This is very intriguing – a second hand report about Japanese troops using multiple suicide bombing as a tactic against the Russians in 1904 or 1905. I’ve spent a few hours looking for a primary source or even a better secondary source and can’t find one – vague references to the tactic but no specifics. Fascinating in its implications. Rather than lift the story, here’s a straight image from the book, as is.
I’ve found a new source of interesting historical explosive incidents that will fill several blog posts. But I couldn’t resist posting this story straight away. (It’s a little apocryphal I admit). Stand-by for more from this source.
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, a certain Russian officer was an impatient, overbearing martinet. He took particular pleasure in treating his Chinese servants with the utmost of harshness, for the slightest delinquency or indeed for no reason at all. One of his favoured forms of punishment was to dismiss his servants and as they left kick them roundly around the backside as they left through the door.
On of his servants became very irritated with this treatment, and one day related the circumstances to a man he met who happened to be a Japanese spy. The spy gave the Chinese servant much sympathy and promised him a solution – a pair of padded breeches which he would supply himself the following day. A rubber hot water bottle was filled with absorbent cotton wool and topped up with nitroglycerine. An initiation system using a percussion cap was fitted alongside such that any blow would cause detonation. The unfortunate Chinese servant was oblivious to this, thinking that he had a fine, but bulky new pair of trousers which would protect him.
At the next meeting the servant inadvertently spilled a little tea on the officer’s uniform. Thereupon the master raged and raged and dismiised the servant in the usual way, but with perhaps a little more precipitation than usual.
One of the officer’s legs was blown off, an arm was crushed, four ribs were broken and the Russian was unconscious for a good period of time. When he came to, he found himself a prisoner of the Japanese who had overrun the hospital. The Chinaman, well, he was never seen…
A friend of mine asked me my opinion on the most significant terrorist attacks in history. Here’s one which had pretty significant implications.
“John the Painter ” aka James or John Aitken, aka Jack the Painter, aka John Hill aka James Hinde was born a Scotsman but adopted America as his cause. A petty, and not so petty, criminal he made his living as a painter and clearly his daily dealing with turpentine and flammable liquids prompted a thought. He was also seized with enthusiasm for the cause of Independence for America, having arrived there in 1775. He became a prototype lone wolf terrorist.
In 1776 he knocked on the door of the leading American diplomat in Paris, France, Mr Silas Deane, and with a little encouragement described a plot to set on fire the key naval dockyards in England, thus crippling the British Royal Navy. He showed Deane his incendiary device:
Producing a portable infernal machine of his own invention, he explained his scheme. The machine consisted of a wooden box to hold combustibles, with a hole in the top for a candle, a tin canister, no larger than a half-pound tea can and perforated for air, to cover it; the whole to be filled with inflammable materials—hemp, tar, oil and matches. The candle, having been lighted, would burn down until it ignited the inflammable materials, and these exploding would scatter the fire for yards around.
Deane gave him a little encouragement and a little money and sent him on his way. On returning to England, John the Painter successfully burnt down the Rope House at Portsmouth Naval dockyard. He also set a number of fires in Bristol. This created the public impression that gangs of American revolutionaries were active in the country. The King himself offered a reward for his capture and demanded daily briefings.
In an early form of Weapons Intelligence Investigation a failed device of the same design was discovered in an adjacent building to the burnt down rope house and subsequently witnesses attested that John the Painter had had it made in Canterbury. John the Painter was hunted, arrested and tried – the transcript of his trial is available on line in Cobbett’s State Trials. The device is described very clearly on a number of occasions by witnesses. An intriguingly thorough trial even down to the calling of a witness from whom he had bought matches.
He was duly transported to Portsmouth where he was strangled at the gates to the Naval Dockyard then hoisted up the 64 foot mizzenmast of the HMS Arethusa [specially unbolted and placed on land for the occasion] then they eviscerated his body, tarred it, hauled it back up the mast and left him to waft in the wind for years as a warning to all and sundry.
The mast was the highest gallows in England’s history. 20,000 people attended the execution (quite a number, given the population of Portsmouth was 13,000)
So, why was this so significant in its implications? Here’s why:
A newspaper of the time stated:
“Of all bad characters, an incendiary is the foulest. He acts as an assassin armed with the most dreadful of mischiefs, and in executing his diabolical purposes, involves the innocent and the guilty in the same ruin.”
A “coal torpedo” was the name given by Confederate Secret Service agents for a crude IED disguised as a lump of coal. The device was then introduced into the stocks of coal on ships and trains with the aim of causing an explosion in the boiler when it was shoveled into the engine.
The coal torpedo seems to have been invented by Capt Thomas Edgworth Courtney of the Confederate Secret Service. Courtney proposed the idea to Jefferson Davis motivated probably by the financial rewards promised by the Confederacy which were suggested could be 50% of the value of Union shipping destroyed by new inventions. In this case, financial reward became the mother of a number of inventions. Courtney was commissioned and formed a Secret Service Corps of 25 men with direction to to attack any Union vessel or transport carrying military goods found in Confederate waters, with his rewards (no salary) being paid in Confederate war bonds.
Details of Courtney’s plan leaked to the Union who put a price on his head. Courtney escaped to England, and tried to sell the design of the Coal torpedo to the British Navy, the French, the Spanish and Turkey, without success.
The Union naval forces on the Mississippi under Admiral David Porter issued General order 184 accordingly:
The enemy have adopted new inventions to destroy human life and vessels in the shape of torpedoes, and an article resembling coal, which is to be placed in our coal piles for the purpose of blowing the vessels up, or injuring them. Officers will have to be careful in overlooking coal barges. Guards will be placed over them at all times, and anyone found attempting to place any of these things amongst the coal will be shot on the spot.
Details of the actual ships destroyed by this means are unclear as records have been destroyed but it appears likely that a number of the devices functioned as intended.
Courtney’s torpedoes were manufactured carefully at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop in Richmond, Virginia. Actual lumps of coal were used to form a mold into which iron was cast. The walls of the devices surrounded a hollow sufficient to hold about four ounces of blackpowder. After filling, the void was closed with a threaded plug, dipped in beeswax and rolled in powdered coal to disguise it. The device, although small, could rupture the pressure vessel of a ship, causing much greater secondary damage.
The concept of coal torpdeos carried on. After the American Civil War the Fenian Brotherhood (see previous blog posts) had connections with both sides and there appears to have been a plot in the 1860s and 70s to use such devices to place in the furnaces of New York hotels and British shipping .
In WW1 German saboteurs operating in the US planned to use such devices to attack munitions ships, and in an earlier post I mentioned that such devices were found by US forces after overrunning the Germans in France in 1918.
In WW2 both the OSS and the SOE used similar devices, as did German spies. I have found reports that the Japanese also developed a similar tool at the Noborito research Institute, and they were used by Japanese commandos in raids in New Guinea. There is also a hint that the CIA explored this as a tactic to be used in Vietnam.
The OSS didn’t do things by halves and developed a coal camouflage kit for such devices, with a range of paints to enable the device to match variations in coal supplies.
This is another oddity. Alexander Keith was born a Scotsman in 1827. He worked in Canada for a while and then worked for the Confederate States in the American Civil war as a blockade runner. In one escapade he was involved in what would today be called a chem bio plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever into the Northern cities in the United States.
It appears that he attempted to swindle some colleagues and fled to St Louis and then settled on the prairie. However one of his alleged victims tracked him down and he fled again, this time to Europe, where he assumed the name of “William King Thomas”, and later the alias William Thompson. As he began to run out of money, in 1875, he concocted a complex insurance fraud that involved blowing up a passenger ship. But his plans went badly wrong.
Keith hid a large timed IED in a barrel and arranged for it to be shipped across the Atlantic to New York in the steamship Mosel. As the barrel was being loaded onto to the Mosel, the barrel slipped, fell and exploded on the dockside in Bremerhaven. There must have been a significant quantity of explosives, and in a massive explosion 80 people were killed. A witness stated ” “A mushroom-shaped column of smoke rose approximately 200 meters above the harbor. Everywhere people were crying and whimpering beside ruins. The entire pier was covered in soot: it was like the gateway to hell.” Newspapers of the time dubbed the incident the “crime of the century”.
Interestingly Keith was on the Mosel and clearly understood that his plan had gone wrong. He had intended to sail on the ship, but leave it, and its explosive cargo, when he got to Southampton. He went to his cabin immediately, and shot himself in the head twice (think about that…) . In the drama of the post blast no-one noticed the two shots from his cabin – only later did someone hear a groaning from his cabin. The door, locked from the inside, was broken down and Keith found lying on the floor, still alive. A revolver was by his side with 4 remaining bullets. His second shot paralyzed him.
Now, as I have written before, placing IEDs on ships was something that confederate agents had done before. (My next blog post will be about confederate “coal torpedo” IEDs used to damage ships) But by 1870 dynamite had become available significantly increasing the potential of an IED. As we know, Confederate IEDs had utilized clockwork mechanisms. Keith needed to obtain one for his plan, and had approached a German clock making company called JJ Fuchs of Bernberg, with a request for a silent spring-loaded mechanism capable of functioning after a 10 day delay. Keith refused to explain why he needed the mechanism but Fuchs designed it nonetheless. The mechanism was large and weighed about 30 pounds, and was so expensive that Keith initially refused to buy it. He approached two Viennese clock makers for a cheaper alternative but they failed, so eventually he returned to Fuchs.
The Fuchs timing mehcanism
There remain suspicions that Keith may have been involved in the disappearance of at least two other ships, The SS City Of Boston in January 1875 and the schooner Marie Victoria in 1864.
The suicide note