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.

Suspicious Shrapnel

Interesting report in today’s newspapers here, suggesting that this former soldier Ronald Brown had 6 oz of shrapnel in his body since a mine exploded under him in 1944.  With all due respect to the man concerned, now passed away, a genuine veteran who did recieve wounds in 1944, I pretty much doubt that German mines or booby traps had wire staples as fragmentation, or contained “philips” screws… which while invented in the 30’s, I doubt were yet components in German munitions.

The Yildiz VBIED, 1905

I’m often asked about the history of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices, or car bombs. The book “Buda’s Wagon” posits that the first terrorist bomb of this kind was the explosion in Wall Street in 1920.   But as I pointed out here, this tactic is somewhat older with the attack on Napoleon in 1800 being a classic example.

Another pre-1920 VBIED that isn’t well known was the so-called “Yildiz” assassination attack on July 21, 1905.  This was an attempt by an Armenian revolutionary organization against the head of the Ottoman head of state, Abdul Hamid II, at the Yildiz Mosque in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

By 1905 Armenian left-wing revolutionaries had been fighting a long campaign against the Ottoman empire.  An interesting example of previous Armenian revolutionary attacks was the 1896 Ottoman bank take-over, when Armenian revolutionaries seized the Ottoman bank headquarters in Constantinople and held its mainly western staff hostage with a mixture of pistols, grenades and IEDs. IEDs allegedly recovered from the 1896 Ottoman Bank take-over They did this in order to publicise their campaign internationally. This attack has interesting parallels with modern “Fedayeen” tactics such as the Mumbai attacks of…. Indeed the Armenian revolutionaries even referred to themselves as “fedayees”.

Armenian Revolutionaries

In 1905 the plan was to create a large IED, and a founder of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Christaphor Mikaelian started making explosives in Sofia, Bulgaria. During this process, Mikaelian and a comrade Kendirian were killed in an accidental explosion.  Despite this, the plan for the operation continued.

 The attack once again took advantage of a predictable pattern of behaviour by the target. Sultan Abdul Hamid II attended the Yidliz mosque every Friday as a matter of routine. The Armenian revolutionaries studied his movements carefully, and decided that a large device, set on a timer, hidden in a carriage outside the mosque had a good chance of succeeding.

It’s interesting that the timer, to be set by the carriage driver, was a clockwork timer of only 42 seconds, giving, in theory, just enough time for the carriage driver to leave the scene. The carriage driver, a revolutionary called Zareh, was a veteran of the Ottoman Bank take-over from 9 years earlier.

Due to an unforeseen delay the Sultan escaped injury but 26 people died, including the carriage driver Zareh.

 

The design of the IED in the carriage was interesting.  The device was placed in a metal chest, and included 120kg of home made explosives.  Other reports suggest 80kg of explosives and 20kg of iron pieces as shrapnel.  I’m going to guess that the explosive used was nitroglycerine based.  Beyond that details of the IED and the attack are pretty scarce, and what can be found is confused by conflicting Armenian and Turkish claims.

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!

Pipe Smoking – Counter-Terrorist EOD in 1974

There’s a nice bit of history available on the BBC iplayer here, a 1974 BBC documentary about the training and operations of EOD operators going to Northern Ireland. Apologies to those of you who can’t access iPlayer outside the UK.

The following comments spring to mind:

  • When did it become unacceptable to turn up for an incident smoking a pipe?  And smoke a pipe during lectures?  : – )
  • Some very snazzy shirts….
  • Some very posh accents especially from the 39 Bde watchkeeper….
  • Is that a very young looking Barry Taylor at the 5.42?  By later in the program he’s grown a Ginge Carrahar droopy moustache…
  • The late great Ron Cooper telling what would now be inappropriate jokes at 17.40
  • Baldrick the dog turns up at 19.00.
  • Stroppy RESA …. :- ) at 29.50

 

Update on Friday, June 15, 2012 at 2:31AM by Roger Davies

I forgot to comment about the SATO working hard to get his mug on camera.  I assume much to the disgust of the very large team on the ground. I also couldn’t work out why he needed one radio to transmit and another to receive…. but then again SATO’s always know best don’t they…. : – )  And to me the berets looked just fine…

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