Whose Bomb Came First?

There's a new book out:-

Mike Davis
BUDA’S WAGON
A brief history of the car bomb

This caught my eye in a review:-

Buda had shown how large quantities of high explosive could be brought to a precise point next to – or inside – a high-value target at minimal cost. Davis’s account opens in New York but soon proceeds to a dizzying global tour that takes in, among other places, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers, Belfast, Beirut, Colombo, Johannesburg, Florence, Oklahoma City, Moscow and Kabul. The car bomb, Davis observes, has proliferated along a “vine of destruction”, and it has taken root in “the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed...

...Another seminal date in Davis’s account is January 12 1947, when Zionist extremists, the Stern Gang, drove a truck of explosives into a British police station in Haifa to lethal effect...In response to Martin Amis’s recently expressed concern that boarding a bus may become the vexatious equivalent of a journey on El Al, Davis caustically retorts that he need not worry. The Israeli airline has a level of professional security far beyond what most cash-strapped municipalities or transport companies will ever be equipped to provide.

Well, actually, the January 12 incident is mentioned on page two of the book in this fashion:-

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

As for the utilization of car bombs in Mandate Palestine, I am checking to see who did emply it first but, in any case, that January operation was not the first by the Lechi.

Here's the comment I sent in to the TLS:-

If the Palestine Mandate is to be included in the locations that have become famous for car bombs, I would hope that those placed by British soldiers who crossed over to the Arab side in early 1948 that blew up the Palestine Post editorial offices on Feb. 1 and Ben-Yehuda Street on Feb. 22 with almost 60 fatalities as well as the March 11 car bomb explosion in the Jewish Agency courtyard - all three in Jerusalem - with almost another 20 dead, although the driver of that one was an Arab aided by British explosives experts will all be included in the book, or if not, in its second edition.

But regarding the Stern Group, their first car bomb attack was at Sarafand Army camp on December 5, 1946. Two hundred kilos destroyed offices in the camp and causing casualties and injuries.

And if you are intersted in more of the British view on the war for liberation by the Irgun and Lechi, as well as the Hagana and Palmach, undergrounds, go here.