Friday, August 27th, 2010. Z Force Folboats.
This original footage of the assembly of collapsible kayak and its launch through surf was probably filmed circa 1942 at the Fraser Commando School on Fraser Island in Southeast Queensland, near to the McKenzies Jetty, where the Z Special Unit, also known as Z Force or the Services Reconnaissance Department trained in water insertion for raids in harbours held by the Japanese Imperial Army.
The Fraser Commando School (FCS) was since October 1943 the main Services Reconnaissance Department training facility after training operations were transferred from the Z Experimental Station, a mile inland from the town of Cairns, North Queensland. The Z Experimental Station in turn had been chosen in June 1942 after founding that the climate at the original Guerilla Warfare School near Foster on Wilson’s Promontory, Victoria, was too rigorous even for part of operatives who had lived for many years in the tropics. The site had been chosen due to its remoteness and the ruggedness of the surrounding terrain. Each of the eight Independent Companies trained under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive and modelled after the British Army Commandos, were trained in this Guerilla Warfare School whose first instructors were Michael Calvert and Frederick Spencer Chapman.
Chapman had been attached as a ski expert and naturalist to Gino Watkins’ 1930-31 British Arctic Air-Route Expedition and a subsequent Greenland Expedition in 1932–33, where he hunted for supplies in traditional kayaks, experienced cold of such intensity that he lost all his finger and toe nails, learnt the native Eskimo-Aleut language, led a team of three acroos the Greenland ice-cap, and spent once twenty hours in a storm at sea in his kayak. Chapman emerged from the Greenland expeditions, of very tough characters, to be amongst the toughest of men, and an able Innuit kayaker and dog sledger.
The commando proclivity for the use of kayaks was founded in the need for stealth in coastal raids and water insertions. The collapsible Folboats consisted of a wooden frame which when assembled was placed inside a rubberized canvas hull which was then tensioned. The long blades of the paddles were chosen for a minimum of splashing and wake.
The second video shows the Type 6 Rigid Limpet Mine. These devices were used by SOE, Commandos, the OSS and the Australian Special Unit. The limpet mine invented by Major Millis Rowland Jefferis, director of the technical section of the Military Intelligence (Research), a special unit of the British Ministry of Supply which developed unusual weapons. The idea of the limpet mine arose after Jefferis read in the issue of July 1939 of the magazine Armchair Science that the research laboratories of the General Electric Company in New York had developed a most powerful permanent magnet. Only half the size of the eraser on a lead pencil, it would lift a flat-iron weighing 5lb.
Jefferis contacted Stuart Macrae, the editor of Armchair Science who in turn contacted Cecil Vandepeer Clarke, the former editor of a caravan and trailer magazin, and both promptly undertook to perform experiments and to produce prototypes of a new weapon that could be carried by a diver and attached by magnets to the hull of a target ship below the waterline.
The first versions were put together in a matter of weeks. The innovative design included a ring of small strong magnets for adhesion and the detonator used slowly dissolving aniseed ball sweets to provide the necessary time to get away. The operational limpets were to be fired with an acetone/cellulose timer rather than the detonating cord seen here in the video.
Just before war was declared, Macrae joined the War Office as a civilian, getting a commission in October 1939. Clarke too was soon called up. He served in the SOE with Colin Gubbins and would later be appointed Commandant of one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s schools.
The limpets mines used by the British during the Second World War contained only 4 kilograms (8.8 lb) of explosive, but placed 2 metres (6.6 ft) below the water line they caused a 1-metre (3.3 ft) wide hole in an unarmoured ship.
Posted on Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 03:04AM
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[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
in Folboats, Limpet mines, Military
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[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
in Folboats, Limpet mines, Military
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