Standing Well Back
Russia

Russian Partisan EOD search, 1942

I’ve found an interesting book, “The Partisan’s Companion“, a guerilla warfare manual produced by Russia in 1942. There’s a small section on EOD search for German mines and booby traps which is interesting.

Remember the fascists use mines widely and employ them with cunning and trickery. Quite often they leave various lures in plain sight and connect them to mines. You should be careful and wary of them.

Do not enter a house which has been left by the Germans until you have inspected the ground around it, The stair steps of the porch, doors, windows, floor boards and various household objects – all of them could be connected to mines.  Any attempt to move them or even a simple touch could produce and explosion.   Use long rope and a grapnel to open the door of such a house.

After entering the house – thoroughly inspect it. First, do a visual inspection, looking for the revealing signs of mines: fresh spots in the wall’s plaster, evidence of disturbing the bricks in the walls or stove, fresh scratches on the floor. Also check the electrical wires – see if there are any devices connected to them. If you find suspicious areas- check them more thoroughly.

Try to avoid all kinds of twine, rope and wire in the forest, on the roads and in the houses. They could be linked to mines. Be careful around places which show some disturbance to their uniformity.For example: small lumps of dirt on grass warn you about digging at that site. Be careful not to pick up a rifle or other weapon left behind by the Germans, especially if it is in a highly visible spot. Remember that the Germans sometimes even put mines on the corpses of their soldiers and officers.

The manual then goes on to describe an interesting technique for finding buried clockwork timed mechanisms attached to mines, using a “water stethoscope”.  A water bottle is filled almost to within a few centimeters from the top, and a glass tube inserted through the stopper. Put a rubber hose onto the outside of the tube. Then plant the bottle in the ground, with the surface of the water in the bottle level with the ground. Place the end of the hose to your ear and if there is a buried clockwork device nearby you will hear it.

That sounds like an interesting technique – I’ll have to give it a try.

 

 

1850-1860

Report of IEDs in the Crimea, 1855

I have written before about Russian use of IEDs in the Crimea, here and here, but recently I came across another report referring to IEDs in Sebastopol, left behind after it was taken by the British in September 1855. Before evacuating the city, Russian forces had prepared and set thirty to forty victim operated IEDs (“booby traps”).   Lt Col Frederic Dallas wrote “ the Russians, outside all their works, have Machines, our men call them “Man traps”, which explode when you touch, or rather tread upon them, and they are a frightful source of accidents”.

The Illustrated London News war artist wrote an account of one such incident on 28 September 1855 describing an explosion that had taken place.  He also describes the initiation mechanism of these IEDs which is clearly the so called “Jacobi Fuse”, actually designed by Alfred Nobel’s father, Immanuel Nobel for Jacobi who was head of the Russian munition design bureau.  Here’s the report:

Yesterday, as I was sketching in the west of Sebastopol, an explosion shook the buildings around and reverberated through the roofless and untenanted edifices of the place. The Arsenal Creek was filled with a heavy black smoke, and showers of large stones fell into the water, lashing it for a moment into sheets of foam. The centre of the fire was a battery on the left flank of the Creek Battery. This was one of the works erected by the Russians to sweep the approaches of the Woronzoff road; it was built of stones taken from the houses around it, faced with earth externally, and without a ditch. The magazine was in the foundations of a house which had once stood there […]. The Russians had placed a fougasse over it, and an accidental tread upon a wooden peg driven into the earth broke a glass tube of inflammable matter which communicated with the powder below […].

Three of the men in the work were blown to atoms; and a large number were buried in the ruins; whilst sad havoc was at the same time committed on parties of workmen leading mules along the road close by. Two soldiers of the guard in the Creek Battery were killed by stones projected with great violence into the air, and launched with fatal force upon them. Several mules and horses were killed in this same manner, and every point within 200 yards of the spot was visited by the terrible shower. The crater left by the explosion was about twenty feet deep and twenty wide; and in its crumbled sides were found some of the wounded, who were speedily conveyed to hospital.

After this incident , troops searched carefully for others and found one in a nearby battery . The devices left behind in Sebastopol prevented the British and French form occupying the city properly. It did not prevent them from undertaking appalling looting however.

1900-1910

Multiple suicide bomber attacks in 1904 or 1905

This is very intriguing – a second hand report about Japanese troops using multiple suicide bombing as a tactic against the Russians in 1904 or 1905. I’ve spent a few hours looking for a primary source or even a better secondary source and can’t find one – vague references to the tactic but no specifics.  Fascinating in its implications.   Rather than lift the story, here’s a straight image from the book, as is.

 

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…

1850-1860

Weapon Technical Intelligence in 1855

I’ve found a very interesting print of a Russian Infernal Machine (i.e. an “IED”) from 1855 from the Crimea, with an interesting back story, demonstrating once again that technical exploitation of IEDs as part of “Weapons Technical Intelligence” in nothing new.

The print is shown below.  It was drawn by a British Naval artist, Oswald Walter Brierly who was attached to the British Naval fleet at Crimea as an artist in residence.

In May 1855 British forces, assisted by Turkish and French contingents, conducted a large scale raid to seize the Russian held port of Kertch.  They destroyed several magazines, seized weapons and found this IED in the Dockyard.  The Dockyard was clearly being used to manufacture a number of devices, ammunition and other munitions.  The device was recovered and examined carefully along with other material.

From a military perspective the raid turned into something of an embarrassment – although it achieved its aims, the behaviour of the Turkish and British troops was appalling as they committed rape, pillaged the town and destroyed everything they saw.   From a technical perspective the device is interesting as it shows, I believe, an evolution from the designs of Immanuel Nobel and Professor Jacobi found in the Baltic and seized earlier by the British

a. The Jacobi Fuze (designed, I believe, by Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel

b. Improvised Sea mines from the Baltic – 1854

c. American WTI in the Crimean War 

From a separate source I have the following description of the device shown in the image above, which consisted of six of the charges shown, operating in a chain:

It consisted of six vessels of wood, shaped like two cones placed base to base, each 21/2 feet long by 11/2 feet in diameter at the base, and of several similar vessels of a conical form, and of equal dimensions, loaded to float with the apex downward, the base being provided with a cover to fall on a prepared fuse and ignite the charge upon contact with any floating object.  These vessels were attached to each other by wires, and hen placed in the water would look like a line of buoy; but the wires were carried to the poles of a galvanic battery within the Russian magazine on shore.

The diagram above shows an electrical initiator in the upper part of the device and describes a “gutta percha” seal system to protect it from water ingress.

I think this then is an evolution of the devices seen before – using a “Jacobi fuze” as a contact initiator in the same manner as the devices described in the links above, but having a secondary, electrical initiation system as an alternate. Thus, they are one step more sophisticated in combing the two.

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