Standing Well Back
19th Century

IEDs in the Boer War

I’m currently digging in to instances of the British Army using IEDs in various campaigns. There’s a couple of interesting stories from the Siege of Mafeking (1899-1900). The British were surrounded at Mafeking and held out for quite a period against the Boers.   They were short of supplies, but led by Baden-Powell used all sorts of ingenious methods, including improvised explosive devices (and hoax explosive devices) to keep the Boers at bay. Certainly the Boers were intimidated by the threat of these improvised landmines (often placed in likely artillery positions). The Boers too made extensive use of IEDs at this time.

Other munitions were developed at a workshop in the railway yard.  There were a large number of improvised grenades made , using dynamite, a tin can and a burning fuze.   Other IEDs used Boer artillery shells that had failed to function, and indeed on more than one occasion using recovered Boer IEDs that and been rendered safe. Here’s the description of one such, by Baden-Powell the Garrison-Commander, talking about a forward Boer position that they abandoned:

Their somewhat noisy retirement made me suspicious, and two scouts were sent on to see if all was clear. They found some wires, quite newly laid, and a mine of nitro-glycerine, so something equally soothing, awaiting our entrance into the work. The wires were therefore cut and wound in for future use against the layers. And while we sang ‘God save the Queen,’ the Boers were probably touching the button at the other end of the wire with considerable impatience at their failure of their fireworks.

Seasoned “standingwellback” readers will recall that I have written before  about Boer railway line IEDs here.

The defenders too used electrically initiated IEDs – one here was awarded a “Mention in Dispatches” thus:

Koffyfontein Defence Force-Corporal H J Jellard (promoted Sergeant); on October 11, for exposing himself to heavy fire at 60 yards’ range when getting on to a debris heap to connect a wire from a battery to a mine, and also for holding an advanced position with assistance of one native

One particularly effective method of delivering improvised grenades to the target was drawn by Baden-Powell himself – no mean artist:

Sgt Page (other reports name him as Sgt Moffatt) used a fishing rod and line with the grenade attached to the end of the casting line. Apparently he could deliver the improvised grenade a distance of 100 yards with some precision.  Baden-Powell suggest that the fishing rod technique replaced a mechanical spring device which was less effective (a technique seen in recent years in Syria). The Baden-Powell sketch was then used as a basis for this image below, which also shows on the right an ingenious “dummy” to draw fire.

In one of those odd parallels, you may recall that I wrote about an improvised artillery piece used during the Boxer rebellion (1899) here, that had been dug up in a garden. Well there was also an improvised artillery piece art Mafeking also used in 1899. It too was dug up in a garden It is described here by Baden-Powell himself:

The third gun was one which Mr. Rowlands dug up from his garden: an old muzzle-loading ship’s gun with a history.  We had it cleaned up, sighted, and mounted on a carriage, and it did right good work. Owing to its ancient Naval connection the gun was named ‘Lord Nelson.’   It was made in 1770 and weighted 8 cwt. 2 qrs. 10 lbs. These figures 8.2.10 were inscribed upon it and led some people to suppose it was made on February 8, 1810. It also had the initials ‘B. P.’ Upon it, which might have led such people further to suppose that it belonged to me in former times. It didn’t really; those initials stood for Bailey, Pegg & Co., the makers, of Brierley Foundry, Staffordshire. The absence of the Royal Cypher showed that it had not been a Royal Navy gun but belonged to a privateer. According to local tradition two Germans brought it to Linchwe, a neighbouring chief, some forty years ago, and he sold it to the Baralongs for twenty-two oxen, to aid them in their defence against Boer freebooters.  It fired a 10-lb. shot, and carried 2,000 yards, though not with great accuracy. We found its sister-gun in Rustenburg, where in 1881 it had been used by the Boers to shell the British defence works. And a third gun of the same family was found by General Burn-Murdoch near Vryheid; while a fourth stands, I believe, at Brierley Hill, having been presented to the town by the makers.

How extraordinary that in two sieges in separate parts of the world, at the same time, they both used ancient cannon dug up from a garden.

Other artillery pieces were entirely improvised, here described by Baden-Powell again:

Our great gun was our home-made one, ‘The Wolf’ (my nickname from Matabeleland). This was made from a steampipe round which were lapped iron rods which were welded and turned till a good strong barrel was made. The breech and trunnions were bronze castings. The whole was built up by the railway workmen under Mr. Coghlan, the energetic and ingenious foreman, and under the general supervision of Major Panzera. The blast furnace for making the castings alone was a triumph of ingenuity made out of a water-tank lined with firebricks — the blast being introduced through a vacuum brake tube.

The “Wolf” is now held by the Royal Artillery Museum, due to open later this year.

Baden-Powell also mentions this IED attack – reminiscent of more recent IED attacks I have also blogged about here and here

The Boers sent a trolley loaded with dynamite rolling down the railway into Mafeking, but it luckily exploded before reaching us — about a mile outside.

 

Rather oddly Baden-Powell doesn’t mention that the British themselves used the same tactic. On 13th October, a British locomotive pushed TWO carriages full of dynamite out of Mafeking on the railway until they saw Boer’s in the distance. Fuzes were lit and the carriages rolled towards the Boer position – but were detonated by rifle fire from there Boers.
 It’s clear that the demands of the remote and isolated town of Mafeking demanded innovation and improvisation from the occupants – and many of the same pressures were prevalent on the Boer side. I’m struck by the leadership shown in reading Baden-Powell’s notes on his command during the siege. Quite remarkable. It also further highlights the prevalence of improvised munitions in history, and shows the same patterns, driven by tactics and tactical design as we still see today.
Update:   Here’s a pic of the Wolf howitzer, made in the railway workshops in Mafeking, and some improvised munitions for it.  Sometimes Pounder shells fired at the British by the Boers, but which failed to function were recovered, somehow re-fuzed and fired back.
And here’s a sketch of the “Nelson” in action:
17th Century

An explosive device in Whitehall

Some more detail of an early IED attack attempt that I had heard about  but which I didn’t have much detail of until now.  I mentioned in my post a couple of years ago here (Bomb Alleys) about an assassination attempt on Oliver Cromwell, with a device designed to burn down Whitehall Palace and I’ve found a few more details in the transcripts of the trial in ” Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings etc Volume 5, pages 842-872″.    It seems this was a successful EOD operation as part of a complex counter-terrorism operation. What a curious world counter-terrorism was in those days – as it remains today.

Cromwell – the target of the assassination attempt

The counter-terrorism operation was run by Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster, John Thurloe.  The protagonist in this was one Miles Sindercombe, whose pseudonym was “Mr Fish”. Sindercombe appears to have been funded by a rebel puritan officer, Colonel Sexby, from the Netherlands.  After four plans to ambush Cromwell had failed, Sindercombe decided to burn down Whitehall Palace, where Cromwell was living, in the hope that it might kill him.  The device he used was constructed “by a man sent from overseas”.

The device was in a wicker basket, and contained, a gunpowder charge, and “tar, pitch and tow” and “brimstone” to add an incendiary component. It had two “slow match” burning fuses in parallel with an expected delay of about 6 hours. That’s quite a delay for a burning fuse. The device was left in a chapel in the Palace (now the site of the UK Ministry of Defence, and buildings in that area), which Sindercombe had reconnoitered by attending a service earlier. On 8th January 1657, Sindercombe and his accomplices gained entry via a back door into the chapel, and hid the device under a seat. They lit the fuze and left the premises. However Sindercombe’s cell had been penetrated by government agents working for Thurloe and the authorities were alerted.  The Palace Guard “found” the device and the Officer of the Guard rendered it safe by removing the burning fuzes.

Sindercombe was injured resisting arrest the following morning, and refused to co-operate. However all his co-conspirators did cooperate, gave testimony and Sindercombe was found guilty and sentenced to death a month later. He escaped the gallows by committing suicide by poisoning but suspicion remains he was killed to prevent a riotous public assembly at the execution. There are details of a rather bizarre post-mortem conducted some time after he had been buried beneath the gallows with a stake through his heart.

The details of his earlier assassination attempts on Cromwell are also intriguing. In one he hid an arquebus and pistols “in a viol case” (very 1920s…). In another, a purpose built firearm was to be used, described as a “strange device” that fires 12 bullets and a slug at the same time. Peculiar.

It’s surprising to me that this assassination attempt of the de facto head of state is little known about. Whitehall Palace – a mish-mash or architecture and complex passages , built mainly from wood did eventually burn down fifty years later. During the attempt to put out that fire in 1698 gunpowder charges were used to try to create firebreaks.

Here’s a useful pic of the Palace in 1680 – I’ve highlighted the chapel. It does indeed look like a warren of buildings. Those of you familiar with the area in modern day can orientate yourself with the Banqueting House and Horseguards

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.

 

 

Railway IEDs

A Missing Link – IED designs being passed through history

This is quite startling.  I have written before about Boer use of upturned-trigger-initiated IEDs used to attack British Railways in the Boer War, and more recently about how the same design of IED was used in the German East African Campaign

These devices were used again, exactly this same design, by the British against the Ottoman rail system in Arabia in 1917.  One of the issues in my mind was how “Bimbashi Garland”, the Arab Bureau’s explosives expert,  got to hear about Boer IEDs from an earlier war. In British eyes, this Boer design, then adopted by the Germans in 1915, became, by 1917, the “Garland mine” .  Thanks to the research of “JB” we have an answer as to how that happened and what an interesting answer it is. Bear with me as I explain

Here are parts of a letter sent from a relatively senior British Army officer with previous campaign experience in the Boer War. He sent a letter to the British Army in Egypt suggesting, specifically, that the Boer explosive device he had seen many years previously in South Africa be used to attack the Hejaz Railway in Arabia. Not only that, but he includes a detailed description of the device, which with minor variations is clearly the same device.

 

For comparison here’s a diagram of the device from one of my earlier posts

The correspondence is then passed from British HQ in Cairo to General Reginald Wingate whose headquarters was in Khartoum, with some comments from the Fortifications and Works Department.  Of particular note here is that they refer to the German use of such devices in East Africa, and comment that these devices have been effective. Here’s the comment from a Sgt in the Fortifications and Works department.

So that’s interesting… but it gets better. The original letter was dated October 1916. Herbert Garland, the former Ammunition Examiner NCO, now with a commission and on the staff of the Arab Bureau,  shortly afterwards began working “behind enemy lines” with the Arabs, and taking the advice/instruction of the letter writer , made his first attack on an Ottoman train in February 1917 – so the dates match up. Subsequently he trained the Arabs and other British officers on similar missions, including Lawrence of Arabia, to do the same. So we have a nice link between the Boer War, the German East African Campaign in WW1 and now the Arab revolt of 1917, all using the same design of IEDs, now called the “Garland Mine”.

What is perhaps even more interesting for historians is the identity of the original letter-writer, that at first I confess I didn’t notice.  It is written by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes…    Sykes is perhaps the key personality in terms of strategic influence on British activity in the Middle East, way beyond Lawrence.   Sykes, with the French diplomat Picot, was responsible for the “Sykes -Picot” agreement which divided the Middle East, and specifically the Ottoman Empire,  between the British and French, and this strategic diplomatic activity was going on at the same time as the letter was written – so this is so much more than a retired Army officer pontificating about how what he learned fighting against the Boers could have application in “modern war”.  This is the lead British strategic diplomat in the Middle East politely and diplomatically directing that an IED campaign using this specific explosive device be used to disintegrate the key aspect of the Ottoman empire’s strategic hold on Arabia. In the usual history books the strategic direction of the Arab Revolt is sometimes credited to the “Arab Bureau” but there were bigger cogs turning and directions being given to them. The Bureau’s efforts were at the operational level in this regard.  Here we can see history was being made in the Middle East and with these specific IEDs and with strategic thought. And not for the last time.

(Apologies for the racism displayed in the Sykes letter, but it is important to see, and perhaps adds to our understanding of his thought processes and how they may have impacted his strategic efforts)

Close Me
Looking for Something?
Search:
Post Categories: