A HISTORY OF THE CAR BOMB
PART 1: The poor man's air force
By Mike Davis
atimes.com
MY COMMENT: An interesting history. I didn't know the first car bomb (horse and wagon bomb!) was used in New York. Talk about a history of terrorist acts.
"You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!"
- anarchist warning (1919)
On a warm September day in 1920 in New York, 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," wrote Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of US anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings 12 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, scores of bodies littered the streets."
Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J P Morgan 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 US 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.
<LONG AND INTERESTING> |
