Standing Well Back
1850-1860

Senior officers and explosive investigation don’t mix

In the last few days the British Royal Navy  have announced a “large” deployment (their words not mine!) to the Baltic as part of a NATO exercise.     The reports mention that this is the largest deployment to the Baltic for 100 years.

Actually the previous deployments are pretty interesting.  If you don’t know the story of Agar VC, who tore around the Baltic in a fast torpedo boat, delivering and picking up spies for MI6, then sinking Russian cruisers, in 1919 (!)  you should read this life story here.  Jaw dropping stuff.  I have mentioned one of his WW2 exploits here, and he also took part in the Zeebrugge Raid in 1918, so he is a recurring character on this blog.  Nothing to do with explosives but the story of the sinking of HMS Dorsetshire is remarkable.

There also was a significant range of British naval operations in the Baltic during the Crimean war (1855).   I’ve mentioned this in passing in earlier posts but it’s worth revisiting.  The Russians had a major naval base on the island of Kronstadt hat was potentially a target for attack by the British Navy. The Russians deployed a fairly large number of explosive devices, tethered just below the surface of the sea on the approaches to the base, in effect an early sea mine. (Similar devices had been deployed in the Crimea and you can see a superb drawing of one here)

The British Navy on patrol in the Baltic became aware of them, and decided to investigate, sending two ships, with senior officers aboard to recover and examine the devices.

Here’s a Royal Navy diagram:

The device works when the rod A-A is struck by the side of a vessel. This rod then pushes on a glass vial of Sulphuric Acid (D-D), breaking it at the bottom. The acid drops into a container full of Potassium Chlorate (C), causing a reaction which ignites the gunpowder charge. This fuze is called a “Jacobi fuze” although in fact it was designed by Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel.

Provided the rods aren’t pushed, (they are held by a spring), it is possible in theory to recover the mine, which is exactly what sailors from a ship carrying Admiral Seymour did. On recovering the device onto the deck of the ship it was carefully taken apart, and there was discussion amongst the officers observing how the mechanism should work.  Admiral Seymour, being a “hands-on sort of chap” worked it out an exclaimed “O no. This is the way it would go off” – and he pushed the bar A-A. The device duly functioned as intended , exploded, and knocked everyone down around it. Seymour survived but was badly injured.

 

The very next day, a ship carrying Admiral Dundas recovered a similar device. Admiral Dundas performed exactly the same trick as Admiral Seymour, the device exploded and Dundas nearly lost his sight.

Senior officers eh?

 

 

20th Century

The first Anti-Tank Mine – an IED

Tanks of course didn’t exist before WW1. But when tanks arrived in the scene, then an anti-tank mine was needed quickly. Here’s an early German one, showing an artillery shell mounted in a wooden box that would be buried in the ground. A cross-member is laid across the top of the fuze and would exert a crushing force downwards on the fuze initiating the device.

 

Of course this wasn’t the first time that artillery shells were utilised in IEDs – Here’s one from the US Civil war.   But I suspect the principle is the same, utilising the pressure of a tank track to impinge on the armed fuze of the artillery shell, buried in a box.

1910-1920

This man made IEDs that blew up dozens of British trains

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a reminder of the Boer device:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Update: Some more detail of the attacks:

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

 

 

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

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

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

Command IED

Command initiated explosive device from 1582

I’m steadily working my way through more military handbooks from the late 1500s when there appears to have been a lot of revolutionary thought going into military technology and explosive device development in particular. My previous post on a grenade was dated 1578, you may recall that Giambelli’s ship explosive device was 1584, and I’ve written before about a postal device in the city of Pskov in 1581.  I’ve also written before how “gun-locks” were used as initiating devices for explosives over a 250 year period.

On that latter point I’ve just found a gun lock (in this case a wheel-lock) drawn in a manuscript from Germany, dated 1582. The drawing is here and as you can see the design is very clear.

 

The wheel-lock was a progenitor of the flintlock which came in a few years later, in about 1600. In a wheel-lock a spring-loaded wheel spins against some pyrites held in the cock.  Here you can see how the gun lock has been removed from a firearm and fastened to a frame. A string is attached to the trigger, led around a pulley and away to the person initiating the device. When the target presents itself, the person pulls the string, which pulls the trigger. On pulling the trigger a spring mechanism spins the steel wheel against the pyrites held in the cock. This causes sparks which ignites the fuse. The fuse leads to a barrel of gunpowder hidden nearby.  In a post a few years ago I have an image showing a multiple IED attacks against a military convoy employing these exact devices, so it’s good to corroborate the attack with a contemporary IED design.

So, this is another example of how explosive device design appears to have developed rapidly at this peculiar point in history, across Europe. I think it is the publication of these handbooks and manuals of military science that seems to be helping – bu I’m afraid I’m not a good enough historian to identify other causes of this bubble of ideas. Comments from proper historians welcome!

A couple of follow-up thoughts:

1. The “pull string” could of course be adapted to a trip string, turning the command-initiated device into a victim-operated booby trap.

2. One possibility of the sudden uptick in apparent use of explosive devices at this point in history is manufacturing technology.  I wonder of clock-making saw similar technological leaps at this time.  Wheel-locks were invented in the early part of the century but are quite complex in design from an engineering and manufacturing perspective. Perhaps clock making manufacture and design took parallel leaps at this time and the transfer of ideas to wheel locks (essentially a clockwork mechanism, with a wheel powered by a spring) enabled cheaper device components and they became more commonly available rather than the early wheel locks which were the weapons of the rich.  I’ve just read that coiled carbon steel spring (essential for wheel locks) was first made possible in the early 1500s – perhaps manufacture became easier in the 1570s, allowing them to be more easily and cheaply manufactured, and hence available for regular soldier’s weapons and “one-time use” in explosive devices. Perhaps the wheel lock mechanisms, like in the diagram above, were separated from the main charge and were thus in theory recoverable after the event.

19th Century

Earlier Russian stay-behind explosive devices

In my previous post I discussed Russian stay-behind explosive devices . Now, it is usually my habit to dig back in history to find earlier instances of certain attack styles, and indeed this does apply in this case. I’ve written a little before about Russian mines in the Crimea during the war with the French and British in the 1850s. When the Russians lost Sebastopol to the British and French in 1855, they “left behind” numerous booby-trapped explosive devices hidden in the buildings and connected, in some cases, to powder magazines within the fortresses of Sebastopol. So these were massive IEDs, left behind within potential military facilities, by the Russians. so in some ways exactly the same concept of operations as the WW2 F-10 devices, except the latter were command detonated rather than victim-operated.

Here’s a report from a “war artist” who was on the scene of one of the explosions:

Yesterday, as I was sketching in the west of Sebastopol, an explosion shook the buildings around and reverberated through the roofless and untenanted edifices of the place. The Arsenal Creek was filled with a heavy black smoke, and showers of large stones fell into the water, lashing it for a moment into sheets of foam. The centre of the fire was a battery on the left flank of the Creek Battery. This was one of the works erected by the Russians to sweep the approaches of the Woronzoff road; it was built of stones taken from the houses around it, faced with earth externally, and without a ditch. The magazine was in the foundations of a house which had once stood there […]. The Russians had placed a fougasse over it, and an accidental tread upon a wooden peg driven into the earth broke a glass tube of inflammable matter which communicated with the powder below […].

Three of the men in the work were blown to atoms; and a large number were buried in the ruins; whilst sad havoc was at the same time committed on parties of workmen leading mules along the road close by. Two soldiers of the guard in the Creek Battery were killed by stones projected with great violence into the air, and launched with fatal force upon them. Several mules and horses were killed in this same manner, and every point within 200 yards of the spot was visited by the terrible shower. The crater left by the explosion was about twenty feet deep and twenty wide; and in its crumbled sides were found some of the wounded, who were speedily conveyed to hospital.

So for the victors in urban environments, the challenge of stay behind devices goes back a long way. I contend that there are direct similarities in the concept of operations between the Russian stay-behind devices in the Crimea in 1855 and those of 1941 and the Eastern Front. I wonder too about those towns in Iraq and Syria, liberated from ISIS/Daesh and the identical challenge faced by EOD teams this very day and for years to come. Nothing in EOD is new.

From the description above it’s clear that these were versions of the Jacobi-Fused landmines used elsewhere in defensive positions by the Russians.

The fact we know a fair amount about these mines is in part due to a US military mission to the Crimea.  In 1855 Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, created a team called “The Military Commission to the Theater of War in Europe”.  The team consisted of three officers – Major Richard Delafield, (engineering), Major Alfred Mordecai (ordnance) and Captain George B McClellan of later US Civil War fame.  McClellan resigned in 1857 and the report was published in 1860. It is wonderfully detailed and I’d recommend it to any students of military history – it covers just about all aspects of European military developments, from defensive positions, artillery to mobile automated bakeries aboard ship, ambulance design, hospital design and French military cooking techniques.

With regard to innovative munitions, Immanuel Nobel (father of Alfred Nobel) had been engaged by a Russian military engineer,  Professor Jacobi,  to develop submarine charges and a contact fuzing system. These “Jacobi” fuzes consisted of a pencil sized glass tube filled with sulphuric acid fastened over a chemical mix.  Some reference history books say the chemical mix was potassium and sugar but I think that’s probably a misunderstanding – I would suspect the mix was actually potassium chlorate and sugar, as in Delafield’s report below.  When the glass vial contianing the acid is broken, (such as when stood upon) it mixes with the chemicals below and explodes initiating a gunpowder charge sealed in a zinc box.  One might have expected Mordecai to take an interest in the IEDs but it was Delafield who took particular interest and heartily recommended the use of such things by the US military. Here is an extract from Delafield’s technical report from the device recovered by the British:

They consisted of a box of powder eight inches cube (a), contained within another box, leaving a space of two inches between the, filled with pitch, rendering the inner box secure from wet and moisture, when buried under ground. The top of the exterior box was placed about eight inches below the surface, and upon it rested a piece of board of six inches wide, twelve inches long and one inch thick, resting on four legs of thin sheet iron (o), apparently pieces of old hoops, about four inches long. The top of this piece of board was near the surface of the earth covered slightly, so as not to be perceived. On any slight pressure upon the board, such as a man treading upon it, the thin iron supports yielded. When the board came into contact with a glass tube (n) containing sulphuric acid, breaking it and liberating the acid, which diffused within the box, coming into contact with chloride of potassa (sic) , causing instant combustion and as a consequence explosion of the powder.

Delafield goes on to note that the British and French exploiting these devices did not have a chemistry lab available to properly identify the explosives.  I think a mention of a lack of resources for what today might be called “Tech Int” is instructive! The deployment of Technical Intelligence laboratories and associated “CEXC” capabilities to theatres remains an issue today.

A second device is then described:

Another arrangement, found at Sebastopol, was by placing the acid within a glass tube of the succeeding dimensions and form. This glass was placed within a tin tube, as in the following figure, which rested upon the powder box, on its two supports, a, b, at the ends. The tin tube opens downwards into the powder box, with a branch (e) somewhat longer than the supports, (a, b)   This , as in the case of the preceding arrangement, was buried in the ground, leaving the tin tube so near the surface that a man’s foot, or other disturbing cause, bending it, would break the glass within, liberating the acid, which, escaping through the opening of the tin into the box, came into contact with the potassa, or whatever may have been the priming, and by its combustion instantly exploded the powder in the box.  What I call a tin tube, I incline to believe, was some more ductile metal, that would bend without breaking. For this information I am indebted to the kindness of an English artillery officer who loaned me one in his possession and from which measurements were made.

The famous Colonel Majendie, who later became the British Chief Inspector of Explosives, the UK first official bomb disposal officer, and who conducted remarkable IED and technical investigations some 30 years later, in the 1880s, fought as a young artillery officer at Sebastopol. Could it be the same man?  I’d like to think so.

The Jacobi fuse , or at least a variant of it, was used in Russian sea mines at the time – see this earlier post.

But of course one can go back further in time to look at previous Russian efforts, earlier still. When Napoleon’s Grande Armee entered Moscow in 1812, it was with great triumph and the summit of a remarkable campaign – but within a day Russian saboteurs had started to burn the city to make it uninhabitable for the occupants. Napoleon himself had to be rescued from fires encroaching the Kremlin and soon the retreat from Moscow started.  I don’t doubt that the Russians of 1855 and 1941 knew their history. and whether it is a knowledge of history, or something else, the ruins of Syria and Iraq today pose an identical challenge.  Moscow 1812, Sebastopol, 1855, Kiev and Kharkov 194, and Syria 2019.

Here’s a pic of Moscow burning, set fire by Russian saboteurs, with Napoleon looking glumly on.

Update:

I’ve been asked for a bit of clarity on the Russian mines discussed by Delafield and the “Jacobi fuzes”.

So, Jacobi fuzes were designed by Immanuel Nobel, and were fitted to a range of munitions. The fundamental principle behind the fuze is a glass vial of sulphuric acid held above a potassium chlorate (or potassium chlorate and sugar) mix.  Some action or other on the munition breaks the glass vial, which then allows the sulphuric acid to mix with the chlorate. this generates enough energy to ignite a powder train to the main charge.  In the sea mines encountered by the British Navy in the Baltic during the Crimean war there were steel springs and rods which broke the glass when a ship touched the moored mine.  In the Crimea itself and these devices above then it was the action of a person stepping on a plate which in turn caused the glass to break.

Delafield’s diagrams, (Fig 101 and 102) respectfully, are indeed not that clear. But there are two different mechanisms, both pressure from above in each device which cause the glass to be broken. The “pitch” mentioned is simply a method to seal the box containing a volume of gunpowder from the ingress of water from the ground in which it is buried, giving the “mines” a longevity. If you wish you can read the original “technical intelligence report” at this link here.

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