The earliest reference to a suicide attack is the story of Samson who died together with his victims as he collapsed a Philistine temple:"Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines!' Down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more as he died than while he lived." (Judges 16:30).
In the late 17th century, Qing official Yu Yonghe recorded that injured Dutch soldiers fighting against Koxinga's forces for control of Taiwan in 1661 would use gunpowder to blow up both themselves and their opponents rather than be taken prisoner.[1]
During the Belgian Revolution, the Dutch Lieutenant Jan van Speijk detonated his own ship in the harbour of Antwerp to prevent being captured by the Belgians.
During their revolts against the British in late the 1700s, 1818 and 1848 the Sinhalese conducted numerous suicide attacks against the British. The common tactic was to hide inside a hollowed Kitul Palm Caryota urens tree trunk and blow up oneself when the British troops came near.
Another example was the Prussian soldier Karl Klinke on 18 April 1864 at the Battle of Dybbøl, when he blew a hole in a Danish fortification.
Modern suicide bombing as a political tool can be traced back to the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881. Alexander fell victim to a Nihilist plot. While driving on one of the central streets of Saint Petersburg, near the Winter Palace, he was mortally wounded by the explosion of hand-made grenades and died a few hours afterwards. The Tzar was killed by a member of Narodnaya Volya, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, who died while intentionally exploding the bomb during the attack.
During the Battle for Berlin the Luftwaffe flew "Self-sacrifice missions" (Selbstopfereinsatz) against Soviet bridges over the River Oder. These 'total missions' were flown by pilots of the Leonidas Squadron under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Heiner Lange. From 17 April until 20 April 1945, using any aircraft that were available, the Luftwaffe claimed that the squadron destroyed 17 bridges, however the military historian Antony Beevor when writing about the incident thinks that this was exaggerated and that only the railway bridge at Küstrin was definitely destroyed. He comments that "thirty-five pilots and aircraft was a high price to pay for such a limited and temporary success". The missions were called off when the Soviet ground forces reached the vicinity of the squadron's airbase at Jüterbog.[2]
Following World War II, Viet Minh "death volunteers" fought against the French colonial army by using a long stick-like explosive to detonate French tanks, as part of their urban warfare tactics.
