Standing Well Back
20th Century

IED Innovation… or not

In May 1992 I was just starting my second tour in the EOD world. One of my jobs was to disseminate to my colleagues information on technically significant IED incidents, and the following was one of those incidents, and seemed very innovative. Given the ongoing discussion about “Backstop Borders”, or not, with the Irish Republic, it’s also quite pertinent.

In 1 May 1992, the British Army manned and ran a checkpoint ay Cloghoge on the Northern Ireland/Irish Republic border adjacent to the main road between Dublin and Belfast. This is about as far South as South Armagh goes, and in those days there was a very high level of threat from the Provisional IRA.  The main railway line also sat right there, and the small post, quite heavily protected, was right next to the road and the railway. It was normally manned, if I recall correctly, by about a dozen soldiers, providing “cover” and assistance for the police stopping the cross-border traffic at the check point. In Army terms the checkpoint was called “Romeo 1-5” (R15).

The Provisional IRA mounted a clever attack on the checkpoint. They stole a mechanical digger, and separately, a van. They loaded approximately 1000kg of home-made explosives in the van. Using the digger they made a makeshift ramp from the road, up to the railway lines, manoeuvred the van up the ramp then fitted the van with railway wheels. The digger was then used to lift the van, with its railways wheels, onto the the railway line (it wasn’t that busy a line and it was the middle of the night). All this happened out of sight of the checkpoint, at about 800m south of the border.

The van was fitted with a spool of cable, to initiate the device, and the cable fed to a terrorist who could see the checkpoint or someone who was in radio contact of someone who could see the target. At about 2 o’clock in the morning the van was set off in first gear, with no driver, towards the checkpoint paying out the spool of cable.

The Army sentry on the checkpoint, Fusilier Grundy, heard and then saw the approaching vehicle bomb and raised the alarm. Most of the occupants of the checkpoint took cover. Fusilier Grundy, correctly assuming this was a threat to his life and those of his team, opened fire in an attempt to disable the vehicle bomb. at 0205hrs the device was exploded next to the concrete sanger containing Grundy, killing him and throwing the ten ton protective sanger into the air. The remaining soldiers survived in a shelter, built to protect them if a vehicle bomb was delivered by road.  The replacement to this checkpoint was removed when the Good Friday Agreement came into effect.

I duly wrote up a technical report to the teams I supported (I was on mainland UK at the time), and highlighted that this innovative technique had never been used before.

Or so I thought…  But this is “Standingwellback” ain’t it, where I delve back in history. So check this out:

On 31 October 1943 the Germans were holding and guarding a railway bridge on the Ubort River in the Ukraine, West of Kiev. A Soviet partisan group led by an NKVD Major called Grabchak decided to use an “innovative” method to attack the strongly defended, strategic bridge. The area around the bridge was heavily mined, enclosed with barbed wire, there were several machine gun posts and a large garrison protecting it with mortars and other heavy weapons.

Twice a week the local German commandant travelled down the line to inspect the defences at the bridge from his base a few miles away. He invariably travelled to the bridge by a “special section car”, a small vehicle that was mounted on the railway line rails and used by railway officials for inspecting the line. As far as I can work out this was pretty much a road car fitted with railway wheels. Grabchack and his partsians, over a two week period, made a “replica” section car. The base of the vehicle was fitted with five large aircraft bombs. The fuzing arrangement was simple and ingenious. They knew the height of the cross bracings on the bridge. They fastened a long pole, upright between the bombs. Towards the base of the pole was a pivot point and at the base, a length of wire leading to the pin of a grenade fuze connected to the main charge explosively. So the concept was that the “section car” would be sent down the railway, and as it started to cross the bridge, the pole would hit the cross braces of the bridge, pulling the pin from the grenade fuze.   To add to the effect of the “expected” section car, two dummies were made, dressed in German uniforms, one an officer, the other a driver, and sat as realistically as possible in the car.

At 4pm, on 31 October 1943 the car was carefully placed on the rails about 1km from the bridge, just out of sight, near the village of Tepenitsa. It trundled down the line towards the bridge, and seeing it coming a guard opened a barrier and let it enter onto the actual bridge itself, presumably saluting smartly as it passed by. There, the device exploded, damaging the bridge severely.  Interestingly the German forces put out some propaganda that the device was a suicide bomb, driven all the way to the bridge on rails from Moscow, by “fanatical red kamikazes”. Apparently several more of these railway delivered IEDs were constructed and used but I can find no records, which given it was 1943 and the middle of a war full of sabotage operations is not surprising.

I have written a previous piece about trains loaded with explosives in Mexico in 1912, “loco-locos”, here.

So, the analysis of these incidents suggests the following:

1. There are several instances, historically, of trains or vehicles on train lines being the delivery method of getting explosives to targets. A variety of switching methods is possible. The technique can cause significant surprise, and such vehicles can carry sufficient explosives to overwhelm hardened targets.
2. Apparent innovation isn’t always new. Especially on standingwellback.
3. Border crossings are tricky, whichever way you look at it.

1930-1940

Guy Fawkes, MI6 and the NKVD

In my last, lengthy post discussing the Russian IED Godfather Ilya Starinov and his efforts to encourage sabotage and partisan operations (using IEDs) behind enemy lines, I touched on the resistance to such activity that was prevalent in parts of the Russian government.  Stalin’s purges really started in about 1933/1934.  It was the NKVD that drove the purging activity and Starinov observed them destroy his partisan strategies, and arrest and liquidate those partisans  whom he had trained to make and deploy explosive devices.  At the same time, Starinov felt that production of manufactured explosive devices was prevented by the NKVD, because the availability of a stockpile of sabotage devices might, in the eyes of the NKVD, enable counter-revolutionary warfare against the Soviet Union, and so he emphasised improvised explosive making as a result, before the NKVD prevented even his training activity and associated sabotage schools out of a fear of the capability it might provide to people intent on overthrowing the now established government of Stalin.  Starinov thought such precautions were ridiculous and attempted to work around them. And that generally makes sense.

But. But…  What if the NKVD’s concerns had a real grounding? What if there was evidence that those trained to conduct partisan operations against an enemy really could be a threat to their own nation? What if the NKVD had bought onto that concept, that mechanism, to create a capability, what evidence is there to indicate that?  I think I have found some.

In 1938/1939 a British SIS (MI6) officer made a convincing suggestion that Britain needed a sabotage training school.  It would address how British sponsored partisans would work behind enemy lines, gather intelligence and use explosive devices to disrupt the economy and the warfighting of the enemy nation they operated in. The concept is/was remarkably similar to Starinov’s. I think that might not be a coincidence.  The school was established soon after and the SIS officer who suggested the requirement became its Second in Command and a syllabus was developed by another SIS officer acting as Chief Instructor. Training began in 1939. Amusingly the officer who had the idea wanted to call the facility “The Guy Fawkes School”, but this was turned down and the place was called “D School”

So that’s all fine, I hear you thinking, big deal, what’s the connection between this British Sabotage School and Russia, and using the capability of a school against the nation for which it as purported to support?

Well you see… the MI6 officer who suggested the school and became its 2IC was a man called Burgess. The Chief Instructor was called Phiby.

Guy Burgess and Kim Philby were both double agents of the NKVD. So Britain’s sabotage school was doing in the UK exactly what the NKVD was worried about in Russia. The Sabotage School was completely within their very direct and nefarious interest. No wonder they were nervous about Starinov’s training facilities.

Guy Fawkes indeed.

Two Guys – Burgess and Fawkes

1910-1920

This man made IEDs that blew up dozens of British trains

Thanks to “JB” for flagging up an interesting report of an ordnance officer dealing with a German IED in East Africa using “hook and Line” techniques during WW1. It’s led me down a fascinating burrow, and ties up a whole series of IED attacks on trains and other targets. It also provides a dreadful familiarity – an IED campaign with direct parallels to modern IED attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it sits in the context of a part of WW1 that I was barely familiar with. Here’s the story followed by the links and its context in IED history.

This man is Nis Kock. He was a young sailor in the German Navy. He made literally hundreds and probably thousands of IEDs for the the German East African Campaign in WW1.  He is often described as a Danish sailor, but he certainly saw himself as German, although he could speak Danish as well as German.  He was already a member of the German Navy in 1914 when he was recruited for special duties.  The Germans were putting together a blockade runner, a ship disguised as a Danish freighter to slip through the British blockade in the North Sea and resupply the cruiser Königsberg off the East African coast. As a young adventurous man, he jumped at the chance.  His ship, a captured British steamer the “Rubens“, was called the “Kronborg” for the purposes of the mission, loaded with coal, dynamite, field guns and ammunition. It slipped through the blockade in late February 1915, sailed the Atlantic and round to the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa. There the Königsberg was being blocked by British cruisers in the Rufiji delta. At the time there was also a land campaign beginning between the British and the German Forces in East Africa under the command of General Lettow-Vorbeck – a remarkable character. I dont have space to describe this campaign but suffice to say that a few thousand German forces tied up a quarter of million British Empire troops for the duration of the war, who might otherwise have been deployed to the Western Front.  It was a nasty, vicious campaign fought in appalling conditions in the jungle and the bush. What is little known, I think, is the key role that IEDs played in restricting British movement in the theatre. Certainly the use of explosive devices or mines is barely mentioned in British history but it is clear they were fundamental to Lettow-Vorbeck’s successful strategy, operations and tactics.

When the Kronborg arrived off the coast of East Africa it raised the suspicions of the British Royal Navy, spotting it as it tried to break through their screening blockade, and chased it into the shallow water of Manza Bay (nowadays in Northern Tanzania). The ship was damaged by naval gunfire, and scuttled with just her superstructure remaining above water while the crew escaped ashore. Importantly the cargo received little damage and the British didn’t realise this. Over subsequent weeks, Nis Kock and his fellow crew members recovered most of the cargo from the semi-submersed Kronborg, and much of this material became Kock’s raw materials for IED manufacture in subsequent months and years.

What happened next is interesting. The Kronberg’s pseudo-Danish crew (actually German) were co-opted into the German East African Force. Nis Kock, clearly a bright individual was made assistant to the “munitions director”. His task was to store the explosives and munitions and prepare them for use. Keen readers of this blog will recall the following earlier posts:

  1. The use of firearm mechanisms for explosive device initiation.
  2. How trigger mechanisms were used by the Boers in the Boer War to initiate explosive devices atacking British trains

Now it appears that there were a number of Boers, veterans of the war against the British in South Africa a decade and a half earlier. They clearly remembered the technique of using an upturned trigger mechanism as a switch to initiate the explosives in a device. Kock was instructed to manufacture such devices and he got to work.

Here’s a reminder of the Boer device:

It would appear from Kock’s diaries that he perhaps wasn’t aware of the origins of this concept, but he certainly churned them out as packages for the raiding German insurgency to deploy, probably in their hundreds.  It’s clear to me that they were key and central to Lettow-Vorbeck’s plans as Kock received constant requests to produce more.  He was operating either from makeshift workshops or “in the field’ and developed, I think, remarkable skills.  The impact of the IEDs made by Kock was considerable, for example in the summer of 1915, Lettow Vorbeck turned his attention to the Ugandan railway – which ran through what is now Kenya and was a key logistical route for the British. The German insurgency (and that’s what it absolutely was) had considerable success with their IEDs. For example in one short period between March and May 1915, the German insurgents using IEDs blew up 32 British trains, nine bridges and a dam. I believe that these could have all been devices made by Nis Kock.

Kock himself occasionally laid his improvised mines. His experience indicated to him that setting the device was somewhat tricky with the bomb-layer having to reach into the buried device to release the safety catch on the device once it was in position and he describes in his diaries that as a consequence he developed a new design that made the process safer and easier. Regrettably there are no details of this design change.

Kock used a variety of components – usually the initiation switches were the trigger mechanisms from damaged firearms, used either as booby traps or as pull switches for demolitions.  I suspect there was a shortage of “detonators/blasting caps” and there were no batteries to use electrical initiation methods so this got around that problem with the damaged firearm firing a bullet into a main charge of dynamite or an adapted shell fuze. But I am guessing a little here, as Kock deliberately is a little vague on detail in his notes. The main charge was either dynamite recovered from the Kronborg, ammunition intended for the Königsberg in terms of naval gun shells or captured munitions.  The devices were used against trains but also as demolition charges and to emplace on tracks used by the British in the bush, placing a wooden board on top of the trigger and lightly covering the board with sand and earth. Here’s a translated excerpt from his diaries:

 

As I researched the context of this insurgency and its use of IEDs I was struck often by the similarity between the activity of Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla groups and more recent insurgent IED campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s remarkable campaign is worthy of closer study in that context.

Most of all, I am intrigued of a very weird parallel.  At the exact time that Kock was enabling Von Lettow-Korbeck’s campaign against the British in East Africa, exploding devices under trains on the Uganda railway initiated with rifle triggers, an idea from the Boer War, then an identical campaign was being waged in Arabia. Here, Lawrence of Arabia’s insurgent campaign against the Ottoman Turks and the Hejaz railway, was being enabled by Garland’s trigger-initiated IEDs, inspired too by the Boer war experience. See here and here. Same device, same war, different campaigns, different sides.

In terms of an EOD response, there appears to be very little detail.  Here’s the diary event which was sent to me which started off this pot.  In his War Diary, Major Guy Routh reports, “having to dissect these German contraptions for blowing up our train engines and although they learnt to put two trucks of stones in front of the engines, the enemy countered that with delay fuzes. It was no fun pulling a wire from behind a wall in case the bombs go off, nor was it a job that could be delegated”.  It should be noticed also that there was a little technological battle ongoing between the IED design and the countermeasures designed to defeat it – again this translates directly to much more recent experience in recent wars. However new we feel these modern IED threats are, they have almost always been seen before, it’s just that history is always forgotten.

Update: Some more detail of the attacks:

Here’s two photos showing that bridges were blown up:

 

 

I have also found a report that the Germans (probably Kock) made improvised command-detonated sea mines for use at the coast, however none functioned as intended. For attacks on tracks against foot patrols and vehicles, it appears that as well as the wooden board method, the trigger mechanisms were adapted to function by trip wire.

My friend Ian Mills, who has investigated the Boer use of these devices in the earlier Boer conflict reminded me that the British used the counter-IED method of pushing two sand or rock loaded carriages ahead of the train as sacrificial elements against Boer IEDs, so the British re-used this technique here. The Germans claim to have developed a mechanism that would “count” the number of wheels that passed over, so circumventing this counter-measure. Regrettably I have no detail of this.

It also appears that the most effective IEDs were actually made from British demolition charges, captured by the Germans at Tanga.

17th Century

Meester’s Ship IEDs of 1695

I’ve written a few times before about ship IEDs, which typically are massive devices sailed into an enemy port and then exploded after the crew flee. You can see my earlier posts on the subject by following the “Ship IED” link in the right hand column to this page. The earliest I have is 1584 and the “Hoop” used against the Spanish in Antwerp, and the latest is HMS Campbelltown used against the Germans in St Nazaire in WW2.  In one of my earlier posts I mentioned in passing that such devices were used by the Royal Navy against Dunkirk in the 1690s. I have used a number of sources and there are some odd date discrepancies. The main attack on Dunkirk appears to have been on 1 August 1695 but I think there were other attacks at least one other using a “machine vessel”.

I have now found more details of these ship born IEDs used against Dieppe and Dunkirk in 1694 and 1695. The explosive component was designed and built by a Dutchman, Willem Meesters, who was contracted by the Ordnance Board in 1690 to provide the devices and convert a number of small ships. Meesters, favoured by the King, was appointed by the Board Of Ordnance to be “Storekeeper of the Ordnance” in the Tower of London in 1691. The attack on Dunkirk in 1695 was a complete failure and there was much recrimination between those involved and some of the blame was apportioned to Meesters. He was accused of “Cowardice and Misconduct” by the commanding admiral.  The attack on Dunkirk, as did other attacks in that era on St Malo and other targets used a range of special ships. and it is important to understand the differences:

a. “Bomb Ships” are not ships designed to explode, they carry large mortars and bomb the target from close to shore

b. “Fire Ships” are disposable ships, which are set fire to and drift into enemy shipping, causing confusion, smoke obscuration and hopefully set fire to ships they collide with.

c. “Machine ships” are the ones we are interested in, with “infernal machines” which explode. They may be disguised as fire ships.

The technical detail of Meester’s “machine ships” is described in his proposal to the Ordnance Board.  He proposed to use a watertight metal box fitted with a clockwork mechanism which acted on a flintlock as the initiator for other explosives. Around this box were packed barrels of gunpowder, scrap metal and “fireworks”. Some of his vessels were designed to explode with great violence and others simply to provide smoke screens.

Meester’s design, in general principle, is identical to both that of the “Hoop” in 1585, and the Campbeltown in 1942 – a mechanical time fuze set to initiate a massive improvised charge in a ship. I still find it fascinating that this near identical history of ship IEDs stretches so long over the centuries.

In May 1692, Meesters was authorised to purchase a number of vessels in which his ‘machines’ could be fitted. He bought, at first, seven vessels and some months were spent fitting them out for his purpose. All the ships were former Dutch merchant vessels. These were renamed, and by 1694 were based in Portsmouth, each with a crew of 10. A number of these were paid off and not used but the ones deployed operationally which exploded were:

1. Abram’s Offering, a 55ft vessel under Commander Edward Cole. This ship was recorded as “expended” during the Dunkirk attack in “September 1696”.

2. Saint Nicholas, a 70ft vessel under Commander Roert Dunbar. This was exploded in an attack on Dieppe in July 1694.

Then a series of smaller vessels were bought, each with a crew of 4. These were never used.

In 1695 four larger vessels were purchased and all were exploded in an attack on Dunkirk in August 1695. I have only the names of these vessels – Ephraim, Happy Return, Mayflower and the Wiliam and Elizabeth.  All four of these “machine vessels” were set too early and didn’t get close enough to shore and caused no damage to the Dunkirk targets when they exploded. The admirals were not happy, Meesters was arrested, made to demonstrate another device, which itself failed. But he seemed to retain the patronage of the King, and remained in his official position at the Tower of London until 1701.

Despite the attack being a failure, I have found a treasury record that he was paid (three years later), the large sum of £3222 for provision of these machine ships for the attack on Dunkirk.

19th Century

A railway bomb in Watford, 1880

Another in my series of bombs on railways. (see the tags for Railway IEDs in the RH column) This one an unsolved case from 1880 where the perpetrators of an attempt to blow up the London and North Western railway were never discovered.  Early on the morning of Monday 13th September 1880, a gang of workmen were doing a routine check of the line between Bushey and Watford, about 16 miles north of Euston. They were half a mile from Bushey station  when they discovered an explosive device, apparently damaged by a passing train. The device consisted of a package of dynamite placed beneath the rails. Connected to it was a rubber tube filled with gunpowder and some detonators. The assessment is that the rubber tube was somehow placed on the line, with the intent that a trains wheels would have crushed the detonators, ignited the gunpowder and hence initiated the dynamite.  The workers recovered the package and took it to the police, suggesting that the rubber tube had fallen off the rail due to the vibrations of the approaching train. A separate, slightly contradictory, report suggests the tube was cut by the trains wheels but no detonator had been crushed. I suspect the former is more likely. The dynamite was in the form of cylinders, 4 inches long, and one inch in diameter, then wrapped in newspaper, and then brown paper, tied with whipcord. Later analysis suggests the dynamite and detonators were standard commercially available materials for quarrying.

The motive for the attack was unclear. One suggestion was that the device was the work of Russian “nihilists” attempting to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, who travelled on the line a day or two earlier.

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