AHC: Earliest Possible use of Suicide Bombers?

whitecrow

Banned
Inspired by Suicide bombers as resistance tactic in WW2 thread. The thread asked an intriguing question but, unsurprisingly, quickly turned into a flame-war (pardon the unfortunate pun).

However, one interesting conclusion that I think everyone seemed to agree on was that prior to the use of various suicide attacks in WW2 by Japanese no large-scale suicidal bombings where used by military or paramilitary groups.

So I was wondering – what is the earliest date at which systematic use of suicide bombers by military or paramilitary forces can be deployed? And how?

Oh, and so that people do not derail this thread (SergeantHeretic, I am looking at you) like last time, let me make a few things clear:

This thread is NOT a discussion on the morality of suicide bombing
This thread is NOT a discussion on the effectiveness of suicide bombers

So let’s try to answear the question at hand, shall we?
 

aktarian

I guess anarchists or like could do it in Russia. Maybe fire ships are manned so they can be steered toward their targets.

But in general I'd say you need modern(ish) detonators replacing wick for individual bomber to be really effective.
 

AdA

Guy Fawkes as a suicide bomber?

Detonating a gunpowder bomb at a precise time was not easy in 1605. Lets say Fawkes is not caught, stays in that basement, sends a letter explaining his intentions and blows himself up under the House of Commons.
 

Derek Jackson

AdA said:
Detonating a gunpowder bomb at a precise time was not easy in 1605. Lets say Fawkes is not caught, stays in that basement, sends a letter explaining his intentions and blows himself up under the House of Commons.
Click to expand...

I assume the gun powder plotters did NOT want it to be known that the crime they intended was carried out by Catholics
 

BlondieBC

Banned
I would actually not be surprised to find out that there were suicide attacks in the Middle Ages, that they did not work well, and that they generally have been forgotten by history.

The use of gunpowder "grenades" was common on the Great wall by the Ming dynasty, if not earlier. It would be fairly easy to adapt this technology to suicide bombing, all that would be required is lighting the grenade in a public market. Suicide bombing seem to require a strong religious element and lots of media coverage. The damage is often not that large compared to what a standard weapon of the day could do, it is the media covering over and over and over that makes it a desirable weapon choice.

Think about a 9/11 style attack in the Ming dynasty. Four teams of 5 mean steal some grenades. They go to 4 different markets around two cities and blow themselves up killing/wounding a few dozen people. You would have to be pretty deep into Chinese history to actually read about such an attack. The emperor probably is not informed, the matter is handle at the local level, so you would have to say look at the archives of the records of say the City of Wuhan to even find the information, and that is assuming it would be recorded and the records would have been kept for several hundred years.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
I suppose that the earliest *potential* uses of the concept might be in the first age of terrorism when it was a secular, Marxist thing. Religions allow for Martyrdom in an Abrahamic fashion, but suicide they never allow for.
 

aktarian

Snake Featherston said:
Religions allow for Martyrdom in an Abrahamic fashion, but suicide they never allow for.
Click to expand...

Jews don't seem to have much troubles with it. Masada & all......

Islam went through some serious religios debate whether this is OK or not. OK, at first it was shi'ia thing, sunnis copied from them.
 

AdA

Derek Jackson said:
I assume the gun powder plotters did NOT want it to be known that the crime they intended was carried out by Catholics
Click to expand...

But if he doesn't claim it, we couldn't be sure he hadn't accidentaly blown himself help. That's why he had to write a leter to someone, and later when the letter was found we would know he had been a suicide bomber.
 

SergeantHeretic

The Earliest I can think of is Suicide "Stosstruppen" by the Collapsing Imerial Germans in World War one in the last weeks of World War One.
 

AdA

Snake Featherston said:
I suppose that the earliest *potential* uses of the concept might be in the first age of terrorism when it was a secular, Marxist thing. Religions allow for Martyrdom in an Abrahamic fashion, but suicide they never allow for.
Click to expand...

And yet we have all those saints who walked to their death just to spread the word...
Romans anounce they wil crucify anyone who preaches in public. Guy walks to a public square and preaches right in front of a Roman patrol. Suicide preacher? Did they though the Romans were joking?

And what was the line for all those christian who were in areas were they risked capture by local "savages" (specialy women) Save the last bullet for yourself.

And wasn't it a tradition when an officer risked trial for dishonourable actions to give him a minute alone with a loaded (with just one bullet) gun?
 

AdA

Snake Featherston said:
I suppose that the earliest *potential* uses of the concept might be in the first age of terrorism when it was a secular, Marxist thing. Religions allow for Martyrdom in an Abrahamic fashion, but suicide they never allow for.
Click to expand...

Secular Anarchist thing. Marxists were more revolutionaries than terrorists.
 

SergeantHeretic

AdA said:
And yet we have all those saints who walked to their death just to spread the word...
Romans anounce they wil crucify anyone who preaches in public. Guy walks to a public square and preaches right in front of a Roman patrol. Suicide preacher? Did they though the Romans were joking?

And what was the line for all those christian who were in areas were they risked capture by local "savages" (specialy women) Save the last bullet for yourself.

And wasn't it a tradition when an officer risked trial for dishonourable actions to give him a minute alone with a loaded (with just one bullet) gun?
Click to expand...
Carefull we want to stay away from conflating t0o many different concepts.
 

SergeantHeretic

The subject as I understand it

The subject as I understand it is the earliest possible use of human-guided explosive munions platforms, or as they are more commonly known, "Suicide bombers"

Not priests preaching in defiance of a secular prohibition, not pushy missionaries lipping off around pre-industrial people that would really rather they fuck off, not the western version of seppuku.

The subject is the use of people as the guidance and delivery system for a reletivly large quantity of explosives to a military or civilian target.

I just want to be clear that we're talking about that, and not mixing up any more Apple/orange cocktails.

OK?
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
aktarian said:
Jews don't seem to have much troubles with it. Masada & all......

Islam went through some serious religios debate whether this is OK or not. OK, at first it was shi'ia thing, sunnis copied from them.
Click to expand...

Masada was a clear exception to a general rule, and in any event the Second Temple Judaism was not exactly the version of modern times, with the people who did that being an extremist fringe of an extremist fringe.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
AdA said:
And yet we have all those saints who walked to their death just to spread the word...
Romans anounce they wil crucify anyone who preaches in public. Guy walks to a public square and preaches right in front of a Roman patrol. Suicide preacher? Did they though the Romans were joking?

And what was the line for all those christian who were in areas were they risked capture by local "savages" (specialy women) Save the last bullet for yourself.

And wasn't it a tradition when an officer risked trial for dishonourable actions to give him a minute alone with a loaded (with just one bullet) gun?
Click to expand...

Sure, but in the second of your three examples the motivation for that was racism, the first and the third were the products of the non-Christian element of Western tradition. Any variant of a post-1900 POD wanting suicide bombers to be used means they have to come from the Marxists.

AdA said:
Secular Anarchist thing. Marxists were more revolutionaries than terrorists.
Click to expand...

The Soviets might disagree with that, what with their MO prior to taking over being taking up the mantle of Russian terrorism from the Narodnaya Volnya First Wave. :rolleyes:
 

superkuf

whitecrow said:
So I was wondering – what is the earliest date at which systematic use of suicide bombers by military or paramilitary forces can be deployed? And how?
Click to expand...

Technical I would say dynamite is needed. Black powder isn't strong enough to warrant the loss of a soldier. Nitroglycerine is to unstable. Greek fire takes to much space to carry.

Ideological ... difficult to say. There is a difference between attacking a high value target, such as the HQ of Germanys Third Army during WW1, and walking into a square filled with civilians. I can see type 1 attacks early - the attackers have some ordinary weapons and the suicide charges are backup. Type 2 I have difficulties to see any military doing (they would use car bombs), but more terrorist-leaning movements (that could be paramilitary) could do it early.

The nationalistic japanese military movements during 1920s were suicidal in behavour (shooting a journalist, judge or officer with "wrong" political views and then wait for the police to arrive, standing trial and being executed) and could probably start to use suicide bombs early. But that would be in precise operations - a newspaper with liberal views, not a bus.

Militaries prefers to not waste soldiers lives if there are alternatives, and they have almost always better alternatives (mortars, car bombs, IEDs) than carrying the explosives to the target and blow yourself up. Terrorists don't have these preferences and neither the skill/training/resources for the alternatives.
 
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