Standing Well Back

1940-1950

The Nazis and Copernicus

One of the nice things about this blog is that I don’t have to stick rigorously to its stated subject.  In the previous post I examined some of the explosive devices used by the Polish Resistance in Warsaw.  During that research I came across this story which is simply worth retelling.

The Polish resistance was not without its sense of humour, and the occupying German forces… well lets just say they were German and not renowned for the perspective humour offers.   In the heart of Warsaw stood a large statue of the astronomer Copernicus. Copernicus lived when the Kingdom of Poland was part of Prussia so both the Poles and the Germans had claims to him.  At the base of the monument was a plaque with the inscription ” To Copernicus, from his countrymen”.  The German authorities, on occupying Warsaw, removed the plaque and replaced it with another that read “To the Great German Astronomer”.  The statue was in a square right outside a German police station.

One day a group of workmen, seemingly from the city council, arrived and began to work on the base of the statue, unnoticed. They removed the German plaque. It was actually a group led by Polish resistance fighter Maciej Aleksy Dawidowski.   It was 10 days before the authorities noticed their plaque had gone missing. The German commander, Governor Fischer was outraged.  This is his picture – he looks pretty much like the proto-typical Nazi war criminal that he was doesn’t he?

Fischer issued a proclamation below:

A translation is something like this:

“On 11th or 12th February 1942 criminal elements removed the tablet from the Copernicus Monument for political reasons. As a reprisal, I order the removal of the Kilinski monument. At the same time I give full warning that should similar acts be perpetrated I shall order the suspension of all food rations for the Polish population of Warsaw for the term of one week”

Now, Jan Kilinski was another popular historical figure in Warsaw, a shoemaker who led the fight against the Russians in a siege of Warsaw in 1794.  His statue was indeed removed by the Nazis and stored in the vaults of the National Museum.   By the following morning someone had painted in very large letters on the side of the Museum

“People of Warsaw, I am in here! Signed Jan Kilinski”

A week later, all of Fischer’s proclamations were over pasted with another announcement, printed in the same style. This proclamation read:

“Recently criminal elements removed the Kilinski monument for political reasons. As a reprisal, I order the prolongation of winter on the Eastern Front front for the term of two months.  

Signed Nicholas Copernicus”

Now as it happened the winter of 1942 was indeed long and hard for the Germans on the Eastern Front.   Fischer was tried for war crimes and hung in 1947. Dawidowski died very bravely in 1943 in an attempt to rescue fellow partisans from jail.

 

 

1940-1950

Warsaw IEDs

I’ve been researching the improvised explosives used by the Polish resistance in WW2.  One can’t but help notice some parallels between the Warsaw uprising and the ongoing tragedies in Syria – the devastation of Warsaw looks pretty similar to that being seen in Aleppo and other Syrian cities.  The Nazi destruction of the ghetto is scarily similar to the Assad regime’s destruction of areas of Syrian cities.  Compare the effect of the use of the siege mortar “Thor” (Karl-Gerat) against the Warsaw ghetto with the user of barrel bombs in Aleppo.

Here’s two interesting images – the black and white one shows a Warsaw resistance fighter examining a “blind” Karl-Gerat munition. The colour image below it shows a Syrian resistance fighter with a “blind” barrel bomb. I’m not suggesting the munitions are identical, but in terms of explosive effect they will have been pretty similar, and it’s spooky how similar the images are, some 70 years apart.


1944


2014

Consider the similarity of effects:


Warsaw


Aleppo

There are other similarities too – the Polish resistance had a very significant production of ingenious improvised weapons – and some of their techniques appear similar too to those seen in Poland. Look at this image of a spring-loaded Molotov cocktail projector – I’ve seen similar from Syria

The boundaries between improvised weapons and production weapons can get a bit vague here – for example its is thought that tens of thousands of Sidolowka and Filipinka grandes were produced by the resistance.

These improvised grenades had a variety of fills, but most commonly “cheddite”, a chlorate/nitrobenzene mix I have discussed in earlier posts (used by many including Irish revolutionaries circa 1920.) Not much difference in design , of course with the Irish grenades seen here…with the same explosive fill.  All aspects of the grenade including the fuse and the detonators were produced by the Polish resistance. Largely they obtained the potassium chlorate component of the explosive by theft from the Germans.


An improvised Filipinka grenade. The Cyrillic marking is an attempt by the Polish resistance to obfuscate indigenous manufacture

 


Improvised Sidolowka grenade.

The Polish resistance also made significant use of command wires devices and other IEDs to attack trains and other targets.    Here’s a picture of the explosive unit of the Warsaw resistance on route to attacks the Warsaw telephone exchange on 18th/20th August 1944 with a command wire initiated device.

Hundreds of German military trains were attacked with IEDs too. During one six month period the British SOE assessed that the Polish resistance had wrecked 1,268 railway engines and damaged 3,318 carriages. This report describes the operationally sophisticated use of multiple IEDs along a railway line:

An ordinary railway mine, which exploded when the first train passed over it would cause an interruption in traffic for only about four hours. At one time we were anxious to interrupt traffic on the main Warsaw-Malkinia sector of the Eastern front for a minimum period of 10 days. Our experts solved the problem, and the resulting interruption lasted as long as two weeks.  It was done by specially devised mines which could be automatically blown up. A chain of these mines was laid across the tracks. The first, which was placed in the middle of the chain, went off as the first train was passing over it. Two more placed on the tracks on either side of the first when the rescue train arrived from one side or the other. The remaining mines on both sides of the wrecked trains exploded successively when the repair trains arrived from both directions. Result: Ten miles of track effectively mined. After their first train has been blown up four repair and relief trains sent in to deal with it had been effectively destroyed.

Other sophisticated IEDs were also created by the Poles. I have found one report that 18 Luftwaffe aircraft were destroyed by the use of an explosive device in an elongated cylinder which was hidden in the rear of German aircraft and initiated on a reduction of atmospheric pressure once the aircraft reached a certain height.

1930-1940

Explosion at C-IED Lab, Paris, 1938

In a previous blog I detailed the French C-IED facility that existed at the Municipal Laboratory in Port de Vincennes, Paris.  This facility started around 1880, and my earlier post detailed its operations in 1911.

A sister facility existed in the French suburb of Villejuif in 1938.  At that time there was a terrorist campaign of bombings by an anti-communist fascist group called the “Cagoulards”, some of them “false flag” attempts to blame communist groups.  The French authorities mounted a series of security operations.  In 1938 large quantities of improvised grenades were recovered in one such operation.  As was the normal drill these were recovered to a laboratory for examination, some 3000 in all (some sources say 5000). The large quantity resulted in the need to move them to a larger storage facility in Versailles  The French military were tasked to assist the police in the loading of these grenades onto appropriate transport (two military trucks) at the Pyrotechnical Laboratory in Villejuif.  For reasons not understood, (but probably caused by someone dropping one of the delicate improvised grenades into a box of others) there was a large explosion and 14 people were killed including the M. Schmitz the head of the explosives investigations unit at the laboratory.  Three of the five explosive laboratory buildings were destroyed.

Here’s a video of the aftermath.

20th Century

It’s a Cracker!

In my research regarding the historical use of explosives, one of the avenues I’m digging away in is the use of explosives to break into safes. Clearly explosives have always been a potential tool for damaging locked doors, and containers. It’s intriguing to follow the development of safe design through the centuries, and see how the engineering technology followed the various threats posed.  I also learned a few things along the way that I hadn’t realised like that fact that safes had two purposes, the first being to prevent the damage of documents and valuables by fire, and the second to prevent theft. In the former there’s an interesting thread of safe design that protected the contents by insulation, heat sinks and water vapour production.

In the mid 19th century, safe manufacturers became worried about the explosive technique of inserting blackpowder into the lock of a safe and initiating it there to blow out the lock, so various techniques to make “powder-proof” locks were invented, usually involving much more careful design which eliminated the space where gunpowder could sit in the lock.  Thus the amount of explosive possible to insert in the lock was reduced. In 1914, an anti-explosive re-locking device was patented, in the usual tit-for-tat for battle that exists between explosive users and those defending against them.

The hey-day of the explosive safe cracker was for about 20 years, from the late 1940s till about the mid sixties, allegedly because the wartime experience of a number of criminals had opened another box, Pandora’s, with regard to the clever use of explosives. A long time ago I was told that the establishment of the London Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad in the 1960s was at least partly because there were so much safe cracking going on and someone had to be there to pick up all the bits.

The slang term for an explosive safe cracker in the criminal community at this time was a “peterman”.  The reason for this is a little obscure. Here’s a few suggestions:

  • It’s Cockney rhyming slang.  A safe is called “a can”, which leads you in the obscure logic of East End language to be “peter pan” which is shortened to “Peter”.  So a Peter man was a man who dealt with safes.
  • Many Scottish safe crackers ended up in Peterhead prison…. hence “Peter man”
  • An ancient term for an explosive charge used to blow off doors was a “petard”, and this got transformed from Petard man to Peterman.

For further background there’s a nice website on the subject of Petermen, here  , and a related site here.

The Peterman site also details some famous safe crackers, including “Gentleman John Ramsay”.  I quite like the fact that Ramsay, after one conviction wrote a letter to the authorities letting them know he’d left a quantity of explosives packed into another safe at the scene of the crime.

Beware though – many of the stories you can find about John Ramsay are probably not true.  One story is intriguing though, and that’s that while serving with a specialist commando intelligence unit (30AU) in WW2 , he quietly repatriated Nazi gold and other treasures to Scotland, that he had recovered from safes in the German embassy in Rome. Wouldn’t that be a temptation to a career criminal?

Finally, here’s why you shouldn’t trust the electronic safe you find in your hotel room. When you can “bump” a safe (a widely known technique) who needs explosives?  Google “bump opening safes” if you don’t believe me. There’s a lot of videos of similar examples. A lot of electronic safes aren’t safe at all.

1920-1930

History lessons

Some earlier posts discussed the home made explosives and IEDs manufactured by Irish republicans shortly after WW1 (around 1920), and I’ve returned to the trove of information I have discovered on this subject. One of the themes of this blog has become the way in which today’s counter-terrorist operatives can learn lessons from the past, and this is a particularly good example.   During the 1980s one of a number of explosive devices designed by the Provisional IRA was a “drogue bomb”.  This basically consisted of a tin full of explosives, with a striker fuze behind it, and it was lobbed at vehicles with plastic strips trailing behind it to ensure it hit the target nose first so activating the striker by momentum.  To the EOD operator this was simple but “new” device.

What is interesting is that it wasn’t new at all. In about 1920 the IRA had previously developed what they called then a “drogue bomb”, and the diagram is shown below.  For obvious reasons I’ve left off some of the technical detail – if you are an appropriately accredited EOD operator contact me and I’ll give you the full diagram.   There are of course some differences between this 1920 design and the one from 60 years later in the 1980s… the striker mechanism has switched from the front to the back, and the steel case in the earlier device is thicker.  Those of you knowledgeable of other IRA mortars from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s will also recognise certain aspects of the fusing from this earlier device.  I can tell you that EOD operators of my generation had no knowledge of the history of Irish republican device design from earlier campaigns. More fool us. As I’ve shown in earlier blog posts, improvised munition design used by Irish republicans goes back not only to this post-Easter Rising period, but to much earlier back to almost 1800.   Previous blogs to have highlighted the similarity between an IRA mortar of this 1920 period and the British Stokes Mortar of WW1.

 

 

Of course there are similarities to this device and Russian grenades, and I believe also to WW1 German trench grenades which I suspect this device is derived from.

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