Standing Well Back
20th Century

German Explosive Remote-Control speedboats of WW1 and WW2

Apologies, it has been some time since my last blog – I have been distracted on other projects.
This blog is an interesting addition, I think, and opened my eyes once again to matters of historical technology that have been forgotten by many. It concerns German remote-controlled, explosively-laden boats in WW1 and WW2 used in the English Channel and the north European coastline. Given current interest in drone technology it is tempting to start by putting it in that context, but I think I’m going to start by putting it in the context of the boat and ship-borne IEDs that have been something of a theme of this blog in recent years.  To remind you the North European coast from the Netherlands, through Belgium, the English Channel and round the French coast beyond St Nazaire have seen repeated use of the concept of a ship or boat loaded with explosives and sent to or placed next to a target for many centuries.  You can see my blogs on these by following the “ship-Borne IED” tag on the right hands column,   In rough historical order, these are:
  • The Hoop, Antwerp, 1584
  • A floating IED designed by Fulton, use against the French in 1620s by the British Royal Navy
  • Benbow’s Vesuvius of 1693, St Malo
  • Captain Dundas’s “machine vessel”, used against Dieppe and others used against Dunkirk, 1694
  • Meister’s ship IEDs of 1695
  • A catamaran IED used against the French by the Royal Navy in 1804
  • Cochrane’s Infernals of 1809 used at the Aix Roads, and a  larger vessel built in 1812
  • The Zebrugge raid of 1918
  • Operation Lucid, 1940
  • Operation chariot , St Nazaire, 1942
So all of these attacks used boats or ships loaded with explosives to attack ports and shipping.  In that context the use by the Germans of the same concept in WW1 and WW2 shouldn’t be a surprise but I have only just become aware of them.

WW1.

 Below is a picture of a WW1 weapons used by the Germans in the English channel in WW1. It’s called the “Fernlenkboot” (“remote control boat”), sometimes abbreviated to FL-boot.  The vessel was 17m long, and carried 700kg (1,500lbs) of explosive.   The concept was to use these against British Royal Naval vessels operating off the coast of Flanders – right in the traditional area for such attacks over the centuries. The control concept was quite complicated. Each boat had a spool of wire 20km long to provide control signals.  Observation was by aircraft which flew above and sent radio messages to a control station about steering directions.  The boat had a powerful petrol engine and could achieve speeds of 30 knots.  I have found some inconsistent but intruiging suggestions that as well as the cable controlled versions, radio control systems may also have been developed. Certainly some seem to have been equipped with antennae.
The commands available included
  • System test
  • Engine start, engine stop
  • Set Rudder position
  • Turn on a light, to enable the boat to be tracked at night
  • Detonate the warhead, to prevent capture of the boat if it missed its target
In later systems there was an auto destruct mechanism added that functioned after a time period.
The vessels were not used that often but one did hit HMS Erebus in October 1917 which was damaged but not sunk.
The provenance of this weapon is worthy of exploring. The system was built by “Siemens-Shuckert” and seems to have had its genesis in an idea that Werner Siemens the late 19th century engineer developed in 1871. I have blogged about Werner Siemens and his port defence command initiated IEDs before here.  In 1905 his son Wilhelm resurrected his father’s ideas for remote controlled boat weapon. It appears that Siemens developed the idea of an remote controlled , explosively laden boat some time before Tesla, who had a similar idea some 20 or 30 years later. Siemens really does play an important part in the history of explosive systems. The development of such technology of course parallels the development of modern torpedo technology. The advantage of a surface system is that it can be actively seen and steered by the user – the disadvantage is that the system can also be seen by the target, (stating the obvious here).    By 1914 the Siemens-Shuckert firm had continued to develop its technology and an interesting event occurred. There was a “power boat competition” in Monaco and a hi-tech French powerboat with an innovative engine was expected to be the winner. Just before the race, the boat was withdrawn by the French competitor and the boat disappeared – to turn up later in the Siemens- Shuckert research facility in Berlin, being reverse engineered. There was a French government investigation into the acquisition by the Germans of this technology. It appears that a man called Schmidt, who “pretended to be Russian” had bought the speedboat for hard cash. He was working with the German company Bosch, who were in return working for Siemens. This is the motor that appeared in the FL-boot in the war.  So some very interesting German technical espionage and industrial technology acquisition was going on before WW1.

WW2

In WW2, the Germans develop a similar concept called “Linsen” – high speed boats filled with explosives.  The concept was somewhat simpler – the boats had a crew (eventually of one person) who got the system within a distance of a target and then they “bailed out” jumping overboard. Then a control boat with an operator steered the Linsen craft to its target at high speed. this control boat in theory then picked up the original crew.  Like other systems, there were quite a few variants. Maximum speed from its Ford petrol engine was 31 knots. The boats carried a charge of 300kg.  A contact fuse in the bow caused the bow to blow off but the main charge (and engine) in the stern then sank, and detonated at a depth under the target, thus increasing the explosive effect. Clever.  Radio control from the support vessel was by ultra-short wave radio on the 7m band, a Blaupunkt, using various transmitted “tones” decoded into commands.  The receiver filtered the tones into relays and actuators.   The controls possible were:
  • Actuate starboard rudder
  • Actuate port rudder
  • Stop engine
  • Start engine
  • Slow ahead
  • Go faster
  • Detonate  the boat, if the attack was a failure.
  There is a suggestion that the control mechanism was also used in some of the Goliath tracked vehicles that I have blogged about here.
The control units, incorporating a very modern looking chest rig and joy stick look remarkably modern.
The Linsen boats were small, fast and worked in pairs.
The Linsen were used with very  limited success against Allied vessels off the coast of Normandy in the summer of 1944.   In one of those neat historical coincidences , later in 1944, Linsen explosive boats were used against Allied vessels trying to use the port of Antwerp in Belgium – some 360  years after the Hoop explosive vessel had been used near Antwerp to attack the Spanish invaders. Some things are never new…    Of course, other nations produced similar concepts in WW2, including the Italians, the Japanese (who used “swarm tactics” in high speed craft not unlike that envisaged by Iranian craft in the Gulf).  I may write about these in the future.    Small fast moving vessels containing explosives is a concept still very much in vogue, but largely the tactics remain similar, and the technology has advanced a little – but there’s really not much new, as ever!
20th Century

Palestine 1935 -Arab and British IEDs

I’ve been digging away at a few historical instances of IEDs using artillery shells or other ordnance, either recovered from battlefields or from storage depots. – These were seen very frequently, of course, in the Iraq conflict of the previous decade and still occur today – but I’ve been looking back for earlier instances.

I have lost a reference that I’m sure I had found discussing Belgian resistance groups in WW2 “steaming out” explosive from munitions recovered from WW1 battlefields so I have no detail on that. But I do have some reports from IRA devices in the 1920’s that used stolen artillery shells.  Recently I have picked up threads of some interesting history from Waziristan (now NW Pakistan) in 1937 where the British were involved in a nasty little campaign against the Pashtun in the area (on and off over a few decades actually) – but there are reports of both locals AND the British military using discarded or recovered munitions in “booby traps”.  The British Army were no angels when it came to what we today call IEDs.  I have yet to uncover more details but I then stumbled across a great report from 1935-1936, but from “Palestine”: where British forces were dealing with an IED campaign from the Arabs at the time.

The report I have has some terrific diagrams – in the interests of not teaching the wrong people, I’m not going to say where I found this report and I’m going to blur a bit some of the diagrams and be a little vague about some technicalities. so if the diagrams or explanations don’t quite make full sense, that’s the reason.  The devices are largely what we would today call “victim operated” – i.e. with some sort of switch that an unsuspecting victim would trigger.  If I’m honest I think the author is describing the devices “second hand” – some aspects of his report are doubtful, but interesting nonetheless.

The first device was found and defused by an infantry patrol of the South Wales Borderers on a railway line between Jerusalem and Artuf. They noticed the switch laid on the rail, dealt with the device themselves, threw the components in a wheelbarrow and delivered the device to a Royal Engineer in Lydda station.

Although this device above used HE extracted from “old shells”, a number of other devices used the shells themselves, with a very idiosyncratic methodology of drilling a hole in the side of the shell, and then inserting a plain detonator into it.  The shell was then buried under a rail and a striker pin attached to the rail such that the defection of the rail when a train passes pushed the pin into the detonator. If I’m frank, I find the author’s report here a little unconvincing, as I cant see a safe way of setting the device below. Elsewhere the author of the report, an Engineer officer, doesn’t appear to be aware of the existence of delay detonators – but I may be doing him a disservice – did delay detonators exist in the 1930s?

The report mentions an interesting device rendered safe – a “daisy chain of artillery shells” along the Nablus-Tulkarm Road, with shells spaced out every few feet, a total of ten 6″ shells  buried a foot deep alongside the road – something that EOD operators in Iraq in say 2004/5 would have found very familiar. However the device had been placed by an amateur and did not have a viable initiation system.

Here’s an interesting victim operated device that was successfully made safe. I’ve hidden the key part of the mechanism but those that need to know can work it out, I’m sure. The device was placed on a track used by Jewish settlers.  The device was dealt with by pulling the string causing it to initiate.

I confess this next device described in the report I find a little unconvincing – while it might theoretically work its seems too tricky to manufacture with any ease. The idea of making a circuit with a key in the lock would be difficult to do reliably. Tell me if you disagree

 

The final device, which I won’t show because I suspect it’s a very effective device used a mousetrap and string to trigger an IED protecting a stone “sangar” sniper position near Nur-esh Shems. Interestingly the device was allegedly laid by an Arab revolutionary called “Fauzi Khawaji” from Iraq, who had been formally trained as an officer at the French St Cyr academy.

The report also mentions that the British Royal Engineers, (specifically 2nd Field Coy RE and 12 Field Coy RE) used IEDs themselves to protect the Jerusalem water supply – they booby trapped a number of manhole covers and other British used sanagars. The first victim was a water company official who hadn’t been told…. the official wasn’t seriously injured…  but as a result the RE increased the size of the explosive charges from 2lb to 5 lb!  the initiation system for these Royal Engineer IEDs was a “bare wire loop switch”….which I won’t explain further here.  I find this very strange given the theoretical availability of “proper” switches in the RE inventory.  These “British” devices were used elsewhere too and when they caused casualties the British blamed the victims for having a  device that exploded prematurely.

Given the reports I am piecing together about British use of IEDs in Waziristan, also in 1937, it seems that this tactic was not a one off. Make of that what you will.

The Arabs supply of munitions to use in IEDs were thought to have come from WW1 ammunition Depots in Gaza or Rafah (either Turkish or British)  that were mismanaged after WW1. The task of dealing with these munitions supply dumps after WW1 was given to a contractor (!) who allegedly cut corners, leaving a significant quantity “under sand” which could be easily recovered.

 

 

20th Century

HMS Barham – Magazine explosion

Explosions, especially big ones, are horrendously nasty. The the link below is to footage of HMS Barham’s ammunition magazine exploding following a U-Boat torpedo attack will stay with you, I’m afraid.  The battleship was attacked by U-331.  She was hit by three torpedoes simultaneously.  4 minutes later her magazine exploded, due to a fire from the outer magazine spreading to the main magazine. Amazingly about a third of her crew survived, but well over 800 of the crew perished.  The event occurred off the coast of Egypt in November 1941.

(Just being careful about licenses go to You Tube and enter HMS Barham.)

There are some interesting details on the HMS Barham association website here.
War is awful, don’t forget.

 

 

20th Century

The IED that sank a US Aircraft Carrier

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.

You can find an interesting interview with one of the perpertators here.

 

20th Century

Lt Finch, Proto-ATO

In my last post I mentioned the command-wire IED used in Salonika to bring down a German Fighter ace, and that “Lt Finch” of the Army Ordnance Corps designed the device.  Well, it turns out that Lt Finch was a remarkable character – and since this blog sometimes veers into stories of interesting characters, such as “Bimbashi Garland” (another former member of the Army Ordnance Corps) I think his story is worthy of a brief recount here. I won’t tell the whole piece about his device because it’s going to be shortly included in a book by a former colleague on the exploits of the Ammunition Trade in the British Army – so you’ll have to wait for that for technical details of the device and read it in his book. I’ll let you know when it is published.

  • George Finch was born in Australia in 1888. He was brought up in Paris by an eccentric mother.
  • He was an outstanding piano player and nearly became a concert pianist. He was a clearly a born adventurer and scaled both Beachy Head and Notre Dame cathedral (at night) illegally.
  • He decided to study physics and chemistry in Zurich so sat down and learned German in 4 months to enable this.  He passed out with the highest marks, winning a prize. One of his lecturers was Einstein.
  • While in Zurich he climbed mountains, with his brother Max, making a number of “first ascents” on some serious mountains, inventing modern alpinism, which eschewed the traditional use of local guides. He invented several mountaineering pieces of equipment, still in use today, including lightweight anoraks and down filled jackets.
  • He was very critical of “traditional” British mountaineering, and the use of guides. He believed that modern alpinists should not use guides and be capable of leading serious pitches and choosing routes. In may ways he was a forerunner of post-WW2 British alpining techniques – just two men on a mountain, pitting their own skills together against the elements. But the British Alpine Club took decades to forgive him, and his somewhat abrasive character.
  • In 1912 he was appointed as a research chemist at Woolwich Arsenal Laboratory (the same Lab that Garland graduated from 8 years earlier). He also started work at Imperial College London, where he later became a distinguished Professor.

Finch in the laboratory

  • In 1914 he joined the Army as a Gunner Officer and ended up in Salonika where he worked for the Ordnance Department, managing ammunition stocks as an Ammunition Technical Officer. He was intimately involved in a major project to recondition many thousands of crucial artillery rounds that were exuding explosives.
  • He received great credit for his careful professionalism in designing the balloon explosive device discussed in my last post and about which more details will be published in a future book by JB.
  • In 1921 his role in a Mallory-led reconnaissance expedition to Everest was blocked by committee men in the Alpine Club. At the time he was the foremost alpine mountaineer in the country. He grew his hair long, wouldn’t wear a hat unless he had to, and hadn’t been to public school, so he didn’t fit the “establishment” Alpine Club.
  • But in 1922 he was part of Mallory’s first proper Everest expedition. He invented the oxygen system used in this climb and subsequently by Hilary and Tensing in 1953. He got as high as 450m from the summit in 1922  (higher than anyone ever before) but turned back when his partner became ill. He could have been first to summit were it not for this drama
  • In WW2 he ran a team improving British fire brigades responding to German Luftwaffe  incendiary bomb attacks by looking at the physics of how fire spreads. He conducted detailed post bomb analysis of incendiary attacks as a precursor to developing new firefighting techniques.   Later from an office in Whitehall he developed the “J-Bomb”, a much improved incendiary munition – 800,000 of which were dropped by Bomber Command from 1943.

    • The J-Bomb produced a 2 foot wide by 15 foot long white flame which burned for one minute or more.
  • The J-Bomb designed by Finch eventually used a liquid fuel/metal powder mix which is sort of interesting in terms of modern munition design.  He also helped the Americans develop a similar system, tuned for Japanese buildings and was much praised by the Americans for his pragmatic scientific contributions. By strange coincidence his Office in the Old War Office Building in Whitehall was later occupied 50 years later by an Ammunition Technical Officer.
  • He became a well respected Professor at Imperial College. In the 1950s he became the scientific adviser to India, and redesigned his oxygen system for Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the Hughes Medal (other winners included Nils Bohr and Fermi). I believe he was a member of the Nobel Prize for Physics Committee.

So an interesting chap, to say the least. He had three wives. During the WW1 (as a young Captain) he had returned from Salonika and found out his first wife pregnant. It was ten months since he was last home…. and she told him she was having an affair with a Lt Col. He caught a ferry to France, found the Colonel, “thrashed him” and cracked on with a new girl.

So, our erstwhile Gunner/Ordnance Corps Ammunition officer was someone quite remarkable. You can read more about his mountaineering life in the book ” The Maverick Mountaineer” .

Sua Tela Tonanti.

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