Timed IED Archives - Page 4 of 9

standingwellback 10th April 2019 20th Century

Two IED attacks on police during WW2

Here’s the story of two curious IED attacks that occurred during WW2. Different in nature, but with some odd parallels between the two.

The first attack took place in Tel Aviv, Palestine against the British Palestine Police in 1942. The target specifically was members of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) investigating the extremist “Lehi” group, aka “The Stern Gang”. This was a significantly complex IED plot, what might be termed a “double come-on attack”, using 3 IEDs, the latter two electrical command-initiated, targeting the responders to the first explosion. Senior members of the CID had had a number of successes against Lehi in the months prior to the attack. In particular Superintendent Geoffrey Morton and his subordinate Tom Wilkin were well known to the Stern gang. When Wilkin managed to arrest Lehi’s chief of staff for shooting a Jewish member of the Palestine Police, the Lehi leader, Avraham Stern, decided on very focused action against the head of CID (Morton) and his assistant Wilkin.

The plot was complex and multi-stage. A small explosion was made to occur in a roof-top room of a house in Yael St, Tel Aviv, as if it was a premature explosion in a Lehi bomb factory. The CIDs response to such an incident was well known and the Lehi assumed that Morton, as head of CID would attend the scene of the incident, along with Wilkin as he normally did to incidents involving Lehi. A second larger device had been hidden in the roof-top room, connected by a carefully concealed command wire to a waiting operative in a building nearby. Another command-wire initiated device was buried in a flowerbed just outside the house, providing another opportunity to attack responding policemen.

When the first reports of the explosion came in, Morton and Wilkin were involved in another matter so tasked other senior Palestine Police officers to the scene, saying they would follow shortly. Three officers went to the the house in question and went up to the roof top. Deputy Superintendent Shlomo Schiff was the leading officer, and was the senior Jewish officer in the Palestine Police. He had been the target of a Lehi assassination attempt the previous year. He was accompanied by Inspector Nathan Goldman and Inspector E Turton. As they approached the door of the roof-top room the command wire device was initiated. Allegedly the perpetrator mistook the uniformed police for Morton and Wilkin. Schiff was killed immediately and the other two succumbed to their injuries in following days. Morton and Wilkin arrived shortly afterwards but the third device was not initiated and was discovered later. It contained 28 sticks of gelignite. In police operations that followed a number of Lehi members were shot during raids. Stern himself was shot dead by Morton after being arrested. In a curious after-story, there was an attempt on Morton’s life three months later, another command wire IED on a car he and his family were traveling in. He escaped serious injury but later hidden IEDs were found at the cemetery where supposedly Lehi expected him to be buried, purportedly to attack mourners.

The second attack took place in Rome, Italy, in 1944, against the German SS “Bozen” Polizie Regiment. The attack target specifically was a mass column of German speaking Italian police, recruited by the Nazis from northern Italy, who regularly walked the same route on parade through Rome. Thus the column of marching troops provided a predictable target for the attack by the partisan “Patriotic Action Group” (GAP). The regular march by the column of police, paraded through Rome singing, around the Piazza del Spagna and into the narrow street of Via Rasella. The partisans prepared a large charge consisting of a steel container holding 12 kg of TNT, along with another bag containing more TNT and TNT filled metal tubing. The bomb was hidden in this hand cart.

A forty second burning fuze was lit as the marching troop approached (exactly the same technique as used in the VBIED attack against Napoleon in 1800). 28 of the SS policemen were killed in the explosion. The incident led to very significant reprisals by the Nazi authorities, including the dreadful Ardeatine massacre where 335 Italians were executed.

I think there are some interesting points shared by these attacks. Both were against police forces at least partially recruited or sponsored by other nations. Both exploited the predictability of their targets, albeit in different ways. In both events the aftermath of the IED attacks led to further nasty tragedies. In war the focus of history is on the front line battles between armies. But Home fronts also provide an environment for IEDs and the police are often the targets but are often forgotten in some history books. Patterns of IED tactics seen today appear as we look further and further back in time.

standingwellback 30th April 2018 20th Century

IEDs in Belfast – 1922

Ian Jones has passed me details of IEDs in Ulster in 1922. Ian is a real EOD history guru and I recommend his excellent books.

In 1922 Ireland was still being fought over and Irish republican bomb attacks were still relatively frequent (see my earlier posts such as this.)

Belfast was no different and a range of IEDs were encountered. There are details below of some interesting devices. But note that the military response to these was by the Royal Engineers, not the RAOC who later became responsible in the province for such activity. In a report published in the Royal Engineer Journal, which I cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons, Captain EW T Graham-Carter reports a series of incidents that his Unit responded to.

1. An attempted bombing of a telephone junction box in Arthur Square in the centre of Belfast, two IRA men disguised and equipped as telephone repair men opened a manhole cover and left a times device behind. A Sapper Unit was requested to deal with the device. The manhole was filled with water by the Fire Brigade (!) and after three hours the package was removed. The device, wrapped in sacking, consisted of a wooden box with a slider switch on the outside. The timing device was an adapted alarm clock. (There are pictures in the journal). The device failed because the alarm clock had not been wound up. The main charge was an unidentified home made explosive or incendiary material (possibly sodium chlorate and sulphur). The initiators were interesting – two glass tubes sealed with insulating tape with two copper electrodes immersed in magnesium flash powder. Subsequent experiments were able to cause the main charge mix to explode.

2. A series of other devices are interesting because like many modern devices in the Middle East they utilised artillery shells, in this case 18pdr, but filled with home-made explosive. These were left in a number of “picture-houses” (cinemas), but on a number of occasions failed to function and were recovered by the Royal Engineers.

3. Other devices were designed to be hidden by or in roads. One found near Armagh consisted of hollow concrete blocks, 9in X 9in X 9in, with the addition of scrap metal as improvised shrapnel. It held 5lbs of explosive and was initiated electrically by a command wire of 300 yards in length.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Apart from the Sappers that is.

standingwellback 8th February 2018 20th Century

Suffragette Bombs, 1912 – 1914

There’s a lot of talk about the suffragette movement right now, and that’s entirely appropriate. But there is little about the suffragette bombing and arson campaign. On these pages I try to avoid political commentary, but just for the record here’s an outline of some of the bomb attacks by the Suffragette movement. There were also a considerable number of arson attacks. This is by no means an exhaustive list of bombing attempts but I think it’s most of them. I have commented on device construction of some of the incidents, where known.

18 July 1912. Theatre Royal Dublin. several small explosive devices exploded during an attack by suffragettes who tried to burn down the theatre.
19 February 1913. Walton on the Hill, Surrey. A house being built for Lloyd George was attacked with two crude explosive devices. Only one functioned, disrupting the second. The unexploded device had a main charge of 5lbs of gunpowder.
4 April 1913. Oxted railway station, Surrey. Bomb exploded in men’s lavatory. Clockwork mechanism and battery recovered.
14 April 1913. Bank of England, London. Milk can attached to railings by hat pins in the street outside the Bank of England, opposite the entrance top the Stock Exchange. Relatively large charge. Timing device of a wristwatch and battery, device initiated but did not explode properly, device spotted emitting smoke, policeman carried the burning device to the Royal Exchange and immersed it in a fountain.
17 April 1913. Aberdeen Railway Station. Gunpowder charge, fuse was a lit candle. A railway porter extinguished the candle.
24 April 1913. Free Trade Hall, Manchester. Bomb exploded.
24 April 1913. Crown Court, Newcastle. Bomb exploded. 2ft long pipe bomb.
2 May 1913. Piccadilly Tube station. London. A quantity of nitroglycerine was found abandoned at the station.
5 May 1913. Borough Market Post office, London. Gunpowder and nitroglycerine recovered from a parcel.
7 May 1913. St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Ticking bomb discovered and defused. the device contained a clock, two batteries, and contained nitro-glycerine as the main charge. Nitroglycerine was a relatively rare explosive used by the Suffragettes.
10th May 1913. Cambridge. a bomb exploded in the changing rooms of the Cambridge University football ground.
10 May 1913. Lime St station, Liverpool. A device failed to function in the waiting room. Burning fuse had gone out. The device was packed with improvised shrapnel (nuts and bolts).
10 May 1913. Empire Theatre, Dublin. A woman discovered a bomb made from 24 cartridges of gunpowder, with the fuse burning i the ladies lavatory in the theatre. She picked up the device and plunged it into water in a sink, extinguishing the fuse.
10 May 1913. Reading Post Office. A parcel was found ticking and a postal device connected to a timer was recovered. The explosive charge consisted of gunpowder and nitroglycerine.
14 May 1913. Parcel bomb sent to Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, a magistrate, at Bow Street court, London. Device consisted of a tin of gunpowder, and a bullet with a nail fixed to strike the percussion cap, presumably released on a spring when the package was opened (but not that clear). Device defused. A few days later two persons attempted to push Sir Henry off a cliff near Margate as he was out walking.
15 May 1913. A small bomb planted outside the National Gallery, London. Failed to explode.
16 May 1913. a series of bombs at
1. A library in South London
2. A church in Hastings
3. An hotel in Brentwood
4. At Westbourne Park Station (device failed)
21 May 1913. Royal Observatory, Blackford Hills Edinburgh. Bomb exploded.
27 May 1913. Reading station. A bomb was thrown onto the platform from a passing train (the Bristol Express), where it exploded.
11 June 1913. Post Office, Newcastle upon Tyne. Bomb exploded.
15 June 1913. Eden Park railway station, Beckenham. Bomb recovered. A clockwork timer had failed to function.
17 June 1913. Blackfriars Bridge. Bomb thrown from the bridge, exploded on or under the water.
18 June 1913. Stratford Upon Avon Canal, Birmingham. Large explosion damaged the canal. Remains of a long burning fuse recovered.
5 July 1913. Cotton Exchange, Liverpool. Bomb exploded.
7 July 1913. Monsall Road railway siding. Manchester. Device exploded on a train carriage parked in the sidings.
19 July 1913. Haslemere station. A bomb was discovered in a box on some steps leading to the platform. It was plunged into a pail of water bya porter. a clock, battery, “fuse” and explosives were recovered.
11 November 1913. Alexandra Park, Manchester. A large explosion of a pipe bomb, probably gunpowder. Initiation system not known
14 November 1913. Sefton Park palm House Liverpool. Bomb failed to explode.
18 December 1913. Holloway prison, London. Two large dynamite bombs below up next to the prison garden wall. The devices had been exploded by two 50ft loing burning fuses run to a nearby House.
6 January 1914. Crown Point, Leeds. A bomb exploded at an electricity generating station.
7 January 1914. Harewod Barracks, Leeds. A dynamite bomb was thrown over the wall of the barracks which was being used by the police at the time. It exploded.
24 January 1914. Kibble Palace botanic gardens, Glasgow. Two devices were encountered in the Botanic gardens. One was rendered safe by a gardener who cut a burning fuse with his knife. The other exploded.
March 1914. Church of St John the Evangelist, Smith Square, Westminster, London. Bomb exploded. (see second attack on this church on 12 July 1914)
3 April 1914. Belmont Church, Glasgow. Three small devices exploded in Belmont Church, Glasgow
5 April 1914. Trafalgar Square, London a bomb exploded at the church of St Martin-In-the Fields, starting a fire.
17 April 1914. Britannia Pier, Yarmouth. Bomb exploded causing a fire which destroyed the Pier. On the same day a number of fires were started around the country.
3 May 1914. Upper Windledon Reservoir, Yorkshire. Large iron pipe bomb discovered at valve house, having failed to explode. Fuse was a wax taper.
10 May 1914. Metropolitan Tabernacle, Elephant and Castle, London. A bomb exploded in the gallery of the church.
22 May 1914. Glasgow. Two large explosive devices discovered buried beside a Glasgow aqueduct. Fuses had been lit but had extinguished.
5 June 1914. Dudhope Castle, Dundee Policeman discovered a pipe bomb at the castle entrance. Burning fuse was wrapped around a candle, which had been lit but had gone out.
11 June 1914. Westminster Abbey, London. a bomb exploded beside the coronation chair, probably damaging the Stone of Scone. which is built into the chair. Iron shrapnel and been built into the bomb.
14 June 1914. St George’s Church Hannover Square, London. Bomb exploded.
15 June 1915. Olympia, London. A suffragette was arrested in possession of a bomb at a horse show.
8 July 1914. Robert Burns’s cottage , Scotland. Two people were spotted placing large explosive devices against the wall of the cottage, an historic building. One person was detained, the other escaped. two devices were recovered, each containing about 4kg of blasting powder, each with a 20ft burning fuze.
12 July 1914. A postal bomb exploded while in transit on a train between Blackpool and Manchester causing a fire. A guard was severely injured in the flames
12 July 1914. device left under a pew in the Church of St John the Evangelist, Smith Square, Westminster, London during a service. Perpetrator Annie Bell arrested as she left, having been under surveillance. device consisted of a large charge of 5.5 lbs of gunpowder with a lit candle inserted. Device was extinguished by the congregation.
13 July 1914. Rosslyn chapel, Edinburgh. Bomb consisted a a tin of gunpowder and a long burning fuse, was set on a window ledge and exploded.
1 August 1914. Lisburn, Northern Ireland. Bomb exploded outside Christ Church Cathedral, leaving a crater 4 feet deep

Churches targeted: 11

Railway targets: 10 (including a postal device that functiond on a train)

Devices defused by passers by/first responders: 10

Devices failed to function as intended: 10

standingwellback 2nd February 2016 1910-1920

Mystery Sabotage Device, 1918

This post is a bit of a puzzle, that I may need some help with. I’ve blogged before about the German sabotage campaign on the east Coast of America in 1915 here:

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/9/17/kurt-jahnke-the-legendary-german-saboteur.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/22/massive-explosion-in-new-jersey.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/2/12/booby-trap-ieds-on-the-battlefield-1918.html

And indeed I’ve built up a bit of a presentation on German sabotage in 1915-1917 which I may get round to posting here. In brief summary, German agents either operating out of the German Embassy or operating undercover developed a systematic and effective sabotage campaign to disrupt munitions and other cargoes being shipped to the European Allies of France, Russia and Great Britain, before the US entered the war. There is documentation that certainly 35 ships were firebombed, and an additional 39 suffered suspicious fires. Many sabotage events were downplayed or not reported so the number could be significantly higher. A number of munitions factories in the US attacked. Five US Navy warships suffered fire damage, and the USS Oklahoma and USS New York, two new battleships under construction were almost completely destroyed.

Most of the cargo ships sabotaged in 1915 were attacked with small incendiary devices, the size of a cigar. These contained sulphuric acid in one small compartments separated from picric acid or potassium chlorate, by a copper disc.. The copper disc was dissolved over time (usually several days) and then the sulphuric acid was in contact with the other compound causing a violent ignition. Typically a number of these “cigars” were secreted in the cargoes in a ships hold by stevedores of German or Irish extraction in US East Coast ports. Some devices were made aboard German ships, interned in US ports when the British blockaded them. One in particular, the “SS Friedrich der Grosse” of the NordDeutschland Lloyd line was docked in New York and German agents ferried the devices from the ship to the dock workers to hide on board munitions and cargo ships. Other cigars or “pills” as they saboteurs described them, were made in the laboratory of the designer, Dr Scheele at 1133 Clinton Street, Hoboken, New Jersey.

The “cigars” were to a design develped by a German sympathiser, Dr Scheele, and are reported to have been about 4 inches long. Once initiated they ejected white hot flames from both ends.

Now, there appears to have been more than one design. In a diagram produced by another saboteur, Frederick Hermann, the construction of the incendiary appears a little more complex, than simply two compartments in a lead pipe separated by a copper disc. It is hard to interpret the diagram below but I note that the compound to which the acid mixes is described as chlorate and sugar, which will make a difference to its explosive effect, depending on relative qunatities of the mixture. The diagram appears (I think) to show an upper reservoir of sulphuric acid, a “neck” halfway down labled “c” (for copper, presumably a copper plug and not a disc), and below that the chlorate with sugar. Wax probably closed both ends.

It should be noted that to work effectively the cigar needs to be positioned vertically, to allow the acid to dissolve the copper and then fall into the chlorate-sugar mix. Only a proportion of the devices functioned and some were recovered by French and British governments in ports in Europe. In 1915 this activity was being led by two officers from the German embassy , Karl Boy-Ed, and Kapitan Franz von Papen. Later in 1915 a secret agent of the German Navy Franz von Rinteln was sent to encouage the sabotage campaign. In a range of investigations led by the head of the NYPD bomb squad, Thomas Tunney, who was seconded to Military Intelligence, the German sabotage cells were largely disrupted. By 1917 the US had entered the war, Rinteln was captured and imprisoned in England and the others had been arrested, expelled or in the case of Dr Scheele, escaped to Havana.

Given that history it was intriguing to find a report on the Australian War Memorial blog about an incendiary device recovered from a ship in 1918, possibly in Liverpool, from a ship arriving from the US. By 1918 most of the German sabotage cells had been rounded up, also the design of the incendiary device is somewhat different.

These images are included on the AWM blog and I’m grateful for their kind permission to reproduce them here.

Working from the photographs alone, it appears that the knurled steel “head” appears to have two openings in it, closed by bolts. I would have perhaps expected only one, to simply fill with acid. The main body appears to be copper and the strange shaped base appears to be aluminium (?), corroded by a galvanic reaction. The base is an odd design. This device, bigger than the earlier cigars would have been more difficult to smuggle aboard and its dimensions would have made it more difficult to conceal in a cargo. The description accompanying the images suggest that rather than acid eating through a reservoir wall in this case the acid ate through a wire which retained a spring action to an initiator…. that’s a quite different initiation mechanism. This device would have taken more skill to construct and the threaded and knurled head, the apparent 3 sections of copper pipe and a neat fitting of the copper pipe to the aluminium base indicates a higher level of engineering…. Something about the base design rings a bell, but I can’t put my finger on it. The design of the base must have a reason and there must be a reason for it to have been different from the copper…but I cant work that out. Any suggestion gratefully received.

The blog from the AWM also has set me off on a new thread. The device appears to have been forwarded to the Australian section of the British “Munitions Inventions Department” in Esher, for examination. The Munitions Inventions Department had been set up earlier in the war to coordinate the wide range of scientific and military engineering developments required by the Allies to win the war. It was really the forerunner of later government defence research departments. Teams of ingenious, pragmatic and capable engineers had been co-opted into developing a wide range of innovative weaponry. By all accounts the Australians were masters of such craft and contributed significantly to a wide range of innovative munitions. I’ve started some research on that and will no doubt blog about some of the wilder and more interesting inventions in the future.

Update on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 3:38PM by

Roger Davies

So a follow up on the mystery device. I have some thoughts beginning to crystallise.

1. I think the corroded base might be Magnesium and not Aluminium. Magnesium would also also be subject to galvanic corrosion (same principle as “sacrificial” corrosion) as it remains in contact with the copper cylinder.

2. In around 1917 German forces developed air dropped incendiaries that used magnesium, dropped by Zeppelins on England. These were impact fuzed, and contained a thermite charge. The thermite then reacted with a magnesium body to cause a fierce fire. Most UK EOD folk will be aware of a further development of these which were used extensively in WW2, and we, the Brits, called them 1kg incendiary bombs. The Germans called them either “Goldschmidt bombs” after the guy who discovered the Thermite reaction, or Elektronbrandebombe or Elektron incendiary bombs, “elektron” being the German name for the magnesium alloy of the body.

3. So.. I think it is possible that this device is a “home made” variant of a German Elektron incendiary. If that is the case then the impact fuse has necessarily been replaced with an acid time fuse, as required in the ship sabotage use-case. Thermite would have been contained in the copper piping, and the magnesium base provided to get the high energy heat, initiated by the thermite reaction. In some of the earlier Zeppelin bombs the body of the core of the bomb was wrapped with rope soaked in tar to give additional burning. This might explain the wide base at the bottom with the tar soaked rope wound around the central core, above the “shelf” provided by the base.

4. Here’s an image of an early incendiary dropped from a Zeppelin (this one is not an elektron bomb, I think).

And here’s one after it is burnt out showing a broad base on which the rope is mounted and a central core:

The design of the magnesium incendiaries evolved quite quickly – here’s what they looked like by the end of WW1 and pretty much through to WW2, with only minor changes:

So… my best guess at the moment is that the device on the AWM site is an improvised incendiary, that may have been wrapped in a tar soaked rope originally and may have contained a thermite charge inside the copper tubing. The base might be magnesium and in the intervening years has galvanically corroded. It will continue to corrode, slowly as it remains in contact with the copper tube. The initiator was a timed mechanism probably using acid to erode a wire, which released a spring allowing a striker to initiate a charge which then ignited the thermite. But I’m far from certain. This means that these later devices, in any event, were much larger than the small 4 inch cigars used in 1915 and therefore harder to smuggle aboard a ship and conceal in the cargo. I’m very open to alternative interpretations.

Update on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at 5:02PM by

Roger Davies

I have a new update, thanks to the curator at the Australian War Memorial Museum. Following this blog post they tested the base. I had guessed the base might be magnesium, but they found the base material consisted of Copper, Zinc and Manganese. Minor amounts of Arsenic and trace amounts of Titanium, Chlorine and Potassium were also visible.

Back to the drawing board…. Does anyone have any suggestions?

standingwellback 24th December 2015 1710-1720

18th Century TPU, 19th Century Grave Robbers

I’ve blogged before about the use of flintlocks and other gun-lock mechanisms used as initiators in IEDs between the end of the 16th century and the middle of the 19th century. Some recent digging has made me think that the integration of a timing mechanism with a flintlock mechanism was a widely used system, perhaps not regularly within an IED but widely enough that it’s use must have been well known, even if only as a potential initiation system. Here’s some images of a couple of peculiar alarm clocks which I think make the point well. The operator sets a time on the clock which when reached released a spring loaded trigger on a flintlock. A small amount of powder is then initiated which also ignite the wick of a candle which then by a linked spiring stands up in the box. These are I think from the period 1715- 1740 or thereabouts. Nowadays we’d call these a Time and Power Unit (TPU)

I have also found a “set gun” which attached a flintlock to a tripwire, used as a deterrent for both for both poachers and grave robbers. Here’s an image of one of these.

To be clear I’m not suggesting any of these are IEDs, just that such a mechanism could have been used at the time to initiate explosive devices. The set guns were outlawed eventually but in 1878 an inventor, Mr Clover of Columbus, Ohio then came up with a “coffin torpedo” to deter grave robbers who opened a coffin with something like a shotgun cartridge, initiated by the opening lid. “Torpedo” was the name given to IEDs at that time.

In 1881 a Mr Howell invented two “Grave Torpedos”, much more like IEDs and images from the patent application is shown below. These were much more like an American Civil War land mine, placed on top of a coffin with a plate above it, designed to be initiated when the grave robbers dug down.