Standing Well Back
20th Century

Starinov, Krushchev and the radio-controlled explosive device

In my last post I promised a little more on Ilya Starinov, the Russian explosives expert and the godfather/grandfather of sabotage explosive attacks.  In the blog post on the F-10 explosive device I recounted how Starinov himself was directly involved in planting the F-10 radio controlled device that killed German General Braun in Kharkov in 1941, and this story relates to that incident directly.

The Russian retreat from Kharkhov was carefully planned. Hundreds of “stay-behind” explosive devices were left and Starinov was directly involved. Some of the explosive devices were on timers, some of them with victim-operated switches, and a good handful of F-10 radio controlled devices, these usually with very large charges associated with them. Furthermore there were large numbers of deliberate indications  left behind that the Russians created to give the impression of yet more devices to further slow the German progress into the region – holes in the ground, disturbed earth, and hoax devices where no device was actually planted, and sometimes devices laid on top of other hidden devices.  According to Soviet sources, 30,000 anti-tank mines were laid in and around Kharkov, about 1000 victim operated devices, and 2000 timed devices.

This anecdote relates to Starinov’s role in this and I cannot be certain it is true, but it is a story worth telling anyway.  A key individual in the Soviet forces in the region was Nikita Khrushchev, who apparently worked closely with Starinov. It is clear, with our view of history, that the Russians expected a significant German EOD effort – by November 1941 the pattern of “stay-behind” devices had been set, including the use of F-10 devices hidden in likely headquarter buildings to be occupied by advancing German forces  in Odessa and Kiev in previous months.

Here’s a pic of an F-10 device being removed from the Opera House in Kiev in October 1941, by a German EOD team. The distinctive construct of the F10 receiver is clear.

-and below is a fascinating Nazi propaganda film showing towards the end the explosive charges and German EOD team’s removal and inspection of the F-10 device itself recovered from the Kiev Opera House. Quite remarkable footage.

So Starinov was instrumental in the dummy devices, and the efforts to overwhelm, fool, distract and out-think the Wehrmacht engineers.   In the run up to the German advance, Krushchev’s headquarters was in a building in Dzerzhinskiy Street on Kharkov, in a building identified by Starinov as likely to be soon used as a German headquarters. Learning the lessons from Kiev, according to this story, two F-10 devices were planted, one hidden carefully below the other in the basement.  Interestingly Krushchev did not move out from the headquarters immediately, as he felt this might give an indication to the advancing Germans that the building was prepared with F-10 devices.  So clearly Krushchev and Starinov met and there was a degree of trust between the two. But remember, the political atmosphere within Soviet forces was febrile and senior officers were frequently “purged”, accused by Beria’s secret police. In some ways Starinov had been lucky to escape, but here we see perhaps a clue giving one reason he had evaded the purges.

As the Germans entered Kharkov, they did indeed , as Starinov expected, have some success at finding and rendering safe quite a number of explosive devices. Nazi propaganda was quick to trumpet these successes and their success against the “dastardly Bolshevik devices”. This apparent success was noticed by Beria’s secret police, who saw, perhaps, that the devices were being found too easily, giving the German’s success and suggested that something had been so planned by Starinov. The Nazi propaganda from the previous month of the device being found in Kiev would perhaps have added to their suspicions. Then General Braun’s staff made an announcement that they had “easily cleared the major part of the mines”.  The secret police prepared a case against Starinov, but Krushchev got to hear of it. He advised Starinov to detonate the two devices in the Dzerzinskiy Street Headquarters now, as predicted, occupied by General Braun.

According to the source I have found the “top” F-10 explosive device planted in the cellar had, as expected, been found, made safe and the initiation mechanism presented to General Braun, showing the headquarters was made safe. The now safe initiator sat on a desk in a main room. Accordingly Starinov, warned of the expected investigation by the secret police, ordered the first device initiated – and in the main hall of the German headquarters the receiver “clicked”, to the delight of the Wehrmacht.  Five minutes later the second device, still hidden deep under the building and with a massive charge attached to it received the necessary transmission… and General Braun and many of his staff perished in the explosion. Thus , Starinov’s investigation was dropped by the secret police, and he continued his career.

I should state that other sources slightly contradict this story – saying the “top device” designed to be found was a time delay device. But perhaps the story as detailed above makes a better story – I found it in a 1963 edition of Izvestiya, and it too may well be propaganda. The best stories often are. I do note that the Izvestiya report gets the wrong date attributing it to 1942 and not November 1941.

Here’s a picture of Starinov I have found. I’m not sure when this was taken but I suspect it was some years after the war. Starinov is the older man in civilian clothes pictured with serving Russian soldiers, perhaps those he was training in the late 1960s or 1970s.

Here’s another picture of Starinov taken, I think in the late 1980s.

 

And here, as young man being introduced to Marshal Klim Voroshilov.

The efforts of the German Wehrmacht EOD/Engineer units in dealing with the significant explosive threat in places like Kiev and Kharkov in 1941 probably deserve some attention.

 

 

1940-1950

The Russian IED connection

Last year I wrote two important blog pieces. The first was about the Russian IED expert Ilya Starinov – certainly the most important person in the history of explosive sabotage.  The second post was about the Russian F-10 radio controlled demolition device, used successfully by Starinov in WW2.

Since than I have been digging to find more details of Starinov’s devices, which I have finally successfully done, and there are some very interesting findings.    I’ve also uncovered other anecdotal stuff about Starinov and indeed about the broader history of IEDs which I’ll post in coming days and weeks.  I also have more technical detail on the F-10 to discuss in future posts.

Now, firstly, a caution. Some of the material I have found regarding the construction and design of certain IEDs could be abused by people with ill-intent. All the material I am going to post is unclassified, but I’m going to obscure parts of it and discuss things in some vague terms  to make it much less useful to those with criminal intent.  If you want to know the source and you know me or can prove you have a legitimate need to see the sources I am using, then get in touch. Otherwise I make no apology for being deliberately non-specific about some of this material. Now, I found the source of this material on line, and others may be able too, but I am going to limit my helpfulness towards those who shouldn’t have this detail.  If you want to challenge my assessments and why I draw the conclusions I reach below, I’m very happy to do this off-line.  This means, perhaps, you are going to have to trust me on some of my assessments. Or not!  Finally I should also point out, sadly, that there is no shortage of detailed technical instructions for miscreants to find how to make bigger and better IEDs then these here discussed in an openly available 70-year-old document, discussing devices from the Eastern Front in 1942.  The horse of IED knowledge bolted a long time ago.  Close the stable door if you can – I can’t.

The document I found was developed not from Russian sources, but from US sources, who clearly in the immediate post-war period of 1945-1950 had access to German Wehrmacht engineers reports. These engineers had conducted thousands of successful EOD operations. By gleaning reports of Soviet demolition activity, dealt with by the German engineers in WW2, the US military tried to gain a greater understanding of Soviet capabilities in the 1950s. So this was real technical intelligence on Soviet explosive technology, and explosive sabotage tactics, as the Cold War span up.  So here we have, in 2020, the opportunity to examine 1950s US military technical intelligence, derived from Nazi German technical intelligence from the period 1940-1945, about Russian explosive devices.  So this isn’t exactly a primary source.  But some of the detail I’m going to show you makes me convinced this is worthwhile, valuable historical material, and there are certain aspects which surprised me.

Firstly to remind you of the context. It is apparent that the Soviet soldier of WW2 was pretty familiar with improvising explosives charges, either using his own munitions or captured German munitions. The Germans state that the Russian soldier is “particularly ingenious in installing improvised mines and booby traps“. During the latter part of WW2, the Russian use of sabotage explosive devices went way beyond anything seen before or since. Furthermore partisans in Eastern European countries were trained to improvise yet further. Thousands of railway lines, trains and vehicles were attacked explosively by Russians or Russian sponsored partisans in eastern Europe. Much of this was coordinated by Ilya Starinov, who also designed explosive devices , trained the perpetrators and on many occasions planted key devices himself. Starinov survived numerous purges, and went on to develop spetzntaz units and tactics, and taught revolutionaries around the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

In this first post, I’m going to highlight some very interesting similarities between Soviet sabotage devices from WW2 and (get this) IRA devices of the 1970’s, 1980’s and even 1990’s.  These similarities go beyond just application of general explosive/sabitage principles – there are significant design similarities in aspects of the devices.  Here’s some examples, and a final, highly technical device that I won’t comment on too deeply.

  1. Firstly there is the use of specific component items.  In the 1970s and into the 1990s, many PIRA devices encountered in the UK had firing or arming switches as part of the circuitry. In the vast majority of cases, in what was termed “Time and Power Units” (TPUs) this switch consisted of an adapted wooden springed clothes peg help open with a wooden dowel. Here’s a demonstration circuit showing the “IRA technique”.
  2. The clothes peg was wired so that a switch closed when an insulator was removed from the jaws of the peg, arming this device. In the 1950 document I have found. German engineers describe this exact concept being found in Russian devices in the early 1940s. Here’s a pic:  

3. In the late 1980s, PIRA developed the “Mk 12” mortar as British Forces called it. This was followed in 1993 by the smaller “Mk16” Mortar. These were missiles that had a shaped charge in its front end, a hollow pipe behind it containing a fuze and tail fins to stabilise in flight.  This wasn’t really a mortar but a horizontally fired missile typically fired at vehicles. It had a shaped charge warhead and a fuze set in the hollow tube behind, with simple fns to stabilise  it in its short flight.  Here’s  a picture of a PIRA Mk 12 Mortar. disassembled:

4. In WW2 Russian partisans developed a device that is remarkably similar. Not tube-launched but built for a similar purpose and with almost identical design principles. Here’s the pic from the 1950 report:

5.  The Russians also concentrated significantly on additional circuits or mechanisms to booby trap charges. By introducing anti-handling and anti-lift charges, several of the devices used by the Soviets appear remarkably similar to what the British EOD community of the 1970’s refer to as “Castlerobin” devices. I’m not going to discuss this further here. But clearly there is a thought-process going on to prevent the render safe of devices, and target the EOD operator. The parallels in design are clear.

6. The creation of devices which target EOD activities went a step further with the introduction of a RF sensitive switch designed to initiate an explosive device when certain mine detection equipment was used. This was fielded in December 1943.  Some of this equipment was captured by the Wehrmacht in January 1944, and rapidly exploited.  70 years later , technology which is triggered by the RF signature of certain EOD equipments would be regarded as a very high threat indeed – yet, here the Russians were in the early 1940s developing such technology. The device responded to a frequency of 800-2000Hz at short range, emitted by German EOD equipment. What is more, the Germans recognised the importance of such an advance, examined the Russian technology, identified some flaws, and developed their own version of the equipment. They also developed technical solutions to the threat.   I find that remarkable, and some of you will share my surprise for reasons we won’t go into. Here’s an excerpt from the report showing the circuit to prove it is what I say it is – (I have obscured part of it for reasons explained earlier).

To be clear in my assessments: I’m not saying that the IRA devices of the late twentieth century were designed by the Russians – just that there are some odd parallels, that may be coincidences. Direct influence is possible but so, theoretically, is the potential for the IRA to have got hold of the American report written in the 1950s. It’s not secret.  But we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that Starinov was training revolutionaries from around the world. I do think that these parallels once again highlight the importance of understanding the history of IEDs.  The fact that Russian devices were so focused on countering EOD action is interesting and significant and deserves wider understanding.  The general under-appreciation of the extensive, WW2 Russian sabotage campaigns using improvised explosive devices is barely recognised and deserves a much greater level of attention. Frankly it makes the efforts of the British SOE or American OSS look very paltry in comparison.

In future blogs related to all this I will address the following:

  1. Some Russian devices designed specifically for targeting railways – further to my series in the subject. Some were designed by Starinov himself.
  2. More technical details of the Russian F-10 radio controlled device.
  3. Some more details and photographs of Ilya Starinov, and an interesting story about the F-10 radio-controlled devices he deployed to assassinate German General General Braun in Kharkov in November 1941, and the role of a young commissar called Krushchev (yes, that one) in the operation, protecting Starinov from being arrested by Beria’s agents and “purged” before the device was detonated.
  4. An odd and fascinating series of parallels between this 1950s American report and another American report written in 1865 showing almost identical devices. History repeating itself again. Some of the Russian devices of WW2 are identical to Russian devices of the 1850s, and some other Russian devices of WW2 are very similar to American revolutionary devices of 1778.

All in all, this document is a bit of a treasure trove when put within the larger context of the history of IEDs over several centuries.

 

Radio Controlled IED

German WW2 use of ROVs to deliver explosives

In recent years various terrorist groups and others have used land, sea or air ROVs to deliver explosive payloads to targets.  As usual, people view these things as new and innovative threats. But as readers of this blog site will know,  that usually isn’t the case and I have more details here of some interesting early use of such devices from WW2, although they go much further back.  Some of these may be classed as “improvised” but others are clearly formally developed systems – but let’s not get hung up on definitions, because the concept is what is interesting   There are several aspects to this – one is the technology that is used, and another is the tactical employment. Many of the implementations of this concept were unsuccessful but the reasons for this are also interesting and indeed are being repeated in modern terrorist use of ROV technology.  I won’t go into that aspect in too much detail for obvious reasons.   So here goes with a few interesting  German “land based” example ROVs from WW2.

I’ve written before about the WW2 German “Goliath” remote controlled mine, a small tracked vehicle not too different in scale from modern EOD ROVs.   Following the fall of France in WW2, the Germans captured  a prototype French ROVs used for explosive charge delivery which seemed to inspire the development of the Goliath. This vehicle had been “hidden” in the River Seine, but the Germans got to hear of it and salvaged it for technical exploitation and reverse engineering. (Readers may recall a similar reverse engineering operation from a “purchased” French speed boat just before WW1, that I discussed in an earlier post).

 

Captured German Goliath ROVs after D-Day

While there has been some attention on the Goliath tracked vehicle, used to deliver demolition charges to targets, perhaps just as significant for us looking at history was the German Borgward B remote tracked vehicle. A contract was let by the Wehrmacht to the Carl Borgward engineering company in Bremen for 50 tracked vehicles in 1939. It’s not quite clear if the Borgward B was developed originally to deliver demolition charges or for other purposes such as towing mine clearance tools or as an ammunition carriers.  One suggestion is that during the German invasion of France, German engineers found an operational need and had been converting, in an improvised way, standard German tanks to operate remotely for certain tasks. The theory goes that as a result of after-action reports from this campaign the Borgward B was converted to fulfil this role. But it’s war and it’s a little confusing as to which came first, the chicken or the egg.    In any event,  Blaupunkt, the radio manufacturer developed a radio controlled system for the vehicle. These vehicles and their sub-systems were gradually improved in following years resulting in several “versions” as both their use and requirements changed.  A variety of vehicles were used as “control” vehicles as the war progressed. The radio control unit was very “modern” in appearance, using a joystick control and shared many of the features of the Linsen boats control systems.  The key features of the Borgward B was firstly that it could deliver a large charge, (typically 45o – 550kg), and secondly it could drop off the charge and retreat, thus in principle being a re-usable vehicle, unlike the smaller and disposable Goliath.

Here’s a pic of the Borgward B. The driver would drive the vehicle “normally” until it was a “tactical bound” away from the target, then he would get out and the vehicle would then be controlled by radio remotely. It looks like a fun  drive, (unless you are told to drive it to the Eastern Front).

 

The Borgward B wasn’t a huge success. it was unreliable and quite vulnerable to enemy fire.  Some reports suggest that some versions were equipped with smoke units to lay smoke screens or just to hide its own approach, but I’m not sure how it would then be controlled if surrounded by its own smoke screen. Perhaps this version was simply used to lay smoke screen and move laterally across the battlefield.  I have found a report that a single Borgward B was fitted with a TV camera as an observation vehicle during the fall of Berlin, perhaps a prototype but in the main the later use of these vehicles, in theory was to deliver and drop demolition charges.  The explosive charge, when dropped, had a timer initiation system that after a short period caused the charge to detonate.   The charge was released with the help of gravity after explosive retaining bolts were fired by the operator. I’m cautious about this and think it could have been a lever actuator.   It appears that there was an adjustable safety mechanism that armed the charge only after a certain distance (not time) had been covered, so for instance an operator would set the safety distance to 100m as he exited the vehicle, and the charge would only become “armed” after the vehicle had covered that distance. That’s logical, but I’m not sure how it was achieved.  These vehicles were less suited, of course, to defensive operations than offensive, where their utilisation against defended structures was optimised. I’m led to believe that over a thousand Borgward Bs were produced (compared to many thousand Goliath vehicles).

Here’s a great pic of the explosive charge after being “dropped off” by the vehicle. You can see it slides off the front plate where it is held in a “shoe”.

I think it’s worth thinking about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Borgward B and the Goliath.  The Borgward B could be moved into its tactical launch position by one man, but the Goliath needed a small team of men.  Perhaps that’s why the Goliath was used in defensive positions like the beaches of Normandy, where it was prepositioned in shrapnel proof hides, (but it wasn’t particularly effective). The Borgward B was larger and therefore more vulnerable, but delivered a much bigger charge than the Goliath more suitable to taking on defensive positions. The Borgward B was more expensive but in theory was reusable. In the main the Borgward B was radio controlled and this offered some flexibility but also posed some reliability problems with the technology of the day. The cable system principally used by the Goliath was more reliable but vulnerable to shrapnel damage.

There was an attempt at a “middle ground” the NSU “Springer” ROV developed in 1943/1944. This was smaller than the Borgward B, bigger than the Goliath, but was driven into launch position by a driver. About 50 were made, I think. Here’s a picture showing its scale and size. They seem to have limited operational use. I don’t have a handle on their control system.

 

I think it’s fascinating that the Germans also used vehicles captured  from the British and French and convert to ROVs. It seems that the German engineers saw potential in particular from the British Bren Gun carrier and the Belgian “utility tractor” (a British built tracked vehicle made by Vickers, who also made a proportion of the British Bren carriers).

Here’s a pic of both in “normal use”

A Belgian Vickers Utility tractor

Bren Carrier

A number of both these vehicles were converted to be cable-controlled demolition vehicles, each with a 1.2 km cable.  That’s quite a distance, and one imagines that control of vehicle at such range was tricky, based on distant observation.  A total of 60 were sent to the Crimea in 1941.  The German Crimean campaign of 1941 is interesting because I think it was used as a testing ground for range of innovative German technologies.  I’m currently exploring the use of an advanced prototype German fuel air explosive weapon in this campaign, to clear bunkers and defence structures, and it appears that these converted Belgian and British ROVs were used against the same targets to deliver relatively large explosive charges. I have also seen reports of Borgward B vehicles used in the Crimea at this time.  It appears that the majority of the 60 vehicles were deployed with mixed results – some destroyed by mines before they reached the targets, some destroyed by enemy fire, some failed and some functioned as intended destroying Russian defensive positions.  I can find no specifics over the amount of explosives carried by either vehicle, nor any specifics on the control mechanisms fitted.   It appears that the ROVs were “controlled” from a “mother” command tank.  The Germans complained that there were no spare parts for the captured ROVs and recommended development of indigenous vehicles accordingly.  Other feedback included the suggestion that they would be better employed in flatter, desert conditions, such as North Africa, rather than the complex urban defence environments of Sebastopol, and indeed at least one Bren carrier, captured at El Alamein was so converted.   While this effort to convert enemy tracked vehicles to wire guided demolition use wasn’t really repeated , it’s clear it had some success and more importantly allowed the Germans to develop tactics and concepts of operation. . I think too, given the large amounts of “enemy” vehicles abandoned in Europe at Dunkirk and elsewhere, it made economic sense to utilise them, and the Germans had no qualms about recovering, and using, where possible, quite a range of enemy equipment.

This picture is, it is claimed, a captured Bren carrier (complete with German Cross) fitted with explosives being deployed on the Eastern front. The vehicle in the distance is Borgward B, I think, so it seems very likely.

I think it’s fair to say that the Goliath and the Borgward B ROVs were less effective than the Germans had hoped in normal operations on the Eastern and Western fronts. But it’s worth looking more closely at their deployment in the tight urban environments of cities. There are notable reports of Goliaths being deployed into the Warsaw Ghetto in responding to the Warsaw uprising in 1943.  If ever there was a historic precedent to the urban destruction seen in modern day Syria, the destruction of the ghetto by the German in 1943 is it.    Goliath were used to target buildings, and of course with only small arms the defenders had little defence against these ROVs, unlike formal military units.  I also see parallels with modern anti-tank missiles being used against defensive positions in Syria, of which we are seeing many. Yes these aren’t as fast as those missiles but the targets and tactics are quite similar.

Here’s the remains of a burnt out Borgward B vehicle, I think destroyed by fire after it had dropped off its charge in Kilińskiego Street in Warsaw in August 1944. The explosion reportedly killed 200 residents. The story of this attack is dramatic and a desperately sad tragedy. Essentially the vehicle had been captured by Polish troops as the Germans attempted to deploy it towards a road block and was being paraded around Warsaw by cheering locals. Someone pulled a lever which caused the deployable explosive charge to slide off, and as we know there was a timer started by this activation which the crowds did not understand.  The charge detonated shortly after.  There is more detail here if you are interested. It is possible of course that this was a “Trojan horse” attack, and a number of sources claim this but I suspect that it was just accidental.

Here’s some pics of the Goliath systems being deployed in Warsaw.

This is the effect of a Goliath on a building in Warsaw

I think the German forces of WW2 had, in their ROVs, some interesting tools for offensive operations, and for the built up environments of  Warsaw and heavily prepared defensive environments off Sebastopol they were of some use.  But for German defensive operations, they were less suited. Fundamental unreliability was a major issue, it seems, with all the systems they used, and that’s both in terms of motive power and in terms of the control systems. Modern technology perhaps allows for more reliance on the systems used by terrorists and others. In a battle there is perhaps more of an issue of unit cost – whereas modern ROVs are cheaper, and not being deployed, in general, in battle conditions are doubly attractive. Modern ROVs have more precise controls including reliable and usable video components that makes control easier and more attractive. More accurate control also leads to the potential to reduce charge size and so allow the vehicle to be smaller. I think this aspect of modern ROV weapons is not yet widely understood.  Improved batteries for electric vehicles also increases range.  The issue of logistic support is somewhat useful in understanding use of ROVs for delivering explosives and again modern terrorist use changes the impact of that logistic support and is maybe less crucial in terms of systems.  What is inescapable now and in the past is that ROVs offer an aggressor a safe way of delivering explosives, with the size of the explosive charge required having, of course, an impact on the vehicles that might be suitable.  The key difference today is that technology has improved reliability of control systems, and also that technology is broadly available.  However it is susceptible to technical counter-measures.  In particular radio control systems are now consumer items and not limited to government enterprises.  There are also some other parallels in terms of utilisation of captured weapons systems – and here I’m thinking of the way some Syrian jihadists have adapted captured armoured vehicles for suicide VBIEDS.

I recommend thinking in terms of tactical design – the systems outlined above all approached the target to a “control” point. From there the mode of control switches – and remote control takes over.  It’s worth, as with any attack system, particularly terrorist attack using radio or other command systems, having a hard think about what defines that “control point”.  What are the characteristics of that change over point that are needed, are chosen and utilised? Understanding those will help you develop some counter-measures. Modern day control points are perhaps less clearly defined than these WW2 examples, but the principle remains. Another thought that comes to mind is the importance of Technical Intelligence to the EOD operator. Put yourself on the shoes of an EOD tech 75 years ago – what would you want to know about the command and initiation system before you dealt with such an object? It may have no relevance today but as a “process” it’s useful to think through how you, a modern EOD operator, would deal with such things in a variety of situations – it’ll get your brain thinking, and that’s the best use for a brain.

Most of you will be aware of the command driven vehicles used by modern terrorist groups – various Jihadi ones, ETA, FARC and the IRA have all use such systems and others too are in the back pages of this blog site. But most importantly don’t be then thinking remotely driven vehicles delivering explosives are anything new – they are more than a century old and there are lessons to be learned still. From a historical perspective I’m intrigued by the German campaign in Crimea and the manner in which they used innovative weapons systems there – I’ll be digging further as it’s not a part of WW2 that I’m all that familiar with and instinct is telling there’s some interesting history. I have one wild reference to an ROV being used underground there which I’m trying to track down, and of course Russian defence of Sebastopol in the century before has been a subject of previous blogs. It’s strange how the patterns of explosive use over the centuries return to the same places. Sebastopol, Antwerp, London…

 

20th Century

Ilya Starinov – The godfather of modern insurgent IED warfare

I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post.  Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in that sense he is worthy of our attention.  It’s a remarkable story of a man fully across a series of technologies, skills and operational employments. Starinov was a railway engineer, a demolition sapper, a communications specialist, an EOD expert, a commando, a trainer, a weapons exploitation specialist and an extremely innovative thinker. He was also very lucky to avoid being purged by Stalin. His achievements include:

  1. He championed and developed the operational use of the first Radio-Controlled IEDs.
  2. He oversaw the most intense IED campaigns in history, and I think through those influenced the course of WW2 and revolutionary insurgencies around the world
  3. He developed the Soviet Spetsnaz concept
  4. He fought in at least three wars, developed modern partisan techniques and advised the Soviet Union and its allies – overtly and covertly – for decades.
  5. He carried out dozens of attacks personally, he personally built hundreds of IEDs and was responsible for the designs of tens of thousands of others.
  6. He trained thousands of people in the use of IEDs, developed technical capabilities that did not exist before and designed concepts of operations to make best use of the opportunities that IEDs provided to the user.

In this post I’m going to cover some of the factors in his life story that influenced him to become the person he was. His story should be more commonly known in the EOD and counter-IED community. The use of IEDs was extensive in WW2 and that’s not widely understood. Every time the modern world encounters the use of IEDs it surprises us, and it shouldn’t because IEDs are not new – this story once again reinforces that, but also perhaps shows how IEDs became embedded in modern insurgencies. When the US and its allies encountered an insurgent IED campaign in Iraq in 2003/4, the military world should have taken a sharp intake of breath and said “Ah, Starinov, what lessons from his story can we learn from to apply here?”. But no-one, not a soul, did.  And that’s why this story is important.

Starinov had a very significant but broadly unrecognised influence on global IED tactics and strategies. He is not someone to ignore. As I run through his life history I’m going to highlight the key factors in bold which led to his eventual way of thinking about the use of IEDs.

Starinov was born in 1900 and died in 2000. The first thing to note, and it’s significant, is that his father was a railway worker, employed by the Russian state to maintain the railway tracks of that country. So, from his first boyhood experience he knew the importance of the railroad to a nation, its logistics and the vulnerabilities of that system. It was in his blood, and you can see that in his subsequent concepts. One of his earliest memories was of his father inspecting the railway track, finding an unattached rail and warning an approaching train by the use of “railway detonators” laid on the track to signal the driver of a fault ahead.  His family were poor (like most Russians of the time) and he lived in a small village.

The next factor in his development was the Bolshevik revolution which, unsurprisingly, he participated in with enthusiasm as a youth. Although he wasn’t using explosives at this time he did participate actively at first, blocking railway lines to St Petersburg (Petrograd) with lumber to delay “counter-revolutionary” White Russian reinforcement.  This experience of his youth in terms of blocking railway lines further developed his understanding of sabotage activity, and the specific places to have maximum effect. The other lessons he learned during this revolutionary period was that operating in areas controlled by the enemy was easy at night, and ambitious sabotage plans were often rewarded with dramatic results for minimal resources. He served as an infantry soldier in the Red Army and at one point in 1919 was badly injured by shrapnel. He nearly lost his leg, but recovered under treatment. During this recovery in hospital he was persuaded by fellow patients to join the “sappers”.  It was as a sapper he received some on-the-job training followed by more formal education in technical matters.

For a period of time he worked with munitions, and became adept at the handling of explosives.  He then attended a training course in military railroad matters, building on his expertise in this matter. The importance of the railroad in Russia should not be underestimated. In a country of the vast size of Russia and the Soviet Union, it was the only way of managing the logistics of war, and its vulnerabilities were obvious to the young Starinov. In 1922, with great pride, he became a formal member of the Communist Party and after his training became an officer in the Red Army.

By about 1923, Starinov was commanding a Unit repairing railway lines damaged in the revolutionary war. Part of his remit was dealing with unexploded ordnance adjacent to railway lines, removing them and detonating them safely.  In effect, Starinov became an EOD expert. This comment from his diaries is very instructive:

I took full advantage of each piece of unexploded munitions to study the construction of the fuses. I conducted the first experiments in melting down the explosive material out of the bombs and shells, and managed to convince myself that this was a safe procedure. It was useful as well because of the great need for TNT, especially in the spring when it was necessary to break up the ice jams that threatened railway bridges.

The next paragraph in his diaries shows, I think, the direction of his thoughts perfectly

At that time (1923) I first thought about constructing a portable mine for destroying enemy trains. Our mines had to be simple, convenient, and safe; and the fuses had to work faultlessly. In the civil war we had already become acquainted with the construction of a cumbersome, complex delayed-action anti-train mine. We only ever set one of these off, but for the rest of the war we lugged around the remaining mines for no purpose. The Red Army didn’t need such awkward devices!

In 1926 Starinov was assigned a special task of advising a comprehensive defensive plan for the Ukraine. The plan was to counter any potential invasion from the west from Poland and Romania into the Soviet Union. As a railway expert to the military committee developing the defensive plan, Starinov examined the railway lines that led through the Ukraine from the Western borders, but also as a sapper he advised on a much wider range of defensive minefields and demolitions. It was at this point Starinov discovered the demolition charges in a bridge that I discussed in an earlier post. It was he who developed the render-safe technique on the spot and his EOD team that undertook the operation.


Starinov as a young man

More broadly, the defensive plan developed by the committee that Starinov worked on has modern echoes. Their plan was to fight a defensive partisan war after invasion of the Ukraine by a western aggressor.  It involved preparing and maintaining explosive resources and for partisan groups to attack after the invading Western army had taken control of the country – very similar to Saddam Hussein’s strategy in Iraq in 2003 – it’s very hard not to see absolute parallels.  For the Soviets, “partisan warfare” absolutely fitted their revolutionary communist idealism of a fight “of the people” against the enemy. So here we have Starinov in 1926 at the heart of planning partisan IED campaigns in the Ukraine, territories which would see that exact thing happening 15 years later in 1941. As a good communist,  Starinov looked for political validation and context for his military strategies. By 1933 Starinov had a played a key role in training over 9000 people as partisans for the defensive plan for the Western Soviet Union. That’s quite a cadre.  There was already, by then, a plan for hundreds and hundreds (no exaggeration) of secret explosive hides across the whole Ukraine. The entire western part of the Soviet Union was in theory ready for intense IED led partisan warfare as early as 1933. Starinov however noted that these plans were hampered severely by the the Stalinist collectivization of agriculture that occurred in parallel, and the consequent upheaval in society. But he had to hold his tongue. Furthemore when the Stalinist purges were started in about 1933/4, one of the first things they “purged” was the partisan infrastructure.

During the early 1930’s Starinov undertook more training in communications, so he became familiar with the use of radios in military environments. He was also tasked with training partisans as part of a Soviet program to sow partisan leaders both at home for defensive operations and abroad for other purposes. He trained them extensively in explosives, and associated techniques at a number of semi-secret schools. Included in his students were several Western European communists who rose to prominence later in their own countries. Starinov remained a vocal proponent of partisan warfare and the use of IEDs for the rest of his life. 

It was at this point in history that something strange but I think very significant happened which influenced Starinov to develop expertise in “improvised” explosives. We have already seen that he was not enamoured with the “production” demolition munitions used ineffectively to attack railway lines during the Russian revolution. However by the early 1930s several designs (some of them by Starinov and some be design bureaus) were ready for production. But the political landscape suddeenly changed as Stalin began his purges. It’s clear that Starinov believed that stockpiles of mass-produced, industrial-manufactured sabotage devices were not being produced because Stalin feared their misuse domestically to unseat him from power. As a result Starinov could not “teach” his classrooms full of future partisans in the use of standard manufactured Soviet sabotage munitons (which would have fitted political doctrine), so he had of necessity to teach them how to make improvised devices. One of the only exceptions appears to have been the F-10 device discussed in an earlier blog post.

It is clear that on several occasions Starinov himself was lucky to avoid Stalin’s purges. He was certainly investigated for counter-revolutionary thinking in 1935 and his party membership temporarily suspended. Some of his mentors were “purged” which usually meant arrested, tried and executed in short order.

In 1936 the Soviet Union decided to support the opponents of Franco in the Spanish Civil war – and Starinov volunteered for a secret mission to teach, and conduct, partisan activities using IEDs in Spain. Because the mission was secret, the explosive devices had to be largely improvised from locally available components and not shipped in from the Soviet Union, so Starinov’s skills were ideal for the task. Given that in 1936/37 Stalin’s purges were in full swing I sense that Starinov was glad to be out of the country, and able to employ his skills for the international cause.

At one point in Valencia, Spain, Starinov was making IEDs in his accommodation at night and he and his comrades were carrying them in disguised packages every morning to the facility where he was training Spanish communist revolutionaries. Starinov had strong reservations about the operational command and control skills of the Spanish communists, and gradually became more and more insistent that they listened to him. In his diaries he discusses some of his devices with frustratingly vague descriptions, probably for ingrained operational security reasons.  Amongst his descriptions are “match box fuses” that I think were improvised initiation fuzes (pull/push and perhaps timed), and another is described as a “wheel switch” that perhaps was used in railway IEDs. I’m not quite sure what a wheel fuse was but they appear to have been smuggled in from Russia, and they were specifically manufactured as initiation switches- perhaps they were some form of microswitch. He describes some of them as being “nearly 20 years old” which is intriguing.  Most importantly Starinov started to use a phrase to describe the Spanish revolutionary “commandos” who he trained and operated with, which he called the “brigade of special designation”. The phrase in Russian is “Brigad Spetsialnogo Naznacheniya” In typical Russian abbreviation this becomes “Spetsnaz”. So Starinov formed and ran the first Spetsnaz unit, conducting sabotage operations in a foreign country.

As an aside, at this point in his life, actively conducting sabotage operations using IEDs, Starinov had to square his violent activities with his politics. Here is is own justification, which is very interesting:

From the most remote times, saboteurs have been condemned as dark and violent men, with neither conscience or honor. There’s no argument that the dregs of humanity graduating from the intelligence schools of bourgeois nations are animals of this type. But in armies fighting for popular causes, demolition men become the best. most dedicated and most humane fighters.

Make of that what you will.

In Spain Starinov began to train small groups of men who would cross over secretly into enemy territory conduct sabotage operations using IEDs and operate in what today would be pretty close to Spetnaz operations. Starinov took part in several operations but also continued to develop the IEDs. He had particular challenges with dynamite which was too sensitive for convenient use, but he struggled with several attempts to de-sensitize it, usually making it too insensitive. But it demonstrates considerable innovative thought in his IED techniques and determination to operate in non-ideal conditions – key lessons were learned.

During one operation Strainov learned another key lesson. The concrete bridge they were attempting to destroy was simply too sturdily built, and Starinov realised, and was able to convince his Spanish colleagues, that using a smaller amount of explosives to attack train was likely to be a more effective operation. But of course this form of attacks requires, ideally, different initiation switches so the insurgents could depart before the train arrived.

 

I believe this attack was by Starinov’s unit in Spain but I cannot be certain

One device is described by Starinov (vaguely as usual) as an “ampule fused” explosive device. I believe this was a modern version of the Jacobi fuse which I have described in earlier posts. It consists of a glass ampule containing sulphuric acid which when broken reacts with potassium chlorate to detonate explosives. (I think  it was used as a victim operated device, and it wasn’t like the British time delay pencils which could also be described as ampule devices but which would not have worked in this mode of employment). Starinov describes these as being laid in ruts in tracks to attack chasing enemy Spanish fascist forces.

Elsewhere he also describes electrical booby-trap switches using the action of pressure or with a tripwire. He worked extensively in a small garage workshop in the back streets of Valencia developing and making a wide range of IEDs. I doubt it would have looked very different to a modern backstreet IED workshop in Syria. Bizarrely he describes how he would rather work making IEDs rather than accompany his colleagues to watch the spectacle of the bullfight “where innocent animals were killed”.

He also learned much from failed devices, improving their design and hence consistency. In particular he found the “ampule” designs operated too slowly so he successfully redesigned “wheel switches” and “ampule fuses” to operate faster. Interestingly he also developed timed safe-to-arm circuits to make the positioning of the devices safer. The safe-to-arm timing was about ten minutes, but I have no detail on how this was achieved, but I think it was electrical. I think this was an important development and I can find no mention of a electrical safe-to-arm timing circuit in an IED in history before this. At one point Starinov complains that the macho Spanish emplacers were not bothering to use the safe-to-arm circuit, so he redesigned the whole system circuitry so they had no choice. 

Starinov’s IED innovation seems to have been endless. He designed a special IED that could be emplaced between the rails at speed (less than a minute), designed to explode before the train wheels arrived at that point and so derail the train. They contained only 1.5kg of explosives so were more efficient in terms of explosive utilisation than a large charge set to explode under a train. These were called “rapidas” mines because they could be set so quickly.

At one point Sarinov was unhappy with the sensitivity of dynamite still. So he obtained a number of massive depth charges from the Navy and in the garage workshop in Valencia melted out two tons of TNT for his devices. He also adapted pocket watches as timing devices, and made improvised grenades. One particular attack is worthy of note.  Starinov’s team had identified a munitions train and a tunnel, through which the train would pass. Starinov built what he called a “pick up” mine. As the train entered the tunnel a hidden hook system of some sort caused the train to “pick up” the explosive device which contained 50kg of explosives. Now attached to the train the device functioned a few seconds later in the centre of the tunnel, destroying the tunnel and all the munitions on the train at once. Interestingly Starinov describes this device as having been originally developed in Kiev in 1932.

In the spring of 1937, IED attacks on trains and vehicles became an almost daily occurrence. The counter-measures, patrols and search techniques used by the opposition encouraged Starinov to develop anti-handling devices for when the IEDs were discovered. They also developed anti-train IEDs with long delays that could be planted on moonless nights but would activate and detonate as a train passed over a couple of weeks later. Other magnetic IEDs were developed which could be slapped on a target. One particular attack is worthy of attention, although Starinov reports it, he may have not had any direct role. The monastery of La Virgen de la Cabeza was occupied by fascist forces in April 1937. One week a passing itinerant mule-rider came under fire from the monastery. He abandoned his mule which was then taken into the monastery. This was noticed and the event exploited by the besiegers, who caused it to happen again 10 days later. This time the “Trojan” mule was carrying a large IED containing 20kg of dynamite on a timer… and it detonated inside the gate as intended.

Starinov eventually left Spain in the autumn of 1937 – with a strong conviction that his explosive successes were built on the preparatory work done in the Soviet Union in the early 30’s. Little did he know that he would fold back his Spanish experiences into identical activity against the Germans some four years later. Take this important assessment that he made:

In Spain, the tactics and techniques of mining worked out by Soviet-led partisans were more sophisticated than those employed by the enemy for minesweeping. The enemy could not guarantee the security of their rear area. They never did learn how to find several types of our mines, and those they did find, they could not disarm except by exploding them. German and Italian sappers (operating to assist Franco’s forces) tried to learn about our equipment but we constantly gave them new puzzles to work on. Sometimes we set booby traps for them, or fitted mines with fuses that couldn’t be removed or used magnetic mines which were unfamiliar to the enemy.

In the ten month period he was in Spain, between December 1936 and September 1937, the unit which Starinov was attached to and for whom he made his IEDs carried out 239 sabotage operations, 17 ambushes, derailed 87 trains, destroyed 112 vehicles and killed 2,300 enemy. His unit lost 14 members. He also trained hundreds of Spanish and international partisans.

Starinov returned to Russia and found the place fearful of the purges – many of his former colleagues and commanders had been arrested and executed. Alongside them, many of the partisans he had trained were also purged. He was extremely uncomfortable, but there was nothing he could do other than hope he wouldn’t be purged himself. He was interrogated at the Lyubyanka and only then realised that all his efforts to set up a defensive partisan capability and weapons caches along the Soviet Union’s Western border had been liquidated and cancelled, out of the paranoid fear that drove the Great Terror – Stalin felt threatened by such an underground capability. Starinov was shocked.

Importantly though, Starinov was promoted to Colonel and given responsibility for managing a military test range. His resources included an experimental workshop, an 18km railway and a company of demolition troops. He set to work developing new methods of destroying and repairing railways lines and developing explosive devices for a variety of special purposes. Amidst the chaos of the Great Terror of Stalin’s purges this was the perfect employment for him.  He also developed counter-counter-mine technology at increasingly high levels of sophistication. This included the development of special augers that would bury explosives deep, beyond detection or plough capabilities.  He wrote a dissertation called “On Mining Railroads” on explosive methods of putting railroads “out of action” for at least six months but with specialised equipment could be repaired much more quickly if the territory was recaptured from an enemy.

In November 1939 Starinov was posted to command an EOD unit supporting the Russian invasion of Finland. What is very significant here is the process of Weapons Technical Intelligence conducted by Starinov and his team on the Finnish mines, which he assessed as extremely complex. This technical exploitation was conducted rapidly in the field on recovered devices. The first step was to melt out the compressed TNT in the mine, in a variety of captured Finnish cooking pots and a captured bath tub – no kidding. Within 24 hours Starinov had written up his exploitation report on the “boiled” mines and instructions on disarming them for future EOD operations. During this period, on occasion Starinov ended up defusing mines, along with his professor from the test range. He wasn’t the sort of man to hang back…  He was eventually shot in the arm by a Finnish sniper, and left the Front to recover. While recovering he was assigned to be Chief of Mine and Barrier training at Military Engineering Headquarters. Again a perfect posting for him. Starinov saw his role in the job as bringing up the Red Army’s mine clearance capability to international standards.

On 22nd June 1941, Operation Barbarossa started and the Germans turned on their allies, the Soviets, and invaded. Starinov was in Minsk to start with and quickly returned to Moscow. He was given the task of defensive demolition on the strategic route to Moscow, but frankly struggled due to a lack of appropriate munitions and materiel. All his efforts from 1926 to 1934 had been squandered. He was given command of a weakened brigade of sappers, and the only digging equipment they had was spades. There was one rifle for every 3 soldiers under his command.

Starinov headed for the front to begin preparing bridges for demolition – but he found the NKVD had been given responsibility for the bridges and had not been informed of his engineering mission – they arrested him for a few hours as a saboteur. Such were the challenges of a dysfunctional Russian military at this time. Afterwards he led his sappers in conducting a series of demolitions in support of the retreat, and he was able to begin to return to his instinctive choice of enabling partisan IED operations behind enemy lines.  The shortage of military demolition explosives also meant that Starinov reverted again to his instincts of making IEDs, but there were other reasons behind this too. As an example, the standard Russian production anti-tank mine was simply not big enough – it might break a German tank track but little more – so Starinov’s sappers, under his guidance, improvised much larger charges to go alongside the mine, or replaced them completely with IEDs. More importantly, Starinov got momentum politically to start training partisans again, by setting up a training school in Belorussia – all using improvised explosives. He was frustrated about a lack of time and resources but in his mind it was a hugely positive step.   At this point Starinov was using Ammonium Nitrate fertiliser mixed with Aluminium powder, as a main charge for his IEDs and personally teaching lessons on its manufacture and use to the partisans. He commandeered material from farms from factories and from pharmacies.

 


Soviet partisans laying explosive devices.

At this point the political pendulum swung. Since about 1934 the NKVD, Stalin’s Secret Police had been an obstacle for Starinov as they dismantled the partisan program he had worked so hard on, and they led the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror. Suddenly in 1941, with the Germans invading, Stalin himself called for partisan action, and the NKVD switched, of course instantly, in their attitude. Starinov was a pragmatist and saw an opportunity – and he simply co-opted the NKVD into his partisan program, demanding they assist and join his sappers and swing their considerable influence over resources to help him.

As the Germans advanced through the Ukraine, more and more partisans were trained, equipped with IEDs or with ability to manufacture their own, and they slipped behind enemy lines to begin classic partisan warfare. Meanwhile the Red Army, in increasingly frantic efforts, used explosives to attempt the slow the advance.

Here our story meets my earlier post about the F-10 radio controlled devices.  In October 1941 the focus of the Germans was the capture of Kharkhov, Russia’s second city.   Starinov led a truly massive effort to booby trap the entire city with literally hundreds of IEDs – booby traps, long time delayed devices of a month or so, dummy deception devices to slow the German advance through the city and a small number of very large F-10 radio controlled devices. Starinov himself led a six man engineer team to carefully emplace and disguise a 350kg F-10 device, dug in 2m below the cellar of the local Communist Party Headquarters at 17 Dzerzhinsky St in Kharkhov, a grand building which the Russians hoped would be requisitioned by the Germans for its military headquarters.  With great care they disguised the F-10 device deep, hid its 30m long antenna, re-laid the basement floor, repainted the walls and laid another large device in the cellar in the full expectation that it would be spotted and disarmed, but act as a distraction.

On the night of 13 November some three weeks later, the transmitter was set up 300km away in Voronezh to send the activation signal. As we know, the explosion was a success and the German General Braun was killed along with many members of his staff – but the Russians didn’t find this out for certain until 1943. However the broader activity of explosive devices laid across the City was remarkably successful and stunned the Germans. Here’s an excerpt from the diary of a German officer, describing the impact of Starinov’s IEDs in and around this large city:

It reminds me of much more recent reports about towns filled with ISIS IEDs in Iraq and Syria….

Of the 315 delayed action mines laid by Starinov’s sappers in Kharkhov, the German engineers were only able to find 37. Of these, a mere 14 were defused, the rest were blown in place.

Starinov’s next mission was to defend Moscow, and he was actively involved in that planning and encouraging the laying of tens of thousands of mines and other explosive devices. A single Russian engineer group, just one of a number, laid 52,000 anti tank mines in the ground around Moscow, and then when it snowed to several feet in depth, they laid more mines in the snow. It was a remarkable effort.

Starinov continued to push for greater use of partisan IED attacks in December 1941, getting inevitably bogged down in Communist Party machinations and policy development by people (including Stalin) who did not understand his concepts. Even making suggestions that wouldn’t go down well with Stalin or one of his immediate supporters was a life risking effort.  This quote stands out from one of his submissions:

“A tank battalion is a terrible force on the battlefield, but when it is on a troop train it is completely defenseless and can be destoyed by two or three partisan saboteurs”

Starinov was then posted to develop the anti-tank defences around Rostov on Don. Finding the Red Army there very short indeed of manufactured anti-tank mines, he did what we now expect of Starinov. He designed and had built in local workshops tens of thousands of his own anti-tank mines.

In the summer of 1942, Starinov’s constant imploring to resource partisan sabotage operations finally got traction and furthermore he was appointed to the staff of the Partisan Movement, allowing him to directly influence and develop his pet strategic projects. He became responsible for a new partisan training school and also for developing appropriate technology. In this latter role, Starinov continued to innovate, including, for example the development of cone shaped charges for anti-train operations, although I’m not entirely clear how this was used. His staff also experimented with detonation systems and experimented with anti-materiel rifles against trains. In particular they experimented to develop the most efficient use of explosives to damage trains with the smallest quantity of explosives. They also further developed the “rapida” mines first used in Spain, and more importantly came up with concepts of operation for using multiple IEDs of various sorts and delays, in a mix to further hamper enemy rail activity. Starinov also thought deeply about the operational level plans and the structure , communications and strategies to be used by partisan groups.

In March 1943, Starinov was posted again, this time directly to the Ukrainian Partisan command of the Southern Front. His mission was to cut the German supply lines that crossed the Ukraine. He established a sabotage department in the Staff Headquarters. In April 1943, Starinov was directly involved a a massive coordinated sabotage operation – code named “RAIL WAR” intended to overwhelm the Ukrianinain railway system in a tremendous number of simultaneous attacks on rails using explosive devices. Starinov was unhappy with this as he would have preferred to attack the trains themselves and felt he had the technology to do that which was going to be wasted. But orders were orders. The intent was for partisans to destroy a huge number of individual rails – 85,000 in one month long period. In the end Krushchev quietly gave alternate instructions after it was pointed out that 85,000 rails was only 2% of the Ukrainian national infrastructure. In the last 6 months of 1943, Ukrainian partisans destroyed a very remarkable 3,143 trains. Let that sink in. In a six month period, Starinov’s devices destroyed well over 3000 trains in the Ukraine. Amazing.

In September 1943 another massive series of attacks on Railway lines was planned, – this one called operation CONCERTO. Many of the Ukrainian partisans utilised Starinov’s occnept of a complex explosive attack using a number of IEDs and mines of different types. By this time the partisans where well equipped and manned with about 200,000 personnel. Starinov’s pet project was finally working.

Strarinov later assisted in the training of Polish partisans and after the war was involved in EOD duties. Allegedly he taught the KGB and GRU about explosive devices for many years later, and was often an adviser to the Russian government regarding the IED threat from Chechnya.  He died at the age of 100 in 2000.

So, Starinov’s importance in the history of IEDs is clear. He probably designed more IEDs, made more IEDs, and trained more IED makers than any other person in history.  The lessons he learned in his remarkable life, and how he then deployed his expertise are very instructive. He wasn’t the first to combine partisan style operations with IED usage, but he certainly had the most impact.


Starinov in Retirement

20th Century

Russian WW2 Radio Controlled Explosive Device

I’m afraid this is going to be a long and detailed post, but it is one of the most interesting historical explosive devices I have ever written about.  Despite the length, I must urge a little caution. I’m working from a very small number of poorly translated documents, about a technology that is at the edge of my understanding, and about which there are conflicting assessments and denials. I have some Russian references but my Russian is very poor and worse now through lack of use. Very happy for input from anyone who has a better handle on this or who sees errors in my analysis.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s the Russians developed a number of radio-controlled systems. As an aside, this included radio-controlled tanks.  Another system, and the subject of this blog piece, was the F-10 radio-controlled mine. This mine was first developed in 1929 (90 years ago!) and deployed operationally in 1941 in the “Great Patriotic War” (WW2) against the Germans, most notably in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, and against the Finns in what is called the “Continuation War”. Their use came to a real crescendo in September/October 1941.  There are several very interesting aspects to the device, – its design, its employment/and the MO of its use, the highly ambitious planning and significant operations it enabled, and the reprisals that resulted.  Furthermore, the electronic countermeasures employed by both the Finns and the Germans at great speed following technical exploitation of captured systems provide useful historical vignettes about rapid fielding of EW against radio controlled explosive devices.

By necessity, I have to get a little technical, and to repeat, some of my technical assessments and understanding might be wrong, but I’d like to get this out there rather than spend a year refining peculiar technological aspects.

So firstly, the design of the system.  Here’s an image of the main receiver (Rx) of the system. I think this image is actually German, following a render-safe procedure:

The receiver is a briefcase sized radio and decoder, and I’ll come on to the detail of that shortly. It is accompanied by, and wired to, a large battery. More pictures of the components (I think).

The radio component is the Left hand box, the right hand box is the power source or battery. The “decoder” is the small object to the front left.

Below there is a battery, a radio box, and the rubber bag in which the device is placed when concealed (usually buried) and what appears to be detonation cord or cables, perhaps leading to a large explosive charge.

Here’s an image of the batteries and radio enclosed in the rubber protective bag , ready for burial and concealment.

The system is designed to recieve a coded signal , and detonate up to three explosive circuits. The complete device, less explosives, weighs 35kg. There is a 30m antenna, which according to the references can receive a signal if the antenna, placed horizontally, is buried in the ground up to 120cm (some assessments say less),  in water of a depth up to 50cm or hidden by brickwork up to 6cm – Grateful for comments on this aspect from any EW experts or RF engineers.

The system has a complex timing system. Using the batteries alone would give an operational life cycle to the radio receiver and enable power to the explosive circuit of 4 days. But a mechanical timing system is integrated to give a complex range of operations, including a long time delay before activation or providing a number of time “windows”, from as short as 2.5 minutes “on” to 2.5 minutes “off”, and other longer on-off windows, giving a  maximum receiver power life of 40 days.  There is a complex relationship between the length of time windows and the length of the command signal required that I don’t fully understand.  Suffice to say, that several frequency signals in a sequential row need to be transmitted for the decoder to accept a command, and the length of those individual sequential signals isn’t quite clear to me, but is at least a minute and sometimes longer.

Additionally, there are some clever extras… It is possible to set a mechanical time delay to explosive initiation (avoiding the Rx) of up to 120 days. If I understand it correctly, this was usually set as a last-resort back-up self-destruct. It is a mechanical clock and some EOD successes were made by detecting the ticking clock. The explosive contents used with F-10 varied from a few tens of Kg to several thousand Kg.

The device also was fitted or could be fitted (I’m not sure) with anti-handling switches. The anti handling switches quoted in the spec are “EHV, CJ-10,CJ-35, CMW-16 and CMW-60” I haven’t investigated these yet but at least one is a pull switch attached to the opening of the rubber bag the system is deployed in.

The range of the command system of course depends on the power of the transmitter. From German exploitation of a captured F-10 device, the frequencies employed reportedly range from “1094.1 khZ to 130khz”. Again I welcome comment from EW specialists.  This implication is that the “setting” of each F-10 mine to specific frequencies was quite flexible and easy but I’m not sure quite how it was done.  Perhaps by replacing individual tuning forks?  I have found one reference, a Finnish technical exploitation report, saying the tuning forks were colour coded, which would be logical. Another report suggests that the radio receivers were marked with a numerical code in roman numerals, which defined the initiation frequencies.  A slightly contradictory early Finnish exploitation report, very interestingly, suggests that two of the frequencies allocated to the F-10 were set to pre-war popular music radio stations from Kharkhov and Minsk, with a specific “calling tune”.  I can’t quite make sense of that, but never mind.

The decoding system predates DTMF of course. A system such as the F-10 needs to be able to discriminate random signals from an actual command signal, so this system uses (I think) a triple tuning fork mechanism, with specific successive frequencies transmitted over a time window. Only when three successive signals of different specific frequencies, each of a sufficient duration, are received will the “AND” logic of the system allow initiation.

Such a capable system allows for a wide range of operational designs, or employment plans.  It is clear that the Russians used these in areas where they ceded territory, so they are “stay-behind” sabotage devices. They are expensive too, compared to other mines and challenging and resource-heavy to deploy effectively. So to justify that, the targets have to be significant. Initiation could be by a separate line-of-sight concealed engineer team using a transmitter quite close, or indeed could be several hundred km away (I think). So the device could be under observation and initiated at the optimum time, or more remotely, without line of sight, perhaps based on intelligence.

In the Finnish campaign, the Finnish military encountered quite a few of these devices as they re-took the city of Viipuri in September 1941 and rendered at least one safe. One such item is on display in a Finnish military museum. As a result, it is alleged, they developed an electronic counter-measure, which was to set up a permanent high power frequency transmission on one of the first two frequencies. This overwhelms the timer element of the decoder and perhaps jams incoming other frequencies from the system with its power. That, sort of, makes logical sense to me but I’d appreciate comment from any ECM experts. I have seperate reports, hard to confirm, that the “jamming signal” was a piece of music transmitted at high power over and over again at a fequency of 715KHz.  In response the Soviets changed the frequency of the F-10 systems. and the Finns responded by putting the same song out, constantly, on every frequency they could, apparently

Here’s an image of a Finnish EOD team and the F-10 recovered safely from a water tower in Vyborg. I’m pretty sure the “wall” they are leaning against is TNT blocks.


The removed radio controlled exploding device, wiring, 2400kg TNT and the Finnish engineers that found and removed the “mine” from Viopuri/Vyborg water tower

On a more practical level, Finnish engineers worked out that the long 30m antenna gave them an opportunity to locate the mine. In any places where they suspected a buried F-10, they dug a small trench 2 ft deep, around it, and if there was a mine hidden there, they invariably encountered the antenna.

As an aside, I understand that the young Finnish Officer (Lauri Sutela) who rendered safe one of these devices in September 1941 in Vyborg rose to be Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces in the 1980s.  There’s always hope then for young EOD officers to make their way in the world…

German EW responses to radio control initiation appear also to have been developed and deployed quickly. They captured an F-10 mine in mid September 1941 and it appears there were countermeasures deployed, apparently by 25 October at the latest. That’s pretty fast for a capture, technical exploitation to deployed countermeasure cycle.

German countermeasures included:

  1. Digging an exploratory trench looking for the antenna as the Finnish engineers did. Quite often Russian prisoners of war were used for this task.
  2. Use of an electrical listening microphone to listen for the mechanical clock component
  3. A responsive jamming capability to transmit, quickly, a powerful “blocking”  signal if any known F-10 frequencies were detected. I don’t think this was automated.
  4. There was another RF method developed, apparently of limited use, which involved transmitting a “disabling” signal, somewhere “between 150 – 700Hz” but I cant quite make out the sense of that. Again advice accepted, gladly.

When the Germans took territory from the Russians, in 1941, eventually the cities of Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa were ceded.

In the run up to Russian withdrawal from these cities, engineer teams in significant number laid a wide range of mines and booby-traps for the advancing Germans. The Russians worked out that quite often Germans would take over large buildings that had been used for Russian military headquarters, and use them for their own headquarters. It appears that although equipped with a wide range and number of relatively cheap mines and booby traps, the expensive radio controlled mines were used in a very focused manner to target senior officers and their staff in headquarter buildings. The Germans moved into large office buildings (as previously used by the withdrawing Russians), presumably because they had the scale, number of rooms and perhaps even telephone lines. So a vacated Russian Army HQ would become a HQ for the advancing Germans. This provided a predictability that the Russian engineers could exploit. Russian engineers became expert at laying “slightly obvious” booby traps which German EOD would render safe and then assume the ground underneath was clear – but actually often there was an F-10 radio controlled mine buried deep and everything including the antenna was much more carefully concealed.

In the captured cities of Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa, German generals and their Headquarter staff were killed by concealed F-10 devices over a 7 week period in 1941, as follows:

Between 24 and 28 September, numerous F-10 devices were exploded in central Kiev in buildings occupied the prior week by German Army headquarters.  The F-10 devices were allegedly initiated by command from stay-behind hidden engineer units observing the area from an island on the Dneiper river. In particular an explosion on 24 September hit the Rear Headquarters of the Wehrmacht army Group south killing a large number of officers, including the artillery commander of the 29th Wehrmacht Corps. In immediate reprisals the massacre of Babi Yar took place, with a death toll of 100,000.

On 22 October, the Romanian Military Headquarters in Odessa, established 3 days earlier and manned jointly by Nazi and Romanian military staff was exploded up by an F-10 device (I believe) killing 67 people including the Romanian General. 40,000 Jews were killed in reprisals.

On 14 November, multiple buildings just occupied by German forces in Kharkov were destroyed I think with F-10 devices. There were hundreds of casualties, including the German commander, Generalleutnant Georg Braun. In immediate reprisals 200 civilians, mostly Jews, were hung from balconies of surrounding buildings. The following month there were further reprisals and 20,000 Jews were gathered at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. All were shot or gassed in a gas van over the next two months.

It is hard to get to the bottom of how many F-10s were used in these cities but I think they were used in significant numbers, alongside extensive conventional mining and booby trap techniques. I think historians in regarding these cities separately in the Eastern front campaign miss the point that this was a clear strategic effort to deploy these weapons to “cut off the head” of the advancing German armies. The fact that these attacks came at the same time as their use in the Vyborg peninsula against the Finns, cannot be a coincidence and I sense a strategic decision to employ these weapons as the Soviets were being pushed on all fronts.  In the main, use of the F-10 was part of operations under the command of a remarkable explosives engineer, Col Ilya Starinov.  I will be returning to discuss Starinov in future blog posts, suffice, for now, to say he was ultimately responsible for more explosive attacks on trains and railways than any other man that has ever lived (by a long way) and fought in at least 4 wars as a Russian explosives expert. He really was the instigator of Soviet Spetznatz tactics.

This F-10 radio controlled device then poses a fascinating case study of an early radio controlled explosive device threat, and how a technical capability (in this case of a pretty flexible system) when coupled with intelligence and innovative employment can pose significant threats not only to whatever troops are in its path, but also targeted specifically on high value enemy leadership as part of a strategic plan.  The appalling reprisals to these F-10 attacks suggests the concern felt by the Wehrmacht.

This story also demonstrates the rapidity that is possible with suitable technical intelligence resources and processes to develop both technical and procedural countermeasures. The RC threat and response game is nothing new.

 

Update:

I’ve been looking further into how the F-10 radio controlled mine was designed.   In itself it is an interesting story.  In 1923, the Soviets started up a “Special Technical Bureau” for “Military Inventions of a Special Purpose” known as “Ostekhbyuro” in typical Russian fashion.  The two people credited with the invention were V. Bekauri and V Mitkevich. Bekauri, was instrumental in developing a number of other Soviet radio controlled systems including the Teletank and other guided weapons. I believe the work on the F-10 mine was completed in 1929. In 1932 the devices were taken on by a specially constituted military Unit, I think designed to exploit the specific capabilities of these devices. The radio controlled mines were at first referred to as “BEMI” mines, named after the first two letters of the last name of each inventor. Later they were re-designated F-10.

In 1937, Bekauri had risen to be Director of the Ostekhbyuro, but was arrested, interrogated, charged with counter-revolutionary behaviour, found guilty 15 minutes later and then executed as part of Stalin’s purges in 1937.

 

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