Standing Well Back
16th Century

Chinese 16th Century Ship-Borne IED

An interesting pic below.

 

This is from a book written in the mid-1500s by a Chinese Imperial official and shows a sophisticated vessel containing large amounts of explosives.  This and other vessels of a similar nature were made at the Dragon River Shipyard near Nanking.  There are some interesting features to this:

 

  1. Note the bow of the vessel – these protuberances are described as “wolf’s teeth nails”. When the vessel is rammed against the target these steel teeth engage and fasten the bow of the IED vessel to the target.
  2. Note the “hook and eye connections” amidships. This is pretty clever. After the vessel is rammed into the target the entire “bow” containing the explosives and rockets, is detached by detaching the hooks from the eyes and the attackers row away the foreshortened vessel. Other vessels from the Dragon River Shipyard utilised other designs for leaving behind explosive or combustible material and rowing a smaller boat away  – and disguise was a key design consideration.  This vessel may have looked like an ordinary commercial vessel with plenty of crew aboard and therefore not like an expected explosive ship, which were usually towed.
  3. The skipper is protected from enemy weapons in a cabin, and the rowers are equipped with long poles to defend themselves and presumably light the charge.
  4. The official describes this vessel as being 14m long, with the forward detachable section being about 1/3rd of the length, (so roughly 5m long).

Europeans (specifically the Portuguese) would have encountered these sort of attacks in their war against the Chinese in the first part of the 16th century.  So these vessels just preceded the first real European use of this sort of weapon, namely the “Hoop” at Antwerp in 1584.  In the early 17th Century the Dutch too faced such weapons in their Chinese adventures. In 1637 a small fleet of English vessels arrived in China to trade and were attacked by a small fleet of fire ships and explosive vessels.  The attack was described by a man aboard one of the ships and adventurer called “Peter Mundy”. (That name will make some of you older British EOD types smile).  Mundy writes:

“The fire was vehement. Balls of wild fire, rockets and fire arrows flew thick as they passed us, But God be praised, not one of us all was touched.”

Mundy then learned that the attack was actually inspired by the Portuguese in Macao to deter British trade competition.  This concept precedes then the development of “spar torpedoes” used frequently in the US Civil war, where an explosive charge was on the end off a spar on the front of an attacking boat, designed to attach to the target.

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!
19th Century

Massive Command Wire IED in Charleston, USA

In my last post I discussed a massive electrically initiated command wire IED from the Crimean war in 1856. This article is about a massive command-wire device in Charleston during the American Civil War in 1863. I’ve been finding stuff on explosive devices during that conflict for a few years now, but this one is new to me, possibly because it failed to explode.  Importantly I think this IED was the biggest ever seen in the USA – perhaps my US colleagues would care to comment.

This Confederate device was constructed using an entire ship’s steam boiler as a container. It was packed with 5000 pounds of blackpowder (other reports suggest 3000 pounds)  and sunk in 6 fathoms of water 1500 yards off Fort Sumter, just outside Charleston, South Carolina. Insulated electrical cables led from the boiler to an electrical charge generator in the Fort, defended by Confederate Forces. There had been a series of naval bombardments of the Fort over several months. On 8 September 1853 the Federal Navy approached the Fort again to bombard it.  The flagship “New Ironsides” placed itself directly above the device and fired nearly 500 rounds at the Fort. Every attempt was made to initiate the device but it failed to function. After 90 minutes the Ironsides moved off. The device had been in place for 4 months before it was attempted to fire. The man responsible for testing the circuit daily was put in irons, although he claimed he had circuit tested it the previous day. Probably there had been an ingress of water or there was insufficient voltage.   But 5000 pounds of powder exploding a few feet underneath a battleship would have been quite an attack.

Here’s a report on the laying of the device, which suggests that the resulting cable length was over a mile longer than expected – perhaps the power source was insufficient to cope with that:

The torpedo was successfully sunk on the spot located by General Ripley, but while running the cable the steamer (Chesterfield) ran out of steam, and, unable to hold against the tide and wind, went aground near Fort Sumter. On the increase of the flood we had to run back a long circuit reach Cummings Point and land the cable. It resulted from this accident that we played out 2 miles of cable, instead of 1, as expected.

Here’s a couple of diagrams of the explosive device, which I think are contemporary:

The boiler, full of powder, is probably still there…

There is some mention of the use of powder filled boilers being used unsuccessfully on the James River by the Confederate explosive expert Captain Maury at an earlier time during the Civil War. Apparently the boilers were not anchored well and moved in the current, parting the electrical cables. Captain Maury’s electricity generator apparently “weighed nearly a ton” which also made the devices awkward to deploy. Maury was later sent on a mission to England to procure better electrical power sources (in modern parlance, “IED components”)  from the scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone.

Fort Sumter in August 1863, a month before the incident:

 

Here’s the USS New Ironsides, the target of the IED:

I have found some new material on underwater Confederate devices used to prevent Federal ships moving up the James River subsequent to Captian Maury’s boilers, but I need time to check this new material against other records. I’ll put up a post at some time in the future when I have time.

In one of those strange “mirrorings” in history the following year it was Union forces who considered use of a massive IED against Fort Sumter. Union commander ,Major-General John Foster had in mind a plan to level Fort Sumter by way of a large explosive device.  “As soon as a good cut is made through the wall,” Foster wrote to Washington on July 7, 1864, “I shall float down against it and explode large torpedoes until the wall is shaken down and the surrounding obstructions are entirely blown away.”

Later that month Union naval forces had made a “cut” in a protective wall and pushed an explosively-laden barge towards Fort Sumter. But due to miscommunication and bad weather the attack was abandoned.  Other attempts were then made in August 1864 by land forces using improvised rafts, laden with explosives and initiated with timing devices. These were to be pushed into place by boat. Here’s one contemporary report:

On the night of the 28th ultimo, a pontoon-boat, fitted up for the purpose and containing about twenty hundredweight of powder, was taken out by Lieut. G.F. Eaton, One hundred and twenty-seventh New York Volunteers, boat infantry, and floated down into the left flank of Fort Sumter. The garrison of Sumter was alarmed before the mine reached them, and opened upon our boats with musketry, without, however, doing them any injury.

The device exploded, but in the wrong place and too far away to cause significant damage. Then:

On the night of the 31st ultimo six torpedoes, made of barrels set in frames, each containing 100 pounds of powder, were set afloat with the flood-tide from the southeast of Sumter with the view of destroying the boom.  They probably exploded too early and only injured perhaps two lengths of the links of the boom, which are now not visible.

Another attempt was made the following night on 1 September 1864, the device exploded but again causing no significant damage.

Here’s a drawing of the devices being launched:

 

 

I also have found some new interesting technical material about very large submerged electrically initiated devices used in the defence of Venice, in 1859, that appear also to have used Samuel Colt’s “Camera Obscura” command post technique – again to follow when time permits. I continue to view Samuel Colt’s amazing explosive device initiation command post of 1836 as one of the most remarkable things I have ever come across in all my research.

 

 

Uncategorised

Russian command wire device – Crimean war, 1855

I have blogged a few times earlier this year about Russian”stay behind” devices and here.   In these earlier posts I also discussed some evidence that victim operated explosive devices were left behind when the Russians retreated from various places in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856.

I have just found a contemporary translation of a French report from the Crimean War detailing massive command-wire electrically initiated devices from that conflict, intended to target advancing French and British forces.  So it appears that the Russians were making significant use of both victim operated explosive devices as well as electrical command wire devices in this conflict. I don’t think that has been widely recognised by historians.  Bearing in mind electrically initiated explosive devices were still something of a novelty in the 1850s, this really shows that the Russians had grasped the potential of the use in warfare of such devices and had planned and probably succeeded to detonate several simultaneously. Although the length of the wires are not specified, I think they were fired from a considerable distance, from a central command post. I find the obvious parallels with this concept in 1855 and the F-10 “stay behind” devices used in WW2  by Russia, 90 or so years apart, detailed in my earlier post very interesting, as well as early adoption of this initiation technology. The fact that the command wire ran such a distance , and partly under the sea, and that there were a number of them shows significant technical, tactical and operational capability with this early use of the technology.

The use of the devices was in the Battle for Malakoff in September 1855, which was in the main a French effort, but British forces played a key role in the Battle for the Redoubt. It was a bloody battle, with 20-30,000 deaths and 19 generals killed.

Here is an excerpt from the translation.  Well done that sapper for cutting the command wire to the Malakoff redoubt with his axe!

I have the tale of another quite remarkable electrically initiated device from the 19th Century, from some new research I’ve been doing, up my sleeve, this time an American device that nearly sank a battleship. Watch this space.

Follow up:

I continue to find further hints and comments about the use of command wire IEDs by the Russians during the siege of Sebastopol.  For example this comment in a letter from General Charles Gordon discussing the aftermath in Sebastopol:

“We have traced voltaic wires to nearly every powder magazine in the place”

Also this photograph taken shortly after the battle. Although the image is not that clear the title is surprising. Here we have a Royal Engineer Search Team (REST) looking for an IED command wire, in 1855.

Carronade Battery, flanking the Ditch of the Redan. Sappers looking for Electric Wires communicating with the Powder Magazine

 

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.

 

 

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