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mikemike -> RE: OT: Disposal of German Parachute Mine (4/12/2008 9:24:46 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Shark7
quote:
ORIGINAL: Historiker
It's some month ago when 2 workers on a german Autobahn died while they wer cutting through the tar. Their machine hit a 500lbs bomb...
That's horrible. [:(] The war has been over for 60 years, and yet it is still claiming lives.
That's nothing exceptional in Germany. AFAIK, the bomb disposal squads in Germany have to defuse about 1000 WWII bombs every year. If you want to build a house in Berlin, you are obliged to have the plot searched with metal detectors because there are such vast amounts of unexploded ordnance in the ground. I think in Berlin alone they dispose of several thousand items per year, everything from bombs through artillery shells to rifle cartridges - there was massive ground combat when the Soviets took the city. And most of that stuff will still explode o.k.
There has been an estimate a few years back that there may be still more than 100,000 dud bombs in the ground all over Germany. They estimated that as much as 40-45% of the HE bombs dropped may have been duds, with the worst offenders being British HE bombs with chemical delayed-action fuzes, which were intended to kill rescue workers hours after the attack proper. Those fuzes were primitive - the striking pin was held back by a celluloid disc that was slowly dissolved by acetone from a glass phial that shattered on impact, with the delay depending on the thickness of the disc. If the bomb didn't stay nose-down, the disc would either not be attacked by the acetone or only partly dissolved - anyway, that fuze stays live until it falls to dust a few centuries hence. And you can't see from outside if the thing is on a hair trigger or not.
In the city where I live, there was a brewery just across from the Central Station, beside a heavily travelled autobahn. That brewery was demolished in the late nineties to make room for some new office buildings. During the demolition and excavation work they found four unexploded bombs that had remained undetected for more than forty years. Each time the area was cleared for 500 metres around, the autobahn was shut down, the railway line was shut down, until the bomb-disposal people had defused them. The one bomb they didn't find blew up in a building rubble recycling plant, killing seven.
So you see, this kind of stuff is routine in Germany, so frequent it is just a matter of local concern unless something happens, mostly you don't see it reported elsewhere. The Britons are truly lucky this is such a rare occurrence in the U.K. it hits the national news every time.
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