My old friend Panjandrum saw a military history magazine in a newsagent’s today and took this image of Page 35.
Given the title of the article in the magazine, this blog’s title, and this piece from this blog in 2012, that’s a fine coincidence!
For what it is worth I’m pretty sure that Garland didn’t serve in the Boer War as the magazine articles suggests, but I have no doubt the concept of initiation system came from there.
Last night I enjoyed the inaugural US-UK EOD gala dinner, raising money for EOD related charities on both sides of the Atlantic. US Ambassador Matthew Barzun gave a great speech. The theme of the night was the shared challenges of the EOD community and the transatlantic bond that is so powerful between the EOD communities. I related this story to the audience which perhaps deserves wider understanding:
In 1933 a young American man, named Draper Kauffman, graduated from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was the son of an Admiral. Despite his father’s position, at the time the US Navy was shrinking because of the economy and he wasn’t offered a commission because of poor eyesight. Instead, this adventurous young man left to seek employment in Europe for a shipping company. When war broke out in 1939, being a determined and ethically driven individual, he joined the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps and was captured by the Germans as they invaded France in 1940. He was released and went to England (after being awarded, I think, the Croix de Guerre by the French) where he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and trained in bomb disposal, serving during the Blitz in London.
Draper Kauffman in RNVR Uniform with a German Mine
In 1941 he returned to the US and obtained a US Naval Reserve commission. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war, there was a problem with an unexploded Japanese 500-pound bomb just outside the doors of an ammunition storage compound in Fort Scofield, Hawaii. The US Army in Hawaii requested advice from Washington, who in turn asked Great Britain. The response was a little brief – “Try Lt Kauffman, we trained him, he’s experienced and he works for you now!”. Kauffman was sent to Pearl Harbor. There he won the Navy Cross for his EOD efforts defusing the first Japanese bomb for subsequent techncial study. Kauffman returned to Washington and because of this experience he was asked to urgently establish an EOD Training School. His first action was to request 4 British EOD instructors which the UK managed to provide despite the huge pressures on that profession at the time, where the life expectancy during the Blitz had been a lttle over two weeks.
He later earned a second Navy Cross in the Pacific theater in Saipan leading his team in a daylight reconnaissance of fortified enemy beaches under heavy fire. He retired as an Admiral having set up the US Navy Underwater Demolition teams. That’s a military career that is impossible to match.
When I related that story, my friend Ken Falke shouted “Go Navy!”. My only reply, of course, was “Go Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve!”.
Both communities, British and American, are proud to follow the footsteps of Draper Kauffman.
Rear Admiral Kauffman USN
In a previous blog post 18 months ago I described how the IRA in 1920 designed and used an improvised mortar. I’ve now found some context for that development and found out where a damaged mortar tube from 1920 exists today. Some of the below is a repeat of the earlier post and some is new information.
A number of IRA members had fought in the British Army in WW1 and had experienced trench mortars, either as a user or recipient. The IRA funded a secret delegation to visit Germany and buy arms on the black market , including a German trench mortar but this mission was unsuccessful. As a fall-back they asked their engineers to develop a home made mortar based on the British “Stokes” trench mortar. I’m not sure how closely they followed the design, but the IRA version appears to have been of same calibre as the Mk 1 Stokes mortar (3 inch) and projected an 11lb mortar bomb, again the same as a Mk 1 Stokes mortar. It appears that the IRA was able to obtain British Army manual for the Stokes mortar. The tube was made by Matt Furlong’s brother, Joe, at a railway workshop, and Matt (who later died testing a version of the mortar) made the bombs for it at 198 Parnell St, Dublin.
Some early Stokes mortar bombs are “armed” on launch by use of a grenade lever spring which is released when the lever arm is free to fly off as it leaves the barrel. I can’t be certain but i suspect the 1920 IRA mortar bombs used this principle too, and not the more sophisticated fuze design used in later WW1 Stokes mortars. Here’s a British Stokes mortar handbook from 1919 showing the later fuze types. Here’s an image of a Stokes mortar with a fuse fitted with a fly off lever.
The propellant charge was a 12 bore shotgun cartridge with shot removed and more propellant (black powder) added. The impact fuze was adapted from a grenade fuze, (as was the early Stokes mortar bomb fuze). The mortar bomb weighed 11lbs. I don’t have exact details but have a pretty good idea and those of you with an EOD background can probably make the same assumptions about arming on launch as I have. For the rest of you, tough.
The IRA conducted some extensive trials, under Matt Furlong of this improvised mortar system in October 1920 in County Meath. First a number of dummy mortar bombs with propellant only were fired, to establish ranges and calculate the propellant charge needed for a range of 100 yards. Then three bombs were fired without a main charge but with an impact fuze fitted to test initiation. The trials established that the bomb tumbled through the air, but despite that, the fuze appeared to work however it struck the ground. One of the engineers believed that the impact fuze was being initiated on “set back” within the mortar tube and not on impact at the target. This is an important assessment ignored by Matt Furlong. Attempts to fire a “live” mortar failed as the bomb got stuck in the tube. Probably fortunately.
The engineers involved were concerned about the impact fuze functioning on “set back” within the mortar tube, so they added an additional safety mechanism (which I won’t describe here) and this was was built in to the fuze for subsequent trials. The second set of trials took place near Kells in County Meath. After firing a live shell with the new safety feature which then failed to function on impact, an argument ensued between Furlong and McHugh, an assistant who was present. Matt Furlong insisted on removing the additional safety feature and firing the mortar as originally designed. McHugh, nervous, stepped a few yards away. The others retreated. As the mortar bomb was launched it did indeed explode in the tube, severely injuring Matt Furlong, who later died in hospital after losing a limb.
The loss of the mortar was seen as a significant blow to the IRA in Dublin who had expected to be able to mortar barracks with impunity mounting the mortar on the back of a vehicle, a tactic that they applied successfully 60 years later in the North.
The mortar tube that exploded, eventually killing Matt Furlong, was hidden in the River Tolka for some years before being recovered. In 1937 it was given to the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) where it exists today. There’s some pictures at this link here – it has been mounted at an incorrect angle, but that doesn’t matter.
(Note the damaged base of the mortar tube some way down the page)
On occasion the arming system also failed in later IRA mortars, as I can vouch for personally. To me there is a clear technological development route from the Stokes mortar of WW1, to the IRA’s improvised Mk 10 and Mk 11 mortars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think there is a distinct possibility that the PIRA designer of the Mk 10 mortar and bomb based the designs in part on the 1920 Joe Furlong designed mortar and bomb which in itself was based on early WW1 Stokes Mortar designs.
Additional research leads me to believe that the additional safety feature in the mortar fuze that Matt Furlong removed before his accident was remarkably similar to a fuze safety feature I saw in on operations in 1991 – on another IRA mortar. That’s seventy years apart, and essentially the same safety feature being used on an improvised mortar. I won’t post details here, of course. The British Army EOD techs of the time were certainly not aware of that provenance. More fool us.
The image above shows a small artillery piece. The artillery piece is actually improvised and how it got put together, how the ammunition was provided for it and how it was used is a story worth telling.
In 1899 the Boxer Rebellion erupted in China. This was a violent anti-foreign, nationalist uprising. In June 1900 large numbers of Boxer fighters converged in Peking. Many foreigners sought refuge in an area known as the Legation quarter, where a number of foreign legations had their headquarters and residences. The Chinese government response was at best ineffectual and at worst complicit, eventually declaring war on the foreign powers. The Legation quarter, remarkably was then under siege for 55 days, occupied by the foreign legations working together in defence and by a number of Christian Chinese. There were about 473 foreign civilians, 409 soldiers from eight countries, ( Japan, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, Italy, USA and Austria-Hungary) and about 3,000 Chinese Christians present in the blockaded area. The foreign powers, represented by an Eight nation alliance shared responsibility for the defence of a makeshift perimeter and waited for relief columns.
From a “Standingwellback” perspective the siege had some interesting aspects – electrically initiated (improvised?) mines were placed in the major navigable river to prevent European ships from accessing Peking by a water network. I’m hunting out details of these. The Boxers also tunnelled extensively under the legations and a number of extremely large IEDs were initiated, killing hundreds.
For the defence of the legation area, the defending legations had a number of small arms and a very small number of heavier weapons. These heavier weapons included the following:
Considerable ingenuity was required to maximise the defensive firepower. When the Italian one-pounder piece ran low on shells, Gunner’s Mate Joseph Mitchell of the USS Newark manufactured new ammunition. Pails full of spent enemy bullets were gathered up and handed to Mitchell. Using discarded shell casings and improvised propellant, he melted the bullets to make new projectiles.
At one point an ancient muzzle-loading bronze cannon barrel was recovered (some reports say it was dug up, others that it was found in a junk shop). Now, Gunners can be an inventive bunch, (some of my best friends, etc) and Mitchell, the US gunner, worked out that they could fire improvised grapeshot from this old bronze cannon. Things were that desperate. Then someone realised that the bore was the same diameter as the “useless” Russian 9-pounder ammunition. The barrel was roped to a stout roof-beam and wheels from an Italian gun carriage. The 9 pounder rounds were taken apart, the propellant stuffed down the muzzle with the projectile rammed on top, it became a remarkable effective weapon and perhaps crucial the defence.
Loading the International Gun
Chinese solders and Boxer forces built barricades and advanced them foot by foot, encircling the legations ever tighter. Weapons fire from the Chinese was often constant – artillery, small arms, firecrackers and bricks lobbed over walls. The defenders returned fire with what they could. So here we had a barrel found by the British, on an Italian carriage, fired by American gunners, with Russian shells. So while some called the improvised artillery “Old Betsy “ or “the Dowager Empress” it became best known as the International Gun. It played a crucial role in maintaining the defences. It remains today in the US Marine Corps Museum, I believe. I’ll have to zip down to Quantico on my next US trip to see it.
This post is a bit of a puzzle, that I may need some help with. I’ve blogged before about the German sabotage campaign on the east Coast of America in 1915 here:
http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/9/17/kurt-jahnke-the-legendary-german-saboteur.html
http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/22/massive-explosion-in-new-jersey.html
http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/2/12/booby-trap-ieds-on-the-battlefield-1918.html
And indeed I’ve built up a bit of a presentation on German sabotage in 1915-1917 which I may get round to posting here. In brief summary, German agents either operating out of the German Embassy or operating undercover developed a systematic and effective sabotage campaign to disrupt munitions and other cargoes being shipped to the European Allies of France, Russia and Great Britain, before the US entered the war. There is documentation that certainly 35 ships were firebombed, and an additional 39 suffered suspicious fires. Many sabotage events were downplayed or not reported so the number could be significantly higher. A number of munitions factories in the US attacked. Five US Navy warships suffered fire damage, and the USS Oklahoma and USS New York, two new battleships under construction were almost completely destroyed.
Most of the cargo ships sabotaged in 1915 were attacked with small incendiary devices, the size of a cigar. These contained sulphuric acid in one small compartments separated from picric acid or potassium chlorate, by a copper disc.. The copper disc was dissolved over time (usually several days) and then the sulphuric acid was in contact with the other compound causing a violent ignition. Typically a number of these “cigars” were secreted in the cargoes in a ships hold by stevedores of German or Irish extraction in US East Coast ports. Some devices were made aboard German ships, interned in US ports when the British blockaded them. One in particular, the “SS Friedrich der Grosse” of the NordDeutschland Lloyd line was docked in New York and German agents ferried the devices from the ship to the dock workers to hide on board munitions and cargo ships. Other cigars or “pills” as they saboteurs described them, were made in the laboratory of the designer, Dr Scheele at 1133 Clinton Street, Hoboken, New Jersey.
The “cigars” were to a design develped by a German sympathiser, Dr Scheele, and are reported to have been about 4 inches long. Once initiated they ejected white hot flames from both ends.
Now, there appears to have been more than one design. In a diagram produced by another saboteur, Frederick Hermann, the construction of the incendiary appears a little more complex, than simply two compartments in a lead pipe separated by a copper disc. It is hard to interpret the diagram below but I note that the compound to which the acid mixes is described as chlorate and sugar, which will make a difference to its explosive effect, depending on relative qunatities of the mixture. The diagram appears (I think) to show an upper reservoir of sulphuric acid, a “neck” halfway down labled “c” (for copper, presumably a copper plug and not a disc), and below that the chlorate with sugar. Wax probably closed both ends.
It should be noted that to work effectively the cigar needs to be positioned vertically, to allow the acid to dissolve the copper and then fall into the chlorate-sugar mix. Only a proportion of the devices functioned and some were recovered by French and British governments in ports in Europe. In 1915 this activity was being led by two officers from the German embassy , Karl Boy-Ed, and Kapitan Franz von Papen. Later in 1915 a secret agent of the German Navy Franz von Rinteln was sent to encouage the sabotage campaign. In a range of investigations led by the head of the NYPD bomb squad, Thomas Tunney, who was seconded to Military Intelligence, the German sabotage cells were largely disrupted. By 1917 the US had entered the war, Rinteln was captured and imprisoned in England and the others had been arrested, expelled or in the case of Dr Scheele, escaped to Havana.
Given that history it was intriguing to find a report on the Australian War Memorial blog about an incendiary device recovered from a ship in 1918, possibly in Liverpool, from a ship arriving from the US. By 1918 most of the German sabotage cells had been rounded up, also the design of the incendiary device is somewhat different.
These images are included on the AWM blog and I’m grateful for their kind permission to reproduce them here.
Working from the photographs alone, it appears that the knurled steel “head” appears to have two openings in it, closed by bolts. I would have perhaps expected only one, to simply fill with acid. The main body appears to be copper and the strange shaped base appears to be aluminium (?), corroded by a galvanic reaction. The base is an odd design. This device, bigger than the earlier cigars would have been more difficult to smuggle aboard and its dimensions would have made it more difficult to conceal in a cargo. The description accompanying the images suggest that rather than acid eating through a reservoir wall in this case the acid ate through a wire which retained a spring action to an initiator…. that’s a quite different initiation mechanism. This device would have taken more skill to construct and the threaded and knurled head, the apparent 3 sections of copper pipe and a neat fitting of the copper pipe to the aluminium base indicates a higher level of engineering…. Something about the base design rings a bell, but I can’t put my finger on it. The design of the base must have a reason and there must be a reason for it to have been different from the copper…but I cant work that out. Any suggestion gratefully received.
The blog from the AWM also has set me off on a new thread. The device appears to have been forwarded to the Australian section of the British “Munitions Inventions Department” in Esher, for examination. The Munitions Inventions Department had been set up earlier in the war to coordinate the wide range of scientific and military engineering developments required by the Allies to win the war. It was really the forerunner of later government defence research departments. Teams of ingenious, pragmatic and capable engineers had been co-opted into developing a wide range of innovative weaponry. By all accounts the Australians were masters of such craft and contributed significantly to a wide range of innovative munitions. I’ve started some research on that and will no doubt blog about some of the wilder and more interesting inventions in the future.
Roger DaviesSo a follow up on the mystery device. I have some thoughts beginning to crystallise.
1. I think the corroded base might be Magnesium and not Aluminium. Magnesium would also also be subject to galvanic corrosion (same principle as “sacrificial” corrosion) as it remains in contact with the copper cylinder.
2. In around 1917 German forces developed air dropped incendiaries that used magnesium, dropped by Zeppelins on England. These were impact fuzed, and contained a thermite charge. The thermite then reacted with a magnesium body to cause a fierce fire. Most UK EOD folk will be aware of a further development of these which were used extensively in WW2, and we, the Brits, called them 1kg incendiary bombs. The Germans called them either “Goldschmidt bombs” after the guy who discovered the Thermite reaction, or Elektronbrandebombe or Elektron incendiary bombs, “elektron” being the German name for the magnesium alloy of the body.
3. So.. I think it is possible that this device is a “home made” variant of a German Elektron incendiary. If that is the case then the impact fuse has necessarily been replaced with an acid time fuse, as required in the ship sabotage use-case. Thermite would have been contained in the copper piping, and the magnesium base provided to get the high energy heat, initiated by the thermite reaction. In some of the earlier Zeppelin bombs the body of the core of the bomb was wrapped with rope soaked in tar to give additional burning. This might explain the wide base at the bottom with the tar soaked rope wound around the central core, above the “shelf” provided by the base.
4. Here’s an image of an early incendiary dropped from a Zeppelin (this one is not an elektron bomb, I think).
And here’s one after it is burnt out showing a broad base on which the rope is mounted and a central core:
The design of the magnesium incendiaries evolved quite quickly – here’s what they looked like by the end of WW1 and pretty much through to WW2, with only minor changes:
So… my best guess at the moment is that the device on the AWM site is an improvised incendiary, that may have been wrapped in a tar soaked rope originally and may have contained a thermite charge inside the copper tubing. The base might be magnesium and in the intervening years has galvanically corroded. It will continue to corrode, slowly as it remains in contact with the copper tube. The initiator was a timed mechanism probably using acid to erode a wire, which released a spring allowing a striker to initiate a charge which then ignited the thermite. But I’m far from certain. This means that these later devices, in any event, were much larger than the small 4 inch cigars used in 1915 and therefore harder to smuggle aboard a ship and conceal in the cargo. I’m very open to alternative interpretations.
Roger DaviesI have a new update, thanks to the curator at the Australian War Memorial Museum. Following this blog post they tested the base. I had guessed the base might be magnesium, but they found the base material consisted of Copper, Zinc and Manganese. Minor amounts of Arsenic and trace amounts of Titanium, Chlorine and Potassium were also visible.
Back to the drawing board…. Does anyone have any suggestions?