Standing Well Back
19th Century

Copycat IED attacks – 100 years apart

One of the reasons I study historical IED attacks is the parallels with current IED attacks. Sometimes the parallels need a bit of analysis to see; sometimes the parallels are frankly startling.  He’s some specific UK examples.  It is often forgotten that the Irish terrorists have been planting IEDs in England since the late 19th century.  There were then subsequent campaigns in 1939 (the “S Plan”) and later in the 20th century. It is interesting that sometimes the exact same targets were attacked.

The IRA’s “S Plan” in particular, although largely unsuccessful, posed an intriguing terrorist threat worthy of study because the IRA in the early months of 1939 attacked the national electrical power supply infrastructure in the UK. Not with much success, I admit, but nonetheless with clear strategic intent.  There are a few other terrorist campaigns where specific aspects of infrastructure have been targeted but this is an interesting one. Details of the quite broad ranging S Plan attacks are here.

Below is a list of attacks that match or replicate IED attacks from earlier campaigns. In particular I would highlight the repeat attacks on Victoria Station (three times), and Hammersmith Bridge

Prisons:

1. 1867 – A “fenian” device used to breach a prison wall at Clerkenwell

2. 1939 IRA device blew up against the wall of Walton Gaol in Liverpool

London Train/ Tube stations

1. 1883/1884/1885 IEDs exploded at Gower St Station (now Euston Square) and Victoria Station left luggage office. Device defused at Charing Cross Station. Other devices exploded in tunnels

2. In 1939/1940 Devices exploded at Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square, Kings Cross and Victoria Station left luggage office then in 1940 Euston station. IRA two devices defused at Baker Street

3. 1991, 1992 IEDs at Paddington station, Hammersmith and Victoria Station, London Bridge station, other devices on trains and near stations

Hammersmith Bridge

1. March 1939 Hammersmith Bridge attacked with two IEDs

2. June 2000 Hammersmith Bridge attacked with one IED

Houses of Parliament

1. 1884 Fenian devices exploded in the Houses of Parliament

2. 1974 IRA device exploded at the Houses of Parliament

Department stores

1. 1939 department stores attacked with incendiaries

2. 1991/1992 department stores and shops attacked with inendiaries

Scotland Yard

1. In 1884 a device exploded next to Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police

2. In 1973, Police defused a bomb outside New Scotland Yard

Tower of London

1. 1885 An explosion at the Tower of London

2. 1974  An explosion at the Tower of London

Gasworks

1. 1883  A gas works was attacked with an IED in Glasgow

2. In 1939 gasworks were on the intended strategy of the IRA’s S Plan

3. In 1993 A gas works was attacked in Warrington

1990-2000

Collar Bombs and the Media

The recent collar bomb incident in Australia (link here; (a hoax) highlights to me the role that modern media can play in designing both IEDs and indeed in designing the criminal operations associated with them. I’m treading a fine line here between discussing my concerns and avoiding adding to them. But I’m working on the basis that even the most stupid terrorist has access to a TV and the internet and has worked out the joys of google. And I’m not going to discuss much at all about the technicalities of construction or render-safe. My discussion focuses on the widespread coverage of such events and the ideas they give miscreants.

For background, collar bombs are not new, and normally associated with extortion or hostage situations. In 2000 there was a well-documented case in Colombia, that resulted in the death of a victim and a bomb disposal operator. Less well reported was an earlier case in Venezuela that I suspect was indirectly linked. The Colombian case was unusual for the complexity of the device and surprisingly small amount of money being extorted – if I recall correctly about $6000.

In 2003 there were more cases in Colombia and perhaps Venezuela again.

In 2003 a well publicized case of a collar bomb occurred in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The concept has been used frequently and often by TV producers. The movie “Miami Vice” in 2006 featured one and the TV show CSI Miami also used such a story in 2002, An episode of Hawaii five 0 (season 1 episode 12) used a similar story. One episode of (“1000 ways to die”) also featured a device of this nature.

A film released 2011, called 30 minutes or less featured a neck bomb.

Other films featuring collar bombs include:

  • Swordfish
  • The Running Man
  • SAW 3
  • Battlefield Earth

Other TV shows that featured the concept include:

  • NCIS
  • Nikita
  • Flashpoint
  • MacGyver
  • Torchwood
  • Criminal Minds
  • Law and Order: Criminal Intent
  • The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  • Alias

A short drama film was made called PVC1 received widespread attention which featured a collar bomb.

The video game SAW also featured a collar bomb detonating.

The concept also fascinates documentary makers… The following have featured examination of the Erie device:

    • America’s Most Wanted have featured the case three times

Anderson Cooper 360

  • Fox News Channel “In the line up”
  • The 99 most Bizarre Crimes

 

I think significantly, a very detailed analysis of the Erie case was published in Wired magazine 8 months ago.

So in truth, there is no shortage if inspiration for evil people….but perhaps TV and movie script writers do lack imagination and like copying each others ideas more than terrorists do.

20th Century

Ah, the gentry….

While researching another project I came across the fascinating story of the Earl of Suffolk GC, killed defusing a German bomb – and an interesting back story about his role in WW2.

Here’s a quick summary:

Charles Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk was born in 1906. He was a “wild young man”, entering Dartmouth naval college as a naval cadet, but quit to sail around the world in a windjammer. On his return he was persuaded to join the Scots Guards as an officer but was shortly asked to resign for some misdemeanour or other. I think it didn’t help that he was by then covered with all the tattoos that a windjammer seaman would expect to have. So he hopped on a ship again and worked as a jackeroo in Australia for six years between 1928 and 1934.

He 1934 he married a dancing girl (as you do…..), before remarkably enrolling to study Chemistry at Edinburgh University. He passed with a first class honours degree and took a job at the Nuffield laboratory in Oxford working on “explosives and poisons”. At the start of WW2 he became a Liaison officer for the British with the French Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. His first job involved charging around France, as the Germans invaded to recover:

  • Rare machine tools
  • $10 Million worth of diamonds ($400 million at today’s value)
  • Fifty key French scientists
  • And a few bottles of heavy water that the Germans desperately wanted…

Not a bad shopping list, but he had to personally berate Marshal Petain himself to get his way. It is said he visited all the diamond merchants in Paris, ahead of the German’s arriving, persuading them to pass over the diamonds for the good of the war effort. Apparently he carried two revolvers on his person, named “Oscar” and “Genevieve” – which must have helped his argument.

He commandeered a truck and then a ship to recover the heavy water to Bordeaux. Whilst still loading in Bordeaux a Belgian banker named Paul Timbral arrived having been sent there by the British Embassy. Timbral brought two cases of industrial diamonds and found Lord Suffolk stripped to the waist, covered in tattoos from his time as a crewman on a sailing ship, looking like a pirate and speaking fluent French to give orders and crack jokes to keep everyone hard at work. As the Germans passed through France the steamer left for England, with Suffolk eventually arriving at Paddington station, unshaven, wearing a trenchcoat with his revolvers and 12 jerry cans of “special fluid”.

On his return to Britain, he worked as a researcher for the ministry of supply working on bomb disposal techniques, In a manner that only the English gentry could carry off he then assigned himself to bomb disposal units in London during the blitz, accompanied by his chauffeur and female assistant. His assistant would either stand next to him taking notes or run a wire to his limousine parked around the corner while the Earl discussed his bomb disposal techniques as he worked on the bomb over a field telephone. He successfully defused 34 German bombs but the 35th detonated and killed him.

The bomb that killed him had in fact been dropped 6 month earlier and recovered to Romney marshes. He was attempting to recover the fuses for research and training purposes. Suffolk was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

1940-1950

Bloody few are violinists…

A divergent aside from the grim world of terrorism.  I came across a fascinating historical eccentric British military figure.  He went by the name of Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO. Very non-PC. I’m digging into his life story, and honestly you couldn’t make it up.   Here’s some examples of his exploits:

  • He enlisted in the Army as a trooper in the Boer War, and was invalided home
  • He fought in British Somaliland in 1914 against the Mad Mullah
  • He was wounded 11 times in battle. He was shot through the lung (in South Africa), in the eye, and ear and arm in British Somaliland, lost his left hand in 1915, biting off his fingers when a doctor declined to remove them, shot through the skull and ankle at the Somme through the hip at Passchendale through the leg at Cambrai and through the ear at Arras.
  • In 1914 De Wiart was taken back to Britain where he had what was left of his left eye removed. By this point it was early 1915 and World War 1 was in full swing and De Wiart was informed that he could only go if he wore a glass eye (they didn’t want the Germans to think they forced to use one eyed officers), De Wiart agreed and as he left the Medical Board he took out his eye and threw it away.
    He won the VC and commanded three battalions and a brigade on the Western front
  • He was part of the British military mission to Poland after the war and retired and settled there in the 1920’s, and illegally was gun running for the Poles with the aid of a stolen train (allegedly). He was involved in a number of escapades which included shooting marauding Russian cavalry with his pistol from the footplate of a train. He then fell off the train (but jumped back on).
  • On escaping from Poland in 1939 he crossed into Romania with this terrific quote. When he got to the border the first sentry on the other side stood up and de Wiart addressed him, first in English and then in French. He said there were only three sorts of Romanians: they’re either pimps, pederasts or violinists, and bloody few are violinists….. Fortunately the Romanian sentry, thinking this was mutual regard, saluted and they passed through.
  • He commanded a pretty disastrous Norwegian campaign at the start of the German invasion there.
  • He was appointed head of the British military mission to Yugoslavia as the Nazis were poised to invade, but en route his transport aircraft crashed over the Med and he became a POW after swimming to shore. Despite his age and disability he set about working on an escape tunnel for seven months and tried to escape 5 times.  Once de Wiart evaded capture for eight days disguised as an Italian peasant, no mean feat considering that he was in northern Italy, did not speak Italian, and was 61 years old, with an eye patch, one empty sleeve and multiple injuries. Ironically, de Wiart had been approved for repatriation due to his disablement but notification arrived after his escape. As the repatriation would have required that he promise not to take any further part in the war it is probable that he would have declined anyway.
  • By August 1943 he was back in England (long story!) and was then sent to China as Churchill’s personal representative. There’s a whole book worth of anecdotes there…
  • A champagne, claret and port man, he detested whisky, liked popular music hall tunes and had no ear for classical music.
  • He married a countess, had two daughters but omitted mention of any of them (and his VC) in his autobiography. His second wife was 25 years younger then him.

I think he might be the subject of my next book…. 🙂

1910-1920

A Train Of Thought

A bomb on a railway line in Russia yesterday, 27th November, causes me to bounce, in a mind map sort of way along a series of thoughts. Let me try and replicate this below with, excusing the pun, a progression of thoughts in a train. I’ll put a link or two at each “carriage” so you can dig detail if you wish. I’m limiting my thoughts to bombs under train tracks and not bombs on trains.

The explosion yesterday appears to have derailed the train, killing at least 26 people. Interestingly there was a second explosion some hours later a short distance away – details are not yet clear.

Devices placed on railway lines, detonated as the train passes aren’t new in Russia. One occurred in 2007. Two Chechen terrorists were charged with the crime.

Earlier in Russia’s history trains were attacked by IEDs by other terrorists. Tsar Alexander II was the target of an IED attack in 1879 when the Narodnaya Volya terrorist group attempted to attack his train by placing explosives under the railway Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the tsar’s train. The Narodnicks attacked the Tsar seven times, finally killing him in 1881.

One of history’s best train bombers, arguably, was Lawrence of Arabia, famous for attacks on the Turkish controlled railways in Arabia during the ”Arab revolt”. This excerpt from a letter to fellow officers from Lawrence.

In a letter to fellow officers describing one of his daring raids on a Turkish train, Lawrence vividly captures the excitement he felt fighting in the desert. The train, he wrote, “had two locomotives and we gutted one with an electric mine. This rather jumbled up the trucks , which were full of Turks shooting at us. We had a Lewis and flung bullets through the sides. So they hopped out and took cover behind the embankment and shot at us between the wheels at 50 yards.Then we tried a Stokes gun, and two beautiful shots dropped right in the middle of them. They could not stand that (12 died on the spot) and bolted away to the East across a 100-yard belt of open sand into some scrub. Unfortunately for them, the Lewis covered the open stretch.”

In other conflicts too, IED shave been used against trains. The diagram below is of an IED recently researched by a colleague in South Africa dating from the Boer war and was a Boer IED used to attack trains. The device uses the trigger of a rifle which is pressed when a train travels over it.

EXTRACT FROM PAGES 25 & 26 – TO THE BITTER END BY EMANOEL LEE

This incident highlights the Boers’ success in wrecking trains, which plagued Roberts and Kitchener throughout the war.  No train was safe.  At first they were derailed by setting off dynamite as the train passed.  The attackers had to lie next to the line to light the fuse.  This was highly dangerous, and the Boers subsequently developed a safer method of stopping trains without injuring passengers or damaging the supplies they needed.  Old Martini-Henry rifles (for which there was no ammunition) were prepared by sawing off the butt behind the breech and removing the barrel a few inches in front of it.  The trigger-guard was the removed and the breech opened.  They inserted a cartridge without a bullet in the breech and placed a dynamite cartridge in the shortened barrel.  Stones were then removed under the rail to make a hole, which was packed with dynamite.  The mutilated breech of the rifle was then placed upside-down on top of the dynamite with the trigger just touching the rail.  When a train passed, its weight made the rail sag and set off the trigger.’

 

Jumping back to modern times, and to demonstrate the potential vulnerability of rail systems, the terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings were believed to have planted a device under the tracks of a Madrid express train to carry out a subsequent attack but they all died when their safe house was discovered before this follow on attack could be launched.  The 12kg device was found on April 2 2004 on the Madrid to Seville express line. Other islamist/Al Qaeda plots focused on train tracks are numerous.

In France a few years ago there was a bizarre extortion plot threatening trains that soaked up thousands of hours of track searching by the police.

Elsewhere, a wide variety of groups around the world have attacked train tracks and the trains that run on them. Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc etc,  Here’s a couple of reports  from India both in the last two weeks which demonstrate how commonplace such attacks are:

I think this ‘train of thought’ technique works quite well – please feel free to add your own carriages of related material – remember this thread is explosions of tracks to attack trains not bomb on trains.

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