Description of 1944 Render Safe

I’m taking a bit of a gamble with this story. Usually the stuff I post is out of copyright. The excerpts below are from a book published in 1977 by the then Lord Rothschild.  I have contacted his estate to seek permission to quote this small excerpt but received no reply. I think this story is worth telling and shows the man in a good light so I’m going to take a chance and copy some images here.  I will remove if anyone objects and make a donation to a suitable charity if it causes concern.

Lord Rothschild (1910-1990) was one of those larger than life characters, a real polymath if lived a life to the full.

During WW2 he worked for MI5, advising on the vulnerability of British industry to sabotage, and in one or two other related “spooky” activities related to explosives, much of which there is little or no public record of.   In 1944 there were some sabotage devices sent from Spain, I think, to the UK hidden in cases of onions. One arrived, somehow in Northampton and Lord Rothschild went  to deal with this German sabotage device which used 21 day timers.  I have no other details of this German operation.  Below is an extract from Rothschilds telephone conversation with his secretary as he rendered the device safe.  It reminded me very much of the Earl of Suffolk, another Lord involved in Bomb Disposal in the Second World War who I have written about before – he too conducted his RSPs while talking to his secretary on a field telephone.

I understand that it was mainly for this operation that Lord Rothschild was awarded the GM. Good job.  No doubt his secretary then asked “So, how do you think that went?”

 

This excerpt is from “Meditations of a Broomstick” By Lord Rothschild, published in 1977 by Collins.

 

 

 

South Armagh Command Wire IED – 1921

UPDATE!!!

This story below, based on contemporaneous news reports, turns out to be incorrect.  I’m indebted to JB for sending me the Irish History statement of an IRA member of the time describing how the tracks were manually removed causing the train to derail and crash.  So the story below doesn’t stand up.  But I’ll leave it here because its interesting on a number of levels:

a. how the press reports will vary from the truth quite dramatically.

b. The geography of the area that I assessed as being useful for a command-wire attack, also enable this manual sabotage operation.

Here’s what I wrote originally:

During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s South Armagh in Northern Ireland was a tricky place for IEDs. Only the best and most experienced EOD teams were deployed there.  And one particular part of South Armagh posed more problems than most and that was the railway line that snaked sinuously through the countryside.  As the line gets towards the border, it can be viewed as if in a large amphitheatre, and can be observed for miles, and with the border close by providing escape routes, things were pretty challenging.   At the time no-one told us this place had history. But exactly 100 years ago there was a very significant attack on the British Army here, blowing a train of the track and killing soldiers and horses. Here’s a brief outline.

The new government in Belfast had just been formed. A British Army Cavalry unit, the 10th Hussars, normally based in Dublin, had travelled North by rail , in three separate trains with their horses, for the parades and pageantry associated with the opening of the new Ulster parliament by the king. On 24 June 1921, the unit were travelling back to Dublin again by three trains.   It was the third and last train that was attacked.  The front carriages contained the soldiers and the rear carriages the horses. A few mile beyond Newry the line runs through open countryside with Slieve Gullion on the right and the Ravensdale hills on the left.  In the 80s and 90’s I knew this place as the “Drumintee Bowl” and in those days it was under a lot of observation from the British Army.  In 1921 though it was just pretty rolling wild countryside.  Both then, and in the 70’s,80’s and 90’s the place provides an “arena” for the IED – long views, little high hedged lanes, and a border to escape across. Tricky place for an EOD team, who can feel very exposed there.  A lot of detailed procedural techniques were honed and carefully applied during EOD operations in the Drumintee bowl and on the railway line in particular.

The railway line, which still runs today on the same route runs along an embankment, sitting about 7 -10m high, in full view.  The IRA of the time, knowing the trains were to return to Dublin and knowing , presumably when the trains were loaded and boarded at Belfast, had planted two explosive charges under the rails. The press of the time suggested the device had a time fuse, but I think this is unlikely. Much more likely would have been a command wire, run to an observation point a couple of hundred yards away.  Local IRA men had been trained in the use of electrical command -wire IEDs from the previous year and were equipped with the components including coil exploders.

As the train passed the point of explosion, the circuit was made and the device exploded under about a midpoint on the train. One carriage containing a few soldiers took the brunt of the explosion and three of the soldiers were killed. The carriages behind containing the horses then tumbled off the embankment and about 50 horses were killed (all but one). Here’s a  Pathe news reel of the time at this link.

Of course it’s no surprise that the characteristics that made this place attractive to the bombers of 1921 were the same 60 years later. The IRA probably knew fully well about the 1921 attack – I can tell you that the EOD teams operating in South Armagh 60 years later were , to their chagrin, less aware of history than they should have been.   Other attacks planned by the IRA in the 1920/21 era in South Armagh included pumping oil and paraffin in a mix into a police Baracks in Camlough as a pumped “flame thrower” incendiary. This technique was returned to by the Provisional IRA to attack the RUC station in Crossmaglen in 1993. (Guess what, the British Army had forgotten the earlier attack) , and using a large explosive device paced at the entrances to police barracks – another techniques which came around again in the 1970s,  1980s and 1990s in that same place.

The soldiers who died that day in 1921 were Private Carl Horace Harper, Private William Henry Telford and Sgt Charles Dowson.

The attack was carried out by a IRA unit led by Frank Aiken, a notorious man who commanded the IRA volunteers of South Armagh and Newry at the time. In the weeks that followed their were tit for tat reprisals including the shooting of four IRA men by the B Specials, and so on. South Armagh always was a hard place.

 

More early explosive ROVs

In an earlier post here, I discussed some First World War antecedents of modern ROVs, these early one being used to deliver explosive charges – essentially a mobile land mine.  One of the early ones I mentioned was a Schneider “Crocodile” from 1915 which I have not much information on but is pictured here, and which apparently was French developed, but was trialled by a number of nations including Britain and Russia.

Here’s a pic of the controlling team, manning some sort of command interface while the ROV pays out or pulls a cable. I think they are French.

Interestingly I’ve just come across a reference to a number of other Russian devices, some of which seem to have been ROVs. These are referred to as “Sidelnikov’s mobile mine, the creeping mines of Kanushkin and Doroshin, the crocodile mine of Colonel Tolkushin.”     It’s interesting that Colonel Tolkushin’s device was also called a “Crocodile” like the French device. I have only this poor image of it from about 1915-1920:

It seems to be a multi-charge device, on wheels, but to be honest it’s not that clear. Alas my Russian is not good enough to dig out more detail.

Russian ROV technology also preceded some other German technology to deliver large explosive charges in WW2 that I have written about here .  In the 1930s, Russia developed the “Teletank” . One of the versions of this teletank had a large charge (200-700kg) which was “dropped” by the ROV tank like the German Borgward. These were radio-controlled tanks and utilised some early systems which were designed to prevent radio jamming.  Don’t underestimate Russian technology.

 

10,000 explosive attacks a night

I’ve written over 30 posts in the last few years about explosive attacks on railways – you can see these from the categories link on the right hand column below.  For this post, I’m returning again to Russian partisan sabotage attacks on the Germans.  One of the reasons for my focus is the belief that the intensity of the attacks in Eastern Europe is largely underestimated. The more I look at these attacks the more intriguing it gets. I don’t claim to be anything other than a very amateur historian and I’ve learned a lot about the Eastern Front that I never knew, in general terms. Whereas I normally focus on tactical aspects of device design, this post is very much focused on the strategic.   This post is less about the technicalities of the attack but more about the level of coordination and intensity of the attacks and comparing them to railway sabotage in Western Europe at a similar time.

I would suggest, if you haven’t already you read the earlier post on Ilya Starinov, one of the most important people in explosive sabotage history and probably THE most important individual. I see his fingerprints on much of what follows.  I’d also recommend the post on Boer War railway attacks – which in WW2 terms are a most instructive historical campaign on a strategic level, with many similarities.

Now, as I have discussed before, railways make ideal targets for explosive sabotage. Here’s just some of the reasons why:

  • Railways are an infrastructure target which can impact on a whole economy or military capability, in some cases with strategic effect.
  • The scale of railways are too big for defensive forces to provide adequate security. Fundamentally a large railway system cannot be protected.
  • The railways then provide high value targets (trains) at predictable times, (and no trains at predictable times too) making operations easier to plan.
  • The kinetic energy of a train can be utilised by an attacker to increase attack effect. Remove just one rail or even the connection between two rails and a speeding train will do the rest of the damage for you.
  • Railways offer either time and space for command initiated devices to be emplaced and initiated or known and repeatable mechanical opportunity to use a train-triggered switch.
  • Responses post-attack are predictable and usually aligned geographically to the railway.
  • Failed attacks can cause almost as much disruption as successful attacks, as devices need clearing.

I think the apogee of explosive attacks on railways came in three bursts on the eastern front of the Second World War, as the Soviets faced the Germans.  The numbers of the attacks were quite remarkable, even if you view Russian claims very sceptically.  The three key railway attack efforts were:

  • Operation Rail War
  • Operation Concert (sometimes referred to as Operation Concerto)
  • Railway sabotage attacks as part of Operation Bagration.

I’m going to summarise these in turn.  Each of these sabotage efforts were part of a strategy to disrupt German advances and also make the German defences much weaker.  But first it’s important that we place the importance of the railway system in Eastern Europe in context. Railways in Eastern Europe were much more important than in Western Europe because there were few roads capable of taking significant traffic.  If you wanted to do anything logistically “strategic” in Russia and Eastern Europe, you did it by rail.  I’m going to give a link here to a fascinating article about how the Russians and Germans ran their railways in the war – you might think that would be dull dull dull, but by golly it’s an eye-opener. Of particular note are these things:

  1. There is a myth that the Nazis were the ones who got the railways running properly. This linked article demolishes that completely – it was the Russians who optimised the railways system so much better, and with a simple robust methodology.
  2. It is fascinating that when the Germans advanced into Russia they took over 40% of the Russian rail network – but only 15% of its trains. And that’s a big problem if you then have to find hundreds of trains and carriages (also with a different gauge).
  3. It’s important to understand the logistic manner of functioning with “depots” serving areas of track – the locomotives stay attached to the depot and shuttle backwards and forwards – the carriages are passed like a baton.
  4. Russians ran their trains slower, all at the same speed – conserving engines and carriages and train lines. This also allows for simpler control mechanisms (even if it’s a man with a flag). The Germans tried to run their trains at a variety of speeds, leading to more wear and tear and a much more complex control system to allow for “overtaking”.
  5. The numbers of people involved in railway logistics on both the Russian and German side is stunning.

Russian partisans were made up, in broad terms, from the following:

  • Soviet soldiers who had been bypassed by the German advance. All soldiers were instructed to undertake sabotage operations in these circumstances.
  • Captured Soviet soldiers who had escaped
  • Civilians from the overrun population, usually communist party functionaries. Some of these formed more formal “Destruction Battalions” including retired soldiers and factory workers. Their prime mission was originally securing the Soviet rear area and destroying infrastructure as the Russians retreated, but once overrun they became partisans in effect, with at least some sort of command and control, and relevant training.
  • NKVD or military personnel brought in by plane and parachute.
  • Other partisans of all sorts of backgrounds.

The command and control system was flexible and changed as the war progressed – becoming more organised as time passed. So let’s look at the three key Russian rail sabotage efforts.

Operation “Rail War”

This operation occurred during the Battle of Kursk as over 100,000  partisans tried to disrupt German rail activity, disrupting German reinforcements and logistic supplies. This was in July and August 1943.  This operation built on the experience of an increasingly effective partisan campaign over the previous year – in the previous winter 225 German trains were derailed, and much other infrastructure attacked.  Coordination was handed over from the NkVD to other Russian command structures and became much more coordinated. In Belorussia alone 123 partisan detachments were assigned to demolition activity – often, but not always, with explosives.  Literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of track were either blown up or removed.  As a cross reference, in July 1943 alone, the Germans reported at least 1,100 separate railway attacks.  Then, during the nights of August 3rd and August 4th, the German Heeresgruppe Mitte reported 4,100 railway demolitions.  A German source puts the figure even higher for the whole front suggesting 10,900 demolition charges were laid on the night of 2-3 August alone, with over 8000 functioning as intended and the remaining rendered safe by German EOD, many of them “daisy chains”.   That’s an incredible number. It seems some attacks were carried out by Red Army demolition units of 30 men each (probably sent by Starinov) flown in to support Partisan activity during the Operation. Is this the first effective use of Starinov’s “Spetznats”? These latter groups seem to have focused on undertaking attacks with more complex devices.

Operation “Concert”

This was a strategic offensive to against German rail communications and logistics  during the Battle of the Dnieper and Russian Operation Suvarov, an attack in the direction of Smolensk. It took place immediately after Operation Rail War, from 19 September – 1 November 1943. This was a wide ranging set of attacks from the Baltics to the Crimea. According to Russian sources it involved 193 partisan units, totalling more than 210,000 men.  Railways were disrupted across a 560 mile front, to a depth of 250 miles.  One source suggests that German logistic movements were restricted by 35 – 40% , In Belorussia alone, partisans claimed to have destroyed or damaged 90,000 individual tracks, 1,061 trains, and 72 railway bridges during this 6 week period.  Two examples of the intensity of explosive sabotage operations during this time are as follows:

  1. On one 30 mile stretch of the railway to Minsk, there were 643 explosive demolition attacks on a single railway. On another 40 mile stretch there were 580 attacks.
  2. At one stage on this Minsk line the situation got so desperate that reinforcing troops were off loaded from trains and stationed at 20 ft intervals to guard against the attacks.

Sabotage in support of Operation “Bagration”

At least 150,000 partisans took part in sabotage operations in support of Operation Bagration, the major assault that occurred roughly the same time as the Allied attacks on Normandy. In many ways Bagration was much more successful than the Normandy attack in terms of the advances made, albeit at heavy cost.  In the West we think of “Normandy” as the key battle in WW2 – but if you look at the number of troops and the distances involved, Bagration was a much bigger affair. Partisan disruption of German logistics, by explosive sabotage on railways, played a crucial role. On a single night the night of June 19th 1944, there was more than 9,500 explosive attacks on the German occupied railway infrastructure. The Soviet offensive with conventional forces started three days later, and they were able to overcome German defenders who had no supplies and no reinforcements.  It is interesting to consider this three day gap, which perhaps allowed the Germans to catch their breath.  I don’t quite understand this pause.  One explanation might be that the partisans simply used up all their explosives on the first night. Another might be that the Russians expected the Germans to denude their front lines of infantry units to guard the railway lines.   In any event, two and a half months later, the Soviets has advanced almost 600km and most of the German occupied Soviet Union was retaken. (By comparison by that time the allies had got to Paris, about 25okm.) It is clear too that the ability of the partisans, in terms of setting and emplacing explosive devices had improved, probably due to Starinov’s influence in training and device design. Similarly, coordination, control leadership and planning had improved too, making partisan operations more effective, but perhaps not fully optimised.

As the war progressed and particular after responsibility was passed from the NKVD to other military structures, Russian support and coordination to the partisans improved, in terms of direction and resources often airlifted in to the vast spaces of Eastern Europe.

 

Elsewhere in Europe

Partisan style attacks of course occurred in Western Europe and it is useful, where possible, to compare these against the scale of the Russian partisan efforts.

During October and November 1943 (a comparable time period to the Russian Operation Concert above) the Vichy French police reported more than 3000 attempts made by the resistance to attack the railway system.   The biggest comparable effort was “Plan Vert” by the French resistance movement, in support of the forthcoming Allied Normandy Landings and subsequent battles. Around the time of the landings in Normandy, 486 attacks were made on the French railway infrastructure by the Resistance preventing German reinforcement on a number of lines.  This, while significant, appears to be an order of magnitude smaller than the Russian efforts. Of course, the two theatres are not directly comparable in terms of the importance of the railway infrastructure. In Northern France the optimum logistic  infrastructure were the roads. Throughout the whole of the “OB West” administrative sector (which equate to the Western Front against the Allies,) 500 locomotives were destroyed by sabotage or air attack during March 1944, but there were 500 sabotage attacks on railways in France in April 1944, much of which had an impact on the supply of concrete and steel to build the Atlantic Wall.   In the West, the Allies relied predominantly, but by no means exclusively, on air attack to disrupt the railways. From all sources, however rail traffic was reduced by 60% from 1 March to 6 June 1944.  There were, according to some sources, 1,800 sabotage attacks on French railways between 1 March 1944 and 6 June, and 2,400 rail targets hit by Allied bombers.  But compare that 1,800 figure over a 4 month prior to the 10,000 plus on one night in August 1944 on the Eastern front, (and that’s a German figure), and I’m not saying that the French railways were a similarly important target – but whatever the measure, the Russian partisan attacks in the East were remarkable in their number, and I suspect in their effectiveness.

Of course there were other successful rail attacks on the German forces elsewhere in Europe, but these are relatively few and far between and simply get reported better than the thousands of attacks on the Eastern Front. In particular there were quite a number of attacks by Polish resistance forces, who on one occasion cut all railway lines to Minsk, and who carried out “hundreds” of explosive sabotage operations on the railway during the war. Of course the Polish attitude towards the Russians was complicated which affected their operations.

It is also important to recognise that not all sabotage was by the use of explosives. Unbolting tracks, adding grit to lubricants, allowing boilers to overheat, allowing trains to travel too fast or too slow, or making deliberate mistakes with railway points all count towards a broader sabotage effort.

In general in the West we assume , wrongly, that the sabotage by the French resistance was a large scale operation, and we note other individual attacks across Europe or historical campaigns such as those of Lawrence and Garland in Arabia in the First World War. The truth is, though , that they are nothing, a pinprick compared to the huge efforts of the partisans in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1944.

Assessment

So my assessment is that the sabotage attacks on German rail infrastructure was significantly greater than in the West and the impact of this is probably largely underestimated. The partisans showed that if necessary they could mount 10,000 explosive attacks in one night, and maintain many thousand attacks a month across most of the Eastern front. I can think of no other sabotage or explosive campaign in history with that level of intensity.  It might have suited Russian propaganda to downplay the scale and proportional effort and effectiveness of rag-tag partisans rather than more formal Russian forces, just a much as they might exaggerate the effectiveness of individual local partisan detachments.  Quite often though I have found German sources to present even higher numbers, which leads me to believe that this incredible level of operational activity was genuine. And, the Germans were better at record keeping than the Russians.   But we should also remember that in the East the rail systems were much more crucial to military success, and circumstances allowed a much more “permissive environment” than in Western Europe.  Other factors leading to this success include:

  • Significant numbers of partisans available, often from overrun Soviet Army units, in the area behind German front lines.
  • A huge geographic space where large numbers of partisans could “disappear” into, and regroup, resupply unhindered by occupying Germans who were focused on the front.  The imperative  driven by Hitler himself was to throw any and every German unit into the formal front rather than focus on securing rear areas. This gave the partisans a freedom of movement.  The Germans simply didn’t have enough troops to secure their rear areas and supply routes and guard the railway system consistently. Furthermore, most of the troops securing rear areas did not have transport. Nor were there enough troops to guard prisoners or feed them. If you were one of a thousand Russian troops being guarded in dense woodland by three second-rate Germans with bolt action rifles and pocket full of ammunition and one horse between the three of them, and you weren’t being fed, would you sit tight in the snow or simply walk away and become a partisan? That’s the reality of the situation.
  • Russian roads being so poor that it was impossible to move any amount of supplies by road, meaning the railways were even more important.  The railway lines where everything – what else was there for the partisans to attack if it wasn’t actual military units? So the most efficient form of attack was an attack on the railway that risked less.
  • The temperature – German locomotives converted to run on Russia gauge tracks, or tracks changed to suit them, were not designed to operate in the winter temperatures of Russia. Damage to German run trains was harder to fix.
  • A Russian “tradition” of partisan warfare going back to Napoleonic times.
  • Poor German logistic management of railways, in some respects.
  • Ilya Starinov himself.

Overall, it is clear to me that partisan explosive attacks on the railroads significantly enabled the defence of the Soviet forces in the summer of 1943 and their subsequent advances. Partisan attacks were intense in number, flexible and by the latter part of 1943 well controlled and supported from Russia. It seems to me that in general they often had an 80% successful rate in terms of devices that exploded versus rendered safe by EOD. That’s pretty high.   This wasn’t always the case, and in some areas that ratio was reversed, probably due to poor training.   I have no doubt they enabled the success of Soviet Forces in the East. German responses to the explosive threat to the railways was occasionally innovative but hampered at every turn by the fact they were deep in occupied territory, on an extended supply chain with locals who if they weren’t unsympathetic to start with became increasingly so as the war progressed and they suffered from the fundamental flaws inherent in a fascist invading army. The Germans were never able to find the military numbers to secure the railway.   I have no doubt that the partisan sabotage efforts shortened the war in Europe and allowed the Russians to reach Berlin well before the Western Allies.  But that’s not because the Western allies failed to attack the rail infrastructure on “their side of Europe”, it’s just because railways were much more important in the East and the Russians realised that and exploited it.

One of the sources I have used for this post also includes some very interesting assessments of German counter-sabotage efforts – well worth a read if you have the time, here. You should note it is drawn mainly from German sources. I’m also looking at similarities between WW2 sabotage operations and what the US/UK and UK faced on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. If you read the lessons learned in the document linked above about the experiences of the Russian partisan efforts, while bearing in mid what occurred in Iraq in 2003/2004, it will make you wince, so clear are some parallels.  The parallels between aspects of the counter-sabotage operations and engagement or otherwise with local forces is particularly pertinent. It’s not nice to see similarities between certain Nazi strategies and operations and your own, but there it is. Do you think what happened in the Anbar Awakening and the “Sons of Iraq ” was an innovative idea? Think again. The Germans used White Russian cossacks in attempts to secure certain areas, and there were a number of other strategies which seem only familiar for an invading Army.  If I were to be really cynical, (and I can be) there’s also some similarities in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Although this post is all about strategy and not my usual focus on technical matters, I found a few intriguing technical references that I intend to follow up on.

  • The first is from the period of the summer of 1943, about the period of Operation Rail War. There is talk of the Germans encountering a new “small” explosive charge provided from Russia to the partisans, which is “daisy-chained” along a length of railway in a series of charges – one report suggests as many as 500 charges in a single daisy chain…. very intriguing and I’ll hunt out details in coming weeks if I can.
  • The second is reference to a specific counter measure – the Germans apparently in response to pressure sensitive explosive devices on the tracks filled a couple of spare carriages with rocks and placed them at the front of their trains, as sacrificial carriages.
  • Some other countermeasures. During Operation Concert one countermeasure used by the Germans was the use of searchlight units set up at intervals along vulnerable tracks – the exact technique had been used by the British Army to counter Boer IEDs on railways in South Africa 40 years earlier. In other areas some sort of “alarm” system was set up but as yet I have no details, but the impression I have was this was electrical, I think utilising microphones because the oblique report I have seen suggests they were linked to “listening posts”.  Anti-personnel mines were laid by the Germans in places alongside railways where they expected attacks. It would appear that the Germans booby trapped some telephone line poles, that they expected partisans to fell,  but the technique is not clear. In another similar approach to the British countermeasures in South Africa 40 years earlier, the Germans manufactured “bicycle trolleys” for troops to patrol tracks.
  • A reader of this blog has also flagged to me that Starinov co-authored another book, in 1961, about the campaigns above called “Mines against the German rear area”.  I don’t think it has been translated but I suspect it’ll contain more interesting detail. I’m searching for a translation.

 

 

Goliath – a Revisionist Historical Anomaly

An odd little historical wrinkle I have uncovered – bear with me.

The development of EOD remote control vehicles by the British Ministry of Defence in the early 1970s is the stuff of legend. Like many legends the story was probably more complicated and nuanced than many history books show. It was reported then, and to a degree now, as a piece of British ingenuity defeating dastardly terrorism.  While I don’t doubt the innovative and remarkable efforts of a number of people in this process, it always struck me as a little odd that the history of the “wheelbarrow” RCVs in the early 1970s is presented as emerging solely from the imagination of a handful of key people, with no reference to the decades  of RCV development that preceded the 1970s. Indeed I have written extensively earlier on this site about RCVs developed in WW1 and WW2, including quite a bit about the German demolition RCV “Goliath” used extensively in WW2 by the Wehrmacht.

Here’s a couple of my posts about early RCVs. linked:

GERMAN WW2 USE OF ROVS TO DELIVER EXPLOSIVES
HISTORICAL ROVS

And here’s a picture of the German “Goliath” of WW2. Note the “rhomboidal” track configuration.

I was therefore intrigued when reading a UK MoD history of the development of “Wheelbarrow” EOD RCV to see that the Mk 4 Wheelbarrow, introduced in the first part of 1973, had a rhomboidal track configuration.  I don’t think any Mk4 wheelbarrows survived, and it is a little known chassis variant – the Mk 4 and Mk5 were very similar with the Mk 5 seeing extensive use.  The Mk 3 version was usually fitted to run on wheels but some were designed with tracks in a rhomboidal configuration and these developed into the Mk 4.  In fact I hadn’t seen the rhomboidal track configuration on the Mk 3 or Mk 4 and had assumed it had the same configuration as the Mk 5 which had a rear track configuration that was “round” around the drive wheel.  It’s important to note that these early British wheelbarrows were used to deliver explosive charges as often as they were used to deliver disabling tools.

I was therefore struck to find a press cutting from 1973, referring to a bomb disposal RCV, I believe a Mk 4 wheelbarrow, in Northern Ireland, showing the rhomboidal track configuration. Not only that, but the RCV is referred to as “Goliath”. That can’t be a coincidence. Clearly someone at least recognised the similarity of the track configuration between the wheelbarrow Mk 4 and the German WW2 RCV. How strange. Could the German Goliath similarity be more than coincidence?  Could the design have incorporated aspects of the German Goliath design from 30 years earlier?  It appears that the name “Goliath” was quickly taken “out of use” perhaps because it would have been seen as inappropriate in 1973 to refer to some sort of Nazi provenance for the design of this proud “British” piece of equipment.

Here’s the press clipping – note the design of the tracks and compare to the German “Goliath” above.

 

So, there are three possibilities:

  1. The similarity between the German Goliath -and the British Goliath (now officially a Mk 4 wheelbarrow) is entirely coincidental, despite both being designed to deliver explosive charges over difficult terrain..
  2. That someone noticed the coincidence, called the 1973 equipment “Goliath ” in a “tip of the hat” to the German equipment of WW2, and later that name was wiped from history, for embarrassment.
  3. That it was more than coincidence and the British designers examined and perhaps copied parts of the design of the German Goliath as they constructed the Mk3 and Mk 4 wheelbarrows. The name was ‘carried over” but later squashed as in 1973 it was a better story to tell of British ingenuity, rather than British reverse engineering a Nazi piece of equipment.

As a reminder,  WW2 German Goliaths were battery powered like the Wheelbarrow, only later versions being converted to run a small internal combustion engine.

Tell me what you think.  I mean no disrespect to those hard working engineers within the UK MOD who provided EOD teams in Northern Ireland with these remarkable tools in quite stunningly short timescales. I’m simply trying to place the RCV development of the 1970s in a broader historical context, if that’s where it fits. I can find no mention in the official history of such a link.

 

 

 

 

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