Standing Well Back
1860-1870

Coal Torpedoes

A “coal torpedo” was the name given by Confederate Secret Service agents for a crude IED disguised as a lump of coal. The device was then introduced into the stocks of coal on ships and trains with the aim of causing an explosion in the boiler when it was shoveled into the engine.

The coal torpedo seems to have been invented by Capt Thomas Edgworth Courtney of the Confederate Secret Service.  Courtney proposed the idea to Jefferson Davis motivated probably by the financial rewards promised by the Confederacy which were suggested could be 50% of the value of Union shipping destroyed by new inventions. In this case, financial reward became the mother of a number of inventions. Courtney was commissioned and formed a Secret Service Corps of 25 men with direction to to attack any Union vessel or transport carrying military goods found in Confederate waters, with his rewards (no salary) being paid in Confederate war bonds.

Details of Courtney’s plan leaked to the Union who put a price on his head. Courtney escaped to England, and tried to sell the design of the Coal torpedo to the British Navy, the French, the Spanish and Turkey, without success.

The Union naval forces on the Mississippi under Admiral David Porter issued General order 184 accordingly:

The enemy have adopted new inventions to destroy human life and vessels in the shape of torpedoes, and an article resembling coal, which is to be placed in our coal piles for the purpose of blowing the vessels up, or injuring them. Officers will have to be careful in overlooking coal barges. Guards will be placed over them at all times, and anyone found attempting to place any of these things amongst the coal will be shot on the spot.

Details of the actual ships destroyed by this means are unclear as records have been destroyed but it appears likely that a number of the devices functioned as intended.

Courtney’s torpedoes were manufactured carefully at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop in Richmond, Virginia. Actual lumps of coal were used to form a mold into which iron was cast. The walls of the devices surrounded a hollow sufficient to hold about four ounces of blackpowder.  After filling, the void was closed with a threaded plug, dipped in beeswax and rolled in powdered coal to disguise it.  The device, although small, could rupture the pressure vessel of a ship, causing much greater secondary damage.

The concept of coal torpdeos carried on. After the American Civil War the Fenian Brotherhood (see previous blog posts) had connections with both sides and there appears to have been a plot in the 1860s and 70s to use such devices to place in the furnaces of New York hotels and British shipping .

In WW1 German saboteurs operating in the US planned to use such devices to attack munitions ships, and in an earlier post I mentioned that such devices were found by US forces after overrunning the Germans in France in 1918.

In WW2 both the OSS and the SOE used similar devices, as did German spies. I have found reports that the Japanese also developed a similar tool at the Noborito research Institute, and they were used by Japanese commandos in raids in New Guinea.  There is also a hint that the CIA explored this as a tactic to be used in Vietnam.

The OSS didn’t do things by halves and developed a coal camouflage kit for such devices, with a range of paints to enable the device to match variations in coal supplies.

1870-1880

Alexander Keith and the Crime of the Century bomb

This is another oddity.  Alexander Keith was born a Scotsman in 1827. He worked in Canada for a while and then worked for the Confederate States in the American Civil war as a blockade runner. In one escapade he was involved in what would today be called a chem bio plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever into the Northern cities in the United States.

It appears that he attempted to swindle some colleagues and fled to St Louis and then settled on the prairie. However one of his alleged victims tracked him down and he fled again, this time to Europe, where he assumed the name of “William King Thomas”, and later the alias William Thompson.  As he began to run out of money, in 1875, he concocted a complex insurance fraud that involved blowing up a passenger ship.  But his plans went badly wrong.

Keith hid a large timed IED in a barrel and arranged for it to be shipped across the Atlantic to New York in the steamship Mosel.  As the barrel was being loaded onto to the Mosel, the barrel slipped, fell and exploded on the dockside in Bremerhaven.  There must have been a significant quantity of explosives, and in a massive explosion 80 people were killed.  A witness stated ” “A mushroom-shaped column of smoke rose approximately 200 meters above the harbor. Everywhere people were crying and whimpering beside ruins. The entire pier was covered in soot: it was like the gateway to hell.”    Newspapers of the time dubbed the incident the “crime of the century”.

Interestingly Keith was on the Mosel and clearly understood that his plan had gone wrong. He had intended to sail on the ship, but leave it, and its explosive cargo, when he got to Southampton.  He went to his cabin immediately, and shot himself in the head twice (think about that…) . In the drama of the post blast no-one noticed the two shots from his cabin – only later did someone hear a groaning from his cabin. The door, locked from the inside, was broken down and Keith found lying on the floor, still alive. A revolver was by his side with 4 remaining bullets. His second shot paralyzed him.

Now, as I have written before, placing IEDs on ships was something that confederate agents had done before. (My next blog post will be about confederate “coal torpedo” IEDs used to damage ships) But by 1870 dynamite had become available significantly increasing the potential of an IED. As we know, Confederate IEDs had utilized clockwork mechanisms. Keith needed to obtain one for his plan, and had approached a German clock making company called JJ Fuchs of Bernberg, with a  request for a silent spring-loaded mechanism capable of functioning after a 10 day delay.  Keith refused to explain why he needed the mechanism but Fuchs designed it nonetheless. The mechanism was large and weighed about 30 pounds, and was so expensive that Keith initially refused to buy it. He approached two Viennese clock makers for a cheaper alternative but they failed, so eventually he returned to Fuchs.


The Fuchs timing mehcanism

There remain suspicions that Keith may have been involved in the disappearance of at least two other ships, The SS City Of Boston in January 1875 and the schooner Marie Victoria in 1864.

 


The suicide note

1940-1950

Mystery bombings

Fritz Joubert Duquesne was an inveterate anti-British spy who apparently used a number of IEDs to destroy British vessels sailing from South America in WW2.    Duquesne’s spying career started when as a British soldier serving in his home country during the 2nd Boer War, be was horrified at the British treatment of women and children.  His sister had been killed and his mother was dying in a British Concentration camp.

Duquesne then lived in the USA and became a German spy in 1914. He was sent to Brazil as “Frederick Fredericks” under the disguise of “doing scientific research on rubber plants.” From his base in Rio de Janeiro, he allegedly planted time bombs disguised as cases of mineral samples on British ships; he was credited with sinking “22 ships”. Among them, allegedly, were the Salvador; the Pembrokeshire; and the Tennyson and the “liner” Liger. One of his bombs allegedly started a fire on the Vauban.

I have been trying to find reference to the explosives planted on the British ships – little other than a reference to “infernal machines” in a press report. At the time numerous German saboteur plots were operating from N America (see earlier posts).

However, in investigating this I have found some discrepancies. For instance the SS Tennyson, was not sunk – it was still operating from Brazil in 1922. I can find no record of the “Liger” or a fire on the Vauban. The S.S. Pembrokeshire was “hulked” in 1913. Very curious. Was this a British misinformation campaign?

Here’s a press report of the time giving some details

Duquesne once again operated for the Germans in WW2, running the “Duquesne spy ring” which was broken by the FBI.

20th Century

Operation Lucid – to singe Mr Hitler’s moustache

I’ve blogged before about the use of exploding ships and other fireships in history here.  But I’ve just found another interesting plan of combined exploding/fire ships in World War Two, a plan called Operation Lucid.

With a German invasion fleet massing around Calais and Boulogne, a series of pretty desperate measures were considered as methods of damaging the invasion fleet. Churchill, with his taste of history and knowledge of the fireships used against the Spanish Armarda, approved a plan put forward by Captain Augustus Agar VC. The plan involved two or three old oil tankers, filled with an incendiary mix and explosives to be steamed into the the large collection of German wooden invasion barges being collected at Calais and Boulogne.   The incendiary mix , dubbed “Agar’s Special Mixture” consisted of 50% heavy fuel oil, 25% diesel oil, and 25% petroleum (gasoline).  The explosive components consisted of unmeasured, but large, quantities of gun cotton, cordite and old sea mines.

Here’s a quote from one of the sailors assigned to the operation:

Chief Petty Officer Ronald Apps recalled:

In July 1940, I joined a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker – the War African – that was anchored off Sheerness for an idea that I have always assumed was thought up by Churchill. These tankers were filled up with fuel oil and there were mines and detonators down in the holds. The idea was that we would run them over to Boulogne and about five or six miles out of the harbour, we would set the controls and lash them – with the boilers going full bore – and run them into Boulogne harbour and let them blow up, to destroy the potential German invasion fleet. It was called Operation Lucid and we spent four weeks preparing. We practiced setting the controls and evacuating the ship with two speedboats alongside us which had been commandeered from Southend. These speedboats were remarkable things. They could go at 35 or 40 knots and the idea was that at the blowing of a whistle, we had to rush down, get in the boats and we were away. Those four weeks were a bit hairy because the tanker was full up with fuel oil when it came to us and it was primed and ready to explode and there were air raids at night. When you’re in a tanker, sitting on all this explosive material and the Germans are coming over and dropping bombs, it’s not very … shall I say ‘sleep inspiring’ experience. I got round to the idea that I had to sleep or I wouldn’t be able to walk around the next day. 

In the end there were four attempts to launch the operation, but each failed for a variety of reasons, not least that the elderly ships adapted for the task were simply not reliable enough and kept breaking down. There are more details here.

There are some odd, almost spooky links between the operation’s commander, Agar VC, and previous blog posts I have written. Agar is a really interesting historic character. He had participated in the Zeebrugge raid in 1918 (link) and so was not new to the concept of the modern use of an explosively laden vessel. He was awarded the VC in mysterious circumstances because he was operating at the end of WW1 in support of SIS operations in Russia – running agents in and out of Bolshevik Russia using MTBs in the Baltic and other nefarious activities. As well as the VC he was also awarded the DSO. The DSO and the VC were awarded for two seperate motor torpoedo attacks on Bolshevik cruisers based on the island of Kronstadt (the site of this story in a previous blog).

I never imagined putting a link to a Daily Mail article on my blog, but this story here of the Baltic operations is worth breaking the rule.

The story of how he commanded HMS Dorsetshire, which was sunk under him by Japanese dive bombers in 1942, is also a remarkable story.

20th Century

US C-IED and counter booby-trap efforts on the Battlefield – 1918

Further to my earlier post about German booby-traps on the battlefield in 1918 and the similarities to today’s IED threat, I’ve found the following typed document, a briefing paper, of sorts, from the office of the Chief Engineer of the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918. The document is titled “GERMAN TRAPS AND MINES” and describes the booby traps being encountered by American forces as the Germans retreated. Those of you with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan will recognise some of the phrases.

The document is a little faded, but I’ll make it as big as possible. It’s worth reading.

 

Close Me
Looking for Something?
Search:
Post Categories: