Video shows biggest WWII bomb found in Poland exploding while being defused
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WARSAW - The biggest World War Two bomb ever found in Poland exploded under water on Tuesday as navy divers tried to defuse it.
More than 750 people had been evacuated from the area near the Piast Canal outside the town of Swinoujscie where the Tallboy bomb used by Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) was found. It weighed nearly 12,000 lbs, including almost 5,300 lbs of explosive.
"The deflagration process turned into detonation. The object can be considered as neutralized, it will not pose any more threat," Second-Lieutenant Grzegorz Lewandowski, the spokesman of the 8th Coastal Defense Flotilla, was quoted as saying by state-run news agency PAP.
"All mine divers were outside the danger zone."
Swinoujscie contains a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal but a spokesman for the town's mayor told PAP no one was injured and no infrastructure had been damaged.
The Piast Canal connects the Baltic Sea with the Oder River on Poland's border with Germany. The bomb was dropped by the RAF in 1945 in an attack on the German cruiser Lutzow.
Reuters
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It's the same munition seen in the great old WWII movie, The Dambusters.
They were also the same munitions used by RAF Lancaster bombers to sink the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord with two direct hits and a near miss.
Actually the unit known as the "dam busters " were the only unit in europe that had aircraft designed to fly with the size bombs mentioned , when they were used against the dams they used a munition and tactic known as skip bombing with a spherical bomb that litterally bounced off the water , during the hunt for the tirpiz , the unit had the only planes modified already to carry the "Tallboy" bombs which had a more classic bomb shape .
because the modified lancasters were the only delivery system that could get the bombs off the ground and to target , the dam buster unit was tasked with the bombing missions that utilized that specific munition , which was also designed by the same person who designed the bombs made to breach the dams , which gave the unit its name.
... and was the source for a great film!
A little more on that. The aircraft were designed to actually put a high rate of backspin on the bomb to get it to skip better/more prior to sinking at the base of the damn.
I was really glad to get to this line.
Yes. I saw the same subject, from the BBC. I had to read through several paragraphs before learning that the de-miners were safe.
I suppose that if anyone had been hurt... that would have been the headline.
Sort of another misleading headline, eh?
Me, too.
The divers were outside of the danger zone. Thank goodness for that.
It's been underwater for 75 plus years yet still deadly.
Detonation of the bomb was the way they were trying to defuse it that's what deflagration means.
Look up "the red zone " of france . munitions from WW1, still very deadly even 100 years later to the point that people are still not allowed in .
There's so much of this around the world, bombs and mines left from many decades ago and the victims are usually children. We don't know how lucky we are, it's something we just don't worry about in the USA when we send kids out to play.
Yes. The "Red Zones" Mark describes are leftovers from WWI. They're well-marked, and there are never any incidents with them. (There are very rare incidents with unmarked WWI munitions.)
Sadly, many of the world's minefields are unmarked...
it does happen in the US , just not too often , read recently how a person went to toss out an old civil war cannon ball he had collected , when it went through the recycler it decided it was time to go off.
most times its people finding something dad or grnd dad brought back as a souvenier of a war that it involves , thinking it has been demilled ( made harmless) when it hasnt been.
way i look at it , all old munitions should be treated as live and with great respect , and let authorities make certain determinations on safety.
and with the way metal detecting has become a hobby and the expense of equipment is rather cheap , it could happen more and more.
In Germany, and I suspect other European countries, excavator operators receive special training in excavating when in areas where potential old munitions might exist.
The Germans in WWII buried a bunch of munitions in what was to become Sigonella Naval Air Station on the island of Sicily prior to them abandoning the airfield there.. The Navy put in an 18-hole golf course in sometime after the war, and when I was stationed there in the 1980s, the local EOD team was spending a good amount of time dealing with the old ordnance that was being pushed to the surface. 88mm, 105mm rounds and a good amount of small arms ammunition were disposed of. And you thought sand traps were a hazard.
Thanks for the giggle.
".... He's got a 9-iron for this 110yard approach to the green on the sixth hole here at Sigonella Bob...."
Clank..... BOOM!
"A...... Groundskeeper, we have cleanup on hole number six..."
Ran into some of those during my four years of living on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in the mid 80's. Still a whole lot of unexploded WW II munitions left over from both the Japanese and the U.S., especially out in the jungles in rural provinces around the Subic Bay complex away from the metropolitan areas.
Its getting rarer to read about it but it still happens , back in the mid 80s in belgium on the french border in the ardennes , we were told NOT to walk the country fields and stay on well marked paths in the woods.
i read an off article a couple years ago how a grenade was found in a shipment of european potatoes that was shipped to china , not hard to imagine knowing how they are actually harvested and having been harvesting sugar beets for the past couple weeks. the mechanized digger would just pick it up with the taters and dump it in a truck ,talk about a time bomb....
How about the German built "bouncing betty's".... Wooden cases housing anti-personnel mines that the minesweepers wouldn't pick up. They're still finding those in farm fields throughout Europe.
How many Mk20 Rockeye cluster bombs did we drop in Vietnam?
The explosive material is always much longer lasting than the casings and gets more volatile as time goes by.
Lovely.....!
I assume you know what happens to sticks of dynamite that sit unused for too long and the TNT crystallizes and starts seeping out of the tube? Perfect example of extreme volatility. You just touch that stuff the wrong way and it explodes.
Did a few dets with EOD as a Corpsman in the Philippines. Being around that stuff is always scary!
Got a nephew that is an EOD in Guam..... You know the special qualifications/training for that "cannot confirm or deny" billet.
I also was around the EOD team assigned to NAS Sigonella back in the 1980s. A number of them were ex SEAL types from Vietnam, which was a natural for them given their dive qualifications and security clearance. Needless to say it was an interesting interaction with many facets to it.