They Still keep Turning Up......

Some excitement in Exeter. Quite a good pic of the bomb, but nothing to give it perspective. SC500, maybe ?

Exeter WW2 bomb: 2,600 homes evacuated

 

Wow!
I prefer Tall Boy of all. What a bomb!

 

Amazing how much ordnance is still turning up.

 

I am not sure but in Europe there was no bomb clearing?? We Finns cleared the cities, countryside and the seas after WW2. Still we find bombs but we did clear the known areas.

 

Well, they weren't going to take any risks with this one....

Exeter WW2 bomb detonated after homes evacuated

..the Luftwaffe still packs a punch, 80 years on !

 

So it was considered to be a luftwaffe bomb??

 

No-one else has ever bombed Exeter........

 

I liked the description as a controlled explosion.
Didn't look terribly controlled, did it...

https://twitter.com/MrLukeJohnston/status/1365735102228135941?s=20

(Though, of course, I'm not going to apply any criticism to people that deal with 80 year old half ton bombs in built up areas! )

 

"controlled"...as in "didn't actually take out half the county".

 

1000 KG, apparently with 400 tons of dampening sand shovelled over as unstable fuse not workable.

The thought occurs, again.
"Why are you obsessed with WW2?"
"Why aren't you?! It keeps turning up bleedin' everywhere"

 

Just watching and hearing that damned thing go off gives me a better idea of what the war and the Blitz were really like than any number of books.

 

A very familiar sight in Northern France and Flanders after the ploughing seasons. The ones to watch out for are the gas shells.

 

It's fairly unusual for unexploded ordnance to be exploded in situ these days. In both France and Belgium, the usual practice is for army trucks to 'do the rounds', collecting shells from beside the road. They're then destroyed at army camps ( such as the one at Elsenborn in the Ardennes ). This doesn't apply to aerial bombs and also some WW2 shells ( such as the PaK43 88m etc ) which have very sensitive fuses.

 

Most WWII aerial high-explosive bombs have cast steel casings and are quite robust to avoid potential breaking up when landing on concrete or paved areas, buildings etc. They're activtaed by fuse, not contact ( unlike many shells, for instance ). HC ( high-capacity) bombs such as the 4000lb 'Cookie' or the German parachute mine had very thin-skinned casings, relying purely on their surface blast effect. I'd guess that any of these surviving today would be severely corroded.

The main problem with disposal of German WWII aerial bombs is the large number of different types of fuze used. Some were simple, others were designed to kill bomb disposal teams in 1940 - and can still do so today.