IED or Improvised Explosive Devices are among the most fearsome weapons available to terrorists. They can be placed anywhere in any form: their massive presence in Afghanistan and Iraq was a "tactical surprise" with worrying proportions that pushed the Pentagon to create organizations and following the best practices to mitigate its effects.
The construction of an IED is not difficult even if the risks related to the manipulation of explosives also seriously endangers the lives of those who - more or less expertly - produce them. Certainly the improvised devices are not new: they have a historical background that puts them in the first place among the so-called "asymmetric" weapons used by those who can not support, on an equal basis, the clash with a more gifted army. PIRA militants, Palestinian terrorists, Hezbollah, Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban and many others have spread their territory of these lethal objects which have caused a high number of victims, slowing and in some cases paralyzing the displacement of troops.
The technology developed to identify and remove an IED has very high costs for a ridiculous price to assemble and build them. The most dangerous are the VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) involving a large number of civilians, creating huge damage to infrastructure. In short, the IEDs continue to sow death in every corner of the world and the solution is undoubtedly not only a technological one.
If we go back in the years we see how the use of explosives hidden in everyday objects has had its operational peak in the Northern Irish conflict, but also in the Second World War the use of IED and "booby trap" saw a large used above all in the war "beyond enemy lines" or resistance. During the German occupation in Belarus the partisans would place explosives along the railway lines to sabotage enemy supplies, the same did the Italian partisans or the maquis French.
When the victorious Soviet troops of Marshal Konev and Zukov aimed at Berlin, they stumbled into a furious German resistance that continued even after the official cessation of the conflict. Max Hastings, in his Armageddon. The battle for Germany 1944-1945 tells how the only factor that kept the Russians away from the indiscriminate looting of housing was the fear of jumping on some explosive trap. Obviously this fear did not prevent most of the Red Army from committing the most brutal and shameful violence on the civilian population.
Much of the German withdrawal - from the beaches of Normandy to the fields of Russia - was followed by the careful deployment of small explosive traps that killed several allied forces. The traps put into effect by the Germans were similar to those assembled by the other "bombers" involved in the adversary. The so-called "booby traps" were defensive and non-offensive weapons (as opposed to what is happening today) and their contribution to war was mostly of a psychological nature (more like today's IEDs). The explosive could be activated in different ways, mainly following tears, threads or pressure, but the one in which the Germans excelled was to predict how the enemy would trigger the weapon. A blog of historical British research reports a curious episode in which the Germans had placed an explosive charge behind a picture attached - specially crooked - on the wall of a dilapidated house. When an ally officer saw him, his mind acted instinctively, following a methodical mental scheme: he decided to straighten the frame by jumping into the air along with the whole wall. The episode, although not corroborated by more detailed information, is certainly truthful about the modus operandi of an explosive trap, but also of how the most inexcusable imprisonment and movement can lead to safe death. It is no coincidence that today's C-IED training forces each soldier not to underestimate the surrounding environment and to carefully consider everything that has been considered abnormal but also too normal.
During his retreat the Wehrmacht planted anti-personnel mines, especially on the eastern front when the Russians had now penetrated into Poland and the Reich. To these the soldiers of Hitler combined packaged traps using mainly the grenades they had supplied. The famous Stielhandgranate Mod. 24 it was one of these: many were abandoned on purpose, deprived of their mechanism of delay for detonation. As soon as an unfortunate man snatched the safety, the bomb exploded immediately. The same mortal trick was applied to the bombs Eierhandgranate mod. 39.
In fact, the German army did not employ special tools to build explosive traps, usually relying on standard triggers (DZ 35 push, ZZ 35 with tear and 42 pressure) and common explosives, although "it would be virtually impossible to give a complete list of the booby-trap devices that the enemy used to date, since they have depended to a large extent on deception and concealment - factors limited only by the enemy's extensive imagination"1. After landing at Anzio, the American Intelligence noted with disappointment that in matters of Improvised Antipersonnel Mines the Germans were following in the footsteps of their Japanese allies, true masters of the "booby traps". In particular, they noted the use of anti-personnel mines connected to obstacles such as fences or fences so that they triggered when the military tried to overtake them, or explosives hidden in fruit cans or better still hidden under heaps of garbage.
But the ability of the Germans to pack explosive traps has finally emerged in the 2015 thanks to the discovery of some tables by Laurence Fish, an excellent designer at the service of British sabotage of the MI5. In his plates, the English agent dealt with some models of improvised devices, manufactured by the Germans, which had a left-wing similarity with those used by contemporary terrorists. Among Fish's various drawings, in fact, there are pots with a lid and a doppiofondo useful to conceal the charge, thermos-shaped magnetic bombs placed on the bottom of merchant ships, incendiary cans and even a chocolate tablet. This last artifact would create the envy of the most expert bombmakers in the service of ISIS: it was a steel bar covered with a very thin layer of real chocolate inside which there was a device that triggered the device, when the customer broke the first row of the delicious bar. Certainly a very ingenious system that, according to MI5 had to be destined to kill nothing less than Winston Churchill, notoriously a consumer of this delicacy.
1 Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 11, July 1944, p. 22.
