Standing Well Back
20th Century

Garland’s first IED attack

I continue to be interested by the story of Herbert Garland detailed in this blog a couple of weeks ago.   I have found some more details here (the primary source being Garland’s own reports held in the UK National Archives) of Garland’s adventures.  Garland had a very dry sense of humour and his reports are full of droll phrases.

Some examples:

Garland went to the town of Yanbu in what is now Eastern Arabia to help the Arab revolutionaries defend it against the Turks.  The defences were short of firepower, but Garland found an ancient Turkish cannon at the fort but as it “was apt to fire astern instead of forward we relied on its warlike appearance to help us scare off the Turks”

Here’s his own words describing  the first IED attack on the railway at Toweira station, I think on the night of 20 February 1917. After a week’s camel ride to the attack point, Garland argued over the tactics for the IED attack with his Arab guide. The guide wanted him to place the device and then scarper, but garland wanted to watch the explosion from a nearby hill. As Garland says “The approach of the train five minutes after starting work settled the matter.”

The trains rarely ran at night which was the cause for surprise. Garland, hearing the shriek of a whistle followed by the squeal of wheels was startled. He scrabbled for the three 5 pound cartons of dynamite which he jammed into the hole under the track he had started excavating.   He pulled from under his black Arab cloak the action of the old Martini Henry rifle. Its barrel had been sawn off and the trigger guard removed so that all that was left was an oblong of brown steel from which the trigger protruded, exposed.  This he loaded with a round of ammunition.. Turning the mechanism upside down, so the trigger was uppermost he wedged it under the rail, bullet pointing into the explosive, trigger brushing the rail above.  The lights of the engine were now close, barely two hundred yards away, travelling at, he guessed, 25 mph.  He got up and ran “ I wished I had devoted more time to physical training in my youth,” he says. His Arab robe swirled around his legs, as if determined to trip him up. Beneath his bare feet, the stony ground felt like ”carving knives, bayonets and tin tacks”.

As the locomotive’s front wheels passed over the device , nothing happened, but a split second later the heavier driving wheels of the train flexed the track enough to pull the trigger.  The explosion threw the train from the track, followed by the carriages behind it as they fell down a stony embankment with a “clanking, whirling and rushing” noise.   It was “the first time that the Turks have had a train wrecked” he reported. Some commentators have said it was the first ever act of sabotage committed by the British Army behind enemy lines.  I’m not sure of that – its an interesting thought – if any reader of this blog can think of an earlier sabotage attack by the British, please let me know.

 I’m truly fascinated that Garland was copying, in part, the IED design used by the Boers some 15 years earlier.  I’ve blogged an image of that Boer device before – but here it is for ease.  Somewhat different but very similar in many ways.

I’m intrigued as to how Garland learned about and decided to copy the Boer IED.  The concept of using a bullet fired from a gun as an initiation mechanism was not that unusual – indeed some of the fenian devices of the 1880s used a similar principle.

In looking closely at the role of the Arab Bureau, of which Garland and Lawrence were part a couple of interesting things come out:

Firstly, while I admire Garland’s efforts immensely, of course I’m torn because essentially he was planting IEDs and I’m normally interested in defeating IEDs and view with contempt those who plant them so there is a dichotomy there that I’m struggling with.

If you were to think of modern day night vision images of local terrorists  planting roadside IEDs being planted next to a road in Iraq or Afghanistan there is very little difference between that and the descriptive image Garland gives of himself scuttling away from the railway track near Toweira in 1917.

Separately I’m intrigued as to the parallels with the Arab Bureau and modern day “special forces operations” in terms of working within a country aiding revolution, identifying future leaders amongst a revolution, encouraging the right people, discouraging the “wrong” people, and enduring battle alongside indigenous forces.   Garland and indeed Lawrence didn’t regard themselves “special forces” and were essentially amateur, but there is no doubt that the paradigm they developed by the seat of their pants is identical to certain SOF principles being developed (again) today.

Next I’m going to hunt out details of Garland’s grenade launcher.

1900-1910

New York’s IED Task Force 1905-1919

The article below on Inspector Eagan garnered quite a response so here’s another interesting character for the same city, within a similar line of work. This is Inspector Thomas J Tunney.

 

In 1905 the NYPD set up an organization to deal with the emerging threat of IEDs from the Italian “Black Hand” extortion gangs. This “Italian Squad” led by the famous New York Italian Cop Joe Petrosino played a significant and successful role in addressing the threat. In many ways they were an “IED task Force”. Tunney was assigned to this squad as a young police officer.

Petrosino was eventually assassinated while on a mission in Italy in 1909.

In August 1914 the NYPD Commissioner formed a “Bomb Squad” made up in part from the remnants of Petrosino’s Italian squad. Thomas J Tunney was assigned to command the Unit.  To be clear this was not a bomb disposal unit at the time but, in essence, a detective division.

Tunney’s job initially was to continue the focus on Italian/mafia extortion gangs using IEDs, and the continuing anarchist revolutionary threat – and the emerging threat from German saboteurs.  Tunney coordinated a significant effort from his team of 34 detectives, and led the use of double agents and detectives working under cover as well as extensive surveillance operations..   His team prevented an attack on St Patrick’s cathedral by some anarchists in 1915 when the bomb planters were arrested “in the act” by undercover police officers, one of whom pulled the fuse from the IED to prevent the explosion.

Tunney’s work expanded significantly in 1917 to counter the IED threat from German saboteurs. As the US entered the war Tunney was transferred directly into the Military Intelligence Service, along with 20 of his squad and indeed along with a number of senior NYPD officers. A significant proportion of the Military Intelligence Service (which before the war had consisted of three people) was then assigned in essence to Homeland protection duties to counter the German IED threat.

This military Unit, with Tunney as a Major had significant responsibilities for Investigations and security, combining some of the modern roles of Police, DHS and FBI in one unit.  I think we can tell from Tunney’s stern demeanor that he was a competent man, and indeed the press reports of the time rate him very highly.  Tunney toured the nation establishing special squads to deal with the German saboteur threat and the remaining threat from anarchists and other revolutionaries.

In 1919 he returned to the NYPD and wrote a book about his investigations, available on line here.  However at this time he fell foul of NYPD politics (!) was demoted and assigned to the pickpocket crime division. His deputy, Barnitz, was also demoted, and assigned back to uniform.   Tunney soon resigned and set up a private detective agency.

The following year saw a very significant VBIED attack on Wall Street, which as a crime was never solved. It is tempting to think that had Tunney been in charge he might have got to the bottom of it.

I have gathered some significant material on the German saboteur’s IEDs of 1915-1917 in New York and New Jersey (and elsewhere in the US) and will return to this subject in future blogs.

19th Century

The EOD operator who dealt with more IEDs than anyone else

I’ve been researching the IED history of New York, and it’s pretty fascinating.  I think there have been more IEDs in New York’s history than any other city in the world – it’s certainly up there with Baghdad and Belfast. I’ve already posted some details earlier about the Irish revolutionaries based in New York, in the 1880s and in fact there were two IED training schools in Brooklyn alone in those days, sending IEDs and trained bomb makers to England.  In the early 1900’s Italian extortion gangs used IEDs extensively in the city, and later there were anarchist devices and a very extensive IED campaign by German saboteurs between 1915 and 1917.  There’s lots of great stories, which I’ll put up posts about in coming weeks. For now here’s an image of Inspector Owen Eagen, of the New York Fire Department Bureau of Combustibles, who was in effect New York’s Bomb Tech between 1895 and 1920.  He dealt with over 7000 (yes seven thousand) IEDs between 1895 and 1920.  He lost a couple of fingers along the way.  I think you can tell by the jaunty angle of his hat and the twinkle in his eye that he was a guy who enjoyed the good things in life and maybe the occasional lunchtime tipple.  He has on the desk at his side, I think, a German incendiary IED.  He died in 1920 from “acute indigestion” whatever that means.  As an aside there was an NYPD police bomb squad from 1914, but they focused more on the investigations rather than the render safe.

Eagen was a remarkable man.

1910-1920

A Train Of Thought

A bomb on a railway line in Russia yesterday, 27th November, causes me to bounce, in a mind map sort of way along a series of thoughts. Let me try and replicate this below with, excusing the pun, a progression of thoughts in a train. I’ll put a link or two at each “carriage” so you can dig detail if you wish. I’m limiting my thoughts to bombs under train tracks and not bombs on trains.

The explosion yesterday appears to have derailed the train, killing at least 26 people. Interestingly there was a second explosion some hours later a short distance away – details are not yet clear.

Devices placed on railway lines, detonated as the train passes aren’t new in Russia. One occurred in 2007. Two Chechen terrorists were charged with the crime.

Earlier in Russia’s history trains were attacked by IEDs by other terrorists. Tsar Alexander II was the target of an IED attack in 1879 when the Narodnaya Volya terrorist group attempted to attack his train by placing explosives under the railway Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the tsar’s train. The Narodnicks attacked the Tsar seven times, finally killing him in 1881.

One of history’s best train bombers, arguably, was Lawrence of Arabia, famous for attacks on the Turkish controlled railways in Arabia during the ”Arab revolt”. This excerpt from a letter to fellow officers from Lawrence.

In a letter to fellow officers describing one of his daring raids on a Turkish train, Lawrence vividly captures the excitement he felt fighting in the desert. The train, he wrote, “had two locomotives and we gutted one with an electric mine. This rather jumbled up the trucks , which were full of Turks shooting at us. We had a Lewis and flung bullets through the sides. So they hopped out and took cover behind the embankment and shot at us between the wheels at 50 yards.Then we tried a Stokes gun, and two beautiful shots dropped right in the middle of them. They could not stand that (12 died on the spot) and bolted away to the East across a 100-yard belt of open sand into some scrub. Unfortunately for them, the Lewis covered the open stretch.”

In other conflicts too, IED shave been used against trains. The diagram below is of an IED recently researched by a colleague in South Africa dating from the Boer war and was a Boer IED used to attack trains. The device uses the trigger of a rifle which is pressed when a train travels over it.

EXTRACT FROM PAGES 25 & 26 – TO THE BITTER END BY EMANOEL LEE

This incident highlights the Boers’ success in wrecking trains, which plagued Roberts and Kitchener throughout the war.  No train was safe.  At first they were derailed by setting off dynamite as the train passed.  The attackers had to lie next to the line to light the fuse.  This was highly dangerous, and the Boers subsequently developed a safer method of stopping trains without injuring passengers or damaging the supplies they needed.  Old Martini-Henry rifles (for which there was no ammunition) were prepared by sawing off the butt behind the breech and removing the barrel a few inches in front of it.  The trigger-guard was the removed and the breech opened.  They inserted a cartridge without a bullet in the breech and placed a dynamite cartridge in the shortened barrel.  Stones were then removed under the rail to make a hole, which was packed with dynamite.  The mutilated breech of the rifle was then placed upside-down on top of the dynamite with the trigger just touching the rail.  When a train passed, its weight made the rail sag and set off the trigger.’

 

Jumping back to modern times, and to demonstrate the potential vulnerability of rail systems, the terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings were believed to have planted a device under the tracks of a Madrid express train to carry out a subsequent attack but they all died when their safe house was discovered before this follow on attack could be launched.  The 12kg device was found on April 2 2004 on the Madrid to Seville express line. Other islamist/Al Qaeda plots focused on train tracks are numerous.

In France a few years ago there was a bizarre extortion plot threatening trains that soaked up thousands of hours of track searching by the police.

Elsewhere, a wide variety of groups around the world have attacked train tracks and the trains that run on them. Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc etc,  Here’s a couple of reports  from India both in the last two weeks which demonstrate how commonplace such attacks are:

I think this ‘train of thought’ technique works quite well – please feel free to add your own carriages of related material – remember this thread is explosions of tracks to attack trains not bomb on trains.

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