Standing Well Back
20th Century

Bombing Hitler – A lone-wolf bomber in 1939

Hitler was the subject of a number of assassination attempts. This is the story one of the lesser known ones, using an IED.

Georg Elser was an ordinary German carpenter who took a dislike to Hitler in the 1930s. In late 1938 Elser decided to assassinate Hitler. He took this decision apparently as an individual, with no outside help.  He became aware that once a year Hitler returned to Munich to give a speech in a famous Munich Beer Cellar.  He visited the cellar in November 1938 and decided it would be the site of an attack a year later, showing immense patience and careful planning. Not having access to explosives but realising that an IED would be suited to the attack, Elser got a job in a quarry and over the year was able to steal enough explosive components. He made several “test” devices and exploded them successfully in the Bavarian countryside.

 

Several weeks before the planned assassination, Elsner frequented the Beer cellar and each night hid in a storeroom before closing time. Then after everyone had left, he spent the night preparing the location for his concealed IED. He removed a wooden panel and hid the explosives in a space he chipped out methodically from a stone pillar adjacent to where Hitler was due to speak.  The preparation took two months, working almost every night.

Finally Elser placed the charge, which he had built into a cork lined wooden box, to conceal the noise of the ticking clock timer. He set the timer to go off at 9.20pm on 8 November 1939, twenty minutes into Hitler’s scheduled hour long speech.  The IED functioned right on time, right as expected, killing eight and wounding dozens more.  The only problem was that Hitler had rescheduled the time, had spoken at 8pm and was out of the building at 9.07pm, to catch a train.

Elsner was caught trying to cross the border into Switzerland and arrested.  The border police then found a postcard of the beer cellar in his pocket along with a diagram of an IED. The game was up. Elsner confessed all. He was imprisoned and eventually killed in Dachau concentration camp.

 

There were other attempts to kill Hitler with explosives, including the von Stauffenberg plot, and other failed plots, one involving a suicide IED hidden in the operatives trousers…(underpants bombers aren’t new!) and one hidden in a bottle of Cointreau – I’ll save those stories for future blog posts.

This attack was interesting – by being able to (almost) predict a year in advance the presence of his target Elser was able to conceal an IED behind wooden panelling and time the device to explode at the right time – exactly the same technique used in the failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher with a timed device hidden behind panelling in the Brighton Hotel in 1984.

20th Century

The Ingenious Bombs of Harry Orchard

A colleague put me on the trail of some interesting devices used in Colorado at the turn of the last century and I’ve found some interesting details about some very unusual IEDs.  In balancing the interests of readers and my natural disinclination to inspire any bomb makers I’m going to be a little vague about certain aspects of the design, so bear with me.

The perpetrator of the attacks was a man who called himself “Harry Orchard” but he had an awful lot of other aliases.  Orchard was involved in what are now called the Colorado Labor Wars, a struggle between mine owners and miners in Colorado in 1903 and 1904.

The dispute became more and more violent, and in that time and in that industry explosives and knowledge about their use was easily available.   Harry Orchard first became embroiled with this as a striker and then as a bodyguard to the miner’s leadership. He was a man with few scruples at the time.

IEDs had been used prior to 1903 by both sides – the mine owners had blown up the offices if a “Private Assay Office’ which catered for miners taking gold out of the mine for private sale – a practice called “high grading”.  And a mine workers association had blown up a mill in 1899. There were other incidents using explosives.

Orchard may have worked for both sides of the dispute – planting and laying IEDs in support of miners and also, for pay, for the mine owners as provocative acts.  In one attack Orchard assassinated the former Governor of Idaho, Frank Steuenberg.  There are a few sources about the various attacks that readers can find but for this post will concentrate on his IEDs.   The IEDs were constructed in a way that makes me think he was not an experienced “blaster, with experience from the mines.  In principle most of his devices used a very unusual and dangerous initiation system.  This largely involved using a bottle of acid, placed on its side over a sensitive component in an explosive train.  The acid bottle had a cork in it, and the cork was attached to fishing line.  Orchard then created a number of mechanisms to “pull” the cork, releasing the acid, which caused the explosion.

  • To create a command-initiated device, he ran the fishing line to a safe spot, and waited for his target to approach, then physically pulled the line, puling the cork from the bottle.
  • To create a booby trap, victim-operated device, he stretched the fishing line across the likely path of a victim, leaving the IED hidden beside the path.
  • To create a timed IED he attached the fishing line to the “key” at the rear of an alarm clock. When the alarm sounded (Orchard removed the bell) the key which wound the alarm element rotated, and wound the fishing line in, eventually puling out the cork from the acid bottle.

Orchard had a couple of other designs:

  • One used a pistol, aimed at explosives with fishing line attached to the trigger – for both a command pull and for a booby trap.
  • Another device was  a handful of blasting caps wrapped in burlap and then pitch so it eventually looked like a lump of coal, then the device was thrown onto the coal bunkers.

Here are some pictures of IEDs which he re-created as part of his confession.

 

This was the device used in the Steuenberg attack – but Orchard adapted it to operate by tripwire, leaving the clock element unused.

 

Orchard’s confession is available online –if you’d like details of where to find it let me know – but because it has detailed description of how he constructed the devices I won’t post it publicly.

19th Century

The Felix Orsini Bomb

The Orsini bomb was a remarkable terrorist IED in the form of a hand grenade used in 1858 by Italian Felix Orsini in an assassination attempt on the French Emperor. The bomb or IED was originally designed by a Hungarian artillery officer.

 

The IED casing was made by English gun maker Joseph Taylor In Birmingham and tested in Sheffield and Devon. Taylor claimed he thought the the device a genuine piece of ordnance. The grenades were then smuggled into France as “gas machinery” components.

What is important in terms of IED design and explosive history is that the entire fill of the device was primary explosive, mercury fulminate.  The protuberances mounted crushable percussion caps, as used on small arms of the time.

In one of those peculiar coincidences of history, Orsini decided to attack the target as he went to the Opera. Readers of this blog will know the story of a previous IED attack on the “original” Napoleon in 1800, while he too was on his way to the opera, some 58 years earlier.

Three of the Orsini bombs were thrown, killing 8 people and wounding 142 (including Orsini himself).  But the Emperor Napoleon and his wife were both unhurt.  Here’s a description of the plan from a participant:

 

 

Here’s another odd thing – an Orsini grenade was dug up in a field in Arkansas in the 1950s  – discussed here, which includes a beautiful photo of one of the devices. I know a lot of improvised grenades were used in the American Civil War – perhaps Orsini’s designs were copied?

If you think that improvised grenades have advanced much, technologically, in the 150 years since Orsini, then I suggest you take a look at this from CJ Chivers excellent blog, showing some Syrian improvised grenades.

 

Update on Sunday, December 30, 2012 at 8:08PM by Roger Davies

There’s an interesting follow up to Orsini’s colleague, De Rudio. (De Rudio is quoted directly in the report above)  He was sentenced to jail, not execution. He then escaped, fled to Italy and thence to the US. Eventually he joined the US Army, fought in the Civil War, and then joined the 7th Cavalry under Custer. He fought and survived the battle of Little Big Horn,died in 1910 and is buried in the Praesidio in San Francisco. I kid you not.  Perhaps the Orsini grenade found in an Arkansas field in 1953 fell out of his pocket?  ; -)

Update on Sunday, December 30, 2012 at 8:19PM by Roger Davies

The William Tell Connection. In the assassination attempt outlined above, the target Emperor Napoleon III was en route to the opera with his wife, to see a performance of Rossini’s “William Tell”.

In Barcelona in 1893, some 35 years later, an anarchist called Santiago Salvador threw two “Orsini bombs” into the audience at the Liceu theater, killing 22 and wounding 30.  He threw the grenades during the second act of an Opera – and the name of the Opera was — Rossini’s “William Tell”.

19th Century

Confederate IED organization

Careful reading of the excellent book “The sinking of the USS Cairo” by John Wideman, has allowed me to piece together some of the Confederate “IED” organization in the US Civil War and pull together some threads of incidents I’ve previously blogged about. Here’s a simplified summary with a series of links to the relevant posts

The leader of many such IED activities was Brigadier Gabriel Raines. Raines’s interest in IEDs went back to the Second Seminole Indian war in Florida, where he deployed IEDs against the Seminole Indians in 1840.

Gabriel Raines

Later, when the US civil war began he rapidly proposed the use of similar devices, and used them successfully in the retreat after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862.

This book is a reprint of Raines technical notes about a number of munitions and IEDs.

Raines oversaw the Confederate use of such devices from the Confederate War department’s Torpedo Bureau (“Torpedo”) being a term that then covered a range of land and sea explosive devices).  At the beginning of the war, Raines’s devices were very much improvised, but eventually volume requirements and industrial processes evolved such that eventually many can be considered manufactured munitions.  Within the confederate forces the use of explosive devices was broad ranging and what follows is not the sum total, but there appear to have been two units.

The first was the Confederate States Navy submarine Battery service, under Hunter Davidson which appears to have been responsible for coastal defence sea mines and the like, often electrically initiated.  In  particular this unit had significant success on the James River. Later in the war attention turned to spar torpedo boats (boats with an explosive charge attached to a long spar which were used to ram enemy boats) . Hunter Davidson is an interesting character who I’ll write about in the future.  Here’s an angry letter he wrote in 1874 when some impertinent Brirtish Engineer officers claimed to have invented electrically initiated sea mines

The second unit, was commanded by the one-armed perpetrator of the sinking of the USS Cairo on the Yazoo River, Zere McDaniel

Zere McDaniel was responsible for

  •  Riverine IEd operations such as the sinking of the Cairo
  •  “Land torpedoes” in defence around Richmond, that used artillery shells adapted to detonate when stood upon (designed by Raines)
  •  “Behind the lines” IED and associated sabotage and intelligence operations.

The latter enterprises were as head of a Confederate secret unit “ Company A, Confederate secret service. The unit was formed in 1864 according to instructions that can be seen on this web page – a lovely document!

Some examples of the “behind the lines” operations included the explosion at City Point by Maxwell who reported directly to McDaniel and who used a time bomb or “horological torpedo”

Attacks on trains by Zere McDaniel himself using an IED which I’ll discuss in a future blog once I have found more detail.  Suffice to say that the initiation mechanism appears to have been an improvised wire hook which protruded from under the track and “hooked on” to the front of a passing train, probably pulling a friction initiator.

The confederate use of IEDs appears to have been positively encouraged and a secret law was passed awarding a bounty to confederate supporters who designed IEDs and used them to attack Union forces, awarding the designer 50% of the value of the target. McDaniel himself tried to claim for his attack on the Cairo, but failed in his appeal.   In 1864 McDaniel reported that his unit were engaged in continuous active operations , with elements operating “behind enemy lines” in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere

I see interesting parallels between the innovative use of munitions and explosive devices in the US civil war and the remarkable inventiveness of Syrian opposition forces in today’s Syrian civil war.

1860-1870

Timed IED, 1864, City Point Virginia

Here’s a good report by an undercover Confederate operator, John Maxwell, in the American Civil War, describing an operation in August 1864 where he was able to deliver a “horological torpedo”  (a timed IED in modern parlance) to a Union munitions barge named the “J E Kendrick” in City Point, Virginia.

The IED detonated and caused a large quantity of munitions aboard the barge, and neighboring ships and barges to explode, killing at least 43 people.  The device had a clockwork timer and 12 pounds of explosive, but with the munitions also detonating it would have been several tons of explosive that went up.  Some reports suggest that Maxwell himself designed and built the device. he watched the explosion from about 3/4 of a mile away.

Sir: I have the honor to report that in obedience to your order, and with the means and equipment furnished me by you, I left this city on the 26th of July last, for the line of the James River, to operate with the Horological Torpedo against the enemy’s vessels navigating that river. I had with me Mr. R. K. Dillard, who was well acquainted with the localities, and whose service I engaged for the expedition. On arriving in Isle of Wright County, on the 2nd of August, we learned of immense supplies of stores being landed at City Point, and for the purpose, by stratagem, of introducing our machine upon the vessels there discharging stores, started for that point. We reached there before daybreak on the 9th of August last, with a small amount of provisions, having traveled mostly by night and crawled upon our knees to pass the East picket line. Requesting my companion to remain behind about half a mile, I approached cautiously the wharf with my machine and powder covered by a small box. Finding the captain had come ashore from a barge then at the wharf, I seized the occasion to hurry forward with my box. Being halted by one of the wharf sentinels I succeeded in passing him by representing that captain had ordered me to convey the box on board. Hailing a man from the barge I put the machine in motion and gave it in his charge. He carried it aboard. The magazine contained about twelve pounds of powder. Rejoining my companion, we retired to a safe distance to witness the effect of our effort. In about an hour the explosion occurred. Its effect was communicated to another barge beyond the one operated upon and also to a large wharf building containing their stores (enemy’s), which was totally destroyed. The scene was terrific, and the effect deafened my companion to an extent from which he has not recovered. My own person was severely shocked, but I am thankful to Providence that we have both escaped without lasting injury. We obtained and refer you to the enclosed slips from the enemy’s newspapers, which afford their testimony of the terrible effects of this blow. The enemy estimates the loss of life at 58 killed and 126 wounded, but we have reason to believe it greatly exceeded that. The pecuniary damage we heard estimated at $4,000,000 but, of course, we can give you no account of the extent of it exactly.

 There is an interesting description here of the effects of the explosion.

Initially the explosion was attributed to an accident, but Maxwell’s report came out some time later.  I have also found a good diagram of the device, and in particular of the initiation system which I have annotated.

Timed IED containing 12 pounds of explosive in a box with a clockwork timing initiator

The timer works like this:

1. A piece of wire holds the the balance wheel of the clockwork mechanism. the wire protrudes from a hole in the wooden box.  At the appropriate time the wire is withdrawn, feesing the clock and “arming” the device.

2. As the clock mechanism operates the clockwheel is rotated.

3. Eventually the lever, which has a stud protruding at its rear, falls into the slot.

4. The action of the lever falling into the slot releases hold of the hammer.

5. The hammer is forced by a spring to act against the percussion cap.

6. The percussion cap initiates the main charge.

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