The art of defusing a second world war bomb
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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?
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.
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.
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 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))
A farmer or construction worker (or at least one outside of Germany or any other culture famed for incessant rule following) only needs to watch the bomb squad guy rip a shell out of the ground with a shovel and no specific care given once before they realize it's best if they just do that damn job themselves and avoid the hassle.
Because that can happen. And if they know, it still can go wrong.
From TFA:
"In June 2010, three bomb-disposal experts in Göttingen, Germany, were killed by a 500kg American bomb found beneath the site of a new sports arena. "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/02/germany-bomb-w...
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..
That was a quite impressive experience. Windows in the surrounding area broke and straw, which they used to damlen the shockwave, caught fire and was thrown around.
Link Aerial image: https://gdi.berlin.de/viewer/main/?MAPS={"center":[390416.44...
Link example oblique aerial image: https://gdi.berlin.de/data/luftbild_1954_sl/pictures/1954_sl...
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.
Say 50 million budget. Of course red tape, bureaucracy and just laziness/incompetence of state bureaucrats would make such budget balloon and drag for a decade or two, but it should be doable.
If 15m of water can't contain the blast, adding concrete or similar is more likely to add solid projectiles to the explosion than diminish the force of the blast.
Note that I'm not claiming the above is a good plan. Just that it is better than a dome.
https://www.munirem.com/recovery-and-neutralization-of-dynam...
We are also hoping that future technology will figure out a better way to handle this.
This makes sense if you can tolerate some chance of the whole thing blowing up, but you'd still prefer not to replace all those windows.
I saw them while still attached earlier this summer - very spooky, like being next to a potentially active volcano.
The 2020 Beirut explosion involved 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrite which exploded with a force equivalent to 1,100 tonnes of TNT.
The SS Richard Montgomery sank with 1,400 tonnes of explosives, of a variety of types, some of which could be more powerful than TNT.
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.
Curiously, it is exactly the opposite in many video games. In video games water often protects you from the explosion. I wonder, where did this trope came from...
My guess is water protects from nuclear radiation and they get confused. Anyone else want to guess where the trope came from?
If you're outside the water, the density difference between air and water acts to diffuse the shockwave.
Water is a really good absorbent of explosive energy (as long as you're not also in the same water).
A very worthwhile watch. I come back to it every few years.
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.
It was still in fresh memory for a lot of people, broadcast 25 years after the end of WW2, I think it got the feeling over very well.
It was slightly funny because I configured my phone to use a weird chipmunk voice to read stuff out loud apparently (not a feature I use) and it actually started reading out the message. Big WTF. moment until I figured out. Grabbed my attention though and it was the first real alarm I've received. We get a practice alarm message every few months.
I think it closed for a few years but seems to have reopened. Hopefully it's still got the eclectic collections and the knowledgable staff.
One of the many interesting exhibits was some pipeline and information about Operation Pluto; that was for getting fuel over to France following D-Day.
https://romneymarshhistory.co.uk/pluto
https://www.rmwcollection.co.uk/
https://aviationmuseum.eu/Blogvorm/brenzett-aeronautical-mus...
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)
https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/collections/remotec-wh...
They were a fairly common sight on the streets of Belfast in the 1980s/90s, where carrying out controlled explosions on unattended vehicles proved to be a remarkably effective deterrent against illegal parking...
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...
In some places bomb disposal technicians are only allowed on the job for a limited time. Then they move to the "back seat" and consult or assist from far away. Because with years of knowledge and experience comes the kind of confidence that doesn't apply well to unknown devices rusting in the ground for close to a century. Misplaced confidence is dangerous.
Does it work the same way in the UK?
Probably not. The article mentions two active bomb disposal soldiers whose rank is Major or higher, and a colonel who oversees operations. This seems like a standard military career progression, not specific to the EOD regiment. In the armoured infantry, for example, a company commander (i.e. a Major) might still fight as a dismount, delegating a sergeant to stay in their vehicle to command it.
Also note that in the British Army, soldiers of all trades often move jobs every couple of years, sometime returning to a particular organisation but now with a higher rank.