Standing Well Back
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….

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.

20th Century

Bimbashi Garland

Bimbashi Garland – The man who taught the Arabs about IEDs – a British Ordnance Corps officer and metallurgist.  Thanks to Leslie Payne for flagging this gentleman polymath to me.

Previous posts have detailed some of the remarkable polymaths who have played in the explosive field, like the Earl of Suffolk GC.  Major Herbert Garland OBE, MC FCS is another of these and it’s a remarkable story with real currency.   Herbert Garland was born in Sheffield in 1880. In the years before World War One he was employed firstly as a soldier – an “Ammunition Examiner” of the Ordnance Corps trained at Woolwich, posted to the Channel Islands and then to Khartoum,  then as a government explosives expert as a superintendent at an Army munitions laboratory in Cairo.  During this time his hobby was archeological metallurgy, and Cairo was certainly the place to follow that interest.

When the war started he joined the “Arab Bureau” along with TE Lawrence and a rag tag bunch of businessmen, spies, soldiers and intellectuals. The Arab Bureau’s role was a model of modern day irregular warfare and I’ll write about them more in the future. Basically they had a very broad remit to develop intelligence and undertake operations across the Arab world in support of Britain’s war aims.  It was a model of fusion between military and political activity that is rarely seen. Lawrence of Arabia’s activities where just a part of their activity.  As an organization it wasn’t without its critics who saw them as a group of amateurish and incompetent pro-Arab dilettantes.  It’s intruiging to me that quite a few of the Arab Bureau, including Lawrence, Garland and (the not famous enough) Gertrude Bell shared a common interest in archaeology. 

Garland, given a Special List commission,  became the Bureau’s explosive expert, despite a somewhat casual approach to explosive safety. He developed grenades and an improvised mortar systems to launch the grenades, which was used extensively at Gallipoli.  An image of Garland’s mortar is here

Garland also designed a range of IEDs used by Lawrence and Garland himself in the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. In fact it would appear Garland was doing this work well before Lawrence joined the Bureau. Garland planted the IED that derailed the first Ottoman train near Toweira station in 1917, using an improvised pressure switch mechanism.  Interestingly he built and emplaced his IEDs so that they would not be spotted by Turkish troops employed to check the line before a train ran.

Garland was an Arabic speaker and earned high praise as a teacher of his dark arts.  I rather like this quote from Lawrence of Arabia about thim; Lawrence had travelled to Yenbo, the base of the Arab army under Feisal “where Garland single-handed was teaching the Sherifians how to blow up railways with dynamite and how to keep army stores in systematic order. The first activity was the better.”

In 1918 he was sent to Medina to accept the Turkish surrender.  Lawrence assessed Garland’s contribution to the revolt as “much greater” than his own.   Garland died in 1921, his health destroyed by the campaigns he fought in the Middle East – and it took his wife two years to claim a war pension, as at first the military pensions department refused to accept his illness was directly connected with the rigours of his wartime experience, riding with the Bedu across the deserts of Arabia.

I’m reminded of my favourite quote from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T E Lawrence, and very possibly my favourite quote ever:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Garland like his colleague Lawrence, was a dreamer of the day. Sua Tela Tonanti.

20th Century

Oops! Bangkok terrorist plots have been known to fail before.

Today’s incidents in Bangkok have all the hallmarks of a bit of a disaster for the “terrorist” gang concerned. However this is not the first terrorist plot to go horribly wrong in Bangkok,. Back in March 1994 Ramzi Yousef is believed to have been involved in an attempted vehicle bomb attack on the Israeli embassy there.  He and his accomplices rented a truck, (strangling the delivery driver and leaving his dead body in the back of the truck) loaded it with a ton of explosives  and then the designated suicide bomber set off for the target driving the truck with the bomb and the dead body in the back.  On the way to the target, the klutz of a terrorist got involved in a road traffic incident, crashing into a taxi bike and a car at a busy intersection.  The terrorist driving the VBIED panicked … and ran off abandoning the vehicle, bomb and body included.

 

Police responded to the scene of the traffic accident, and without checking the back, took the vehicle to the police vehicle pound…  A week later the vehicle owner called to try and locate his truck … and was led to a very smelly truck in the vehicle pound where the police discovered the putrefying remains of the delivery boy, and a one ton bomb ready to go off at the flick of a switch.  By then Ramzi Yousef and disappeared but he did leave his fingerprints on the bomb.  Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bomb in New York is often described as a terrorist mastermind and genius, but the facts of some of his exploits don’t bear that out. He nearly blew his hand off in an incident in Pakistan when a device functioned and set fire to his bomb making facility accidentally in Manila while planning Operation Bojinka.

UK

100 years since British suffragettes used IEDs

The public perception of the suffragette movement, some 100 years ago, tends to see it as somewhat non-violent, all “handcuffing to the railings” and ladies throwing themselves in front of horses.  But a deeper dive into history shows that the suffragettes made use of IEDs between 1912 and 1914. Perhaps my wife who regards my blog with disdain as being “boring and irrelevant” : -)  will appreciate these stories.

A small number of the IEDs contained dynamite rather than gunpowder.  Here’s a selection of a the few dozen or so that I have found records of:

  • In 1913 suffragettes planted a 5lb gunpowder IED in a house at Walton Heath in Surrey belonging to politician Lloyd George, severely damaging it, and the components of a second IED were discovered in the house. The device was believed to have been very crude and initiated by a candle burning down to a metal can of gunpowder, surrounded by nails.  A similar device was used at a house not far away Walton-on-the-Hill three weeks later.
  • Also in 1913 a dynamite IED was planted in St Paul’s Cathedral, but it failed to detonate.  An EOD team from the Chief Inspector of Explosives led by Major Cooper-Key of the Royal Engineers dealt with the device (after it had been placed in a  bucket of water (!!).  It contained ¾ of a pound of nitroglycerine, in a metal case. A small adapted watch and a battery were connected to an electric detonator.  However the electrical connection was faulty and the device failed.
  • On April 14, 1913, a small timed device was found attached to railings outside the Bank of England.
  • In January 1914 two IEDs with burning fuzes were planted in the Kibble winter botanical gardens in Glasgow. A night-watchman, came across one device with the fuze burning. He bravely cut the fuze off with a pocketknife.  Seconds later a second device exploded causing considerable damage.
  • On 11 June 1914, an IED hidden in a lady’s handbag was placed on the back of “King Edwards chair” or the coronation throne  in Westminster Abbey , the throne built around the historical “Stone of Scone”.  The device exploded causing minor damage and reportedly contained steel nuts as shrapnel.

The suffragettes also used letter bombs (and acid devices) posted to intended victims, as well as a significant series of straightforward arson attacks.

 

 

Update there’s a later post containing a more comprehensive list of suffragette explosive devices.

Close Me
Looking for Something?
Search:
Post Categories: