Standing Well Back
20th Century

IED Innovation… or not

In May 1992 I was just starting my second tour in the EOD world. One of my jobs was to disseminate to my colleagues information on technically significant IED incidents, and the following was one of those incidents, and seemed very innovative. Given the ongoing discussion about “Backstop Borders”, or not, with the Irish Republic, it’s also quite pertinent.

In 1 May 1992, the British Army manned and ran a checkpoint ay Cloghoge on the Northern Ireland/Irish Republic border adjacent to the main road between Dublin and Belfast. This is about as far South as South Armagh goes, and in those days there was a very high level of threat from the Provisional IRA.  The main railway line also sat right there, and the small post, quite heavily protected, was right next to the road and the railway. It was normally manned, if I recall correctly, by about a dozen soldiers, providing “cover” and assistance for the police stopping the cross-border traffic at the check point. In Army terms the checkpoint was called “Romeo 1-5” (R15).

The Provisional IRA mounted a clever attack on the checkpoint. They stole a mechanical digger, and separately, a van. They loaded approximately 1000kg of home-made explosives in the van. Using the digger they made a makeshift ramp from the road, up to the railway lines, manoeuvred the van up the ramp then fitted the van with railway wheels. The digger was then used to lift the van, with its railways wheels, onto the the railway line (it wasn’t that busy a line and it was the middle of the night). All this happened out of sight of the checkpoint, at about 800m south of the border.

The van was fitted with a spool of cable, to initiate the device, and the cable fed to a terrorist who could see the checkpoint or someone who was in radio contact of someone who could see the target. At about 2 o’clock in the morning the van was set off in first gear, with no driver, towards the checkpoint paying out the spool of cable.

The Army sentry on the checkpoint, Fusilier Grundy, heard and then saw the approaching vehicle bomb and raised the alarm. Most of the occupants of the checkpoint took cover. Fusilier Grundy, correctly assuming this was a threat to his life and those of his team, opened fire in an attempt to disable the vehicle bomb. at 0205hrs the device was exploded next to the concrete sanger containing Grundy, killing him and throwing the ten ton protective sanger into the air. The remaining soldiers survived in a shelter, built to protect them if a vehicle bomb was delivered by road.  The replacement to this checkpoint was removed when the Good Friday Agreement came into effect.

I duly wrote up a technical report to the teams I supported (I was on mainland UK at the time), and highlighted that this innovative technique had never been used before.

Or so I thought…  But this is “Standingwellback” ain’t it, where I delve back in history. So check this out:

On 31 October 1943 the Germans were holding and guarding a railway bridge on the Ubort River in the Ukraine, West of Kiev. A Soviet partisan group led by an NKVD Major called Grabchak decided to use an “innovative” method to attack the strongly defended, strategic bridge. The area around the bridge was heavily mined, enclosed with barbed wire, there were several machine gun posts and a large garrison protecting it with mortars and other heavy weapons.

Twice a week the local German commandant travelled down the line to inspect the defences at the bridge from his base a few miles away. He invariably travelled to the bridge by a “special section car”, a small vehicle that was mounted on the railway line rails and used by railway officials for inspecting the line. As far as I can work out this was pretty much a road car fitted with railway wheels. Grabchack and his partsians, over a two week period, made a “replica” section car. The base of the vehicle was fitted with five large aircraft bombs. The fuzing arrangement was simple and ingenious. They knew the height of the cross bracings on the bridge. They fastened a long pole, upright between the bombs. Towards the base of the pole was a pivot point and at the base, a length of wire leading to the pin of a grenade fuze connected to the main charge explosively. So the concept was that the “section car” would be sent down the railway, and as it started to cross the bridge, the pole would hit the cross braces of the bridge, pulling the pin from the grenade fuze.   To add to the effect of the “expected” section car, two dummies were made, dressed in German uniforms, one an officer, the other a driver, and sat as realistically as possible in the car.

At 4pm, on 31 October 1943 the car was carefully placed on the rails about 1km from the bridge, just out of sight, near the village of Tepenitsa. It trundled down the line towards the bridge, and seeing it coming a guard opened a barrier and let it enter onto the actual bridge itself, presumably saluting smartly as it passed by. There, the device exploded, damaging the bridge severely.  Interestingly the German forces put out some propaganda that the device was a suicide bomb, driven all the way to the bridge on rails from Moscow, by “fanatical red kamikazes”. Apparently several more of these railway delivered IEDs were constructed and used but I can find no records, which given it was 1943 and the middle of a war full of sabotage operations is not surprising.

I have written a previous piece about trains loaded with explosives in Mexico in 1912, “loco-locos”, here.

So, the analysis of these incidents suggests the following:

1. There are several instances, historically, of trains or vehicles on train lines being the delivery method of getting explosives to targets. A variety of switching methods is possible. The technique can cause significant surprise, and such vehicles can carry sufficient explosives to overwhelm hardened targets.
2. Apparent innovation isn’t always new. Especially on standingwellback.
3. Border crossings are tricky, whichever way you look at it.

1910-1920

This man made IEDs that blew up dozens of British trains

Thanks to “JB” for flagging up an interesting report of an ordnance officer dealing with a German IED in East Africa using “hook and Line” techniques during WW1. It’s led me down a fascinating burrow, and ties up a whole series of IED attacks on trains and other targets. It also provides a dreadful familiarity – an IED campaign with direct parallels to modern IED attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it sits in the context of a part of WW1 that I was barely familiar with. Here’s the story followed by the links and its context in IED history.

This man is Nis Kock. He was a young sailor in the German Navy. He made literally hundreds and probably thousands of IEDs for the the German East African Campaign in WW1.  He is often described as a Danish sailor, but he certainly saw himself as German, although he could speak Danish as well as German.  He was already a member of the German Navy in 1914 when he was recruited for special duties.  The Germans were putting together a blockade runner, a ship disguised as a Danish freighter to slip through the British blockade in the North Sea and resupply the cruiser Königsberg off the East African coast. As a young adventurous man, he jumped at the chance.  His ship, a captured British steamer the “Rubens“, was called the “Kronborg” for the purposes of the mission, loaded with coal, dynamite, field guns and ammunition. It slipped through the blockade in late February 1915, sailed the Atlantic and round to the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa. There the Königsberg was being blocked by British cruisers in the Rufiji delta. At the time there was also a land campaign beginning between the British and the German Forces in East Africa under the command of General Lettow-Vorbeck – a remarkable character. I dont have space to describe this campaign but suffice to say that a few thousand German forces tied up a quarter of million British Empire troops for the duration of the war, who might otherwise have been deployed to the Western Front.  It was a nasty, vicious campaign fought in appalling conditions in the jungle and the bush. What is little known, I think, is the key role that IEDs played in restricting British movement in the theatre. Certainly the use of explosive devices or mines is barely mentioned in British history but it is clear they were fundamental to Lettow-Vorbeck’s successful strategy, operations and tactics.

When the Kronborg arrived off the coast of East Africa it raised the suspicions of the British Royal Navy, spotting it as it tried to break through their screening blockade, and chased it into the shallow water of Manza Bay (nowadays in Northern Tanzania). The ship was damaged by naval gunfire, and scuttled with just her superstructure remaining above water while the crew escaped ashore. Importantly the cargo received little damage and the British didn’t realise this. Over subsequent weeks, Nis Kock and his fellow crew members recovered most of the cargo from the semi-submersed Kronborg, and much of this material became Kock’s raw materials for IED manufacture in subsequent months and years.

What happened next is interesting. The Kronberg’s pseudo-Danish crew (actually German) were co-opted into the German East African Force. Nis Kock, clearly a bright individual was made assistant to the “munitions director”. His task was to store the explosives and munitions and prepare them for use. Keen readers of this blog will recall the following earlier posts:

  1. The use of firearm mechanisms for explosive device initiation.
  2. How trigger mechanisms were used by the Boers in the Boer War to initiate explosive devices atacking British trains

Now it appears that there were a number of Boers, veterans of the war against the British in South Africa a decade and a half earlier. They clearly remembered the technique of using an upturned trigger mechanism as a switch to initiate the explosives in a device. Kock was instructed to manufacture such devices and he got to work.

Here’s a reminder of the Boer device:

It would appear from Kock’s diaries that he perhaps wasn’t aware of the origins of this concept, but he certainly churned them out as packages for the raiding German insurgency to deploy, probably in their hundreds.  It’s clear to me that they were key and central to Lettow-Vorbeck’s plans as Kock received constant requests to produce more.  He was operating either from makeshift workshops or “in the field’ and developed, I think, remarkable skills.  The impact of the IEDs made by Kock was considerable, for example in the summer of 1915, Lettow Vorbeck turned his attention to the Ugandan railway – which ran through what is now Kenya and was a key logistical route for the British. The German insurgency (and that’s what it absolutely was) had considerable success with their IEDs. For example in one short period between March and May 1915, the German insurgents using IEDs blew up 32 British trains, nine bridges and a dam. I believe that these could have all been devices made by Nis Kock.

Kock himself occasionally laid his improvised mines. His experience indicated to him that setting the device was somewhat tricky with the bomb-layer having to reach into the buried device to release the safety catch on the device once it was in position and he describes in his diaries that as a consequence he developed a new design that made the process safer and easier. Regrettably there are no details of this design change.

Kock used a variety of components – usually the initiation switches were the trigger mechanisms from damaged firearms, used either as booby traps or as pull switches for demolitions.  I suspect there was a shortage of “detonators/blasting caps” and there were no batteries to use electrical initiation methods so this got around that problem with the damaged firearm firing a bullet into a main charge of dynamite or an adapted shell fuze. But I am guessing a little here, as Kock deliberately is a little vague on detail in his notes. The main charge was either dynamite recovered from the Kronborg, ammunition intended for the Königsberg in terms of naval gun shells or captured munitions.  The devices were used against trains but also as demolition charges and to emplace on tracks used by the British in the bush, placing a wooden board on top of the trigger and lightly covering the board with sand and earth. Here’s a translated excerpt from his diaries:

 

As I researched the context of this insurgency and its use of IEDs I was struck often by the similarity between the activity of Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla groups and more recent insurgent IED campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s remarkable campaign is worthy of closer study in that context.

Most of all, I am intrigued of a very weird parallel.  At the exact time that Kock was enabling Von Lettow-Korbeck’s campaign against the British in East Africa, exploding devices under trains on the Uganda railway initiated with rifle triggers, an idea from the Boer War, then an identical campaign was being waged in Arabia. Here, Lawrence of Arabia’s insurgent campaign against the Ottoman Turks and the Hejaz railway, was being enabled by Garland’s trigger-initiated IEDs, inspired too by the Boer war experience. See here and here. Same device, same war, different campaigns, different sides.

In terms of an EOD response, there appears to be very little detail.  Here’s the diary event which was sent to me which started off this pot.  In his War Diary, Major Guy Routh reports, “having to dissect these German contraptions for blowing up our train engines and although they learnt to put two trucks of stones in front of the engines, the enemy countered that with delay fuzes. It was no fun pulling a wire from behind a wall in case the bombs go off, nor was it a job that could be delegated”.  It should be noticed also that there was a little technological battle ongoing between the IED design and the countermeasures designed to defeat it – again this translates directly to much more recent experience in recent wars. However new we feel these modern IED threats are, they have almost always been seen before, it’s just that history is always forgotten.

Update: Some more detail of the attacks:

Here’s two photos showing that bridges were blown up:

 

 

I have also found a report that the Germans (probably Kock) made improvised command-detonated sea mines for use at the coast, however none functioned as intended. For attacks on tracks against foot patrols and vehicles, it appears that as well as the wooden board method, the trigger mechanisms were adapted to function by trip wire.

My friend Ian Mills, who has investigated the Boer use of these devices in the earlier Boer conflict reminded me that the British used the counter-IED method of pushing two sand or rock loaded carriages ahead of the train as sacrificial elements against Boer IEDs, so the British re-used this technique here. The Germans claim to have developed a mechanism that would “count” the number of wheels that passed over, so circumventing this counter-measure. Regrettably I have no detail of this.

It also appears that the most effective IEDs were actually made from British demolition charges, captured by the Germans at Tanga.

Command IED

Command initiated explosive device from 1582

I’m steadily working my way through more military handbooks from the late 1500s when there appears to have been a lot of revolutionary thought going into military technology and explosive device development in particular. My previous post on a grenade was dated 1578, you may recall that Giambelli’s ship explosive device was 1584, and I’ve written before about a postal device in the city of Pskov in 1581.  I’ve also written before how “gun-locks” were used as initiating devices for explosives over a 250 year period.

On that latter point I’ve just found a gun lock (in this case a wheel-lock) drawn in a manuscript from Germany, dated 1582. The drawing is here and as you can see the design is very clear.

 

The wheel-lock was a progenitor of the flintlock which came in a few years later, in about 1600. In a wheel-lock a spring-loaded wheel spins against some pyrites held in the cock.  Here you can see how the gun lock has been removed from a firearm and fastened to a frame. A string is attached to the trigger, led around a pulley and away to the person initiating the device. When the target presents itself, the person pulls the string, which pulls the trigger. On pulling the trigger a spring mechanism spins the steel wheel against the pyrites held in the cock. This causes sparks which ignites the fuse. The fuse leads to a barrel of gunpowder hidden nearby.  In a post a few years ago I have an image showing a multiple IED attacks against a military convoy employing these exact devices, so it’s good to corroborate the attack with a contemporary IED design.

So, this is another example of how explosive device design appears to have developed rapidly at this peculiar point in history, across Europe. I think it is the publication of these handbooks and manuals of military science that seems to be helping – bu I’m afraid I’m not a good enough historian to identify other causes of this bubble of ideas. Comments from proper historians welcome!

A couple of follow-up thoughts:

1. The “pull string” could of course be adapted to a trip string, turning the command-initiated device into a victim-operated booby trap.

2. One possibility of the sudden uptick in apparent use of explosive devices at this point in history is manufacturing technology.  I wonder of clock-making saw similar technological leaps at this time.  Wheel-locks were invented in the early part of the century but are quite complex in design from an engineering and manufacturing perspective. Perhaps clock making manufacture and design took parallel leaps at this time and the transfer of ideas to wheel locks (essentially a clockwork mechanism, with a wheel powered by a spring) enabled cheaper device components and they became more commonly available rather than the early wheel locks which were the weapons of the rich.  I’ve just read that coiled carbon steel spring (essential for wheel locks) was first made possible in the early 1500s – perhaps manufacture became easier in the 1570s, allowing them to be more easily and cheaply manufactured, and hence available for regular soldier’s weapons and “one-time use” in explosive devices. Perhaps the wheel lock mechanisms, like in the diagram above, were separated from the main charge and were thus in theory recoverable after the event.

20th Century

WW2 Thermobarics?

If this story is true, (and it may not be), it changes what we have thought about the origins of thermobaric weapons. It also could have changed the course of WW2 in one instant. Bear with me as I explain.

Thermobaric explosive weapons came to the general attention of the defence community in the 1990s.  They are still widely misunderstood. The explanation is also not helped by slightly odd nomenclature and descriptions. “Thermobaric” is one such descriptor. Sometimes “Fuel Air Explosives (FAE)” is used, sometimes “Vacuum bombs” even if the words have somewhat different meanings.  Sometimes thermobaric weapons are infantry weapons, engineer demolition weapons and at other times artillery weapons. Sometimes they are deployed by Chemical units.  All these lead to confusion, as do amateurs who also comment that where terrorists add gas cylinders to IEDs they are creating thermobaric or fuel air explosives, when generally that is not the case.  If you need to, you should read up elsewhere on thermobarics but please go beyond the rather simplified wikipedia efforts.

Here’s a very simple summary.  The ability of a fuel when mixed with air and initiated in the right mixture can cause explosions. This is well known and accidental things such as coal dust explosions in mines, and even dust in agricultural or industrial situations has been known to cause significant destruction.   It is possible to artificially, rather than accidentally, cause such explosions to occur, although it is not necessarily easy. Chucking gas cylinders on top of an IED pretty much doesn’t work whatever people may tell you.  The oxidisation of the fuel in the explosion and the progress of a blast wave through the fuel and air is very complex and affected by a large number of variables.  What is important is the effect of such an explosion. Traditionally military weapons, at least in the West, have concentrated on attempting to reach as high a peak pressure for the blast wave as possible, on the assumption that the higher the peak pressure the higher the damage to the target.  Thermobaric weapons however don’t follow that logic. On a graph of pressure over time, the energy imparted by the explosion is represented by “the area under the curve”. Thermobaric explosions give a lower peak pressure but the duration of the pressure is much longer, so there is much more energy involved.  The long pressure pulse also has horribly strange effects in terms reflection, reinforcement and effects on targets, structures, and the human body.  Long pulses knock buildings over very effectively so thermobaric weapons were seen as useful against  structures  and some of the “peculiar effects” that themobarics have in some environments made them “good” at killing people and even against armoured vehicles. That’s about all I’m going to say on that aspect of subject for now, do your own research.  But they make dramatically different weapons with “new” destructive capabilities and should not be underestimated.

Some sweeping statements now, which I’m then going to hit with relatively new information:

Thermobaric weapons first came to my attention in the 1990s, like most people, I think.  The story was the Russia had invested in some new technology and weapons like the shoulder launched RPO-A were the first example. Translation often (in those days and still today) classed these as “flame weapons” which confused the issue but all of a sudden people seemed to realise their effect against targets and the West sat up.  More and more thermobaric/FAE weapons have been produced over the years, including RPG variants, and artillery variants. Perhaps the most dramatic variant is the TOS-1 “Buratino”, a Russian armoured multi rocket launcher that has the ability to attack a large area (such as towns, villages, armour start lines, forming up points etc) with a barrage of thermobaric weapons.  It has an apparently remarkable effect.  Google it. The weapons have been used in Chechnya and indeed the Middle East (probably) and now they are on everyone’s radar.  The technology was presumed to have been Russian, and relatively recent. But if you did some research you might have come across a passing reference to an unsuccessful attempt by Nazi Germany to use thermobaric weapons to attacks formations of Allied bombers, with a missile system called “Taifun” – Germany for Typhoon.

A few days ago an old colleague, Paul H., pointed me in the direction of two books. The books are interviews with German soldiers who were in France around the time of D-Day in 1944. As I understand it the interviews were conducted in the Mid 1950s by Dieter Eckhertz and the books have been edited by his grandson and finally published in the last couple of years.   WW2 history, like most war history, is written by the victors, and the books are fascinating because they give the perspective of the losing side, from apparent primary sources. The Germans, not surprisingly, often have a different take. On their own, the books are fascinating. There are two volumes, both available on Amazon :

“D Day Through German Eyes – by Holger Eckhertz.

Link https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B071NTXK2H/ref=series_rw_dp_sw

Kindle version are cheap.

One chapter in Book One has a fascinating chapter regarding the operational use of Goliath RCVs by the Germans against tanks on the beaches of Normandy, and links to my earlier blog post about these early RCVs here.

But it is at the end of the second book that really made me sit up. You really need to read the chapter yourself and I don’t wish to take away from the authors right to be rewarded for publishing it. So here only in startling outline is what is said.:

  • Germany had an apparently large effort developing thermobaric weapons in WW2.
  • The interviewee, K L Bergmann,was a specialist weapons officer with thermobaric weapons. He eventually died in the early 1980s.
  • The design evolved and was used at various stages of WW2 along the development line, that perhaps were very crude to start (not much more than “flame weapons”  and got increasingly sophisticated.)
  • A version of the Taifun weapon (Taifun A) was used very effectively, allegedly, against Russian Bunker structures in Sebastopol wit dramatic effect.
  • A Taifun system of some kind was allegedly used against the Warsaw Ghetto.
  • The interview clearly implies that the weapon was “tested” against captured Russian soldiers as human targets to examine the effect on the human body.
  • By the summer of 1944, the system had evolved in to Taifun B.  It was mounted as an MLRS system on a number of tracked vehicles (Stuka zu Fuss type vehicles) Interestingly (and very importantly) the interviewee who had taken a detailed part in the development program describes the contents of the Taifun B system as containing a burster charge with a fill of kersoene like liquid with the addition of carbon and aluminium particles. I think that’s a pretty credible thermobaric material, in outline. A second missile system fired after the main charge caused initiation of the dispersed cloud, but eventually the initiation was integral by the summer of 1944.
  • Taifun B was deployed to Northern France with the intent it be used against any port seized by the Allies as the focus of the invasion.  The intent was to simply destroy the port with a barrage from Taifun B and the officer in command appears to have had no doubt it would have that dramatic effect.
  • The fact the Allies didn’t land at a port such as Dieppe or Calais for the D-Day invasion and instead landed on beaches surprised the German command and meant the Taifun-B system wasn’t deployed quickly. There is some discussion by the interviewee about the effect the system would have had on the Mulberry harbours.
  • Eventually the Taifun B system was deployed to counter the expected US breakout from Normandy, under General Bradley, Operation Cobra. Taifun was deployed to the correct place, and the very densely packed tanks of General Bradle in its form up location was set up as the target. However just before the fire order was given the Taifun B vehicles were hit by counter-battery fire (maybe accidentaly as part of a rolling barage), and the launch of the missiles was prevented.
  • Bergmann believed that the use of his thermobaric wepaons would have destroyed Operation Cobra, and could have changed the course of the war. Also he believed that the effective operational use would have convinced the German command to use it again and again.

My assessments:

  • The word “Taifun” seems to have been used to describe a number of weapons systems that were part of the Thermobaric program. They evolved over the war.
  • I note that some commentators have dismissed some of the interviews in the books as fiction because they don’t match “established facts”. To me the interviews seem authentic but I’m no professional historian.  I again point that usually it is the victors who write the history and it doesn’t surprise me there are anomalies from these German interviews.  I find the description of the chemical content of the Taifun B system convincing as is the effect of artillery on a loaded Taifun B Stuka zu Fuss vehicle and its rockets. The description of a thermobaric effect is also convincing, as is the evolution of the system, which is logical. Elsewhere separate interviews such as the operator of the Goliath RCVs ring true to me.
  • I need to research more on possible Taifun usage against Russian bunkers in Sebastopol in the 1942 offensive. This is slightly hampered because the Germans used “Taifun” to describe a very wide strategic military operation in Russia.
  • Ditto Taifun use against the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 needs more research.  There is an odd discussion here:  https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=106078   which describes it as a demolition device using a fuel air explosive to destroy tunnel systems.
  • I think anti-aircraft Taifun systems may have been an entirely different system and may or may not have been thermobaric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taifun_(rocket)  Again the use of the word Taifun may be confusing matters
  • Research is hampered by a number of things. a. Secrecy of the original project.  b. Confusion over the nature of “flame weapons” and thermobaric weapons, with historians and perhaps the military conflating the two, perhaps understandably. c. The  use of Taifun to describe a much broader German invasion of Russia and d. the fact that Taifun thermobaric weapons evolved over a period of time. e. A lot of amateurs on the web who while clearly understanding nothing about thermobarics feel able to offer detailed comment.
  • To me there is a striking similarity between the Taifun B concept allegedly deployed in France in 1944 and the TOS-1 system of todays’s Russia. I think earlier Taifun A, was possibly simply an engineer demolition tool using a fuel gas pumped into tunnels and defensive structures. Taifun B appears to have been much more advanced system delivered by rockets. Early version of this rocket delivered system required a second barrage to initiate the cloud, but by the summer of 1944 this had been integrated.

This is still somewhat of a mystery, and I’m not yet fully certain it is true – some have raised doubts about the veracity of the author. Let me know what you think.

 

Here’s a pic of a possible launch vehicle showing large calibre rockets (added Sep 2020)

20th Century

Investigating Zeppelin Bombs – WW1 Tech Int

A while back I posted a long piece, here, about a number of German air dropped bombs including a peculiar incendiary dropped from Zeppelins.  Here’s a picture I just found of two officers inspecting the remains of such a device – Tech Int from WW1.  I think the “well-known naval airman” on the right might be Lt Rex Warnford, awarded the Victoria Cross for shooting down a Zeppelin.

 

Close Me
Looking for Something?
Search:
Post Categories: