Standing Well Back
1860-1870

Coal Torpedoes

A “coal torpedo” was the name given by Confederate Secret Service agents for a crude IED disguised as a lump of coal. The device was then introduced into the stocks of coal on ships and trains with the aim of causing an explosion in the boiler when it was shoveled into the engine.

The coal torpedo seems to have been invented by Capt Thomas Edgworth Courtney of the Confederate Secret Service.  Courtney proposed the idea to Jefferson Davis motivated probably by the financial rewards promised by the Confederacy which were suggested could be 50% of the value of Union shipping destroyed by new inventions. In this case, financial reward became the mother of a number of inventions. Courtney was commissioned and formed a Secret Service Corps of 25 men with direction to to attack any Union vessel or transport carrying military goods found in Confederate waters, with his rewards (no salary) being paid in Confederate war bonds.

Details of Courtney’s plan leaked to the Union who put a price on his head. Courtney escaped to England, and tried to sell the design of the Coal torpedo to the British Navy, the French, the Spanish and Turkey, without success.

The Union naval forces on the Mississippi under Admiral David Porter issued General order 184 accordingly:

The enemy have adopted new inventions to destroy human life and vessels in the shape of torpedoes, and an article resembling coal, which is to be placed in our coal piles for the purpose of blowing the vessels up, or injuring them. Officers will have to be careful in overlooking coal barges. Guards will be placed over them at all times, and anyone found attempting to place any of these things amongst the coal will be shot on the spot.

Details of the actual ships destroyed by this means are unclear as records have been destroyed but it appears likely that a number of the devices functioned as intended.

Courtney’s torpedoes were manufactured carefully at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop in Richmond, Virginia. Actual lumps of coal were used to form a mold into which iron was cast. The walls of the devices surrounded a hollow sufficient to hold about four ounces of blackpowder.  After filling, the void was closed with a threaded plug, dipped in beeswax and rolled in powdered coal to disguise it.  The device, although small, could rupture the pressure vessel of a ship, causing much greater secondary damage.

The concept of coal torpdeos carried on. After the American Civil War the Fenian Brotherhood (see previous blog posts) had connections with both sides and there appears to have been a plot in the 1860s and 70s to use such devices to place in the furnaces of New York hotels and British shipping .

In WW1 German saboteurs operating in the US planned to use such devices to attack munitions ships, and in an earlier post I mentioned that such devices were found by US forces after overrunning the Germans in France in 1918.

In WW2 both the OSS and the SOE used similar devices, as did German spies. I have found reports that the Japanese also developed a similar tool at the Noborito research Institute, and they were used by Japanese commandos in raids in New Guinea.  There is also a hint that the CIA explored this as a tactic to be used in Vietnam.

The OSS didn’t do things by halves and developed a coal camouflage kit for such devices, with a range of paints to enable the device to match variations in coal supplies.

1940-1950

Mystery bombings

Fritz Joubert Duquesne was an inveterate anti-British spy who apparently used a number of IEDs to destroy British vessels sailing from South America in WW2.    Duquesne’s spying career started when as a British soldier serving in his home country during the 2nd Boer War, be was horrified at the British treatment of women and children.  His sister had been killed and his mother was dying in a British Concentration camp.

Duquesne then lived in the USA and became a German spy in 1914. He was sent to Brazil as “Frederick Fredericks” under the disguise of “doing scientific research on rubber plants.” From his base in Rio de Janeiro, he allegedly planted time bombs disguised as cases of mineral samples on British ships; he was credited with sinking “22 ships”. Among them, allegedly, were the Salvador; the Pembrokeshire; and the Tennyson and the “liner” Liger. One of his bombs allegedly started a fire on the Vauban.

I have been trying to find reference to the explosives planted on the British ships – little other than a reference to “infernal machines” in a press report. At the time numerous German saboteur plots were operating from N America (see earlier posts).

However, in investigating this I have found some discrepancies. For instance the SS Tennyson, was not sunk – it was still operating from Brazil in 1922. I can find no record of the “Liger” or a fire on the Vauban. The S.S. Pembrokeshire was “hulked” in 1913. Very curious. Was this a British misinformation campaign?

Here’s a press report of the time giving some details

Duquesne once again operated for the Germans in WW2, running the “Duquesne spy ring” which was broken by the FBI.

20th Century

Operation Lucid – to singe Mr Hitler’s moustache

I’ve blogged before about the use of exploding ships and other fireships in history here.  But I’ve just found another interesting plan of combined exploding/fire ships in World War Two, a plan called Operation Lucid.

With a German invasion fleet massing around Calais and Boulogne, a series of pretty desperate measures were considered as methods of damaging the invasion fleet. Churchill, with his taste of history and knowledge of the fireships used against the Spanish Armarda, approved a plan put forward by Captain Augustus Agar VC. The plan involved two or three old oil tankers, filled with an incendiary mix and explosives to be steamed into the the large collection of German wooden invasion barges being collected at Calais and Boulogne.   The incendiary mix , dubbed “Agar’s Special Mixture” consisted of 50% heavy fuel oil, 25% diesel oil, and 25% petroleum (gasoline).  The explosive components consisted of unmeasured, but large, quantities of gun cotton, cordite and old sea mines.

Here’s a quote from one of the sailors assigned to the operation:

Chief Petty Officer Ronald Apps recalled:

In July 1940, I joined a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker – the War African – that was anchored off Sheerness for an idea that I have always assumed was thought up by Churchill. These tankers were filled up with fuel oil and there were mines and detonators down in the holds. The idea was that we would run them over to Boulogne and about five or six miles out of the harbour, we would set the controls and lash them – with the boilers going full bore – and run them into Boulogne harbour and let them blow up, to destroy the potential German invasion fleet. It was called Operation Lucid and we spent four weeks preparing. We practiced setting the controls and evacuating the ship with two speedboats alongside us which had been commandeered from Southend. These speedboats were remarkable things. They could go at 35 or 40 knots and the idea was that at the blowing of a whistle, we had to rush down, get in the boats and we were away. Those four weeks were a bit hairy because the tanker was full up with fuel oil when it came to us and it was primed and ready to explode and there were air raids at night. When you’re in a tanker, sitting on all this explosive material and the Germans are coming over and dropping bombs, it’s not very … shall I say ‘sleep inspiring’ experience. I got round to the idea that I had to sleep or I wouldn’t be able to walk around the next day. 

In the end there were four attempts to launch the operation, but each failed for a variety of reasons, not least that the elderly ships adapted for the task were simply not reliable enough and kept breaking down. There are more details here.

There are some odd, almost spooky links between the operation’s commander, Agar VC, and previous blog posts I have written. Agar is a really interesting historic character. He had participated in the Zeebrugge raid in 1918 (link) and so was not new to the concept of the modern use of an explosively laden vessel. He was awarded the VC in mysterious circumstances because he was operating at the end of WW1 in support of SIS operations in Russia – running agents in and out of Bolshevik Russia using MTBs in the Baltic and other nefarious activities. As well as the VC he was also awarded the DSO. The DSO and the VC were awarded for two seperate motor torpoedo attacks on Bolshevik cruisers based on the island of Kronstadt (the site of this story in a previous blog).

I never imagined putting a link to a Daily Mail article on my blog, but this story here of the Baltic operations is worth breaking the rule.

The story of how he commanded HMS Dorsetshire, which was sunk under him by Japanese dive bombers in 1942, is also a remarkable story.

1940-1950

Exotic characters, IEDs and brothels

As the previous post showed there were some interesting characters who could get away with some pretty individualistic approaches to life in World War Two. I’m reading about another just now, Lt Col Billy McLean, an irregular solider who fought with the guerillas in Abyssinia (Wingate’s Gideon Force) and with the partisans in Albania as part of SOE.  Earlier posts discussed how TE Lawrence and Bimbashi Garland, originally based out of the Arab Bureau offices in Cairo took the war to the Turks in WW1 – and it’s clear some of that approach was still extant in Cairo in the Second World War. McLean tells of being trained in IED manufacture at a Commando depot in Egypt, prior to deployment to Abyssinia, and specifically how to blow up trains in the manner of Garland and Lawrence. This, despite the fact that the only train line in Abyssinia, from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, was long since out of service…  But as he says this fact did not dampen their ardour and they happily blew up railway tracks every morning.

He was then taught in the classroom how to make postal IEDs. Their instructor facetiously told them to address their real, but practice, IEDs to someone obvious like Mussolini or Hitler.  One of the sergeants, a fellow student of McLean laboriously addressed the IED to the commanding officer of his own regiment…. : – )

Beyond this, McLean’s experiences in Abyssinia and Albania have some intersting parrallels with modern day SOF operations, in terms of living alongside, fighting with and commanding and mentoring indigenous troops of variable and frankly sometimes doubtful quality, against a mutual enemy.  Such things are not new and there are lessons to be learned, still.  But on the other hand, although public flogging of indigenous troops for wasting bullets might have worked for Abyssinia in 1940, it might not work today.

McLean’s “irregular” traits came to the fore – he was arrested by the military police in an Abbysssinian brothel while “consorting with a particularly attractive inmate who did not smell in the least, apart from a faint tinge of garlic on the breath” but the arresting military policeman turned a blind eye for a moment, and McLean (then a  young Captain) took that as an invitation to scarper into the night.

There are some wonderful throw away lines in the description of Albanian operations such as “Food was in short supply. Luckily one of the mules died and provided them with meat.”

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.

 

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