Standing Well Back
20th Century

A wire to pull a trigger

Historically, firearm mechanisms have often been used to initiate explosive devices, and I’ve blogged about plenty over recent years. Most recently this device here from 1582  shows a very early and very simple example.

I’ve come across a few more devices from the early 20th Century that apparently used a similar technique, perhaps perpetrated by Harry Orchard (aka Albert Horsley, aka Tom Hogan)  as part of the Colorado labor wars in 1903-1905.  I’ve blogged about some of Orchard’s stranger command IED switches before but I didn’t mention then the use of a command pull to pistol trigger.   Orchard was certainly comfortable making, placing, and laying command pull switches and perhaps he saw a pistol trigger as a more reliable system than pulling a cork from a bottle of acid!

Orchard’s case is complex – he worked, apparently, for both sides of a violent labor dispute and there are many accusations of “false flag” attacks. As to whether he committed the crime I’m about to mention, and why, I can’t be certain, but in one sense, for our purposes it doesn’t matter because we are interested in the mechanism and not the motivation or perpertrator.

On 5th June 1904, about 60 strike-breaking miners were on the platform of the Independence Railway Depot in Colorado. They were waiting for a train to take them home in a nearby town. The miner’s union had been in a long and violent dispute with the mine owners.  The perpertrator had planted explosives under the platform, to be initiated by a loaded and cocked pistol placed immediately next to it. A 200ft (some reports suggest 400ft) wire had been  tied to the trigger and led away to a firing point at a safe distance.  The wire was pulled, the device exploded and 13 miners were killed and 9 injured, perhaps one of whom died subsequently.

There are conflicting reports about the nature of the explosive itself – some saying blackpowder, some dynamite.

It also seems likely that a similar device may have been used to cause an explosion in the Vindicator Mine, probably by Orchard, in 1906, albeit that may have been set to act as a booby trap /victim operated switch.

1910-1920

More “Stay behind” devices

In a couple of posts over the last few months I’ve discussed “stay behind” devices.

In this post I discussed Russian stay-behind devices in the Crimean War in the 1850s .  The Russians, in ceding Sebastopol to the French and British, were able to predict where attacking troops would be – whether that be to seize high profile buildings or munition dumps, and lay “booby-traps” which caused significant problems.

In this post I discussed Russian stay-behind explosive devices in WW2, used to attack the invading Nazi army. In particular the Russians in many instances were able to predict the sort of buildings that the Wehrmacht would be attracted to use as headquarter buildings – typically large imposing buildings with large rooms suitable for converting into the various facilities needed by a military headquarters. Using both long delay mechanical timers and radio-controlled F-10 devices they had considerable success in Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa, targeting incoming headquarter units , in many cases several days or weeks after losing the territory.  In many cases, including a device personally emplaced by Ilya Starinov,  deliberately “poorly concealed devices” were laid “on top” of the deeply buried device. EOD troops inspected the proposed building, and cleared the obvious device in the cellar  (not realising another much larger device was hidden under it). Three weeks later the massive device was detonated, successfully taking out an entire headquarter staff.

With all that in mind, I have found another use of a very similar tactics, but used by the Germans against the Allies, in WW1. Booby trapped explosive devices were used extensively by the Germans in WW1. In this example, the tactic used by the Russians, against the Germans seems to be identical.

On about the 18 March 1917 Bapaume, a small but strategic town was captured from the Germans. After taking the town, an EOD unit found a mine of some sort in the cellar under the Town Hall, a prominent building – whose cellars were deep enough to provide shell shelter – so an attractive structure for forces “moving in”.  It is believed that the Germans may have expected or hoped that a Divisional Headquarters may have decided to use the place.  I think that in an earlier part of the war the Town Hall had been  indeed previously used by a British or French headquarters.  As it happens that did not occur but about 30 Australians had “moved in” along with a tea stall from the “Australian Comforts Fund”. On the night of 26 March, so about 8 days later, a timer, set before the Germans retreated, caused a massive device to explode, killing most of the occupants.  I have found reports that the charge could have been as large as 10,000lbs, (but I think that unlikely, more likely maybe a couple of hundred lbs) and had two independent “time pencils”, of the type where the delay is provided by acid eating through a steel thread holding a striker under spring tension.  Interestingly there is a suggestion that the German Pioneers who laid the devices defecated on the ground above it, to dissuade careful inspection.  I also understand that the German withdrawal from Bapaume was part of a carefully planned operation to fall back to the Siegfried Line, which will have given time for the preparatory effort.

UPDATE:  I have learned from Ian Jones that the details of the incident aren’t quite as I described. A large, easily found device was discovered and made safe in the cellar. a somewhat smaller device carefully hidden in the tower of the Town Hall was the device that exploded, collapsing the cellar trapping people in there.

Shortly later a German was captured nearby and interrogation of him suggested there were other devices in the area.  Before this warning could be circulated, at 12.37 p.m. On March 26th, the luxurious dugout system on the edge of Bapaume, in which a headquarters had been set up was entirely destroyed by a similar mine. Several other similar devices appear to have been used in the area.

Here’s a diagram of a German delay switch. I think the Germans also had mechanical clockwork delay switches.

German WW1 Boob-traps are very well explained in Ian Jones’s excellent book “Malice Aforethought”   Anyway, I think its interesting that a tactic perfected by the Germans in WW1 was used by Russians against the Germans in WW2.  There are lessons here too about “predictability” of the target’s behaviour in terms of choice of location for an explosive device, and also in terms of disguising stay-behind devices. Of course, booby traps were used by the British, French and Australians too.

Sabotage During World Wars

Colin Gubbins – Gamekeeper turned Poacher

As part of my research into the use of IEDs for sabotage in WW2, I wrote an earlier piece about Colonel Ilya Starinov, the key person in developing Russia’s sabotage activity in WW2.  More recently I’ve been looking at Britain’s role in encouraging sabotage efforts using IEDs in the same war.  Of course there are differences but the parallels between Ilya Starinov, and his counterpart in Britain, Colin Gubbins are actually pretty interesting.

Steely-eyed Gubbins. 

Gubbins is well known for his role in leading the SOE during WW2, but his influence I think is broader than that. He was also responsible for implementing the ideas of Churchills “Auxiliary Units”, a plan to mount partisan operation in England if the Germans had invaded in the early part of the war.  His 1939 pamphlets on how to conduct partisan warfare were distributed across Europe during the war.  I was interested how this apparently traditional Artillery officer became such source for partisan warfare ideas, and it’s an interesting story, and some of the things I have found are startling, to me anyway.

As a young man he was already a German speaker and perhaps comfortable with the concept of living in a foreign country, having lived for a short time in Heidelberg before the war started.  His WW1 career was fairly standard for a Gunner officer fighting at Ypres, the Somme and Arras.   He was wounded and gassed.   It was only in 1919, after the end of the Great War did Gubbin’s experiences slightly leave the norm.

  • In 1919 he served for a time on the staff of the British Forces in the North Russia Campaign. This was a peculiar and unusual campaign by any standards. Gubbins would have been aware of activity by Bolsheviks to sabotage railways as part of their battles with the Allies who supported the White Russians. He would have also been aware of British encouragement (by MI6) of IED use by their agents and white Russians in Petrograd,
  • At the end of 1919, Gubbins was then posted to Ireland as an Intelligence officer, during the busy years of 1920 – 1922. During that time he attended a three day course in guerilla warfare. Most of his duties will have involved understanding the threats faced by the British Army by the IRA, who were operating a guerrilla campaign. The 18 months or so of this experience as an intelligence officer against an insurgent campaign seems to have sparked a longer term interest in irregular warfare , and started his thinking, in the reverse of poacher-turned gamekeeper. Gubbins was to think hard about gamekeeper-turned-poacher  in coming years.
  • In 1922 he continued his intelligence career in Signals Intelligence in India, before a range of staff, training and policy posts.
  •  In the late 1930s, as a Lt Col, Gubbins started to crystallise his irregular warfare thoughts by being the author of key pamphlets such as “The Partisan Leader’s Handbook”. This is actually a fascinating document, for a number of reasons. Firstly it shows that at least someone, in 1939, in the War office was thinking about irregular warfare. secondly I think I can see hints that the author, Gubbins, had studied earlier campaigns and drawn from not only his own experience in Russia and Ireland but also other campaigns I have discussed in earlier blogs such as the efforts of the Arab Bureau in Arabia in 1917 and the German WW1 Lettow-Vorbeck campaign in East Africa. I also sense that his advice on OPSEC is drawn from his experience as an intelligence officer “from the other side of the fence”

As a small diversion in this blog post, I’d also like to highlight a couple of other aspects of the Partisan Leader’s pamphlet that I think are worthy of attention, and that’s to do with the utter ruthlessness prescribed by Gubbins, which in modern eyes are startling.  Here’s a couple of examples, but remember this is a pamphlet produced by a Lt Col in the War office in 1939:

  • One method of sabotage that is recommended is the contamination of food by “bacilli, poison”.  So here is the British War Office advocating biological warfare by partisans in 1939
  • Gubbins is equally ruthless on the subject of “informers” within partisan groups. Informers must be killed “immediately ” or at “the first opportunity” and “if possible a note pinned on the body stating the man was an informer.  Having personally once had to retrieve such a body that’s a bit shocking as a British document.

Then later in 1939 Gubbins was posted to be Chief of Staff to one of this blog’s favourite characters, General Carton De Wiart, as part of a mission to Poland just before the Germans invaded and war started, advising on Polish partisan tactics.  He was with de Wiart as they crossed the Romanian border escaping from the German advance.  After that he went on to form commando units which deployed to Norway, and after was tasked  to set up the Auxiliary Units in preparation for a German invasion of England, and clearly applied much of his irregular warfare thinking into that.

I find it fascinating to look at a time line of Gubbins’ career with that of Starinov, from about 1918 to 1945. Both experienced in Russia, but on different sides. Starinov starting more lowly but with stronger technical skills, but importantly both learning from their experience and deriving very similar irregular warfare policy developments. Putting aside political differences, both came up with similar solution sets of irregular warfare based around explosive sabotage.  Both put huge effort into developing “stay behind” guerrilla operations against invading forces – for Starinov it was the plan to operate partisan groups in Ukraine if it was invaded, developed as a detailed plan by Starinov in the mid 1920s – 1930s, for Gubbins it was the Auxiliary units developed in 1940 to counter German invasion.  Gubbins formed the first British Commando units, Starinov formed the first Russian Speztnaz units.   Both men ended WW2 running very extensive partisan operations against the Germans. One can’t but help see certain symmetries. One can’t but help see their influence in all sorts of conflict types since WW2.  2003 in Iraq is just one example that could have been based on either man’s plan.    I wonder if they were aware of each other?

Gubbins in retirement

(Note: Copies of Gubbins’ partisan pamphlets and other Auxiliary Unit material including a fantastic explosive demolitions document, disguised as a British Farmers Diary, 1939, are available. Ping me and I might tell you where from). Here’s a couple of pics – some of you will work out the link to “Highworth”.

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.

 

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.

 

 

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