Standing Well Back
1900-1910

A most unusual IED attack from the Russo-Japanese war

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…

20th Century

The Ingenious Bombs of Harry Orchard

A colleague put me on the trail of some interesting devices used in Colorado at the turn of the last century and I’ve found some interesting details about some very unusual IEDs.  In balancing the interests of readers and my natural disinclination to inspire any bomb makers I’m going to be a little vague about certain aspects of the design, so bear with me.

The perpetrator of the attacks was a man who called himself “Harry Orchard” but he had an awful lot of other aliases.  Orchard was involved in what are now called the Colorado Labor Wars, a struggle between mine owners and miners in Colorado in 1903 and 1904.

The dispute became more and more violent, and in that time and in that industry explosives and knowledge about their use was easily available.   Harry Orchard first became embroiled with this as a striker and then as a bodyguard to the miner’s leadership. He was a man with few scruples at the time.

IEDs had been used prior to 1903 by both sides – the mine owners had blown up the offices if a “Private Assay Office’ which catered for miners taking gold out of the mine for private sale – a practice called “high grading”.  And a mine workers association had blown up a mill in 1899. There were other incidents using explosives.

Orchard may have worked for both sides of the dispute – planting and laying IEDs in support of miners and also, for pay, for the mine owners as provocative acts.  In one attack Orchard assassinated the former Governor of Idaho, Frank Steuenberg.  There are a few sources about the various attacks that readers can find but for this post will concentrate on his IEDs.   The IEDs were constructed in a way that makes me think he was not an experienced “blaster, with experience from the mines.  In principle most of his devices used a very unusual and dangerous initiation system.  This largely involved using a bottle of acid, placed on its side over a sensitive component in an explosive train.  The acid bottle had a cork in it, and the cork was attached to fishing line.  Orchard then created a number of mechanisms to “pull” the cork, releasing the acid, which caused the explosion.

  • To create a command-initiated device, he ran the fishing line to a safe spot, and waited for his target to approach, then physically pulled the line, puling the cork from the bottle.
  • To create a booby trap, victim-operated device, he stretched the fishing line across the likely path of a victim, leaving the IED hidden beside the path.
  • To create a timed IED he attached the fishing line to the “key” at the rear of an alarm clock. When the alarm sounded (Orchard removed the bell) the key which wound the alarm element rotated, and wound the fishing line in, eventually puling out the cork from the acid bottle.

Orchard had a couple of other designs:

  • One used a pistol, aimed at explosives with fishing line attached to the trigger – for both a command pull and for a booby trap.
  • Another device was  a handful of blasting caps wrapped in burlap and then pitch so it eventually looked like a lump of coal, then the device was thrown onto the coal bunkers.

Here are some pictures of IEDs which he re-created as part of his confession.

 

This was the device used in the Steuenberg attack – but Orchard adapted it to operate by tripwire, leaving the clock element unused.

 

Orchard’s confession is available online –if you’d like details of where to find it let me know – but because it has detailed description of how he constructed the devices I won’t post it publicly.

Railway IEDs

IED Triggers

In two earlier posts I wrote about how Lawrence of Arabia and Bimbashi Garland used rifle trigger mechanisms to blow up Turkish trains in World War 1, and that they appeared to have been copying an earlier design used by the Boers and Jack Hindon against British trains in the Boer war in 1901.  To remind you here’s the diagram again.

I’m grateful that Dennis Walters in South Africa, who is writing a book on the Boer attacks on trains, has forwarded to me photos taken in the Royal Engineer Museum in Chatham, Kent, of a recovered trigger mechanism found under a railway in the Orange Free State on 20th June 1901.   I’ll pass on details of Dennis’s book when it is published, but in the meantime, here are the photos:

Update – I’ve found several other conflicts where “triggers” were used – US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, WW1  search under the “Railway Attacks” category.

20th Century

The Yildiz VBIED, 1905

I’m often asked about the history of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices, or car bombs. The book “Buda’s Wagon” posits that the first terrorist bomb of this kind was the explosion in Wall Street in 1920.   But as I pointed out here, this tactic is somewhat older with the attack on Napoleon in 1800 being a classic example.

Another pre-1920 VBIED that isn’t well known was the so-called “Yildiz” assassination attack on July 21, 1905.  This was an attempt by an Armenian revolutionary organization against the head of the Ottoman head of state, Abdul Hamid II, at the Yildiz Mosque in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

By 1905 Armenian left-wing revolutionaries had been fighting a long campaign against the Ottoman empire.  An interesting example of previous Armenian revolutionary attacks was the 1896 Ottoman bank take-over, when Armenian revolutionaries seized the Ottoman bank headquarters in Constantinople and held its mainly western staff hostage with a mixture of pistols, grenades and IEDs. IEDs allegedly recovered from the 1896 Ottoman Bank take-over They did this in order to publicise their campaign internationally. This attack has interesting parallels with modern “Fedayeen” tactics such as the Mumbai attacks of…. Indeed the Armenian revolutionaries even referred to themselves as “fedayees”.

Armenian Revolutionaries

In 1905 the plan was to create a large IED, and a founder of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Christaphor Mikaelian started making explosives in Sofia, Bulgaria. During this process, Mikaelian and a comrade Kendirian were killed in an accidental explosion.  Despite this, the plan for the operation continued.

 The attack once again took advantage of a predictable pattern of behaviour by the target. Sultan Abdul Hamid II attended the Yidliz mosque every Friday as a matter of routine. The Armenian revolutionaries studied his movements carefully, and decided that a large device, set on a timer, hidden in a carriage outside the mosque had a good chance of succeeding.

It’s interesting that the timer, to be set by the carriage driver, was a clockwork timer of only 42 seconds, giving, in theory, just enough time for the carriage driver to leave the scene. The carriage driver, a revolutionary called Zareh, was a veteran of the Ottoman Bank take-over from 9 years earlier.

Due to an unforeseen delay the Sultan escaped injury but 26 people died, including the carriage driver Zareh.

 

The design of the IED in the carriage was interesting.  The device was placed in a metal chest, and included 120kg of home made explosives.  Other reports suggest 80kg of explosives and 20kg of iron pieces as shrapnel.  I’m going to guess that the explosive used was nitroglycerine based.  Beyond that details of the IED and the attack are pretty scarce, and what can be found is confused by conflicting Armenian and Turkish claims.

20th Century

Martini-Henry and Other IED Initiation Systems

My friend Ian Mills  has studied the South African origins of the Martini-Henry triggered IEDs, (discussed in the two earlier posts below) and written about it in the British Army Review. I’ll try and get permission to copy his article here, but that may not be possible.  The Boer IED team were led by a former British boy-soldier turned deserter, Captain Jack Hindon, but Ian describes the IED design as liekly being the work of one Carl Cremer, a fellow Boer.  Interestingly while on a posting to South Africa, Ian had the opportunity to conduct some trials on the Martini-Henry trigger system (real Martini-Henry, real trains!) and found it worked just fine.  He also found reference to the Hindon gang using “copper wire” as a pull switch command mechanism

In looking at this I have found reference (albeit unclear and vague) of pressure initiated IEDs used in the US Civil war to attacks trains on railroads.   IED use in the US civil war was very extensive and I have blogged about it before a little, here. I keep finding extensive Civil War references to electrical initiated IEDs, victim operated or target operated devices, (often friction pull switches) and the like for both land and water based IEDs (called torpedoes in the vernacular of the time.).   There’s a lot on intersting development in waterproofing under-water IEDs.  I have just found a good description of a “horological torpedo” or timed IED used successfully by Confederate forces.  As an example see the image below of electrically in initiated command wire IEDs from 1862, recovered by Union forces in Kentucky.

I’d be grateful if any of my US colleagues who might be able to help to write about US Civil War IEDs (you know who you are!) and post as guest blogs.  There’s a lot of open source information out there but you guys can probably dig a little further.  There are interesting connections to be made….

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