The art of defusing a second world war bomb
theguardian.com98 points by sandebert 17 hours ago
98 points by sandebert 17 hours ago
As other commenters have pointed out, finding unexploded bombs is still a fairly regular occurrence. Here's a controlled detonation from 2021 in Exeter:
My aunt lives in Hamm, Germany. It used to be a massive rail road hub and allies bombed the f* out it. The old church sitting middle of the town still carries the scars of bombing. Few years ago, during the renovation of the shopping mall, construction crew found unexploded American 500 lbs bomb in the ground. City had to evacuate a lot of people. Throughout years, there were multiple other incidents with UXO in Hamm, that I can recall. I still wonder how the 500 pound bomb been sitting in the ground so many years, right in the center of the town, right by the shopping mall and no one noticed.
As a German living in Berlin it's still pretty normal that once in a while WW2 bombs are found during construction. Heavy bombs that didn't explode probably penetrated the ground quite a bit so when rebuilding it was probably just easier to just leave them there. That's just a guess.
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.
> so when rebuilding it was probably just easier to just leave them there. That's just a guess.
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?
My own guess is that a fair number of them just buried themselves. While I don't have all the relevant facts at hand, per the US Naval Institute, a 550 lb bomb dropped form 20,000 feet would hit the ground at 880 feet per second [1]. If my rusty mind is correct, that would be around 9 megajoules, while feels like it ought to be enough to bury a bomb pretty well in any sort of yielding soil.
1. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/december/how...
You're looking for Young's penetration equations, developed at Sandia National Lab in the 90s. Your favorite LLM can walk through the math step by step if you're interested, but a US WW2 era AN-M64 500 lb bomb gives results of 15-20 ft penetration in average soil. Reality might be a little less because free-falling bombs have forward velocity from the aircraft that dropped them, so they hit at angle instead of penetrating straight down.
Have another bomb in the vicinity that did not fail and there will be absolutely no visible indication at all that something penetrated the ground.
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.
10 - 20 % never exploded, and those exploding buried the unexploded ordnance. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-bomb-craters-after-allied-...
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..
Yeah, bombs are found regularly. A special case was about 15 years ago when there was a bomb in Munich they couldn't diffuse and which in consequence has been exploded purposly right in the city: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dJwE2wLJKKc
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.
True further east, here in former Germany, now Poland. Especially throughout the construction and investment boom that's been happening since 00's. Just last year my neighborhood was evacuated.
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.
"Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice."
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))
>Definitely not in this eastern part of Germany where I live.
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.
Hm, but they maybe know when it is safe to do so, because they immediately recognize the device and know there is no mechanical fuze that can go off by handling it rough.
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...
For Berlin you can really imagine how much bombs were dropped if you look at the aerial images from the 50s. You can find them on their Geoportal. if you click on the dots there is a link to see the oblique aerial image to get even a better feeling.
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...
9 years ago in Thessaloniki Greece, another 500 pound bomb was found 70000 people were evacuated, the disarming took 30 minutes reportedly. Last week they found 1000 pieces of various unexploded ordnance in the city's harbor, leading theory is they were dumbed during the German withdrawal in the second world war.
It really is very common here in Germany to get an alarm that a WW2 bomb was found somewhere near you, telling people close by to evacuate. Like every couple of months. It doesn’t even register with people, I don’t know if the news even report it.
> I still wonder how...
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.
And the mother of all unexploded WW2 ordance is the SS Richard Montgomery.
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."
Hm, reminds me of the 2020 beirut explosion. It was 2.7 kt of ammonium nitrate.
Isn't that a kind of thing you just have to bite the bullet and deal with directly, because waiting only makes dealing with it more expensive with time?
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 think the 1960s salvage effort of the similar SS Kielce which detonated while they were trying to remove the explosives put off similar efforts for SS Richard Montgomery. Mind you, I'm not sure what they thought would happen since they attempted to clear debris from the wreck with explosives.
According to Wikipedia the leading plans were more like evacuate everyone, build some protection around it, then dissemble it one piece at a time and blow the pieces up individually.
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.
If you keep it from exploding long enough the explosives will degrade and stop being explosives. Seawater ain't great for stuff.
Some explosives degrade by becoming more and more sensitive and dangerous, not less.
The question though is at what rate will things happen. Not everything degrades that way as well. The ideal state would be everything degrades such that when those that do become more sensitive explode there isn't enough else still explosive (because it degraded to nonexplosive) and so we don't get the secondary explosions that makes the whole dangerous.
We are also hoping that future technology will figure out a better way to handle this.
Sounds like each consecutive politician making a gamble that, if it actually does explode and kill people, it will be during someone else's term in the office.
Trying to remove it is also a gamble though: if anything goes wrong the bomb squad dies and it destroys everything anyway. There are no good answers, and it hasn't gone wrong yet.
Source?
As dynamite bundles age past their recommended shelf life, the absorbing material degrades, and the liquid nitroglycerin begins to seep or "sweat" out of the matrix.
TNT or Dynamite will 'sweat' crystals as it is aging.
https://www.munirem.com/recovery-and-neutralization-of-dynam...
Yes, but why be the politician or civil servant responsible for dealing with it when it will most assuredly be someone else's problem in a few years? The political upside of getting it done is low, and the risk and cost are high.
OTOH make a spectacle out of it, and forever secure your place in history books.
If they can spend 5 millions just for mast removal, I am pretty sure they could build some rough reinforced concrete dome / something similar all around it (15m depth ain't something impossible to build on) that could absorb most of the blast.
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.
Water is a great blast-absorbent material.
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.
You probably wouldn't build a dome. Better to build a open top cylinder so that the explosion is directed up. Then gravity takes the heavy stuff right back down, while water comes out as rain. Though that would be very expensive and hide the explosion so you can't sell tickets.
Note that I'm not claiming the above is a good plan. Just that it is better than a dome.
So a cautious person would naturally wonder when will an adversary (such as Iran?) choose to do something with this situation.
They just cut the masts off it last week, apparently to stop boats heading over to look at it.
I saw them while still attached earlier this summer - very spooky, like being next to a potentially active volcano.
BBC says it was to stop the masts collapsing and maybe setting the thing off https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6wyz44x4g33o
Small point: People throw around the "kt" label when it means very different things in context. Nuclear weapons are generally measured in TNT equivalent, the hiroshima bomb being roughly 15,000 tonnes equivalent (15kt). This is so common that "kt" has blurred in the mind and we forget that different explosives can be considerably more or less powerful than their TNT equivalent.
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.
It’s worth tracking down a UK miniseries called “Danger UXB” that was made in the early eighties. Not sure how accurate the actual on screen dry ice and cut the red wire stuff was but as a character study of the men involved and the danger they were constantly in it was compelling viewing. Heartbreaking too. One of my favourite TV shows
Not directly bomb related but another good UK series from the 80s that gives a good impression of how so many bombs ended up undiscovered is "The Machine Gunners".
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.
While searching for that I discovered "U.X.B." a 1942 UK bomb disposal training film that is surprisingly thorough in description of the types of German bombs, fuses, and how to report UXBs (during WW2)
That was one of my favourite TV series as a kid.
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.
James May did a bit about it in one of his shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnQ_pS4T0vI
Oh how i would love a modern incarnation of man lab! Such a good show!
Also "Blitz Street" with Tony Robinson, where they build a street of typical 1940s houses and slowly increase the WW2 bomb size to see the damage the would do.
Whoh 1979! Downloading now, thanks for the rec
Downloading from where?
https://archive.org/details/danger-uxb-1979
A very worthwhile watch. I come back to it every few years.
Wonderful article. Reminds me of my experience scuba diving in Croatia. My group and I were doing a seabed waste-collection dive, and part of it was an obligatory training on ordnance. The sea there has had a fair few wars and conflicts.
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.
> 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.
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...
It is more correct to say that air because it compresses dissipates explosions. Water doesn't amplify them, but it is still going to be a lot worse than air.
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 a diver in the water, the water transmits the shockwave very effectively, and is dangerous.
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).
Well explained. That's why I put scare quotes around "amplify" - but I couldn't find a better way to state it.
Roughly speaking, air/liquid interfaces are excellent protection from explosions, and more are better.
The torpedo defense systems in the most advanced WWII battleships & carriers were about 5 layers thick: sea (may contain enemy mines & torpedoes) | empty compartment (air gap) | ballast/fuel tank | air gap | ballast/fuel tank | yet another air gap | important stuff (engine rooms, powder magazines, whatever)
And to be reasonably effective, each air & fluid layer needs a certain thickness - which scales roughly with the size of the explosive charge.
France has a much worse disposal problem. They're still cleaning up unexploded WWI artillery shells. That's been going on steadily for a century, and there are still large keep-out zones. Estimated completion in another century.
I'm pretty sure if you've seen figures in the 100 year range, that's something that was largely aspirational, put out after the 100 year anniversary of the armistice. Some of the experts in France still say over 500 years at the current rate of remediation.
Surely, these rouge zones can be turned back into useable areas- after the bombs are defused. If there was lots of lead, then the produce from those areas would be poisonous though..
Lead, mercury, arsenic... Some places will never be settled again.
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)
How do we as a species communicate for the next ten thousand years, that these places are poisoned and dangerous? The answer- statues of Goatse..
You may be riffing on it already, but for those who aren't familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin... ("this is not a place of honor" has already become a meme that has escaped containment)
That's an easier problem. The conclusion for the Onkalo nuclear fuel repository was, once it's filled and sealed, not to mark it at all. A marker would create attention, and any future society capable of mining deep enough to get in would probably know about radioactivity.
Here's the sign at the SL-1 site, which is not a deep burial.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
We got an alarm delivered via phone here in Berlin a few weeks ago notifying of an evacuation zone near our office where they had found a WW II bomb. Big enough to evacuate everyone in a 500 meter (I think) radius. Our office was outside of the evacuation zone.
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.
> Fuller also marvels at the detailed records local wardens kept. They saw the danger that unexploded bombs would pose for future generations. In keeping those records, they reached out a helping hand from past to present.
This is a great vote for documentation and keeping records.
You never know piece of trivial information may prove vital down the road. You also don't know how long in the future a current piece of critical information will stay critical.
A few years ago I stumbled across a little museum called Brenzett Aeronautical Museum on the south coast of England. It was ram packed with a varied mix of exhibits, including quite a lot related to bomb disposal, which you tend not to see in the larger and more curated museums. It was also manned by some exceedingly knowledgable and enthusiastic people who were more than happy to chat about the exhibits.
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...
> By 9pm the cordon had crept up to 600 metres, encompassing a further 500 homes, cleared block by block by police officers.
I was recently reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book about gun violence.
One thing that really stood out:
Most European countries have MORE police per capita than the US.
I read this article yesterday and it’s the latest in a long line of really enjoyable real world stories from The Guardian lately. In a world where it seems harder and harder to get people to engage with long-form content rather than just clickbait, it’s nice to see some organisations still publishing good quality articles.
How often do WW2 or WW1 bombs actually explode, injuring or killing people? I would have thought that, for every bomb found and defused (or controlled-exploded) there would be one that isn't detected and banged around a bit...
It probably depends, but for example in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, between 1000 and 2000 bombs are found and defused each year. The last uncontrolled explosion was in 2014, killing one person.
I've seen one of those little robots before. My friend found what looked like a hand grenade while breaking up concrete/brick work in a house renovation. We called the police and fortunately we live right near to a Royal Engineers base with a bomb disposal team. They came out in their van and brought out the robot to have a look then picked it up and took it back with them in the van.
The current models are much fancier but until 2019 they were using various variations of the old Alvis Wheelbarrow, which dated all the way back to 1972!
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...
Yes, that’s pretty normal here. After the war ended, a lot of it was disposed of by the public, and there’s still much more waiting to be recovered from rivers and ponds. Before anything can be built, it must be verified that there is no longer any ammunition in the ground. That’s why construction projects here sometimes take longer. But this profession has a future. And you can only make a mistake once.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
They said the last person to be killed by a WW2 bomb probably hasn't been born yet.
Having to analyze 80 year old bombing records during new constructions adds to the long list of downsides of wars
Even if every scrap of WWII bombing records had been kept, preserved, and properly indexed for that - WWII bomber navigation was nothing near accurate enough for it to be very useful. I'd figure the builders just go with their local knowledge - of how many WWII bombs have turned up, and where, and things to watch out for.
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)
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
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...
> Bomb disposal is a dangerous job but, Hambley told me: “Knowledge dispels fear.”
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?
> Then they move to the "back seat" and consult or assist from far away
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.
