They Still keep Turning Up......

Just a year or so ago a cookie turned up in the mud flats on the Rhine in IIRC Cologne, and a large area was evacuated while a team disarmed it. As Martin said, that type is mostly explosive, about 3000lb.

 

The bomb:
https://twitter.com/DC_Police/status/1365683677951381505?s=20



So... Hands up anyone that even fancies going near the fucker.
Nope. Me neither.

'The long walk' indeed.

Something that's got me: There's even a reasonable chance that the chap who pulled the lever (pushed the button? No idea... ) to drop it may even still be with us.
Think I'd find that sort of satisfying that the thing eventually went bang.

Big style on TTH's comment.
We have no idea, do we?
Wiki paraphrasing:
April '42 - two waves of forty bombers, mostly doing two sorties apiece. May - twenty more.
Over a thousand personnel involved in damage control.
30 Acres 'devastated'.
156 killed, 583 injured.
1,500 of the city's 20,000 houses obliterated. 2,700 badly damaged. 400 shops, 150 offices, 50 warehouses & (The horror!) 36 pubs destroyed.

Some snaps of Exeter cathedral I took a couple of years back.
remarkable work on rebuilding bomb damage. All those reassembly cracks a result of those Baedecker raids:



There's also a beautiful medieval Wooden screen there that was painstakingly reconstructed after being turned to splinters, but it wasn't easy to photograph exactly what was done during restoration. Felt like 'Near-perfectly re-made' was the path taken.

No wonder the Poles are held in such esteem there:

 

So you clear the area or face these bombs all the while. Like said Finland clearead the bombs post-ww2.

 

We still find more bombs as Darwin is developed...


OK Who remembers this little gem of a tv show? Danger UXB (Unexploded bomb)

 

Recently re-run on Talking Pictures tv (well, last year) in the UK. Finally managed to see the one episode I missed on it's first outing in '79.
Great programme. First thing I noticed was the heavy background noise levels in outdoor scenes; even in the '70s, London traffic was abysmal.

 

This thread has given me an excuse to dig out some photos I haven't looked at for many years. In November 1986 I spent a week exporing the Somme. The amount of unexploded stuff was extraordinary and made you realise how intense those barrages of (then) seventy years earlier. I took a few pics along the way - tehse are from the Serre, Butte de Warlincourt and Thiepval areas. And no - I didn't fiddle around with them - although I still have a large chunk of German 15cm shell (with driving band ) which did come home with me.....

 

On UXBs: The Germans dropped a lot of time fused bombs, meant to deter fire-fighters and rescue workers. These time fuses were of some sort of electrical type that were activated when they were released from the bomber. These fuses were in the side of the bomb instead of the nose or tail (see "Danger UXB!" ad above). I get the impression that many of these fuses didn't work and thus became problems when they were discovered-often well after the war.

I've also read that RAF Bomber Command used the same tactic on German cities and I suspect the USAAF did as well.

 

If my memory serves me correctly, I saw the series in the early 1970s on the PBS which ran a lot of BBC content.

 

They clearly had first-class researchers, since all the uniforms (civilian and military) were pretty much spot on.

 

They had better get the uniforms right! Most of the people who wore them in real life were still alive!

 

I remember that series. I only saw a little of it, but I liked what I saw. It certainly made your blood run cold thinking of what those sappers had to deal with.

 

Given you were at the Somme...couldn't some of this be WW1?

 

Sorry, I should have been clearer...the Somme I visited was ALL WW1.....

 

Which then raises an interesting question...was there any fighting in that area during WW2? Even pre or during Dunkirk?

 

Yes there was - the famous incident where British 'Matilda' tanks momentarily halted Rommel's Panzers. But it was very much 'Blitzkrieg' and very few - if any - traces are left of the fighting.

 

Probably not. Civil War mortars were used almost entirely in sieges, ranging from the small Coehorn type to 13" monsters.

A spherical explosive shell likely came from a 12pdr Napoleon smoothbore, one of the most common weapons on both sides. It would be about 4.67" in diameter.