Standing Well Back
Railway IEDs

A Missing Link – IED designs being passed through history

This is quite startling.  I have written before about Boer use of upturned-trigger-initiated IEDs used to attack British Railways in the Boer War, and more recently about how the same design of IED was used in the German East African Campaign

These devices were used again, exactly this same design, by the British against the Ottoman rail system in Arabia in 1917.  One of the issues in my mind was how “Bimbashi Garland”, the Arab Bureau’s explosives expert,  got to hear about Boer IEDs from an earlier war. In British eyes, this Boer design, then adopted by the Germans in 1915, became, by 1917, the “Garland mine” .  Thanks to the research of “JB” we have an answer as to how that happened and what an interesting answer it is. Bear with me as I explain

Here are parts of a letter sent from a relatively senior British Army officer with previous campaign experience in the Boer War. He sent a letter to the British Army in Egypt suggesting, specifically, that the Boer explosive device he had seen many years previously in South Africa be used to attack the Hejaz Railway in Arabia. Not only that, but he includes a detailed description of the device, which with minor variations is clearly the same device.

 

For comparison here’s a diagram of the device from one of my earlier posts

The correspondence is then passed from British HQ in Cairo to General Reginald Wingate whose headquarters was in Khartoum, with some comments from the Fortifications and Works Department.  Of particular note here is that they refer to the German use of such devices in East Africa, and comment that these devices have been effective. Here’s the comment from a Sgt in the Fortifications and Works department.

So that’s interesting… but it gets better. The original letter was dated October 1916. Herbert Garland, the former Ammunition Examiner NCO, now with a commission and on the staff of the Arab Bureau,  shortly afterwards began working “behind enemy lines” with the Arabs, and taking the advice/instruction of the letter writer , made his first attack on an Ottoman train in February 1917 – so the dates match up. Subsequently he trained the Arabs and other British officers on similar missions, including Lawrence of Arabia, to do the same. So we have a nice link between the Boer War, the German East African Campaign in WW1 and now the Arab revolt of 1917, all using the same design of IEDs, now called the “Garland Mine”.

What is perhaps even more interesting for historians is the identity of the original letter-writer, that at first I confess I didn’t notice.  It is written by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes…    Sykes is perhaps the key personality in terms of strategic influence on British activity in the Middle East, way beyond Lawrence.   Sykes, with the French diplomat Picot, was responsible for the “Sykes -Picot” agreement which divided the Middle East, and specifically the Ottoman Empire,  between the British and French, and this strategic diplomatic activity was going on at the same time as the letter was written – so this is so much more than a retired Army officer pontificating about how what he learned fighting against the Boers could have application in “modern war”.  This is the lead British strategic diplomat in the Middle East politely and diplomatically directing that an IED campaign using this specific explosive device be used to disintegrate the key aspect of the Ottoman empire’s strategic hold on Arabia. In the usual history books the strategic direction of the Arab Revolt is sometimes credited to the “Arab Bureau” but there were bigger cogs turning and directions being given to them. The Bureau’s efforts were at the operational level in this regard.  Here we can see history was being made in the Middle East and with these specific IEDs and with strategic thought. And not for the last time.

(Apologies for the racism displayed in the Sykes letter, but it is important to see, and perhaps adds to our understanding of his thought processes and how they may have impacted his strategic efforts)

20th Century

IED Innovation… or not

In May 1992 I was just starting my second tour in the EOD world. One of my jobs was to disseminate to my colleagues information on technically significant IED incidents, and the following was one of those incidents, and seemed very innovative. Given the ongoing discussion about “Backstop Borders”, or not, with the Irish Republic, it’s also quite pertinent.

In 1 May 1992, the British Army manned and ran a checkpoint ay Cloghoge on the Northern Ireland/Irish Republic border adjacent to the main road between Dublin and Belfast. This is about as far South as South Armagh goes, and in those days there was a very high level of threat from the Provisional IRA.  The main railway line also sat right there, and the small post, quite heavily protected, was right next to the road and the railway. It was normally manned, if I recall correctly, by about a dozen soldiers, providing “cover” and assistance for the police stopping the cross-border traffic at the check point. In Army terms the checkpoint was called “Romeo 1-5” (R15).

The Provisional IRA mounted a clever attack on the checkpoint. They stole a mechanical digger, and separately, a van. They loaded approximately 1000kg of home-made explosives in the van. Using the digger they made a makeshift ramp from the road, up to the railway lines, manoeuvred the van up the ramp then fitted the van with railway wheels. The digger was then used to lift the van, with its railways wheels, onto the the railway line (it wasn’t that busy a line and it was the middle of the night). All this happened out of sight of the checkpoint, at about 800m south of the border.

The van was fitted with a spool of cable, to initiate the device, and the cable fed to a terrorist who could see the checkpoint or someone who was in radio contact of someone who could see the target. At about 2 o’clock in the morning the van was set off in first gear, with no driver, towards the checkpoint paying out the spool of cable.

The Army sentry on the checkpoint, Fusilier Grundy, heard and then saw the approaching vehicle bomb and raised the alarm. Most of the occupants of the checkpoint took cover. Fusilier Grundy, correctly assuming this was a threat to his life and those of his team, opened fire in an attempt to disable the vehicle bomb. at 0205hrs the device was exploded next to the concrete sanger containing Grundy, killing him and throwing the ten ton protective sanger into the air. The remaining soldiers survived in a shelter, built to protect them if a vehicle bomb was delivered by road.  The replacement to this checkpoint was removed when the Good Friday Agreement came into effect.

I duly wrote up a technical report to the teams I supported (I was on mainland UK at the time), and highlighted that this innovative technique had never been used before.

Or so I thought…  But this is “Standingwellback” ain’t it, where I delve back in history. So check this out:

On 31 October 1943 the Germans were holding and guarding a railway bridge on the Ubort River in the Ukraine, West of Kiev. A Soviet partisan group led by an NKVD Major called Grabchak decided to use an “innovative” method to attack the strongly defended, strategic bridge. The area around the bridge was heavily mined, enclosed with barbed wire, there were several machine gun posts and a large garrison protecting it with mortars and other heavy weapons.

Twice a week the local German commandant travelled down the line to inspect the defences at the bridge from his base a few miles away. He invariably travelled to the bridge by a “special section car”, a small vehicle that was mounted on the railway line rails and used by railway officials for inspecting the line. As far as I can work out this was pretty much a road car fitted with railway wheels. Grabchack and his partsians, over a two week period, made a “replica” section car. The base of the vehicle was fitted with five large aircraft bombs. The fuzing arrangement was simple and ingenious. They knew the height of the cross bracings on the bridge. They fastened a long pole, upright between the bombs. Towards the base of the pole was a pivot point and at the base, a length of wire leading to the pin of a grenade fuze connected to the main charge explosively. So the concept was that the “section car” would be sent down the railway, and as it started to cross the bridge, the pole would hit the cross braces of the bridge, pulling the pin from the grenade fuze.   To add to the effect of the “expected” section car, two dummies were made, dressed in German uniforms, one an officer, the other a driver, and sat as realistically as possible in the car.

At 4pm, on 31 October 1943 the car was carefully placed on the rails about 1km from the bridge, just out of sight, near the village of Tepenitsa. It trundled down the line towards the bridge, and seeing it coming a guard opened a barrier and let it enter onto the actual bridge itself, presumably saluting smartly as it passed by. There, the device exploded, damaging the bridge severely.  Interestingly the German forces put out some propaganda that the device was a suicide bomb, driven all the way to the bridge on rails from Moscow, by “fanatical red kamikazes”. Apparently several more of these railway delivered IEDs were constructed and used but I can find no records, which given it was 1943 and the middle of a war full of sabotage operations is not surprising.

I have written a previous piece about trains loaded with explosives in Mexico in 1912, “loco-locos”, here.

So, the analysis of these incidents suggests the following:

1. There are several instances, historically, of trains or vehicles on train lines being the delivery method of getting explosives to targets. A variety of switching methods is possible. The technique can cause significant surprise, and such vehicles can carry sufficient explosives to overwhelm hardened targets.
2. Apparent innovation isn’t always new. Especially on standingwellback.
3. Border crossings are tricky, whichever way you look at it.

1930-1940

Guy Fawkes, MI6 and the NKVD

In my last, lengthy post discussing the Russian IED Godfather Ilya Starinov and his efforts to encourage sabotage and partisan operations (using IEDs) behind enemy lines, I touched on the resistance to such activity that was prevalent in parts of the Russian government.  Stalin’s purges really started in about 1933/1934.  It was the NKVD that drove the purging activity and Starinov observed them destroy his partisan strategies, and arrest and liquidate those partisans  whom he had trained to make and deploy explosive devices.  At the same time, Starinov felt that production of manufactured explosive devices was prevented by the NKVD, because the availability of a stockpile of sabotage devices might, in the eyes of the NKVD, enable counter-revolutionary warfare against the Soviet Union, and so he emphasised improvised explosive making as a result, before the NKVD prevented even his training activity and associated sabotage schools out of a fear of the capability it might provide to people intent on overthrowing the now established government of Stalin.  Starinov thought such precautions were ridiculous and attempted to work around them. And that generally makes sense.

But. But…  What if the NKVD’s concerns had a real grounding? What if there was evidence that those trained to conduct partisan operations against an enemy really could be a threat to their own nation? What if the NKVD had bought onto that concept, that mechanism, to create a capability, what evidence is there to indicate that?  I think I have found some.

In 1938/1939 a British SIS (MI6) officer made a convincing suggestion that Britain needed a sabotage training school.  It would address how British sponsored partisans would work behind enemy lines, gather intelligence and use explosive devices to disrupt the economy and the warfighting of the enemy nation they operated in. The concept is/was remarkably similar to Starinov’s. I think that might not be a coincidence.  The school was established soon after and the SIS officer who suggested the requirement became its Second in Command and a syllabus was developed by another SIS officer acting as Chief Instructor. Training began in 1939. Amusingly the officer who had the idea wanted to call the facility “The Guy Fawkes School”, but this was turned down and the place was called “D School”

So that’s all fine, I hear you thinking, big deal, what’s the connection between this British Sabotage School and Russia, and using the capability of a school against the nation for which it as purported to support?

Well you see… the MI6 officer who suggested the school and became its 2IC was a man called Burgess. The Chief Instructor was called Phiby.

Guy Burgess and Kim Philby were both double agents of the NKVD. So Britain’s sabotage school was doing in the UK exactly what the NKVD was worried about in Russia. The Sabotage School was completely within their very direct and nefarious interest. No wonder they were nervous about Starinov’s training facilities.

Guy Fawkes indeed.

Two Guys – Burgess and Fawkes

20th Century

Going Around and Coming Around

During World War One there was an extensive IED sabotage campaign run by German agents and diplomats in North America.  I have written in previous posts about some of these bombing incidents. See:

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

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/17/new-yorks-ied-task-force-1905-1919.html

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

One of the protagonists, or “players” in this great game was a young aristocratic German military officer, serving as diplomat on the staff of the German Embassy in Washington., His name was Kapitan Franz von Papen.


Von Papen in 1914 (public domain)

Von Papen was a man who clearly enjoyed intrigue. As well has involvement in the German sabotage campaign in 1915, he was also involved in discussions as an intermediary to Irish revolutionaries looking for a  supply weapons for the Easter rising of 1916, and was involved in liaison with Indian nationalists as part of the Hindu German Conspiracy.   In December 1915 he was declared “persona non grata” by the US government because of alleged complicity on the Vanceboro Bridge bombing .   Travel home to Germany was challenging, but Von Papen received a diplomatic document, a Laissaiz Passer, meaning he travelled via Falmouth in England knowing he could not be detained by the British under diplomatic law.  To his horror the laissez passer did not cover his luggage and in front of him on the dockside at Falmouth the British officials opened his bags finding code books and incriminating documents.

 

Documents were found which detailed the payment of over $3Million to the German agents involved in the sabotage campaign.   Transcripts of the seized documents are available here and make fascinating reading.  His cheque stubs were annotated with significant detail such as “for the purchase of picric acid”  “for dum-dum investigation” and exposed several agents who lived in England but were offering services to the Germans.   Of note is the Germany authorities in Berlin asking him to find out details of how Mexican revolutionaries were blowing up trains in 1914, “in order to form an opinion whether, in the event of a European war, explosions of this kind would have to be reckoned with”.

One can imagine the apoplectic Prussian officer watching as the British officials simply opened his bags and took the documents out.   Further documents linking Von Papen to the Bombing Campaign in the US were discovered in a Wall Street office he rented. Other documents incriminated the Austria Ambassador who was collecting munition shipping data for the Germans.  One might have thought that Von Papen would have learned his lesson.  But no….  In a later parallel, while serving with the Ottoman Army in Palestine the following year, he left behind a suitcase in a room he was using in Nazareth as the British advanced. In it, papers were found belonging to him incriminated several agents he was running locally.  All in all then, Von Papen’s spy-craft was pretty shoddy.

In 1916, an US indictment was issued against him for plotting to blow up Canada’s Welland Canal, based on the seized documents from Falmouth.  He remained under indictment as he rose in the ranks of the German inter-war political scene, becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1932, at which point the US charges were rescinded.   There is this rather nice quote about Von Papen at the time by the French Ambassador “His appointment to Chancellor of Germany was met by incredulity. He enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies. He  was reputed to be superficial, blundering, untrue, ambitious, vain, crafty and an intriguer.”   He was subsequently easily out-manouvered by the Nazis.  He was then made Ambassador to Austria, in the run up the the Anschluss.

In 1939 he was appointed as Ambassador to Turkey, where the intrigue of the war years suited his inclinations, if not his expertise. The Turks initially objected pointing out that his previous diplomatic activity had involved sabotage in the US and subversion in another (Austria). but he was appointed.  In 1942 a peculiar incident occurred, an act of intrigue against the man with so much experience of it himself.  There are conflicting version of this story but it would appear that the most convincing is this:

The Russian intelligence service , the NKVD, decided to assassinate Von Papen.  After an abortive attempt to incorporate a Czech officer, they found a Yugoslav born communist, now Turkish,  to conduct the mission. The perpetrator was told to shoot Von Papen who regularly strolled along a particular avenue with his wife, then cover their escape by triggering a “smoke bomb”.  But with NKVD subterfuge the smoke bomb wasn’t a smoke bomb at all, but contained a large amount of high explosive. The perpetrator fired one shot at Von Papen, which missed then immediately triggered the smoke bomb’ which exploded blowing the shooter to pieces.  His penis was found in a tree and a distinctive wart on the skin near an eyebrow was also recovered from the scene.   The NKVD had also , allegedly planted documentation in the device packaging suggesting the perpetrators was from the German Embassy itself. Another version suggests that this was “reported” by TASS as disinformation.   Then idea was that the assassination would occur and the perpetrator would be blown to bits to reduce the risk of the incident being compromised as an NKVD operation.

Von Papen and his wife survived the attack, shaken but largely unharmed. For what it is worth Von Papen suspected the British. The Russian embassy hinted that the Americans “knew” it was the gestapo who were responsible.  The turks arrested the “station chief” of the NKVD (officially listed as an “archivist”)  at the Russian embassy . This occurred amongst diplomatic uproar as the Turks surrounded the Russian embassy for two weeks demanding he be handed over.   Two other emigre Yugoslav communists (from the Muslim community) were also arrested.  These latter two confessed that the Soviets had ordered the assassination.   They claimed that the Russians had given the perpetrator, Omer Tokat, a revolver and the supposed smoke bomb. all defendants were found guilty. Things got complicated in subsequent appeals (too complex to explain in a short blog).

After the war Von Papen was convicted at the Nuremberg trials , released in 1949 and died 20 years after that.

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.

 

 

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:

 

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