Standing Well Back
1770-1780

An American terrorist in England

A friend of mine asked me my opinion on the most significant terrorist attacks in history. Here’s one which had pretty significant implications.

“John the Painter ” aka James or John Aitken, aka Jack the Painter, aka John Hill aka James Hinde was born a Scotsman but adopted America as his cause.  A petty, and not so petty, criminal he made his living as a painter and clearly his daily dealing with turpentine and flammable liquids prompted a thought.  He was also seized with enthusiasm for the cause of Independence for America, having arrived there in 1775. He became a prototype lone wolf terrorist.

In 1776 he knocked on the door of the leading American diplomat in Paris, France, Mr Silas Deane, and with a little encouragement described a plot to set on fire the key naval dockyards in England, thus crippling the British Royal Navy. He showed Deane his incendiary device:

Producing a portable infernal machine of his own invention, he explained his scheme. The machine consisted of a wooden box to hold combustibles, with a hole in the top for a candle, a tin canister, no larger than a half-pound tea can and perforated for air, to cover it; the whole to be filled with inflammable materials—hemp, tar, oil and matches. The candle, having been lighted, would burn down until it ignited the inflammable materials, and these exploding would scatter the fire for yards around.  

Deane gave him a little encouragement and a little money and sent him on his way.  On returning to England, John the Painter successfully burnt down the Rope House at Portsmouth Naval dockyard. He also set a number of fires in Bristol.  This created the public impression that gangs of American revolutionaries were active in the country. The King himself offered a reward for his capture and demanded daily briefings.

 

In an early form of Weapons Intelligence Investigation a failed device of the same design was discovered in an adjacent building to the burnt down rope house and subsequently witnesses attested that John the Painter had had it made in Canterbury.   John the Painter was hunted, arrested and tried – the transcript of his trial is available on line in Cobbett’s State Trials.  The device is described very clearly on a number of occasions by witnesses. An intriguingly thorough trial even down to the calling of a witness from whom he had bought matches.

He was duly transported to Portsmouth where he was strangled at the gates to the Naval Dockyard then hoisted up the 64 foot mizzenmast of the HMS Arethusa [specially unbolted and placed on land for the occasion]  then they eviscerated his body, tarred it, hauled it back up the mast and left him to waft in the wind for years as a warning to all and sundry.

The mast was the highest gallows in England’s history. 20,000 people attended the execution (quite a number, given the population of Portsmouth was 13,000)

So, why was this so significant in its implications? Here’s why:

  1. The fires in Portsmouth and Bristol caused terror across England. Vigilante groups patrolled the streets of ports.  Thus the arson attacks really did terrorize the nation.
  2. The attacks turned the public opinion – there had been significant support for the American revolution, especially in Bristol, but this public support was turned on its head. Had this not occurred, and more negotiated independence may have been achieved. Who knows what that may have looked like?
  3. The public mood allowed the production of the 1777 Treason Act and for years after the death sentence for murder in the UK had been abolished in 1965, the death sentence was still permitted for treason, and explicitly included in the list of treasonous acts was arson in the naval dockyards.

 A newspaper of the time stated:

“Of all bad characters, an incendiary is the foulest. He acts as an assassin armed with the most dreadful of mischiefs, and in executing his diabolical purposes, involves the innocent and the guilty in the same ruin.” 

1860-1870

Coal Torpedoes

A “coal torpedo” was the name given by Confederate Secret Service agents for a crude IED disguised as a lump of coal. The device was then introduced into the stocks of coal on ships and trains with the aim of causing an explosion in the boiler when it was shoveled into the engine.

The coal torpedo seems to have been invented by Capt Thomas Edgworth Courtney of the Confederate Secret Service.  Courtney proposed the idea to Jefferson Davis motivated probably by the financial rewards promised by the Confederacy which were suggested could be 50% of the value of Union shipping destroyed by new inventions. In this case, financial reward became the mother of a number of inventions. Courtney was commissioned and formed a Secret Service Corps of 25 men with direction to to attack any Union vessel or transport carrying military goods found in Confederate waters, with his rewards (no salary) being paid in Confederate war bonds.

Details of Courtney’s plan leaked to the Union who put a price on his head. Courtney escaped to England, and tried to sell the design of the Coal torpedo to the British Navy, the French, the Spanish and Turkey, without success.

The Union naval forces on the Mississippi under Admiral David Porter issued General order 184 accordingly:

The enemy have adopted new inventions to destroy human life and vessels in the shape of torpedoes, and an article resembling coal, which is to be placed in our coal piles for the purpose of blowing the vessels up, or injuring them. Officers will have to be careful in overlooking coal barges. Guards will be placed over them at all times, and anyone found attempting to place any of these things amongst the coal will be shot on the spot.

Details of the actual ships destroyed by this means are unclear as records have been destroyed but it appears likely that a number of the devices functioned as intended.

Courtney’s torpedoes were manufactured carefully at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop in Richmond, Virginia. Actual lumps of coal were used to form a mold into which iron was cast. The walls of the devices surrounded a hollow sufficient to hold about four ounces of blackpowder.  After filling, the void was closed with a threaded plug, dipped in beeswax and rolled in powdered coal to disguise it.  The device, although small, could rupture the pressure vessel of a ship, causing much greater secondary damage.

The concept of coal torpdeos carried on. After the American Civil War the Fenian Brotherhood (see previous blog posts) had connections with both sides and there appears to have been a plot in the 1860s and 70s to use such devices to place in the furnaces of New York hotels and British shipping .

In WW1 German saboteurs operating in the US planned to use such devices to attack munitions ships, and in an earlier post I mentioned that such devices were found by US forces after overrunning the Germans in France in 1918.

In WW2 both the OSS and the SOE used similar devices, as did German spies. I have found reports that the Japanese also developed a similar tool at the Noborito research Institute, and they were used by Japanese commandos in raids in New Guinea.  There is also a hint that the CIA explored this as a tactic to be used in Vietnam.

The OSS didn’t do things by halves and developed a coal camouflage kit for such devices, with a range of paints to enable the device to match variations in coal supplies.

20th Century

Operation Lucid – to singe Mr Hitler’s moustache

I’ve blogged before about the use of exploding ships and other fireships in history here.  But I’ve just found another interesting plan of combined exploding/fire ships in World War Two, a plan called Operation Lucid.

With a German invasion fleet massing around Calais and Boulogne, a series of pretty desperate measures were considered as methods of damaging the invasion fleet. Churchill, with his taste of history and knowledge of the fireships used against the Spanish Armarda, approved a plan put forward by Captain Augustus Agar VC. The plan involved two or three old oil tankers, filled with an incendiary mix and explosives to be steamed into the the large collection of German wooden invasion barges being collected at Calais and Boulogne.   The incendiary mix , dubbed “Agar’s Special Mixture” consisted of 50% heavy fuel oil, 25% diesel oil, and 25% petroleum (gasoline).  The explosive components consisted of unmeasured, but large, quantities of gun cotton, cordite and old sea mines.

Here’s a quote from one of the sailors assigned to the operation:

Chief Petty Officer Ronald Apps recalled:

In July 1940, I joined a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker – the War African – that was anchored off Sheerness for an idea that I have always assumed was thought up by Churchill. These tankers were filled up with fuel oil and there were mines and detonators down in the holds. The idea was that we would run them over to Boulogne and about five or six miles out of the harbour, we would set the controls and lash them – with the boilers going full bore – and run them into Boulogne harbour and let them blow up, to destroy the potential German invasion fleet. It was called Operation Lucid and we spent four weeks preparing. We practiced setting the controls and evacuating the ship with two speedboats alongside us which had been commandeered from Southend. These speedboats were remarkable things. They could go at 35 or 40 knots and the idea was that at the blowing of a whistle, we had to rush down, get in the boats and we were away. Those four weeks were a bit hairy because the tanker was full up with fuel oil when it came to us and it was primed and ready to explode and there were air raids at night. When you’re in a tanker, sitting on all this explosive material and the Germans are coming over and dropping bombs, it’s not very … shall I say ‘sleep inspiring’ experience. I got round to the idea that I had to sleep or I wouldn’t be able to walk around the next day. 

In the end there were four attempts to launch the operation, but each failed for a variety of reasons, not least that the elderly ships adapted for the task were simply not reliable enough and kept breaking down. There are more details here.

There are some odd, almost spooky links between the operation’s commander, Agar VC, and previous blog posts I have written. Agar is a really interesting historic character. He had participated in the Zeebrugge raid in 1918 (link) and so was not new to the concept of the modern use of an explosively laden vessel. He was awarded the VC in mysterious circumstances because he was operating at the end of WW1 in support of SIS operations in Russia – running agents in and out of Bolshevik Russia using MTBs in the Baltic and other nefarious activities. As well as the VC he was also awarded the DSO. The DSO and the VC were awarded for two seperate motor torpoedo attacks on Bolshevik cruisers based on the island of Kronstadt (the site of this story in a previous blog).

I never imagined putting a link to a Daily Mail article on my blog, but this story here of the Baltic operations is worth breaking the rule.

The story of how he commanded HMS Dorsetshire, which was sunk under him by Japanese dive bombers in 1942, is also a remarkable story.

17th Century

Prince Rupert’s IED

 

As promised some time ago, here’s the story of an attempted IED attack in 1650.

In 1650 the second part of the English Civil War was taking place. A key Royalist commander and former cavalry chief was Prince Rupert. Prince Rupert is a very interesting gentleman, with a keen scientific interest in explosives and invention. With significant experience as a general in the 30 Years War in Europe, his dashing exploits as a cavalry commander in various battles, including Edgehill, and as an extremely ruthless Royalist leader gave him a bogeyman status amongst the Parliamentarians. By 1650 he was commanding a Royalist fleet of vessels, being pursued by a Parliamentarian fleet.

 

In 1650, his fleet took refuge in the River Tagus, near Lisbon in Portugal. The opposition fleet also lay at anchor not far off with the Portuguese enforcing some sort of ceasefire between the two fleets while they competed for support from the Portuguese king.  Trade between the merchants of Lisbon and the two fleets was natural, and Prince Rupert tried to take advantage of this.

Prince Rupert designed a large improvised explosive device in a barrel, dressed a member of his crew as a merchant and employed two locals to row a small boat, amongst other trading dinghies, down towards HMS Leopard, the key enemy warship. They entered into a trade to sell the “barrel of oil” with the quartermaster of HMS Leopard, and after agreeing a price the barrel was being hoisted aboard when the Leopard’s crew became suspicious. The three man crew were seized and the barrel investigated. It was found that a large explosive filled shell had been placed inside the barrel. A string from the merchant’s boat led in through the bunghole, to a pistol. Pulling the string would fire the pistol and ignite quickfuze leading to the shell.  It was clear that the plan was to initiate the device once it had been swing aboard, killing as many of the crew as possible and damaging the ship.

Ten years later, after the war was over Prince Rupert became one of the three founders of the Royal Society. The Royal Society took great interest in research into explosives and related inventions, and Prince Rupert himself published a paper at the Royal Society on an improved recipe for gunpowder in 1662.

Of course, students of modern day terrorism will see the instant parallels with the USS Cole attack in Yemen in October 2000, which again involved perpetrators approaching a warship with an IED, disguised as a local boat in a port.  The investigation after the USS Cole attack noted the following failures:

  • There was no co-ordinated effort to track the movement of small boats in the harbour;
  • The Cole’s own small boat, which should have been used to investigate the approach of any suspicious craft, was not ready for launching.

It appears that HMS Leopard was pretty much the same, but luckier.

1840-1850

Some of my best friends are Sappers… (Sappers, Doctors, explosives and smoking dope)

My last post about the evolution of detonators involved digging around in some interesting history. I came across two fascinating reports about a British military engineering operation on the Hoogly River in Bengal in 1839 and 1840. The crucial piece about this story is that it straddled the invention of sub-aqua electrical initiation of gunpowder charges as used by Pasley with the earlier much less reliable igniferous technique, in this case using tubes of lead filled with gunpowder, soldered together.  The reports are found in the professional papers of the Royal Engineers, 1840 and Volume 8 of the Journal of the Asiatic society of Bengal, 1840. Go google if you want to read the originals.

The circumstances were that a ship, the Equitable, had sunk on a sandbank and was posing a hazard to shipping. So a young British military engineer, Captain Fitzgerald serving in the Bengal Engineers and some colleagues decided to blow it up, as is the wont of young Engineer officers.  In this case (and not for the last time), they were accompanied, encouraged and assisted by a young medical officer

So, this was a complex operation in a fast flowing and murky river. The Equitable had sunk in October 1839 in the middle of the shipping channel.  It was decided to use large gunpowder charges to break up the vessel.

Attempt 1, Igniferous – Failed.

The first attempt used a large waterproof cylinder full of gunpowder, ignited by means of a linen hose protected by lead piping.  The charge was an enormous 2400 pounds of powder.  The cylinder was an oak cask, bound with iron hoops, and plates of lead were carefully soldered onto it to seal it. The lead pipe protecting the powder train in the hose was made from four 15 feet lengths, soldered carefully together. The hose, one inch in diameter and containing gunpowder was then inserted into the pipe.  I have a description of the explosive chain between the main charge and the gunpowder hose, but have not yet found an associated diagram. so I can’t yet make head or tail of it.  The characteristics of a loose filled gunpowder hose clearly gave rise to challenges, in terms of transmission of the igniferous process in a vertical pipe. To manage this the hose was knotted every 6 inches, and held in place by fastening to a pewter wire inserted down the length of the pipe.

The seal between the powder hose in the pipe and the “primer cylinder” appears to have been achieved with brass fittings and leather gaskets.

The first attempt took place on December 6 1839, and the charge was lowered from a boat onto the deck of the sunken ship.  A “portfire” with an estimated burning time of 10 minutes fastened to the top of the gunpowder filled pipe, and the boat rowed away.  However the portfire failed to ignite the gunpowder train. A second portfire was set, and after a few minutes a muffled small explosion was heard, which was assessed as being the pipe rupturing. The main charge failed to ignite, and the pewter wire was ejected from the lead pipe. The pipe was raised and the rupture found at 25 feet from the top.

Attempt 2. Timed, electrical, using a watch – Successful

For the second attempt the Egineer team, encouraged by a medical doctor William O’Shaugnessy, and no doubt hearing of the success of Pasley, used an electrical initiation method.  O’Shaugnessy “read up” on electrical theory and designed and built his own galvanic battery, a description of which can be found in the reference. O’Shaugnessy conducted several experiments with his battery and platinum wire or platinum foil filaments, making the foil white heat with its electrcial resistance.  Working the physics, O’Shaughnessy established that with some careful design he could initiate the platinum filaments through bare un-insulated wire, under water, provided he kept the “legs” sufficiently far apart and the battery powerful enough.  He also designed a highly ingenious system for holding the filament in a sealed container using a breech of a gun.  Furthermore O’Shaugnessy then designed a remarkable timing initiation using a simple watch, copper “arms” and mercury filled tubes that the copper arms of the watch swept through that automatically “made safe” the firing circuit four minutes after initiation, so it would be safe to recover if the initiation failed.  It is clear from O’Shaugnessy’s report that he had no actual reports of Pasley’s successes other than newspaper reports, and so was working on first principles.

The second attempt took place on 14 December 1839, using this electrical mechanism, the battery and timer being in a small fishing boat above the charge. After setting charge, the demolition party consisting of Capts Fitzgerald and Debude, and Lieutenant Smith, accompanied by O’Shaughnessy and his assistant Mr Siddons, rowed quickly away.  Here’s O’Shaugnessy’s description of the subsequent explosion:

At the thirteenth minute a slight concussion was was felt in our boat, a sound like that of a very distant and heavy gun at sea was heard, and a huge hemispherical mass of discoloured water was thrown to the height of about 30 feet. From the centre of this mass there then rose slowly a and majestically a pillar of water, intermingled with foam and fragments of wreck , and preserving a cylindrical form till it reached an elevation of at least 150 feet. The column then subsided slowly, a wreath of foam and sparking jets of water following its descent, and rendering the spectacle one of indescribable beauty.

O’Shaughnessy later also significantly improved the manner in which the heated platinum filament ignites the charge. Previously the heated filament was embedded directly into gunpowder but O’Shaughnessy found that by embedding the filament in cotton which had been soaked in a solution of “purest saltpeter” effectively lowered the temperature that the filament was required to reach to cause ignition.

Attempt 3, Electrical using an improvised timing mechanism involving portfires and “string” – Failed

A third operation occurred a month later to remove a large part of the sunken wreck still remaining, and this too used a timing mechanism and electrical initiation, however the system failed to initiate due to damage to the priming charge where it was fastened to the main charge.  The sapper officers revised the mechanical timing mechanism of an adapted watch used by O’Shaughnessy and used portfires burning string at timed intervals to make and then break a circuit if detonation had not occurred – I see in the different reports of Capt Fitzgerald and Dr O’Shaughnessy a little irritation from the good doctor as to the contrived nature of this measure, which he regards as crude an unreliable, but which the sapper officers are very proud of (it saved the expense of a watch).

Attempt 4. Electrical using an improvised timing mechanism involving portfires and “string” – Successful

A fourth operation took place on 28th January 1840.  A successful explosion took place, breaking up the remaining part of the wreck and also killing two porpoises.

O’Shaughnessy went on to an interesting career where he was involved in pharmacology, the electric telegraph, encryption and most famously the introduction of cannabis to the UK for “therapeutic use”.

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