The art of defusing a second world war bomb(theguardian.com) |
The art of defusing a second world war bomb(theguardian.com) |
1.4kt of explosive sat in the Thames Eastury, 35 miles down river from central London, that nobody knows how to get rid of.
"it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 300 metres (980 feet)-wide column of water and debris nearly 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) into the air and generate a wave 5 metres (16 feet) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (population circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast."
Just evacuate the people and blow it up, accepting that it'll inconvenience a lot of folks and the national budget even more, but will also briefly revitalize the local economy, as every contractor there is will maximize the opportunity to suck out the funds set aside for repairing buildings damaged in the explosion - and make sure to record the disposal itself from every possible angle, with most expensive cameras government can buy, as selling clips of it to the media industry would be a licensing goldmine and recoup some of the costs.
Hell, turn it into a spectator event, and tourists coming to see it may just pay for the whole thing.
I remember being astounded by how the water "amplifies" the explosions - so while a hand grenade blast is very dangerous on the surface, under the sea it becomes far more horrific prospect, due to the water transferring the blast more efficiently. Nerve wracking stuff, when you're thinking about diving down there - imagining that a bomb dozens of meters away could pulverize you.
Still pretty rare, thankfully. I applaud the diver bomb disposal squads - some of the most dangerous work there is.
Unexploded Soviet ordnance - insane how much of it was dropped and buried in the rubble to this day. You're right though - weird to think that nobody would notice, but so much Europe was turned to rubble at that time. These things got turned to unrecognizable rusty mush after a few decades.
Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice. These things are pretty routine, there is no fear or panic. IThey just diffuse and take the thing away to some military range to dispose of it.
Definitely not in this eastern part of germany where I live. Every major construction needs to check for bombs, but it also happens randomly that a excavator finds a bomb.
There were just a looot of bombs that were dropped. (And they don't always move it, often it is too rusty also to defuse and then controlled explosion if the surroundings allow it (they use lots of water bags on top, witnessed it once))
Those areas where moon craters at the end of the war. But by then logistics where decentralized, all those last days last ditch products, where made in underground facilities or small village smith factories. Effectively they bombed a bomb disposal pit..
There are also still bombs and grenades in the rivers. There are some magnet fishing YouTube channels where you can occasionally see them pulling up stuff like that.
My take (equally guessed): Among the literal rubble spread all over the cities, people constructing everything back up with whatever means possible couldn’t even recognize a mostly buried object as a bomb (instead of just more scrap from a collapsed building).
So less of an active decision to not deal with it, rather one out of necessity and/or not knowing about them, perhaps?
A 500 lbs bomb falling from altitude can bury itself a fair ways in soil. Most of its fellow bombs will have good fuses - and with the mess they make, it would take some careful excavation in just the right spot to find the dud bomb. (Or, maybe it fell in a patch of overgrown brush in a park, or in a river, or a farmer's pond, or ...)
And with the scale at which Germany was bombed in WWII, there was nothing remotely resembling the resources to carefully excavate all the myriad square miles where dud bombs might have fallen. Either during the war, or after.
My parents were around the age of the children in the series during WW II in Germany and what they recounted matched how the children experienced the time pretty well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
(to top that some ammo dumps were simply dumped in holes in the ground at the end of the war and are slowly diffusing there toxic compounds via under ground rivers)
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
BTW, Europe has similar problems with dud artillery shells, old minefields, etc. And it's not just WWII, nor just Germany. The most infamous is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Zone_(World_War_I)
Imagine a place like Afghanistan. I assume neither USSR nor USA records are accessible for the people there. Their landmine issue is just too sad
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-3205978/Pictured-harr...
1. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/december/how...
I might be imagining this but I think that I have seen a report about some systematic effort to trace bomb dropping patterns in aerial images of the aftermath to find gaps in the pattern where something did not go off. But no idea how early or late after the war that happened (if it did happen). And those patterns will only show up for smaller bombs dropped in quantity, not for the big ones.