OT: Disposal of German Parachute Mine

[Local Yokel]

A German Luftmine 'B' airborne parachute mine was recently discovered in Bridgwater Bay, close to where I live. A Royal Navy EOD team attended and detonated the weapon at 11.42 BST today. Here's a link to an initial report with close up photograph of the mine, and video of the detonation on YouTube. Up goes 705kg of HE!

[Shark7]

What's amazing is that no fisherman accidentally hit the thing and set it off in 60 years. Glad they found it where it could be dealt with safely instead of someone getting hurt.

[Historiker]

It's some month ago when 2 workers on a german Autobahn died while they wer cutting through the tar. Their machine hit a 500lbs bomb...

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Historiker

It's some month ago when 2 workers on a german Autobahn died while they wer cutting through the tar. Their machine hit a 500lbs bomb...

That's horrible. [:(] The war has been over for 60 years, and yet it is still claiming lives.

[Grell]

That is horrible Shark.

Regards,

Grell

[tc464]

Unfortunately, it's a problem that will be around for another couple of centuries by some estimates. Here in the US, Civil War ordnance (circa 1860) is regularly found and destroyed. The oldest item I ever found was a Revolutionary War rifle (.68 cal). Europeans have it far worse because of both world wars.
 
The other big problem is that technology doesn't help much. It can find it, but in the end, a guy with a shovel and a tool bag is going to have to hop in the hole [X(][:D]

[mikemike]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

ORIGINAL: Historiker

It's some month ago when 2 workers on a german Autobahn died while they wer cutting through the tar. Their machine hit a 500lbs bomb...

That's horrible. [:(] The war has been over for 60 years, and yet it is still claiming lives.

That's nothing exceptional in Germany. AFAIK, the bomb disposal squads in Germany have to defuse about 1000 WWII bombs every year. If you want to build a house in Berlin, you are obliged to have the plot searched with metal detectors because there are such vast amounts of unexploded ordnance in the ground. I think in Berlin alone they dispose of several thousand items per year, everything from bombs through artillery shells to rifle cartridges - there was massive ground combat when the Soviets took the city. And most of that stuff will still explode o.k.

There has been an estimate a few years back that there may be still more than 100,000 dud bombs in the ground all over Germany. They estimated that as much as 40-45% of the HE bombs dropped may have been duds, with the worst offenders being British HE bombs with chemical delayed-action fuzes, which were intended to kill rescue workers hours after the attack proper. Those fuzes were primitive - the striking pin was held back by a celluloid disc that was slowly dissolved by acetone from a glass phial that shattered on impact, with the delay depending on the thickness of the disc. If the bomb didn't stay nose-down, the disc would either not be attacked by the acetone or only partly dissolved - anyway, that fuze stays live until it falls to dust a few centuries hence. And you can't see from outside if the thing is on a hair trigger or not.

In the city where I live, there was a brewery just across from the Central Station, beside a heavily travelled autobahn. That brewery was demolished in the late nineties to make room for some new office buildings. During the demolition and excavation work they found four unexploded bombs that had remained undetected for more than forty years. Each time the area was cleared for 500 metres around, the autobahn was shut down, the railway line was shut down, until the bomb-disposal people had defused them. The one bomb they didn't find blew up in a building rubble recycling plant, killing seven.

So you see, this kind of stuff is routine in Germany, so frequent it is just a matter of local concern unless something happens, mostly you don't see it reported elsewhere. The Britons are truly lucky this is such a rare occurrence in the U.K. it hits the national news every time.

[Historiker]

Indeed, it's absolutly common to read "several blocks in Berlin/Hamburg/Bremen/Munich/somwhere in the Rhinelands evacuated to defuse a WW2 bomb"...

[BrucePowers]

We have one here in central Florida. In Orlando they built an elementary school on the site of a WWII bombing range. The Army Corps of Engineers is finding ordnance on the site.

[wdolson]

I vaguely recall reading a story of an English golfer who was killed when his golf club set off a buried German naval mine from the war.  I think it was back in the 90s.  In the story, they were able to figure out which bomber it was.  Apparently an He-111 ejected its load of mines in that area at some point in 1941 when they were shot up by an RAF nightfighter.  The He-111 went down and the crew was captured.  One of the mines buried itself where a golf course was later built.

It's been at least 10 years since I've read the story, so I'm sure I'm not remembering it right.

Amazing stuff about the unexploded ordinance in Germany.  I knew there was some left, but never knew there was so much.  The US is very lucky in that sense.  Unless you're on an old gunnery range, there is little risk of coming across any old ordinance.  Especially in the west where the only wars were against the natives and didn't use much in the way of heavy ordinance.

My sister is a geologist and when she was in college she did go on a field trip to Camp Pendleton's aerial gunnery range.  There is some good undisturbed geology on the edge of the range and geology field trips there were common in the 70s.  She picked up some .50 cartridge casings and a 20mm shell, not knowing that it was an actual shell.  It was probable that it was a dummy shell used for practice, but my father went nuts when he found out she had brought back a shell that could be live.  He called the police and wouldn't let anybody into his office until they took it away.

I ended up with one of the .50 cartridge cases, but I don't know what happened to it now.

Bill

[patrickl]

Very interesting posts, guys. In Singapore, we sometime read in the papers that construction site workers found unexploded bombes left by the British or Japanese and the army bomb disposal unit took care of it.

[Dili]

There is still Japanese "wmd" being discovered in China. Also in France, this ones from WW1.

[mikemike]

ORIGINAL: Dili

... Also in France, this ones from WW1.

There is an area in France where the British in 1917 dug tunnels to underneath the German front line positions and emplaced huge amounts of explosives, several thousand tons, below the German trenches. When the charges were detonated simultaneously, they literally atomised the German positions. It was the most powerful man-made intentional explosion up to WWII. Years later, it became known that at least two of the charges had not been blown up when one of them was set off by a lightning strike in the late 'fifties or early 'sixties, an estimated 150-200 tons of explosives tearing a crater about sixty feet deep and several hundred feet wide into a field that had been under cultivation since WWI. A check of old documents resulted in determining that there was at least one other unexploded charge, but it proved impossible to find its location. So there is a place in the French countryside where, sixty or so feet deep, a few hundred tons of high explosives lie waiting to detonate, unaffected by time, unsuspected by the people who live on top of it ...

[Historiker]

You forgot to mention that there was a victim, too! A cow died because of that explosion [;)]
But I read once that at least one of the bombs is suspected to lie under a village that was build after the war...


When I was a small boy, my parents told me again and again never to touch ordnance I may find as this might kill me. And indeed, when I was 9, two boys at around 12 years were killed while playing with a hand granade they had found! I myself also found ordnance, but only cartridges.

At university, I once had a test in folklore (my minor field of study) where I read about children playing with catridges. They took them and knocked them on stones to fire the bullet. One of the children in the book told: "This was one of our favourite games. But then one of our friends died doing this, so we stopped it"...

There was also a report in the German media that neo-nazi groups go around on old battlefields with metal detectors. They digg out old granates and weapons to extract the explosives...
Another case was a weapon collector. He was arrested and the police needed 4 Trucks to carry all his ordnance away, as he had collected 40 tons of guns, granades, ammunition, etc... He bought some of his stuff while he found the other with a metal detector. There was also the report that he had several WW2 MGs in full working order - according to the media he took parts from every gun he found to built new ones...

So still today, we see the results of the two wars...

[Alikchi2]

Another case was a weapon collector. He was arrested and the police needed 4 Trucks to carry all his ordnance away, as he had collected 40 tons of guns, granades, ammunition, etc... He bought some of his stuff while he found the other with a metal detector. There was also the report that he had several WW2 MGs in full working order - according to the media he took parts from every gun he found to built new ones...

This reminds me of some frightening/titillating pictures I came across today.

Link 1 - Link 2

[Historiker]

ORIGINAL: Alikchi

Another case was a weapon collector. He was arrested and the police needed 4 Trucks to carry all his ordnance away, as he had collected 40 tons of guns, granades, ammunition, etc... He bought some of his stuff while he found the other with a metal detector. There was also the report that he had several WW2 MGs in full working order - according to the media he took parts from every gun he found to built new ones...

This reminds me of some frightening/titillating pictures I came across today.

Link 1 - Link 2

[X(]
I want this collection!

[LowCommand]

There is an area in France where the British in 1917 dug tunnels to underneath the German front line positions and emplaced huge amounts of explosives, several thousand tons, below the German trenches. When the charges were detonated simultaneously, they literally atomised the German positions. It was the most powerful man-made intentional explosion up to WWII. Years later, it became known that at least two of the charges had not been blown up when one of them was set off by a lightning strike in the late 'fifties or early 'sixties, an estimated 150-200 tons of explosives tearing a crater about sixty feet deep and several hundred feet wide into a field that had been under cultivation since WWI. A check of old documents resulted in determining that there was at least one other unexploded charge, but it proved impossible to find its location. So there is a place in the French countryside where, sixty or so feet deep, a few hundred tons of high explosives lie waiting to detonate, unaffected by time, unsuspected by the people who live on top of it ...

The History Chanel did a show about this, "One of Our Mines Is Missing. It turns out that more than one is missing. Some very brave military engineers donated their time tracking down some of these mines. They managed find and cut the wires and/or pull the detonators from some of the mines. The explosives are too deteriorated to move. At least one mine is in an unfortunate spot. I've lost my copy of the show, but I seem to remember that some of these men have since died trying to defuse another mine.

[Bombsight]

I'm tempted to pull out my DVD of "Danger UXB" AE TV show from the 70's with Anthony Andrews as a young actor.