Standing Well Back
1870-1880

Alexander Keith and the Crime of the Century bomb

This is another oddity.  Alexander Keith was born a Scotsman in 1827. He worked in Canada for a while and then worked for the Confederate States in the American Civil war as a blockade runner. In one escapade he was involved in what would today be called a chem bio plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever into the Northern cities in the United States.

It appears that he attempted to swindle some colleagues and fled to St Louis and then settled on the prairie. However one of his alleged victims tracked him down and he fled again, this time to Europe, where he assumed the name of “William King Thomas”, and later the alias William Thompson.  As he began to run out of money, in 1875, he concocted a complex insurance fraud that involved blowing up a passenger ship.  But his plans went badly wrong.

Keith hid a large timed IED in a barrel and arranged for it to be shipped across the Atlantic to New York in the steamship Mosel.  As the barrel was being loaded onto to the Mosel, the barrel slipped, fell and exploded on the dockside in Bremerhaven.  There must have been a significant quantity of explosives, and in a massive explosion 80 people were killed.  A witness stated ” “A mushroom-shaped column of smoke rose approximately 200 meters above the harbor. Everywhere people were crying and whimpering beside ruins. The entire pier was covered in soot: it was like the gateway to hell.”    Newspapers of the time dubbed the incident the “crime of the century”.

Interestingly Keith was on the Mosel and clearly understood that his plan had gone wrong. He had intended to sail on the ship, but leave it, and its explosive cargo, when he got to Southampton.  He went to his cabin immediately, and shot himself in the head twice (think about that…) . In the drama of the post blast no-one noticed the two shots from his cabin – only later did someone hear a groaning from his cabin. The door, locked from the inside, was broken down and Keith found lying on the floor, still alive. A revolver was by his side with 4 remaining bullets. His second shot paralyzed him.

Now, as I have written before, placing IEDs on ships was something that confederate agents had done before. (My next blog post will be about confederate “coal torpedo” IEDs used to damage ships) But by 1870 dynamite had become available significantly increasing the potential of an IED. As we know, Confederate IEDs had utilized clockwork mechanisms. Keith needed to obtain one for his plan, and had approached a German clock making company called JJ Fuchs of Bernberg, with a  request for a silent spring-loaded mechanism capable of functioning after a 10 day delay.  Keith refused to explain why he needed the mechanism but Fuchs designed it nonetheless. The mechanism was large and weighed about 30 pounds, and was so expensive that Keith initially refused to buy it. He approached two Viennese clock makers for a cheaper alternative but they failed, so eventually he returned to Fuchs.


The Fuchs timing mehcanism

There remain suspicions that Keith may have been involved in the disappearance of at least two other ships, The SS City Of Boston in January 1875 and the schooner Marie Victoria in 1864.

 


The suicide note

1940-1950

Exotic characters, IEDs and brothels

As the previous post showed there were some interesting characters who could get away with some pretty individualistic approaches to life in World War Two. I’m reading about another just now, Lt Col Billy McLean, an irregular solider who fought with the guerillas in Abyssinia (Wingate’s Gideon Force) and with the partisans in Albania as part of SOE.  Earlier posts discussed how TE Lawrence and Bimbashi Garland, originally based out of the Arab Bureau offices in Cairo took the war to the Turks in WW1 – and it’s clear some of that approach was still extant in Cairo in the Second World War. McLean tells of being trained in IED manufacture at a Commando depot in Egypt, prior to deployment to Abyssinia, and specifically how to blow up trains in the manner of Garland and Lawrence. This, despite the fact that the only train line in Abyssinia, from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, was long since out of service…  But as he says this fact did not dampen their ardour and they happily blew up railway tracks every morning.

He was then taught in the classroom how to make postal IEDs. Their instructor facetiously told them to address their real, but practice, IEDs to someone obvious like Mussolini or Hitler.  One of the sergeants, a fellow student of McLean laboriously addressed the IED to the commanding officer of his own regiment…. : – )

Beyond this, McLean’s experiences in Abyssinia and Albania have some intersting parrallels with modern day SOF operations, in terms of living alongside, fighting with and commanding and mentoring indigenous troops of variable and frankly sometimes doubtful quality, against a mutual enemy.  Such things are not new and there are lessons to be learned, still.  But on the other hand, although public flogging of indigenous troops for wasting bullets might have worked for Abyssinia in 1940, it might not work today.

McLean’s “irregular” traits came to the fore – he was arrested by the military police in an Abbysssinian brothel while “consorting with a particularly attractive inmate who did not smell in the least, apart from a faint tinge of garlic on the breath” but the arresting military policeman turned a blind eye for a moment, and McLean (then a  young Captain) took that as an invitation to scarper into the night.

There are some wonderful throw away lines in the description of Albanian operations such as “Food was in short supply. Luckily one of the mules died and provided them with meat.”

20th Century

US C-IED and counter booby-trap efforts on the Battlefield – 1918

Further to my earlier post about German booby-traps on the battlefield in 1918 and the similarities to today’s IED threat, I’ve found the following typed document, a briefing paper, of sorts, from the office of the Chief Engineer of the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918. The document is titled “GERMAN TRAPS AND MINES” and describes the booby traps being encountered by American forces as the Germans retreated. Those of you with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan will recognise some of the phrases.

The document is a little faded, but I’ll make it as big as possible. It’s worth reading.

 

Sabotage During World Wars

Booby trap IEDs on the Battlefield – 1918

Readers may recall that I have blogged before about German IEDs and sabotage devices in the US during the period 1915- 1918, focused on munitions plants and shipping on the US East Coast.  I’ve been doing some more research on German IEDs of the period in general and found a remarkable number in Europe right towards the end of the war. A significant number were being left behind when the German army retreated in 1918 and others were being transported from Germany via Norway and Switzerland  Some of the IEDs were sophisticated and used some dastardly (love that word) initiation systems.  Here’s some examples:

In October 1918, because so many “infernal machines” had been found, US forces adopted a strict policy of clearance of  facilities vacated by retreating Germans. Therefore they must have by implication had a significant search and EOD capability. US forces discovered a temperature initiated IED in one dug out left behind by retreating Germans.  US ordnance specialists defused the device and assessed that since there were no houses in the area, the Germans expected the advancing Americans to occupy the dug out , and that when they warmed up the space, the switch would have initiated the device.   In the dug out they found the temperature switch under a “cot”, with ten large artillery shells buried nearby connected to the switch.   On at least one occasion a device left in a bed in a house vacated by German troops detonated killing an allied soldier who lay on it.  There are reports of a booby trapped pair of binoculars.  As one quote of the time said

There are unsubstantiated reports that the Germans realized how popular their spiked helmets (pickelhaube) were and so frequently booby trapped them.

Another report (written by Col Joseph Hyde of the US 105th Engineers) reported a 300 pound device in a church steeple, connected to a pressure plate where a man might kneel in front of the altar.

In April 1918 , Norwegian authorities discovered one hundred and seven IEDs that had been smuggled into Norway by German agents, with a view to attacking Norwegian shipping. Also recovered were:

104 incendiaries

9 IEDs disguised as lumps of coal

133”strikers”

269 detonators

470 tubes of acid (for delay fusing)

33 pieces of explosives disguised as chewing tobacco

some fountain pens filled with acid as delay initiators

95 large rectangular bombs in iron cases, initiated with a clockwork mechanism

Also in 1918, Swiss authorities discovered a similar plot, which involved German diplomats smuggling sabotage devices and explosives through Switzerland and on to Italy.  In a similar manner to the way in which IEDs were manufactured in the US, so the Germans established two bomb making facilities in Switzerland at this time.

Here’s a couple of press clips about the devices,  one in a piano in 1916 and one from 1918.

 

I have found some interesting official US Army documents detailing how common booby traps and other IEDs were towards the end of WW1 – they bear remarkable resemblance to documents detailing the threat in Afghanistan today –  I’ll post them in a few days time.

20th Century

Bombing Hitler – A lone-wolf bomber in 1939

Hitler was the subject of a number of assassination attempts. This is the story one of the lesser known ones, using an IED.

Georg Elser was an ordinary German carpenter who took a dislike to Hitler in the 1930s. In late 1938 Elser decided to assassinate Hitler. He took this decision apparently as an individual, with no outside help.  He became aware that once a year Hitler returned to Munich to give a speech in a famous Munich Beer Cellar.  He visited the cellar in November 1938 and decided it would be the site of an attack a year later, showing immense patience and careful planning. Not having access to explosives but realising that an IED would be suited to the attack, Elser got a job in a quarry and over the year was able to steal enough explosive components. He made several “test” devices and exploded them successfully in the Bavarian countryside.

 

Several weeks before the planned assassination, Elsner frequented the Beer cellar and each night hid in a storeroom before closing time. Then after everyone had left, he spent the night preparing the location for his concealed IED. He removed a wooden panel and hid the explosives in a space he chipped out methodically from a stone pillar adjacent to where Hitler was due to speak.  The preparation took two months, working almost every night.

Finally Elser placed the charge, which he had built into a cork lined wooden box, to conceal the noise of the ticking clock timer. He set the timer to go off at 9.20pm on 8 November 1939, twenty minutes into Hitler’s scheduled hour long speech.  The IED functioned right on time, right as expected, killing eight and wounding dozens more.  The only problem was that Hitler had rescheduled the time, had spoken at 8pm and was out of the building at 9.07pm, to catch a train.

Elsner was caught trying to cross the border into Switzerland and arrested.  The border police then found a postcard of the beer cellar in his pocket along with a diagram of an IED. The game was up. Elsner confessed all. He was imprisoned and eventually killed in Dachau concentration camp.

 

There were other attempts to kill Hitler with explosives, including the von Stauffenberg plot, and other failed plots, one involving a suicide IED hidden in the operatives trousers…(underpants bombers aren’t new!) and one hidden in a bottle of Cointreau – I’ll save those stories for future blog posts.

This attack was interesting – by being able to (almost) predict a year in advance the presence of his target Elser was able to conceal an IED behind wooden panelling and time the device to explode at the right time – exactly the same technique used in the failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher with a timed device hidden behind panelling in the Brighton Hotel in 1984.

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