Standing Well Back
20th Century

HMS Barham – Magazine explosion

Explosions, especially big ones, are horrendously nasty. The the link below is to footage of HMS Barham’s ammunition magazine exploding following a U-Boat torpedo attack will stay with you, I’m afraid.  The battleship was attacked by U-331.  She was hit by three torpedoes simultaneously.  4 minutes later her magazine exploded, due to a fire from the outer magazine spreading to the main magazine. Amazingly about a third of her crew survived, but well over 800 of the crew perished.  The event occurred off the coast of Egypt in November 1941.

(Just being careful about licenses go to You Tube and enter HMS Barham.)

There are some interesting details on the HMS Barham association website here.
War is awful, don’t forget.

 

 

20th Century

Lt Finch, Proto-ATO

In my last post I mentioned the command-wire IED used in Salonika to bring down a German Fighter ace, and that “Lt Finch” of the Army Ordnance Corps designed the device.  Well, it turns out that Lt Finch was a remarkable character – and since this blog sometimes veers into stories of interesting characters, such as “Bimbashi Garland” (another former member of the Army Ordnance Corps) I think his story is worthy of a brief recount here. I won’t tell the whole piece about his device because it’s going to be shortly included in a book by a former colleague on the exploits of the Ammunition Trade in the British Army – so you’ll have to wait for that for technical details of the device and read it in his book. I’ll let you know when it is published.

  • George Finch was born in Australia in 1888. He was brought up in Paris by an eccentric mother.
  • He was an outstanding piano player and nearly became a concert pianist. He was a clearly a born adventurer and scaled both Beachy Head and Notre Dame cathedral (at night) illegally.
  • He decided to study physics and chemistry in Zurich so sat down and learned German in 4 months to enable this.  He passed out with the highest marks, winning a prize. One of his lecturers was Einstein.
  • While in Zurich he climbed mountains, with his brother Max, making a number of “first ascents” on some serious mountains, inventing modern alpinism, which eschewed the traditional use of local guides. He invented several mountaineering pieces of equipment, still in use today, including lightweight anoraks and down filled jackets.
  • He was very critical of “traditional” British mountaineering, and the use of guides. He believed that modern alpinists should not use guides and be capable of leading serious pitches and choosing routes. In may ways he was a forerunner of post-WW2 British alpining techniques – just two men on a mountain, pitting their own skills together against the elements. But the British Alpine Club took decades to forgive him, and his somewhat abrasive character.
  • In 1912 he was appointed as a research chemist at Woolwich Arsenal Laboratory (the same Lab that Garland graduated from 8 years earlier). He also started work at Imperial College London, where he later became a distinguished Professor.

Finch in the laboratory

  • In 1914 he joined the Army as a Gunner Officer and ended up in Salonika where he worked for the Ordnance Department, managing ammunition stocks as an Ammunition Technical Officer. He was intimately involved in a major project to recondition many thousands of crucial artillery rounds that were exuding explosives.
  • He received great credit for his careful professionalism in designing the balloon explosive device discussed in my last post and about which more details will be published in a future book by JB.
  • In 1921 his role in a Mallory-led reconnaissance expedition to Everest was blocked by committee men in the Alpine Club. At the time he was the foremost alpine mountaineer in the country. He grew his hair long, wouldn’t wear a hat unless he had to, and hadn’t been to public school, so he didn’t fit the “establishment” Alpine Club.
  • But in 1922 he was part of Mallory’s first proper Everest expedition. He invented the oxygen system used in this climb and subsequently by Hilary and Tensing in 1953. He got as high as 450m from the summit in 1922  (higher than anyone ever before) but turned back when his partner became ill. He could have been first to summit were it not for this drama
  • In WW2 he ran a team improving British fire brigades responding to German Luftwaffe  incendiary bomb attacks by looking at the physics of how fire spreads. He conducted detailed post bomb analysis of incendiary attacks as a precursor to developing new firefighting techniques.   Later from an office in Whitehall he developed the “J-Bomb”, a much improved incendiary munition – 800,000 of which were dropped by Bomber Command from 1943.

    • The J-Bomb produced a 2 foot wide by 15 foot long white flame which burned for one minute or more.
  • The J-Bomb designed by Finch eventually used a liquid fuel/metal powder mix which is sort of interesting in terms of modern munition design.  He also helped the Americans develop a similar system, tuned for Japanese buildings and was much praised by the Americans for his pragmatic scientific contributions. By strange coincidence his Office in the Old War Office Building in Whitehall was later occupied 50 years later by an Ammunition Technical Officer.
  • He became a well respected Professor at Imperial College. In the 1950s he became the scientific adviser to India, and redesigned his oxygen system for Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the Hughes Medal (other winners included Nils Bohr and Fermi). I believe he was a member of the Nobel Prize for Physics Committee.

So an interesting chap, to say the least. He had three wives. During the WW1 (as a young Captain) he had returned from Salonika and found out his first wife pregnant. It was ten months since he was last home…. and she told him she was having an affair with a Lt Col. He caught a ferry to France, found the Colonel, “thrashed him” and cracked on with a new girl.

So, our erstwhile Gunner/Ordnance Corps Ammunition officer was someone quite remarkable. You can read more about his mountaineering life in the book ” The Maverick Mountaineer” .

Sua Tela Tonanti.

Sabotage During World Wars

Colin Gubbins – Gamekeeper turned Poacher

As part of my research into the use of IEDs for sabotage in WW2, I wrote an earlier piece about Colonel Ilya Starinov, the key person in developing Russia’s sabotage activity in WW2.  More recently I’ve been looking at Britain’s role in encouraging sabotage efforts using IEDs in the same war.  Of course there are differences but the parallels between Ilya Starinov, and his counterpart in Britain, Colin Gubbins are actually pretty interesting.

Steely-eyed Gubbins. 

Gubbins is well known for his role in leading the SOE during WW2, but his influence I think is broader than that. He was also responsible for implementing the ideas of Churchills “Auxiliary Units”, a plan to mount partisan operation in England if the Germans had invaded in the early part of the war.  His 1939 pamphlets on how to conduct partisan warfare were distributed across Europe during the war.  I was interested how this apparently traditional Artillery officer became such source for partisan warfare ideas, and it’s an interesting story, and some of the things I have found are startling, to me anyway.

As a young man he was already a German speaker and perhaps comfortable with the concept of living in a foreign country, having lived for a short time in Heidelberg before the war started.  His WW1 career was fairly standard for a Gunner officer fighting at Ypres, the Somme and Arras.   He was wounded and gassed.   It was only in 1919, after the end of the Great War did Gubbin’s experiences slightly leave the norm.

  • In 1919 he served for a time on the staff of the British Forces in the North Russia Campaign. This was a peculiar and unusual campaign by any standards. Gubbins would have been aware of activity by Bolsheviks to sabotage railways as part of their battles with the Allies who supported the White Russians. He would have also been aware of British encouragement (by MI6) of IED use by their agents and white Russians in Petrograd,
  • At the end of 1919, Gubbins was then posted to Ireland as an Intelligence officer, during the busy years of 1920 – 1922. During that time he attended a three day course in guerilla warfare. Most of his duties will have involved understanding the threats faced by the British Army by the IRA, who were operating a guerrilla campaign. The 18 months or so of this experience as an intelligence officer against an insurgent campaign seems to have sparked a longer term interest in irregular warfare , and started his thinking, in the reverse of poacher-turned gamekeeper. Gubbins was to think hard about gamekeeper-turned-poacher  in coming years.
  • In 1922 he continued his intelligence career in Signals Intelligence in India, before a range of staff, training and policy posts.
  •  In the late 1930s, as a Lt Col, Gubbins started to crystallise his irregular warfare thoughts by being the author of key pamphlets such as “The Partisan Leader’s Handbook”. This is actually a fascinating document, for a number of reasons. Firstly it shows that at least someone, in 1939, in the War office was thinking about irregular warfare. secondly I think I can see hints that the author, Gubbins, had studied earlier campaigns and drawn from not only his own experience in Russia and Ireland but also other campaigns I have discussed in earlier blogs such as the efforts of the Arab Bureau in Arabia in 1917 and the German WW1 Lettow-Vorbeck campaign in East Africa. I also sense that his advice on OPSEC is drawn from his experience as an intelligence officer “from the other side of the fence”

As a small diversion in this blog post, I’d also like to highlight a couple of other aspects of the Partisan Leader’s pamphlet that I think are worthy of attention, and that’s to do with the utter ruthlessness prescribed by Gubbins, which in modern eyes are startling.  Here’s a couple of examples, but remember this is a pamphlet produced by a Lt Col in the War office in 1939:

  • One method of sabotage that is recommended is the contamination of food by “bacilli, poison”.  So here is the British War Office advocating biological warfare by partisans in 1939
  • Gubbins is equally ruthless on the subject of “informers” within partisan groups. Informers must be killed “immediately ” or at “the first opportunity” and “if possible a note pinned on the body stating the man was an informer.  Having personally once had to retrieve such a body that’s a bit shocking as a British document.

Then later in 1939 Gubbins was posted to be Chief of Staff to one of this blog’s favourite characters, General Carton De Wiart, as part of a mission to Poland just before the Germans invaded and war started, advising on Polish partisan tactics.  He was with de Wiart as they crossed the Romanian border escaping from the German advance.  After that he went on to form commando units which deployed to Norway, and after was tasked  to set up the Auxiliary Units in preparation for a German invasion of England, and clearly applied much of his irregular warfare thinking into that.

I find it fascinating to look at a time line of Gubbins’ career with that of Starinov, from about 1918 to 1945. Both experienced in Russia, but on different sides. Starinov starting more lowly but with stronger technical skills, but importantly both learning from their experience and deriving very similar irregular warfare policy developments. Putting aside political differences, both came up with similar solution sets of irregular warfare based around explosive sabotage.  Both put huge effort into developing “stay behind” guerrilla operations against invading forces – for Starinov it was the plan to operate partisan groups in Ukraine if it was invaded, developed as a detailed plan by Starinov in the mid 1920s – 1930s, for Gubbins it was the Auxiliary units developed in 1940 to counter German invasion.  Gubbins formed the first British Commando units, Starinov formed the first Russian Speztnaz units.   Both men ended WW2 running very extensive partisan operations against the Germans. One can’t but help see certain symmetries. One can’t but help see their influence in all sorts of conflict types since WW2.  2003 in Iraq is just one example that could have been based on either man’s plan.    I wonder if they were aware of each other?

Gubbins in retirement

(Note: Copies of Gubbins’ partisan pamphlets and other Auxiliary Unit material including a fantastic explosive demolitions document, disguised as a British Farmers Diary, 1939, are available. Ping me and I might tell you where from). Here’s a couple of pics – some of you will work out the link to “Highworth”.

1940-1950

Belgian Resistance IED attacks

I continue to trawl through some fascinating WW2 stuff – and I am amazed at the prevalence of IED attacks and the development of IED technology during the war- this is something I and perhaps others, have never been aware of.

Here’s just a glimpse, and an interesting example.  The Belgian Resistance to Nazi occupation is very interesting – at times many of the 43 resistance groups in the country received virtually no support from the allies, and reverted to manufacturing their own home made explosives, or obtaining it from other sources. Some examples:

  1. “Group G” a resistance group based around the University of Brussels co-opted students with technical skills. Another group involved a chemist to create a complex underground Nitroglycerine/Dynamite manufacturing facility in the cellars under a school.
  2. Another group recovered unexploded ordnance from World War One battlefields and removed the explosives to then use as explosive charges in IEDs.

More German troops were killed in Belgium in 1941 by the resistance then in the whole of France that year. One Belgian group developed small tablets containing abrasive grit which when added to the oil tank on an aircraft engine caused catastrophic damage. On the night of 15th January 1944, Group G sabotaged the entire national electricity pylon infrastructure, effectively cutting electricity to the whole country by using explosives on power pylons in a series of coordinated attacks.

I think the Belgian sabotage campaign in the summer of 1944 is particularly remarkable because it is almost unheard of in the history books. It pretty much matches Russian partisan IED campaign of 1943 against railways that I mentioned in my earlier post on Ilya Starinov.   In 1944, as the Allies invaded France, Belgium’s strategic position for the movement of German resources into Northern France became crucial. Between June 1944 and September 1944, 95 railway bridges, and 285 locomotives were attacked with explosive devices. Over a thousand railway wagons and 17 railway tunnels were attacked. Power lines, telephone lines and canals ere also attacked in this period.  In one single incident 600 German troops were killed as they train they were in was blown up as it crossed a bridge over the Ambleve river.  As the Allies approached the Belgian Resistance took 20,000 German troops prisoner.

Sabotage During World Wars

Lord Rothschild and the German-American Saboteurs -1942

I have written before about “Mad Jack Howard”, the Earl Of Suffolk who was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his EOD activities in WW2. (and I’ve also written in more detail about his adventures in Europe as the Germans invaded France where he rescued a large amount of Heavy Water)

There was fellow Lord, Lord Rothschild, who was also an EOD specialist, (amongst many other things) and another remarkable character undertaking specialised bomb disposal operations in WW2. Rothschild was awarded the George Medal of defusing a German sabotage device recovered from the hold of a ship, hidden in a crate of Spanish onions.  At the time he ran a small department within MI5 responsible for examining the threat from German sabotage devices. They conducted sabotage threat assessments and investigated sabotage devices. I’m waiting for permission from the Rothschild estate to publish an excerpt from his book, a transcript of a telephone call he made, live, to his secretary, describing the render-safe procedure of the “onion crate” as he went through it, together with some photos..

Beyond that I’m digging into the work of his section (and some other interesting UK WW2 organisations with related activities) and will post when I have enough material.

Rothschild, like Suffolk, was a remarkable polymath and a very interesting character.  As well as his EOD work in the UK, he interrogated suspected Nazi saboteurs, and travelled to the US to examine captured explosives and interrogate captured German spies. His detailed report from this US trip is a fascinating read – another case of shared Weapons Technical Intelligence between the UK and US.

One of Rothschild’s key findings in this report on the German saboteurs in the US, that he obtained from interrogating the saboteurs commander, Jansch, was that the Germans had decided for future operations that rather than infiltrate complex sabotage devices into the US by submarine, they were moving to a strategy of inserting one or two saboteurs with minimal equipment (just detonators/blasting caps). The saboteurs were instructed to improvise the explosive devices from locally obtained components. So this was by 1943 becoming a real “IED” strategy.

Although the sabotage mission being investigated by Rothschild, at the invitation of the FBI, was well equipped with explosive devices, Rothschild’s interrogation identified that the German saboteurs were trained to improvise devices. For example, they had been trained to create timing mechanisms using such raw material as dried peas, lumps of sugar and razor blades. Rothschild was disturbed by this as it avoided strategies he had put in place in the UK to identify suspicious purchases which could be used for explosive device manufacture such as clocks and certain chemicals. (The latter point presaged modern efforts in the UK to identify purchases of hydrogen peroxide – in those days it was sulphuric acid and potassium chlorate, amongst other material.)

Rothschild’s report makes clear that, like their enemies the Russians, the Germans too had extensive training in sabotage, albeit in this case the saboteurs were a little undercooked. The Abwehr had identified aircraft manufacture as the key strategic capability to be attacked in the US, and consequently their saboteurs had been given special training in understanding the production processes in aluminium and magnesium alloy plants.  Interestingly I have also found an SOE manual that provides guidance for systematic sabotage of certain industrial machines and I think there is some interesting and peculiar correlation between, Russian, German and British sabotage guidance for machinery. That too a subject for a future post.

I try to avoid much comment on modern political motivations in these blogs – but I’m struck by the parallels with the German saboteurs in the USA and modern jihadi terrorists:

  • Many of the German saboteurs or their families had emigrated to the USA between 1910 and 1930, so in the decades well before the war, so they had intimate knowledge of the USA, and were quite comfortable operating within the USA. Most of them were naturalized US citizens.
  • Many joined radical political organisations in the USA, mainly the German-American Bund. So perhaps they were “radicalised” at this point, in some cases.
  • Some of them returned to Germany when Germany went to war in 1939 with a motivation to support Germany’s war efforts.
  • To some degree the saboteurs were often incompetent.

The German Sabotage School conducted a three week training course, followed by a series of visits to German industrial sites to discuss vulnerabilities to sabotage. Rothschild’s report is fascinating in its detail, even including the pay, pensions and allowances that each saboteur had agreed with the Abwehr.

Rothschild details the home-made explosives and incendiary mixtures that the saboteurs had been trained to put together. They had been specifically instructed in mixes using ingredients that could be purchased from chemist shops in the USA. However it seems that some of the saboteurs forgot some of the mixes, such was their incompetence.

One item of particular note was their instructions to create improvised detonators and the specific mix to achieve such a material. I won’t republish here. Suffice to say it involves peroxide and hexamine, material not unknown to modern terrorists.

Several improvised timing switches are discussed in detail, as is a number of pressure switches. The report also includes diagrams by one of the team. This is an example, (with my redactions) which I’m not going to explain in this forum or clarify the blurry annotation, suffice to say it is an initiation I have never come across before:

I’m happy to forward the details and all of Rothschild’s report to accredited EOD techs if you ping me. If I don’t know you or your organisation, don’t ask.

I was a little thrown by one technical comment in the report by Rothschild – he lists the explosive components smuggled into the USA by the saboteurs and one is described as follows:

Mercury Fulminate in det cord? Surely not? I welcome any comments. Has anyone come across such a thing? I can’t recall such a thing but there are readers of this blog who may know – please comment.

 

 

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