Standing Well Back
1910-1920

Warflour, Paxo and Irish Cheddar

I’ve been doing more research on the IEDs used by the Irish “volunteers” between 1919 and 1922 and found some interesting aspects.   One should remember the time-line of Irish Republicanism that these events of 1919-1922 sit on – Irish revolutionaries were using explosive devices much earlier, certainly as early as 1803, IEDs were used extensively by the Fenians in the latter half of the 19th century, again in 1939 and of course from 1970 onwards.   The window of 1919-122 is just one point on the time line, but is worthy of study for all that.

Firstly, explosives, and I apologise for being somewhat circumspect in the detail here – no need to give modern day revolutionaries with other causes the full recipes. EOD folk can approach me directly of course and I’ll point you in the right direction if I know you. At the beginning of the campaign the explosives used was gelignite stolen from quarries, along with “No 6” detonators.  This supply began to become more difficult to obtain and so the Irish volunteers identified chemists and pharmacists and those with military experience from WW1 to develop home made explosives (HME).  There were three types, each given a nickname. I won’t describe their manufacturing process:

“Warflour”: Warflour was a nitrated resin, using the ingredients of resin, flour, acid and potassium chlorate.

“Irish Cheddar”:  This was the nickname for a form of cheddite, an explosive used quite extensively in the early 20th century, its ingredients being potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene and castor oil. Some sources suggest that “Cheddar” included home made DNT.  As an aside, this HME was used extensively by the Polish underground in WW2 in their IEDs, which I’ll write about in a future blog post.

“Paxo”. This was a mix of potassium chlorate and paraffin wax.  It was the favoured HME in the 1939 campaign but was developed during this period.

The IRA also developed its own detonators at the time, and I won’t describe them here other than to say that interestingly they were non-metallic and quite an effective design.

In terms of IEDs, and further to my earlier post, the IRA of the time made several thousand grenades, mostly under the Dublin Bicycle shop at 198 Parnell St and latterly at other facilities. It appears that the design of these were copied from the German “Egg” grenade of WW1. These were essentially quite a simple design,small and preferred because they were easier to conceal than a larger grenade.  They used the standard sort of fuze with a spring-loaded fly-off lever.  Occasionally larger improvised grenades were used – this is a diagram of one of them, made by an IRA engineer involved in their manufacture.

IEDs used for roadside ambushes were usually cylindrical pipes, either drain pipes or preferably the cylinders from a  cart axle, filled with gelignite or HME and electrically initiated.  The IRA of the time were ambushing British troops on the roads and certainly learned the trick of laying multiple roadside IEDs at the same spacing as convoy vehicles.  I can find little record of timed IEDs of the time, but the later 1939 “S-Plan” campaign in Great Britain concentrated on the use of timed IEDs.  The cylinders were closed by two end plates – initially with a bolt running down the central axis, and later by a bolt that fitted to the outside of the cylinder.   Command wire initiated devices of this type were occasionally adapted to be come booby traps by the use of a grenade striker system.   The diagram below, drawn by an IRA man shows one such IED.

Further research into the improvised IRA mortar described in my earlier post has thrown up more interesting facts. The background to the IRA requirement was that their roadside campaign was increasingly forcing the police and military to confine themselves to barracks (today we might call them “FOBs”), and the IRA leadership felt they needed a means to attack these barracks directly.  A number of IRA members had fought in the British Army in WW1 and had experienced trench mortars, either as a user or recipient.   The IRA funded a secret delegation to visit Germany and buy arms on the black market , including a German trench mortar but this mission was unsuccessful.  As a fall-back they asked their engineers to develop a home made mortar based on the British “Stokes” trench mortar.  I’m not sure how closely they followed the design, but the IRA version appears to have been of same calibre as the Mk 1 Stokes mortar (3 inch) and projected  an 11lb mortar bomb, again the same as a Mk 1 Stokes mortar.  It appears that the IRA was able to obtain British Army manual for the Stokes mortar.  the tube was made by Matt Furlong’s brother, Joe, at a railway workshop, and Matt (who later died testing a version of the mortar) made the bombs for it at 198 Parnell St.

Additional research leads me to believe that the additional safety feature in the mortar fuze that Matt Furlong removed before his accident was remarkably similar to a fuze safety feature I saw in 1990 or 1991 – on another IRA mortar.  That’s seventy years apart, and essentially the same safety feature being used on an improvised mortar.

1910-1920

IRA Improvised Munitions 1919 -1922

Earlier bogs have reported the use of Irish revolutionary improvised munitions as far back as 1803.  Use of IRA improvised weapons has been a theme for hundreds of years.   I have found a long and detailed statement by an IRA weapons engineer called Patrick McHugh, given in 1952 which sheds some remarkable insight into IRA improvised weapon production between 1919 and 1922.   It is generally thought that IRA imporvised mortar development started in 1970, but this shows that that date is out by about 50 years.

In 1919 the Irish volunteers established an “underground” muntions factory at 198 Parnell St in Dublin, under Michael Lynch, disguised in the cellar of a cycle business called “Heron and Lawless”. The facility was equipped with a furnace and a mould trough for casting grenade casings, a forge and a lathe.  An electric light was controlled by a switch to the shop above and used to warn of danger. In such an emergency grenade casing and parts could be hidden in the forge bellows.

All moulding and casting of grenades and “shells”  was done in small moulding boxes, each box containing eight shells.  Both brass and iron were cast – brass for the fuze fittings.  Then subsequent machining of the cast components was also undertaken at the premises.  The output was about 100 improvised grenades a week, and the cost was established as 9 shillings per grenade.

The grenades , empty, were taken to a room in a house in Dominick St were they were filled with gelignite explosive and fuzed. The grenade was small and described as the size of a duck egg.   This is a description of the fuze mechanism, verbatim from McHugh:

It is a little difficult to interpret without a diagram.  My assessment is that a safety pin held a spring striker.  The striker struck a centre fired bullet case, with bullet and propellant removed and a short length of delay fuse inserted, and the other end having a detonator crimped on.

The detonators were commercial and obtained from quarries. The time delay was nominally set for 4 seconds.   Amusingly the lathe used had originally belonged to a jewellers, “Ganter’s”.  When WW1 started the lathe was requisitioned by the British government and used in manufacturing shells for the British war effort.   Mr Ganter than made a a formal application for it to be returned. When he got it back he sold it to the IRA for the same purpose.   Other tools were obtained from the Broadstone works of the Midland railway. The springs for the grenade fuzes were obtained by a front business importing long springs from overseas and cutting them down to size.  Strikers were iron rivets with the head turned down in a lathe to a sharp point.  As an aside I have on my desk in front of me another IRA striker from a fuze mechanism and it’s a much cruder design from 1991.  The facility was raided twice by the British but on both occasions they found nothing.

Michael Lynch then designed an improvised mortar in 1920.  The propellant charge was a 12 bore shotgun cartridge with shot removed and more propellant (black powder) added. The impact fuze was adapted from the grenade fuze, but without the delay. The mortar bomb weighed 11lbs.

The IRA under Matt Furlong conducted some extensive trials of this improvised mortar system in October 1920 in County Meath. First a number of dummy mortar bombs with propellant only were fired, to establish ranges and calculate the propellant charge needed for a range of 100 yards.  Then three bombs were fired without a main charge but with an impact fuze fitted to test initiation.   The trials established that the bomb tumbled through the air, but despite that, the fuze appeared to work however it struck the ground.  One of the engineers believed that the impact fuze was being initiated on “set back” within the mortar tube and not on impact at the target.  Attempts to fire a live mortar failed as the bomb got stuck in the tube.  Probably fortunately.

The engineers involved were concerned about the impact fuze functioning on “set back” within the mortar tube, so they added an additional safety mechanism (which I won’t describe here) and this was was built in to the fuze for subsequent trials. The second set of trials took place near Kells in County Meath.  After firing a live shell with the new safety feature which then failed to function on impact, an argument ensued between Furlong and McHugh.  Matt Furlong insisted on removing the additional safety feature and firing the mortar as originally designed. McHugh, nervous, stepped a few yards away.   The others retreated. As the mortar bomb was launched it did indeed explode in the tube, severely injuring Matt Furlong, who later died in hospital.

The loss of the mortar was seen as a significant blow to the IRA in Dublin who had expected to be able to mortar British positions and barracks with impunity mounting the mortar on the back of a vehicle, a tactic that they applied successfully 60 years later in the North.

198 Parnell St in Dublin then upped its production of grenades and became a significant munitions store – because it was no longer possible to conceal the product, a steel plate was fitted behind the shop counter and a pistol and grenades kept at the counter itself.  In the end the British came across the munition factory and store by accident when no-one was there.


British Forces outside the bicycle shop after the raid.

Other grenade production facilities were established in 1921, with a production capacity of 1000 per week. Later production facilities became even more industrial with revised casting technology improving manufacture.  Security too, improved. Every production facility was emptied as work finished so any raids would be inconclusive.  Finished munitions were kept in hides, and there was a full time organisation to move them around the city. Faked books to disguise legitimate production runs of legal products were generated, and secret dumps of reserve material were established. McHugh claimed to have personal knowledge of still extant dumps from that time even in 1952 “just in case”.

In 1922 work began on a new IRA mortar, this time based on an oxygen gas cylinder (I kid you not!). The cylinder was used for a barrel, and the mortar bombs were cast iron, pear shaped with 4 fins. The launch tripod was fitted with a quadrant and pendulum to set the angle. The propellant was a shotgun cartridge, again with an augmenting charge of blackpowder. (In 1997 I was still encountering improvised mortars using a blackpowder charge).  Trials were undertaken in late 1922 outside Buttevant Barracks. The mortar bombs launched, tumbling as they reached full height then fell nose first.  The mortar was used by the IRA in an action against Free State forces in Kilmallock and again at Macroom.

1920-1930

Early Bomb Squad Protective Clothing

This excerpt from a magazine, dated 1922:

This from 1933, a German protective suit:

And this from the Nineteen-fifties, a NYPD bomb suit.  Note the object behind the operator. This is a “LaGuardia-Pyke Bomb carrier” developed in 1940 and still in use in the 1990s, albeit mounted on a newer truck.  The device was for transporting IEDs before in-situ safe disposal techniques were developed.  I’m pulling together a blog piece on this equipment for the near future.

1910-1920

Extensive IED Campaign in the USA

During the period 1914 to 1932 in the USA there was a violent and extensive campaign of IED attacks from the anarchist group the “Galleanists”.  This IED campaign is largely now forgotten but there are important lessons. The issues are slightly hard to discern because of aspects of the crimes that remain unsolved but with 20/20 hindsight it seems sensible to attribute key attacks to this group. We should also remember that this period in history was complex and also saw IED attacks in the US from German saboteurs, from local home-grown labor disputes and from organised crime.

The politics of the time were heated and radical. The leader of this particular Anarchist group was the Italian Luigi Galleani, and he was active in the US between 1901 and 1919.

Galleani very much pushed the idea of “propaganda of the deed’ as described a couple of decades earlier by Johann Most. Galleani was a powerful orator and writer with an international reputation before he got to the US in 1901, aged 40. His intense activity continued, and he wrote and published anarchist and revolutionary literature extensively. Galleani always championed “direct action” and praised those who committed violent acts. Galleani published a bomb making guide, oddly called “Health is in You!”, which sold for 25 cents.  The guide is interesting reading though with a technical error that allegedly cost the life of at least one enthusiastic student bomb maker making nitro-glycerine.

Galleani was deported to Italy in 1919 but continued his revolutionary work. His followers mounted a number of IED attacks and some significant IED campaigns in the US from about 1914 onwards. Here’s an outline summary:

  • 1914 – Several IED attacks in New York including St Patrick’s Cathedral and the placement of an IED in Tombs Police court under the chair of a Magistrate.

  • 1914 – Premature explosion on Lexington Avenue in a bomb making facility. killing four anarchists.

  • 1915 – Another Plot to blow up St Patrick’s cathedral in New York, intercepted by NYPD Bomb Squad commander Thomas Tunney
  • 1916 – Mass poisoning attempt with arsenic, Chicago. The perpetrator was never caught.
  • 1916 – Bomb attack on a Boston police station
  • 1916 – Galleanists now believed to have been responsible for the San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing on 22 July, which killed ten people.  Local labor activists were convicted but decades later pardoned and the evidence against them discredited. No other perpertrators were brought to justice. Many historians now attribute blame to the Galleanists.  The device was reported as dynamite or TNT packed into metal pipes in a suitcase with a clock as a timing component. However examination of the evidence years later suggest much less certainty about the construction of the device.
  • 1917 – A bomb placed in a church in Milwaukee was recovered to a Milwaukee police station where is exploded killing 9 policemen and a female civilian. The perpetrator was never caught
  • 1917-1918 Other bombings across the US attributed to the Galleanists.
  • 1918 – A number of IEDs placed in the homes of Philadelphia public officials
  • 1919 – An IED being placed by four Galleanists in a Wool Mill exploded prematurely killing four of the perpetrators.
  • 1919 – Further bombings
  • 1919 – In late April 1919 a total of 36 dynamite IEDs were posted to a number of high profile individuals across the US in the mail. The bombs were intended to be delivered on May Day.  No-one was killed but a senator’s housekeeper was badly injured opening one of the packages. No-one directly charged with the offence.  The postal 36 IEDs were described as follows:   The package was wrapped in brown paper. Inside the brown paper the package was again wrapped in green paper, stamped “Gimbel Brothers – Novelty samples”. This contained a cardboard box containing a six inch x three inch x one inch block of hollowed out wood, which held a stick of dynamite. A small vial of sulfuric acid was fastened to the wooden block next to three mercury fulminate blasting caps. Opening one end of the cardboard box (marked “open’) released a spring which broke the vial of acid, which dripped into the blasting caps, causing a detonation.  I note that in some senses the initiation mechanism is similar to the acid initiated devices of Harry Orchard in 1903.
  • 1919 – In June, the Galleanists exploded eight large IEDs nearly simultaneously in several different US cities.  Each utilised about 25 pounds of Nitroglycerine, and was packed with shrapnel. Only two people were killed, – one a night-watchman and the other an anarchist who was laying a device when it exploded.   Police traced the printer who had printed flyers left at the scene of the bombs. They arrested two men, Andrea Salsedo and Roberto Eliam. Salsedo was questioned (some reports suggest he was tortured).  He then either jumped from a 14th floor window or was pushed by Elia. Elia refused to talk and was deported. The investigation stalled and the police used more aggressive tactics, including, allegedly, warrantless wire taps.  No direct suspects were indicted but several hundred suspects were exported.

  • 1920 –   The Galleanist Mario Buda is believed to have built and detonated the Wall St bomb on 16 September, killing 38 people.   The perpetrator was never brought to justice. 
  • 1927 – More bombings of court officials
  • 1932 – Another bombing of a court official

To us, sitting here in 2014, some one hundred years after these bombings started, the concept of a radical revolutionary IED campaign, and significant violent industrial disputes in the USA is hard to fathom.  I’m intrigued too that the revolutionary fervour of the times wasn’t “underground” as it would be today.  Here’s useful evidence of that. In 1914 there was an explosion in an apartment occupied by anarchists in Lexington Avenue New York. Four anarchists died, after the IED apparently exploded as it was being constructed. This image below shows a very well attended public demonstration in New York in support of the dead anarchists. Bizarre by today’s terms, I think.

But the threat posed by the Galleanists was real, and while complex and occurring at the same time as other threats, there was clearly a public concern about their capabilities.  I think that the logistics of planting 8 devices across the country is significant.  I’m also surprised so few perpetrator were properly brought to justice.

The Galleanist campaign reinforces once again the fact that the USA, of all nations, has had a significant domestic experience of IEDs throughout its existence. Those who suggest that the USA only really came to terms with IEDs in the last decade are simply wrong.

1580-1590

Things that have happened before

The press are pretty awful at describing any given terrorist attack as something “new”.  I hope this site and the blog posts associated with it show that very often there is nothing new under the sun.  Tactics, technology, targets all repeat themselves in one form or another, and history is forgotten time after time.  Partly this is because of the “shock” affect of terrorism, which can indeed be stunning, and partly because people (journalists and politicians included) are lazy.

In an effort to counter these, as readers of previous blog posts will have seen, I research and collect early examples of certain kinds of improvised explosive devices, It’s time to summarize a few here, some  of which I’ve written about before and otehrs I will write about when time permits.

a. Letter bombs – I have details of letter bombs from 1581 (Poland) and this one from 1764 (Denmark). A Colonel Poulsen, living in Borglum Abbey, received a box through the mail. “When he opens it, therein is to be found gunpowder and a firelock which sets fire unto it, so he became very injured”

  b. Vehicle bombs. The Wall St bombing in New York in 1920 is often wrongly cited as the first.  There was a famous vehicle bomb in Yildiz, Turkey in 1904 and the attempted assassination of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800, in Paris using a vehicle bomb. The concept was well known and various designs were circulated in military documentation much earlier. I’ve got some copies of those diagrams.

c. IED shrapnel coated in acid or anti-coagulant.  This was trumpeted as a new horrific tactic a few years ago – but the Stern gang attempted such techniques in 1942 (along with exceptionally sophisticated “come-on” tactics) in an assassination attempt on a British Palestinian policeman.  The tactical design of this attack is extremely interesting, very thorough, and I’ll post details in a few weeks.

d. Multiple VBIED attacks – attacks in Iraq ten years ago using multiple vehicles against a target such as a hotel were labelled as “new”. But British Army deserters used three trucks to blow up Ben Yehuda St in Jerusalem in 1948, each allegedly containing a ton of TNT and additional material. Their intended target was a hotel. I’m building a full post on this.

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