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?

 

 

Uncategorised

Stealthy Explosive Attacks at Sea – 1805

Given recent explosive attacks in the Gulf, it’s worth remembering that stealthy attacks on maritime vessels with explosive devices isn’t exactly new.  In 1804 and 1805 Robert Fulton designed some IEDs for the British Navy. Fulton was something of a peripatetic bomb maker and inventor – making devices for the French, for the British and then for his home nation the USA. In 1805, his devices were used in a small number of British attacks against the French in the Channel ports.  Most of these attacks were failures or had limited effect.  However the French authorities recovered the devices, and examined them in detail.  So this is a lovely early example of Technical Intelligence and Weapons Technical intelligence regarding IEDs.  The French artist was fantastic and his diagrams of the devices have survived. Frankly they put many modern IED intelligence reports to shame. Here are the diagrams with some annotations (in red) by me.

The first diagram is a clockwork timer initiation device, used to detonate a floating explosive charge. The clockwork timer is connected to an adapted firearm lock, a flintlock in this case. You should recognise the flintlock mechanism in the device below:

This clockwork initiation mechanism was attached to a main explosive charge. The main charge was a large sealed canoe shaped pontoon, described as a coffer. Two of these were attached to make a barely buoyant twin raft with a rowing position in the middle.

Here’s the charge:

The coffer was filled with gunpowder and also, in effect, sub-munitions, described as “combustible balls” and other, larger “hogshead” explosive charges were , I think towed behind, but the initiation mechanism for these hogsheads I can’t quite make head or tail of.

Finally here

Finally, here’s a diagram of the “catamaran”. It was rowed into place not far from the French Imperial Fleet. The rowers then pulled a lever to start the timer, slipped into the water and swam to accompanying boats. The tide then took the just-floating catamarans (I think there were at least two) towards the anchored fleet, with the barrels designed to foul the ships and swing the larger charges alongside the ship. As you can see they were pretty large contrivances.

So… Here we have, 214 years ago, a stealthy IED attack on French Navy vessels, by the British, designed by an American, and with a superb Technical Intelligence report on the failed devices by the French. This stuff ain’t new.  I hope to have more (new) detail on Fulton’s explosive device design in coming months.

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

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.

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.

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