that they appeared to have been copying an earlier design used by the Boers and Jack Hindon against British trains in the Boer war in 1901.  To remind you here’s the diagram again.

I’m grateful that Dennis Walters in South Africa, who is writing a book on the Boer attacks on trains, has forwarded to me photos taken in the Royal Engineer Museum in Chatham, Kent, of a recovered trigger mechanism found under a railway in the Orange Free State on 20th June 1901.   I’ll pass on details of Dennis’s book when it is published, but in the meantime, here are the photos:

Update – I’ve found several other conflicts where “triggers” were used – US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, WW1  search under the “Railway Attacks” category.

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!

20th Century

Garland’s first IED attack

I continue to be interested by the story of Herbert Garland detailed in this blog a couple of weeks ago.   I have found some more details here (the primary source being Garland’s own reports held in the UK National Archives) of Garland’s adventures.  Garland had a very dry sense of humour and his reports are full of droll phrases.

Some examples:

Garland went to the town of Yanbu in what is now Eastern Arabia to help the Arab revolutionaries defend it against the Turks.  The defences were short of firepower, but Garland found an ancient Turkish cannon at the fort but as it “was apt to fire astern instead of forward we relied on its warlike appearance to help us scare off the Turks”

Here’s his own words describing  the first IED attack on the railway at Toweira station, I think on the night of 20 February 1917. After a week’s camel ride to the attack point, Garland argued over the tactics for the IED attack with his Arab guide. The guide wanted him to place the device and then scarper, but garland wanted to watch the explosion from a nearby hill. As Garland says “The approach of the train five minutes after starting work settled the matter.”

The trains rarely ran at night which was the cause for surprise. Garland, hearing the shriek of a whistle followed by the squeal of wheels was startled. He scrabbled for the three 5 pound cartons of dynamite which he jammed into the hole under the track he had started excavating.   He pulled from under his black Arab cloak the action of the old Martini Henry rifle. Its barrel had been sawn off and the trigger guard removed so that all that was left was an oblong of brown steel from which the trigger protruded, exposed.  This he loaded with a round of ammunition.. Turning the mechanism upside down, so the trigger was uppermost he wedged it under the rail, bullet pointing into the explosive, trigger brushing the rail above.  The lights of the engine were now close, barely two hundred yards away, travelling at, he guessed, 25 mph.  He got up and ran “ I wished I had devoted more time to physical training in my youth,” he says. His Arab robe swirled around his legs, as if determined to trip him up. Beneath his bare feet, the stony ground felt like ”carving knives, bayonets and tin tacks”.

As the locomotive’s front wheels passed over the device , nothing happened, but a split second later the heavier driving wheels of the train flexed the track enough to pull the trigger.  The explosion threw the train from the track, followed by the carriages behind it as they fell down a stony embankment with a “clanking, whirling and rushing” noise.   It was “the first time that the Turks have had a train wrecked” he reported. Some commentators have said it was the first ever act of sabotage committed by the British Army behind enemy lines.  I’m not sure of that – its an interesting thought – if any reader of this blog can think of an earlier sabotage attack by the British, please let me know.

 I’m truly fascinated that Garland was copying, in part, the IED design used by the Boers some 15 years earlier.  I’ve blogged an image of that Boer device before – but here it is for ease.  Somewhat different but very similar in many ways.

I’m intrigued as to how Garland learned about and decided to copy the Boer IED.  The concept of using a bullet fired from a gun as an initiation mechanism was not that unusual – indeed some of the fenian devices of the 1880s used a similar principle.

In looking closely at the role of the Arab Bureau, of which Garland and Lawrence were part a couple of interesting things come out:

Firstly, while I admire Garland’s efforts immensely, of course I’m torn because essentially he was planting IEDs and I’m normally interested in defeating IEDs and view with contempt those who plant them so there is a dichotomy there that I’m struggling with.

If you were to think of modern day night vision images of local terrorists  planting roadside IEDs being planted next to a road in Iraq or Afghanistan there is very little difference between that and the descriptive image Garland gives of himself scuttling away from the railway track near Toweira in 1917.

Separately I’m intrigued as to the parallels with the Arab Bureau and modern day “special forces operations” in terms of working within a country aiding revolution, identifying future leaders amongst a revolution, encouraging the right people, discouraging the “wrong” people, and enduring battle alongside indigenous forces.   Garland and indeed Lawrence didn’t regard themselves “special forces” and were essentially amateur, but there is no doubt that the paradigm they developed by the seat of their pants is identical to certain SOF principles being developed (again) today.

Next I’m going to hunt out details of Garland’s grenade launcher.

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