Standing Well Back
21st Century

Rockets, again

This week the police in the Republic of Ireland held a press conference where they displayed a range of weaponry seized from Republican terrorists. Included in the display were rockets which were described as similar to “kassam” rockets used by Palestinian militants in Gaza.  Here’s a picture of one of the rockets.


And here’s some Kassam rockets for comparison:

Now of course there is some alarm at this, and understandably so, but regular readers of this blog will know that a recurring theme of mine is that terrorist weaponry, well, has a recurring theme. And this is a great example. One might think from the press coverage that the occurrence of terrorist rockets is new in Ireland, and that these terrorists might have been exchanging technology with Palestinians. I’m not going to comment on that, but let me highlight something – rockets used by revolutionaries in Ireland aren’t new at all. A couple of years back I ran a series of posts about Irish rebel improvised rockets used in Dublin in 1803. That’s 216 years ago. And frankly they weren’t that dissimilar, a little smaller, but not much so.  And I made the point that the designs used by Emmett’s rebels in Dublin in 1803, were actually built on instructions from an English rocket designer, Robert Anderson, from over a hundred years earlier, in 1696. Here’s two pages of those three-hundred-year-old build instructions:

 

By the way, I still believe that Congreve, who claimed to have invented military rockets in about 1805 was copying Emmet’s designs and inadvertently copying the even older design by Robert Anderson.

Here’s the links to the posts about the Dublin rockets of 1803 and their links to the 1696 design.

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/24/revolution-and-invention-comparing-syria-in-2012-with-irelan.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/28/the-mystery-of-the-the-man-with-no-history-other-spies-and-e.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/27/woosh-bang-ohnasty.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/28/rockets-a-reassessment-a-mystery-and-a-discovery.html 

Russia

Russian Partisan EOD search, 1942

I’ve found an interesting book, “The Partisan’s Companion“, a guerilla warfare manual produced by Russia in 1942. There’s a small section on EOD search for German mines and booby traps which is interesting.

Remember the fascists use mines widely and employ them with cunning and trickery. Quite often they leave various lures in plain sight and connect them to mines. You should be careful and wary of them.

Do not enter a house which has been left by the Germans until you have inspected the ground around it, The stair steps of the porch, doors, windows, floor boards and various household objects – all of them could be connected to mines.  Any attempt to move them or even a simple touch could produce and explosion.   Use long rope and a grapnel to open the door of such a house.

After entering the house – thoroughly inspect it. First, do a visual inspection, looking for the revealing signs of mines: fresh spots in the wall’s plaster, evidence of disturbing the bricks in the walls or stove, fresh scratches on the floor. Also check the electrical wires – see if there are any devices connected to them. If you find suspicious areas- check them more thoroughly.

Try to avoid all kinds of twine, rope and wire in the forest, on the roads and in the houses. They could be linked to mines. Be careful around places which show some disturbance to their uniformity.For example: small lumps of dirt on grass warn you about digging at that site. Be careful not to pick up a rifle or other weapon left behind by the Germans, especially if it is in a highly visible spot. Remember that the Germans sometimes even put mines on the corpses of their soldiers and officers.

The manual then goes on to describe an interesting technique for finding buried clockwork timed mechanisms attached to mines, using a “water stethoscope”.  A water bottle is filled almost to within a few centimeters from the top, and a glass tube inserted through the stopper. Put a rubber hose onto the outside of the tube. Then plant the bottle in the ground, with the surface of the water in the bottle level with the ground. Place the end of the hose to your ear and if there is a buried clockwork device nearby you will hear it.

That sounds like an interesting technique – I’ll have to give it a try.

 

 

1850-1860

Report of IEDs in the Crimea, 1855

I have written before about Russian use of IEDs in the Crimea, here and here, but recently I came across another report referring to IEDs in Sebastopol, left behind after it was taken by the British in September 1855. Before evacuating the city, Russian forces had prepared and set thirty to forty victim operated IEDs (“booby traps”).   Lt Col Frederic Dallas wrote “ the Russians, outside all their works, have Machines, our men call them “Man traps”, which explode when you touch, or rather tread upon them, and they are a frightful source of accidents”.

The Illustrated London News war artist wrote an account of one such incident on 28 September 1855 describing an explosion that had taken place.  He also describes the initiation mechanism of these IEDs which is clearly the so called “Jacobi Fuse”, actually designed by Alfred Nobel’s father, Immanuel Nobel for Jacobi who was head of the Russian munition design bureau.  Here’s the report:

Yesterday, as I was sketching in the west of Sebastopol, an explosion shook the buildings around and reverberated through the roofless and untenanted edifices of the place. The Arsenal Creek was filled with a heavy black smoke, and showers of large stones fell into the water, lashing it for a moment into sheets of foam. The centre of the fire was a battery on the left flank of the Creek Battery. This was one of the works erected by the Russians to sweep the approaches of the Woronzoff road; it was built of stones taken from the houses around it, faced with earth externally, and without a ditch. The magazine was in the foundations of a house which had once stood there […]. The Russians had placed a fougasse over it, and an accidental tread upon a wooden peg driven into the earth broke a glass tube of inflammable matter which communicated with the powder below […].

Three of the men in the work were blown to atoms; and a large number were buried in the ruins; whilst sad havoc was at the same time committed on parties of workmen leading mules along the road close by. Two soldiers of the guard in the Creek Battery were killed by stones projected with great violence into the air, and launched with fatal force upon them. Several mules and horses were killed in this same manner, and every point within 200 yards of the spot was visited by the terrible shower. The crater left by the explosion was about twenty feet deep and twenty wide; and in its crumbled sides were found some of the wounded, who were speedily conveyed to hospital.

After this incident , troops searched carefully for others and found one in a nearby battery . The devices left behind in Sebastopol prevented the British and French form occupying the city properly. It did not prevent them from undertaking appalling looting however.

1880-1890

Victorian era Bomb basket

I’m indebted to John Balding for forwarding me this picture. The image, I think from around the 1880s, shows the contraption used by Colonel Majendie, the British Chief Inspector of Explosives, for transporting IEDs.  The IEDs were taken to the EOD facility on Duck Island in St James’s Park, Westminster.   I think it is very possible that Majendie copied it from a similar technique used the the French authorities in Paris.

A nicely sprung vehicle, clearly intended to be pushed by a person, possibly based on a “pram”.

1930-1940

Explosion at C-IED Lab, Paris, 1938

In a previous blog I detailed the French C-IED facility that existed at the Municipal Laboratory in Port de Vincennes, Paris.  This facility started around 1880, and my earlier post detailed its operations in 1911.

A sister facility existed in the French suburb of Villejuif in 1938.  At that time there was a terrorist campaign of bombings by an anti-communist fascist group called the “Cagoulards”, some of them “false flag” attempts to blame communist groups.  The French authorities mounted a series of security operations.  In 1938 large quantities of improvised grenades were recovered in one such operation.  As was the normal drill these were recovered to a laboratory for examination, some 3000 in all (some sources say 5000). The large quantity resulted in the need to move them to a larger storage facility in Versailles  The French military were tasked to assist the police in the loading of these grenades onto appropriate transport (two military trucks) at the Pyrotechnical Laboratory in Villejuif.  For reasons not understood, (but probably caused by someone dropping one of the delicate improvised grenades into a box of others) there was a large explosion and 14 people were killed including the M. Schmitz the head of the explosives investigations unit at the laboratory.  Three of the five explosive laboratory buildings were destroyed.

Here’s a video of the aftermath.

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