I came across this nugget of EOD history today while looking for something else. But it’s a good story on its own. In 1968, the famous Cammel Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, Northern England won a contract to “refit” a Venezuelan naval vessel. The Venezuelan Navy delivered the vessel to the shipyard, “handed over the keys” and jumped on a plane back home. The shipyard got to work refitting the ship. Some weeks later, in August 1968, the work package on this ship got to the main armament, a 102mm gun. At some point the breech of the main gun on the ship was opened and a fitter happened to look down the barrel. Expecting to see a shiny barrel with the sunlit sight of Merseyside in the distance the mechanic was surprised to see nothing. Blackness. So he had a think and the next day told his management. A torch was acquired and shone down said barrel. There was something down there. It was a shell. The shell fitted so snugly down the 102mm barrel (4″?) that it was jammed tight. Presumably the Venezuelan Navy had been carrying out some firing exercises in the past, and got the shell stuck, then, perhaps they had “forgotten” about it. Mañana. There were some indications in some strange written records, translated from Spanish, that heavy weights had been dropped down the elevated barrels in an attempt to free the shell. (!) At this point the local Army EOD team was called to Birkenhead to deal with the matter.
Messages were sent to London, translated, and sent through Diplomatic channels to the Venezuelan government seeking comprehensive technical background and details. These were provided, translated and sent back to London then on to the EOD team, stood on the deck of the ship. The advice from Caracas was as follows (in full):
Message starts:
If the shell’s front end is coloured RED, it is high explosive.
If the shell’s front end is painted YELLOW , it is not high explosive.
Message Ends.
The EOD team metaphorically shrugged at this. They lowered a camera down the barrel and took a colour picture. The end of the shell was painted ORANGE. There were other unidentified obstructions in the barrel too…. So what to do? After some thought, they carried out a number of appropriate techniques to loosen the shell in the barrel, all to no avail. Eventually the breech was cut out of the gun completely, shell and all, and transported to a range for destruction. Here’s a pic of the EOD office (in service dress, no less) manoeuvring the shell in the breech at the range in Sennybridge.
Ships in ports are potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack. Their size and value make them attractive to insurgents, and while ships are at sea they are probably relatively invulnerable. But tied up in a busy port with small boats in large numbers and with the difficulty of establishing secure perimeters around them, they become a real target. Most people remember the USS Cole attack in October 2000, but few remember the successful IED attack on a US aircraft carrier in May 1964.
There are a number of reasons why this attack is no widely known:
The story was “sat” on by the US Defense Department at the time, who only announced that the ship had been damaged.
The Aircraft Carrier the “Card” was a WW2 aircraft carrier and wasn’t performing as an aircraft carrier at the time. It was shuttling military equipment as a ferry/transport ship from Japan to Vietnam. It had been redesignated from the USS Card to the USNS Card accordingly.
USNS Card, a WW2 aircraft carrier
Although technically it sank , it settled in shallow water in the port and was repaired, and refloated relatively quickly.
Because the story was squashed not much attention has been paid to the attackers and the IED they used. The attack was made by insurgents from the 65th Special Operations Group. The USNS Card had been shuttling heavy equipment into Saigon Harbour for three years – aircraft, armoured vehicles and the like. it and a sister ship, the USNS Core had attracted the attention of local insurgents.
There had been an earlier attempted attack on the Core, in late 1963, which had failed but the IEDs had actually been recovered by the same terrorist that had laid them, without detection. It was assessed that the battery power source had failed. I find it interesting that the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole had been preceded by a a failed attack (that similarly was not detected) on the USS The Sullivans earlier in the year.
For the attack on the Crd the battery power was replaced, and two devices were made, each weighing about 40kg. Some of the explosive was probably a US military C4 demolition charge stolen or trafficked by the Viet Cong from the South Vietnamese Navy, and the remainder was some other type of explosive, possibly TNT. The devices were transported by a small boat and then carried through a sewer to the vicinity of the docked USNS Card. A port security boat had stopped the small boat but had been bribed to let the men pass. From the sewer the two insurgents swam to the Card. Their devices must have had some sort of flotation. One they attached to the ship near the bilges, and the other by the engine compartment.
One report suggests that the power supply, a battery was stuck on a pole sticking out of the water. A timer was then set – I cant identify from reports the specific nature of the timer, but I’m going to guess an adapted watch. I can’t be sure if there was a single initiator system or two seperate ones.
After the explosion the aircraft settled on the bottom of the 48ft deep port, its superstructure remaining above the water. In less than a month it was refloated and taken to Subic Bay in the Philippines for repairs. although the US Defence Department played down the attack, the North Vietnamese made a thing of it and even issued a stamp commemorating the attack. There are strangely conflicting reports about deaths caused by the attack.
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:
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.
Recently I had a dialogue with some colleagues as I researched modern versions of this very early piece of EOD equipment from 1573.
A remarkably similar piece of equipment was in operational use only 45 years ago and I was seeking a photo of the equipment in use in the 1960’s/1970s. I’m still digging on that.
Anyway the dialogue with a few modest practitioners of the art of EOD in the 1970s took me in an interesting direction, and I’ve turned up some interesting stuff from much earlier on the subject of ROVs. The general perception of the world we live in is that the tracked ROV as used in EOD is a very modern invention. Manufacturers produce glitzy videos showing these twin-tracked vehicles performing tricks as the operator remains a safe distance behind, secure from the hazards that their robotic buddy faces. All very High-Tech. I used to work for one such manufacturer, and we have all seen the videos showing the technological prowess of a wide range of differing modern ROVs. Like many, I assumed that the tracked ROV was essentially invented for the purpose of EOD in the dark days of the early 1970s. But it appears that ROVs were around for a considerable time before the 1970s. This does not to lessen in any way the significant innovative effort that went into the development of the “wheelbarrow” series of ROVs and all subsequent EOD “robotics”, but there are some fascinating precedents.
I began by searching for images of the first ROVs in Northern Ireland in about 1972, in the hope that they might also show images of the protective screen I was looking for so I could do a visual comparison. Suddenly I came across a picture in some archives that made me sit up. You should understand that my operational experience was largely in the 1990s so I’m most familiar with Mk8 “wheelbarrow” ROV. But I came across the image which at first glance appeared to show a number of Mk 8 Chassis…. but from WW2… How could that be?
British soldiers with captured Goliaths
US Navy examine captured Goliaths on Utah Beach 11 June 1944
For comparison here’s a picture of a Mk 8 wheelbarrow – note that the main body of the Mk 8 is remarkably similar to the images above in terms of shape and scale.
The WW2 item turns out to be of a system called Goliath. It’s not an EOD ROV, but rather its a remotely controlled demolition vehicle.
When you think that probably there were only a couple of hundred Mk 8 wheelbarrows produced in the 1980s and 1990s, but there were many thousand “Goliath” ROVs produced. The Goliath ROVs were initially electrically powered but later used a small two cylinder engine. Here’s a great shot from the top, showing the engine and the wire spooling from the rear.
I also found reference to a Japanese tracked ROV, also used a a remote demolition tool – called the “I-GO” developed in 1937. How strange that the nomenclature predates the “I-Robot”
Japanese I-GO ROV from 1937
Now in the early 1990s some of the Northern Ireland EOD units developed a deployment technique called the “Rapid Deployment Trolley”. This was a cobbled together wheeled trolley on which we placed the Mk 8 wheelbarrow ROV to transport it rapidly to and from a small helicopter in emergency situations where a full deployment requiring a large helicopter wasn’t possible. So it was with delight I saw that Germans in WW2 also had such a “trolley” for the Goliath – and actually theirs looked much better engineered!. Vorsprung Durch Technic.
Wheeled Trolley for moving Goliath ROVs
A Goliath being moved on its wheeled Trolley, Warsaw
Then as I was researching the provenance of the German Goliath I came across reference to the genesis of this equipment… It turns out that the German Goliath was based on an ROV developed by the French in the years running up to WW2…. Supposedly, as the Germans advanced on Paris the inventor, Adolphe Kegresse threw the prototype into the Seine, but somehow the Nazis got wind of this, reverse-engineered it, and ended up building the Goliath. I have also found reference to the Germans recovering , later, Kegresse’s blueprints for the ROV and reverse engineering their ROV from that.
The French Kegresse ROV, 1940
I then found details of British tracked ROV, developed in 1940 by Metropolitan Vickers, again as a remote demolition tool. Here’s an image – note the interesting inwardly facing track extensions.
Vickers MLM ROV, 1940
50 of these Vickers MLMs were built before the project was suspended in 1944. I have a copy of a Canadian officer’s trial report if anyone is interested. The ROV had a range of 1100 yards and could carry 120lbs of Ammonal. Initiation was either by a command signal or a contact switch (which had a command safety override).
I then found a reference to an American ROV from WW1. This is the Wickersham Land Torpedo, built in 1918, possibly 1917 but patented in 1922. Here’s the link to the patent. They were manufactured by the Caterpillar company, I think.
Wickerhsam Land Torpedo
This ROV looks similar in size shape and design to a modern day Talon EOD ROV, or a Dragon Runner. The Wickersham and the Kegresse ROVs look pretty similar.
I kept digging and encountered 2 more tracked ROvs that predates the American one – both French.
The first of these was the “torpille terrestre electrique” (electrical land torpedo), developed by M. Gabet and M. Aubriot in 1915. It could carry 200kgs of explosive and was wire guided of course. I’m intrigued that the single lever track at the rear looks a little like the lever track on some modern robots.
The second of these was the “Schnieder Crocodile” also developed in 1915 and trialled by many Allied nations, including the British, Belgian, Italian and Russians.
“Crocodiles” Schneider type B.
It could carry 40kg of explosives and looks similar in size, shape and scale to the Allen-Vanguard ROV
So it seems that next year will be the centenary of the tracked ROV…
Update on Friday, January 2, 2015 at 1:45PM by Roger Davies
Here’s a video showing that the Gemeran Goliath ROV was also radio controlled, and not just command wire steered.
The conviction of a team of radical would-be terrorists who discussed planting IEDs in the lavatories of the British Stock Exchange reminds me that lavatories are a theme in many IED attacks, which I think is curious. Here’s a range of previous “bombs in the bogs””
Only a couple of days ago some sort of apparent explosive device was found in the lavatory of a Libyan plane in Egypt For what its worth I don’t think it was an IED but the story is pretty cloudy for now.
In May 2008 there was the very peculiar incident in Exeter, UK, where a decidedly odd individual detonated a device while he was in the lavatories of a fast food restaurant.
In 1957 an elderly man blew himself up in the lavatory of a passenger aircraft over California. A good investigation report is here The device was constructed by dynamite and blasting caps with the blasting caps initiated by matches and burning paper. Only the perpetrator was killed.
A Canadian passenger aircraft blew up after a device exploded in the lavatory over British Colombia in 1965. The crime was never solved.
In 1939, as part of a significant Irish terrorist bombing campaign in England a bomb was planted in a public lavatory in Oxford street. Disaster was averted when the lavatory attendant dumped the IED in a bucket of water (not a good response, but a brave man). Several other incidents in this campaign were IEDs left in lavatories. The attendant was awarded £5 for his bravery
In 1884, during another Irish bombing campaign in England, (yes there have been a few) the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, was severely damaged in an explosion caused by a large IED being left in a public lavatory next door to the police Headquarters. Here’s a picture.
There’s an interesting aspect to this story. Several months earlier, in 1883, an Irish revolutionary organization , the Irish Republican Brotherhood sent a letter to Scotland Yard threatening to ‘blow Superintendent Williamson off his stool’ and dynamite all the public buildings in London on 30 May 1884. The Met Police largely ignored the warning, and then on the very day promised the explosion at Scotland Yard occurred, as did two other explosions elsewhere in London. The failure of the Met Police to protect their own headquarters, as well as the occurrence of several other IED attacks across London embarrassed the police severely and led indirectly to the formation of Special Branch.
There are numerous other IED attacks on lavatories, too many to list.
Roger Davies