Standing Well Back
20th Century

Never New, Fact and Fiction

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet

One of the strange things about terrorism, and suicide terrorism in particular, is that people always think it is “new”. There is something about the fear of terrorism that always makes it fresh, always makes it feel like a new encounter. Add to that the short memories that people have, and the general perception is that suicide terrorism is a newly thought of tactic, or strategy,  but as I have detailed here before and as Iain Overton’s excellent “The Price Of Paradise” covers, these tactics are simply recycled, decade by decade, century by century.

There are themes within this tactic too. Themes that play out in public, in the mind of the public, and perhaps which terrorist groups recognise and copy, or reflect. Fact and fiction become confused.   There is a theme, played out frequently, of the innocent child, an unwitting, unknowing bomber, tasked with carrying an explosive device, without being aware it is going to explode. You’ve that recently, yes?     Nigeria, or was it Yemen? Gaza? Syria? Afghanistan?  Well, yes probably, but it’s not new.

Here’s a clip from a 1936 film by Alfred Hitchcock, called “Sabotage”, which plays on the fear of the public in the mid 1930s, of infiltration by terrorist groups bent on destroying the nation.  Here, an innocent unwitting child is tasked with delivering a package to a tube station in London- Piccadilly. The clip is classic Hitchcock. Having being delayed en route the boy is on a bus, approaching Piccadilly when the bomb detonates.

This is really very peculiar.  Tube stations were attacked in the 1880s with IEDs and again in 1939, three years after this film was made  Then again in the 1970s, including the Piccadilly  bomb which exploded at a bus stop outside Green Park station in 1975. Then more recently buses in 1996 and  2005 were again attacked   and tube stations have also been targeted again. But here in the clip, masterful suspense by Hitchcock weirdly foreshadows numerous attacks. Crowds of people, and military parades included… will the bomb go off?   And of course military bands and mounted units themselves became targets for real in 1982

So, it’s really a strange thing to see this modern essence of a threat, a child proxy suicide bomber in a fictional movie from 1936.  The rest of the movie (which can be found on YouTube in full)  ends with the bomb maker, with a suicide IED hidden in his coat, detonating his device behind a cinema as the police evacuate the theatre and mount a raid to capture him.  He had been discovered by an undercover police operation.  Such modern themes.

 

 

 

Uncategorised

Tremble! – The Answer to the Mystery Device

A couple of weeks ago I set blog readers a challenge regarding this device, who made it, what the mystery component in the bottom right corner was, and who rendered it safe.

Well done to KH for his (close, but not perfect) answer. I’ll be buying him lunch soon.  It’s actually a pretty interesting story.  The device was found placed next to a telephone junction box under a manhole cover in a street in Arthur Square, Belfast, Northern Ireland, laid by the IRA , in 1922.  The fuel can “Pratts Perfection Spirit” contained a home made mix and two improvised igniters (not a detonators) in parallel. The EOD team (about more of which shortly) recovered a wooden box with a single slider switch on the outside. Inside was the timing circuit, which had failed. There was a 4 volt “Ever-Ready” battery, an American made clock with a soldered wire switch connection.  The improvised igniter design is quite intricate with a thin copper wire running through magnesium flash powder held in a glass tube, but with a spark gap. The can contained about 20lbs of home made incendiary mix, based on sodium chlorate, some scrap metal and  handful of bullets.  When testing the explosive, it burnt with an intense heat, but interestingly also proved in some circumstances to be “detonable”. I’m leaving out details of the mix for obvious reasons.

Here’s a circuit diagram , done in follow up investigation and analysis.

(This device did not work)

The mystery component is, I think, very interesting, but received scant attention at the time. It is described as a “trembler” but it would be wrong to think of it as an anti-handling trembler switch.  It is in fact an induction coil device for upping the voltage from the 4v Ever-Ready to sufficient voltage to cause the igniters to act as designed. It is actually a car component from a Ford Model T.  This component was known as a “trembler” or “buzzer coil”, and provided sufficient voltage for a car’s ignition system (several thousand volts).  Here’s a video explaining this component.

These trembler switches were popular with ham radio enthusiasts and early electronics hobbyists as an easily available and reliable component.

Finally we come to who rendered it safe. For many recent decades, the lead military agency for EOD in Northern ireland was the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who morphed in the 1990s to the Royal Logistic Corps. And very proud of it we were too!  But in the 1920s, it was the Royal Engineers who provided their expertise to deal with the device and many others.  I can hear my spiritual foundations shaking…

Other devices dealt by the Sappers near Armagh that year were cast into concrete to look like kerb-stones, a technique used more recently in Iraq. They were initiated by command-wire.

Update: Render Safe Procedure used in 1922

I have been asked about the Render Safe Procedure (RSP) used by the Royal Engineer EOD personnel  on this device in 1922. I don’t often discuss these things for obvious reasons but I think I’m OK with this one and its quite interesting.  Here’s what they did:

  1. Filled the manhole with water from a fire hose, submerging the device. Gave it a three hour “soak”.
  2. Removed the wooden box (which was in a sack) from the manhole, cut open the sack. There was a concern over a possible booby trap switch attached to the sacking but none was
  3. The external slider switch was cut off manually, leaving an open circuit
  4. The wooden box was pried open, and components separated after photographing
  5. The cap of the fuel can was removed manually  and the “sand like” HME observed, with the leads leading in.
  6. There was a small 1″ diameter hole in the base of the can covered with some sort of cover.  Apparently this concerned the operator as it may have indicated something clever included in the devices construction. Rather than pull the leads out through the cap, or open the tin with a tin opener or hammer and chisel, the explosive was carefully removed, through the bottom 1″ hole, bit by bit with a a long gouge to eventually reveal the igniters (at this stage assumed to be detonators/blasting caps). These were then cut out.
  7. A series of tests were conducted on the components, quite thoroughly.

 

1940-1950

Belgian Resistance IED attacks

I continue to trawl through some fascinating WW2 stuff – and I am amazed at the prevalence of IED attacks and the development of IED technology during the war- this is something I and perhaps others, have never been aware of.

Here’s just a glimpse, and an interesting example.  The Belgian Resistance to Nazi occupation is very interesting – at times many of the 43 resistance groups in the country received virtually no support from the allies, and reverted to manufacturing their own home made explosives, or obtaining it from other sources. Some examples:

  1. “Group G” a resistance group based around the University of Brussels co-opted students with technical skills. Another group involved a chemist to create a complex underground Nitroglycerine/Dynamite manufacturing facility in the cellars under a school.
  2. Another group recovered unexploded ordnance from World War One battlefields and removed the explosives to then use as explosive charges in IEDs.

More German troops were killed in Belgium in 1941 by the resistance then in the whole of France that year. One Belgian group developed small tablets containing abrasive grit which when added to the oil tank on an aircraft engine caused catastrophic damage. On the night of 15th January 1944, Group G sabotaged the entire national electricity pylon infrastructure, effectively cutting electricity to the whole country by using explosives on power pylons in a series of coordinated attacks.

I think the Belgian sabotage campaign in the summer of 1944 is particularly remarkable because it is almost unheard of in the history books. It pretty much matches Russian partisan IED campaign of 1943 against railways that I mentioned in my earlier post on Ilya Starinov.   In 1944, as the Allies invaded France, Belgium’s strategic position for the movement of German resources into Northern France became crucial. Between June 1944 and September 1944, 95 railway bridges, and 285 locomotives were attacked with explosive devices. Over a thousand railway wagons and 17 railway tunnels were attacked. Power lines, telephone lines and canals ere also attacked in this period.  In one single incident 600 German troops were killed as they train they were in was blown up as it crossed a bridge over the Ambleve river.  As the Allies approached the Belgian Resistance took 20,000 German troops prisoner.

Sabotage During World Wars

Lord Rothschild and the German-American Saboteurs -1942

I have written before about “Mad Jack Howard”, the Earl Of Suffolk who was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his EOD activities in WW2. (and I’ve also written in more detail about his adventures in Europe as the Germans invaded France where he rescued a large amount of Heavy Water)

There was fellow Lord, Lord Rothschild, who was also an EOD specialist, (amongst many other things) and another remarkable character undertaking specialised bomb disposal operations in WW2. Rothschild was awarded the George Medal of defusing a German sabotage device recovered from the hold of a ship, hidden in a crate of Spanish onions.  At the time he ran a small department within MI5 responsible for examining the threat from German sabotage devices. They conducted sabotage threat assessments and investigated sabotage devices. I’m waiting for permission from the Rothschild estate to publish an excerpt from his book, a transcript of a telephone call he made, live, to his secretary, describing the render-safe procedure of the “onion crate” as he went through it, together with some photos..

Beyond that I’m digging into the work of his section (and some other interesting UK WW2 organisations with related activities) and will post when I have enough material.

Rothschild, like Suffolk, was a remarkable polymath and a very interesting character.  As well as his EOD work in the UK, he interrogated suspected Nazi saboteurs, and travelled to the US to examine captured explosives and interrogate captured German spies. His detailed report from this US trip is a fascinating read – another case of shared Weapons Technical Intelligence between the UK and US.

One of Rothschild’s key findings in this report on the German saboteurs in the US, that he obtained from interrogating the saboteurs commander, Jansch, was that the Germans had decided for future operations that rather than infiltrate complex sabotage devices into the US by submarine, they were moving to a strategy of inserting one or two saboteurs with minimal equipment (just detonators/blasting caps). The saboteurs were instructed to improvise the explosive devices from locally obtained components. So this was by 1943 becoming a real “IED” strategy.

Although the sabotage mission being investigated by Rothschild, at the invitation of the FBI, was well equipped with explosive devices, Rothschild’s interrogation identified that the German saboteurs were trained to improvise devices. For example, they had been trained to create timing mechanisms using such raw material as dried peas, lumps of sugar and razor blades. Rothschild was disturbed by this as it avoided strategies he had put in place in the UK to identify suspicious purchases which could be used for explosive device manufacture such as clocks and certain chemicals. (The latter point presaged modern efforts in the UK to identify purchases of hydrogen peroxide – in those days it was sulphuric acid and potassium chlorate, amongst other material.)

Rothschild’s report makes clear that, like their enemies the Russians, the Germans too had extensive training in sabotage, albeit in this case the saboteurs were a little undercooked. The Abwehr had identified aircraft manufacture as the key strategic capability to be attacked in the US, and consequently their saboteurs had been given special training in understanding the production processes in aluminium and magnesium alloy plants.  Interestingly I have also found an SOE manual that provides guidance for systematic sabotage of certain industrial machines and I think there is some interesting and peculiar correlation between, Russian, German and British sabotage guidance for machinery. That too a subject for a future post.

I try to avoid much comment on modern political motivations in these blogs – but I’m struck by the parallels with the German saboteurs in the USA and modern jihadi terrorists:

  • Many of the German saboteurs or their families had emigrated to the USA between 1910 and 1930, so in the decades well before the war, so they had intimate knowledge of the USA, and were quite comfortable operating within the USA. Most of them were naturalized US citizens.
  • Many joined radical political organisations in the USA, mainly the German-American Bund. So perhaps they were “radicalised” at this point, in some cases.
  • Some of them returned to Germany when Germany went to war in 1939 with a motivation to support Germany’s war efforts.
  • To some degree the saboteurs were often incompetent.

The German Sabotage School conducted a three week training course, followed by a series of visits to German industrial sites to discuss vulnerabilities to sabotage. Rothschild’s report is fascinating in its detail, even including the pay, pensions and allowances that each saboteur had agreed with the Abwehr.

Rothschild details the home-made explosives and incendiary mixtures that the saboteurs had been trained to put together. They had been specifically instructed in mixes using ingredients that could be purchased from chemist shops in the USA. However it seems that some of the saboteurs forgot some of the mixes, such was their incompetence.

One item of particular note was their instructions to create improvised detonators and the specific mix to achieve such a material. I won’t republish here. Suffice to say it involves peroxide and hexamine, material not unknown to modern terrorists.

Several improvised timing switches are discussed in detail, as is a number of pressure switches. The report also includes diagrams by one of the team. This is an example, (with my redactions) which I’m not going to explain in this forum or clarify the blurry annotation, suffice to say it is an initiation I have never come across before:

I’m happy to forward the details and all of Rothschild’s report to accredited EOD techs if you ping me. If I don’t know you or your organisation, don’t ask.

I was a little thrown by one technical comment in the report by Rothschild – he lists the explosive components smuggled into the USA by the saboteurs and one is described as follows:

Mercury Fulminate in det cord? Surely not? I welcome any comments. Has anyone come across such a thing? I can’t recall such a thing but there are readers of this blog who may know – please comment.

 

 

Railway IEDs

A Missing Link – IED designs being passed through history

This is quite startling.  I have written before about Boer use of upturned-trigger-initiated IEDs used to attack British Railways in the Boer War, and more recently about how the same design of IED was used in the German East African Campaign

These devices were used again, exactly this same design, by the British against the Ottoman rail system in Arabia in 1917.  One of the issues in my mind was how “Bimbashi Garland”, the Arab Bureau’s explosives expert,  got to hear about Boer IEDs from an earlier war. In British eyes, this Boer design, then adopted by the Germans in 1915, became, by 1917, the “Garland mine” .  Thanks to the research of “JB” we have an answer as to how that happened and what an interesting answer it is. Bear with me as I explain

Here are parts of a letter sent from a relatively senior British Army officer with previous campaign experience in the Boer War. He sent a letter to the British Army in Egypt suggesting, specifically, that the Boer explosive device he had seen many years previously in South Africa be used to attack the Hejaz Railway in Arabia. Not only that, but he includes a detailed description of the device, which with minor variations is clearly the same device.

 

For comparison here’s a diagram of the device from one of my earlier posts

The correspondence is then passed from British HQ in Cairo to General Reginald Wingate whose headquarters was in Khartoum, with some comments from the Fortifications and Works Department.  Of particular note here is that they refer to the German use of such devices in East Africa, and comment that these devices have been effective. Here’s the comment from a Sgt in the Fortifications and Works department.

So that’s interesting… but it gets better. The original letter was dated October 1916. Herbert Garland, the former Ammunition Examiner NCO, now with a commission and on the staff of the Arab Bureau,  shortly afterwards began working “behind enemy lines” with the Arabs, and taking the advice/instruction of the letter writer , made his first attack on an Ottoman train in February 1917 – so the dates match up. Subsequently he trained the Arabs and other British officers on similar missions, including Lawrence of Arabia, to do the same. So we have a nice link between the Boer War, the German East African Campaign in WW1 and now the Arab revolt of 1917, all using the same design of IEDs, now called the “Garland Mine”.

What is perhaps even more interesting for historians is the identity of the original letter-writer, that at first I confess I didn’t notice.  It is written by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes…    Sykes is perhaps the key personality in terms of strategic influence on British activity in the Middle East, way beyond Lawrence.   Sykes, with the French diplomat Picot, was responsible for the “Sykes -Picot” agreement which divided the Middle East, and specifically the Ottoman Empire,  between the British and French, and this strategic diplomatic activity was going on at the same time as the letter was written – so this is so much more than a retired Army officer pontificating about how what he learned fighting against the Boers could have application in “modern war”.  This is the lead British strategic diplomat in the Middle East politely and diplomatically directing that an IED campaign using this specific explosive device be used to disintegrate the key aspect of the Ottoman empire’s strategic hold on Arabia. In the usual history books the strategic direction of the Arab Revolt is sometimes credited to the “Arab Bureau” but there were bigger cogs turning and directions being given to them. The Bureau’s efforts were at the operational level in this regard.  Here we can see history was being made in the Middle East and with these specific IEDs and with strategic thought. And not for the last time.

(Apologies for the racism displayed in the Sykes letter, but it is important to see, and perhaps adds to our understanding of his thought processes and how they may have impacted his strategic efforts)

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