Standing Well Back
1920-1930

The Bath School Bombing – 1927

I’ve been doing this blog for some time, and vacuuming up data on historical bombing incidents for even longer. For some reason I thought I had done a piece on the Bath School Bombing some years ago – but turns out I hadn’t.

The tragedy of the Bath School Bombing is still with us today – so called “lone-wolf” terrorists with a grievance against society are still with us and that strange focus on schools still perplexes us all. The attack has some technical aspects that are interesting – the bomber emplacing a concealed large device over many weeks, the classic “return to the scene” and the use of a suicide car bomb – an early one.

Here’s the story. In 1927 Andrew Kehoe was a 55 year old single man living in the town of Bath, not far from Lansing in Michigan, USA. His mother had died when he was a child. His step-mother died in a strange accident with a stove and there are allegations that Kehoe or his father may have tampered with that stove.  So, he had a troubled childhood.   He had in earlier years killed a neighbour’s dog and also a horse that he owned, out of frustration with it. So – an angry man. He later qualified as an electrician which is probably pertinent.

In 1926 Kehoe lost a local election, and this appears to have been the cause of his subsequent acts. He started stockpiling explosives at that time, and also, it seems he undertook various actions to make his foreclosed farm less valuable to its eventual owners – he cut all the wire fencing, killed the trees and killed his grapevines. His wife, Nellie, suffered from tuberculosis and this further strained his finances. At the time of the attack she was chronically ill.

It seems Kehoe’s plan was to punish the community that rejected him – and that the school, (which he objected to paying taxes to support) was as good a representative of the community as he could find. Indeed he was employed by the school as a temporary electrician at one time, so knew the layout and access to the school buildings. Kehoe bought explosives from farm suppliers in small batches over many months and after the incident, police came to the conclusion that more dynamite was stolen by him from a bridge construction team some time earlier.

On May 16, his wife Nellie was discharged from hospital and some time later was murdered by Kehoe. He set a number of incendiary devices in the home and its outbuildings. These were initiated at 0845 on 18 May.   At about the same time, a timed explosive device detonated underneath the North wing of the school where the device had been hidden in the basement. The device was timed with an adapted alarm clock. 38 people were killed in the explosion – mostly children. Lessons had started 15 minutes earlier.

At about 0915, Kehoe arrived at the bomb site in his Ford truck. He summoned over the police chief, Superintendent Emory Huyck.  There was a brief struggle over a rifle and then the truck itself exploded, killing Kehoe, the Police Chief, a local man, and a child who had survived the first explosion. Another man died later from injuries caused. It appears that additional shrapnel had been piled on the back seat on top of a charge of dynamite. I think there is little doubt that this was in effect a suicide VBIED. Investigation at his home found the body of his wife and also two dead, hobbled horses , feet tied with wire, in a burnt-down stable.

During the follow up to rescue injured children another 500 pounds of explosive was found in the basement under the South wing of the school. It had failed to detonate, but was also attached to a timer set to switch at 0845.  Here’s photo of the recovered explosives.

After the events investigators found this sign attached to the Kehoe property gate, presumably attached there by Kehoe himself.

This sad tale suggests that lone bombers are not solely modern phenomena. Easy access to explosives enables such acts, and the technology is “easy”.  The strained mental health of potentially violent people remain issues today.

(All images public domain)

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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

20th Century

The US Navy Sub that destroyed a train, with an IED

I’ve written a few blogs in the past about IEDs placed under train tracks, that the weight of the train triggers. As a reminder:

  • In the US Civil War, in 1864, the Union Army designed an IED (a “rail torpedo”) that initiated when a train ran over a rail , pressing down on a gun trigger that caused the device to function.
  • Another IED design was used in the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, with the rail pressing on an artillery fuse to initiate the charge.
  • In the Boer War, in 1901, Jack Hindon used devices under railways to attack British trains, using an upturned Martini Henry gun lock, with the rail bending under weight to press on the trigger which initiated an explosive charge.
  • In WW1, ordnance specialist “Bimbashi” Garland designed and deployed similar devices, again using an upturned gun trigger, and used by Lawrence of Arabia to great effect against the Ottoman Turk trains in Arabia.

I’m glad to say I’ve now found a similar device, with a great story, from WW2.   The use of the IED was effectively the ONLY US ground combat operation on the Japanese homeland in the entire war. (Noting that the attack took place in southern Sakhalin, which was considered a Japanese home island at the time) .

Late in the war, US Navy submarines began to patrol very aggressively close to the Japanese mainland. One of the subs was the USS Barb, skippered by Commander Eugene Fluckley. The patrol in question started on 8 June 1945 and involved a variety of attacks including, unusually, firing rockets at Japanese targets from the deck of the surfaced submarine. After noting considerable Japanese railway activity on a railway line near the shore, a plan was developed to blow up a train by putting a team ashore at Karafuto from the submarine.

An improvised device was carefully designed.  As far as I can make out it was as follows:

  • The main charge was a 55lb super-Torpex “scuttling charge” held in reserve on the submarine for scuttling the sub in an emergency. The blasting caps used must have been the ones meant to be used with this charge.
  • Power was provided by two dry cell batteries.
  • The switch was a microswitch removed from some electronic equipment on board.
  • The batteries and circuitry were mounted inside an oil-can to protect it from the elements. Included was a “test circuit” to ensure safety.

The crew made careful calculations to estimate the deflection of the railway line  (7/10″, which was adjusted on the operation itself to 1/4″) and made an improvised gauge to help the setting of the switch. They also made improvised shovels to help bury the charge under the rails. An eight man team was put ashore in inflatable boats and made their way (with one or two adventures) towards the track.

The charge was successfully initiated by a 16 carriage train and all the saboteur group escaped unharmed. Commder Fluckley ended the war as the most decorated officer in the Navy.

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