50,000 evacuated due to RAF cookie
 

German evacuation for WW2 bomb disposal in Augsburg - BBC News

Not the type of cookie one wants for Christmas.

A real Christmas 'cracker'!

I hope all goes safely and quickly. Augsburg is a gorgeous city, and I thoroughly enjoyed two tours there in the 70s and 80s.

It looks like they're taking no chances of undersizing the evacuation zone:
http://arkhive.de/schutzzone-25-12-2016.pdf

Seems strange that in the photograph the emergency services are carrying two crates of beer down the street:rolleyes:

Prioritising ;)

p.s. Sorry about that folks, we're speaking to our fuze manufacturers!

A comment from the Daily Mail site....

Missed the railway yards by a mile or two....

Kudos to those highly skilled and brave engineers, who took the gravest risks in dismantling the three detonators of a 1944, 4000lb "cookie-cutter" or "blockbuster" bomb.

The corrosion over 72 years of lying buried deeply underground would be substantial, and despite being a former military field engineer, it's not a job I'd like to be handed.

Here's U.S. military test film from 1942, showing the testing of the blockbuster bomb. They were so-called due to their ability to flatten a city block if exploded at ground level.



Here's video of an actual blockbuster in a museum, and the DH.98 Mosquito that carried it.
There's nothing sophisticated about the later 1944 models - they were just a cylinder packed with 3000lbs of Amatol and 3 detonators to ensure detonation.

Nasty stuff. It's a good job the Germans concentrated on 'tactical bombers' to support their Army, rather than following the rest of us with our 'heavies'. And it's good to recall that our philosophy started with the HP 0/400 ... "Sueter requested "a bloody paralyser of an aircraft" for long-range bombing".

onetrack, would I be correct in guessing that the shock wave advances at about M1.0 but the initial speed of the fragments would be in excess of M10.0?

Don't forget MPN the German war plan didn't involve following, or fighting "us", rather their capabilities were directed firmly at their "red" enemy. That said it's one of the war's mysteries why their Heinkel 177 heavy bomber project was such a fiasco. Even a modest fleet of nazi heavies and the threat or actuality of London being flattened may have led to a de facto truce in bombing cities. Top marks to whoever got the job of defusing this bomb!!

SO:-
Well they certainly missed a trick in not being able to reach all the relocated T34 factories in Siberia, I'll agree. Not clear though what difference it would have made to London with the Luftwaffe being short of heavies. The problem was that they were mercifully short of everything, especially with the launch of Barbarossa. A strong force of Heinkel 1-11s retained in France would have given us even more sleepless nights than pertained pre D-Day. Thankfully they were needed elsewhere, and as ever in far greater numbers than there actually were. Goering was second only to Hitler himself in ensuring ultimate Allied victory. :ok:

In the meantime, much sympathy to the good people of Augsburg for their spoiled Christmas. As has been pointed out it could have been a disastrous one instead had it not been for the skill and courage of those who made this cookie safe.

Looks like they earned a special Holiday nightcap!

https://images.scribblelive.com/2016...9392f0e4b2.jpg

(Roger Flakowski, Christian Scheibinger und Martin Radons)

Amazing work! Great pic. looks like the 3 guys are each holding one of the remains of the the 3 fuzes. Having done quite a lot of dismantling of buried machinery, I am surprised that they can remove the fuzes, it must require some fairly aggressive use of force, not the stethoscope and plastic tweezers we imagine? How about all the talk of explosive decomposition and sensitivity? Or is that all rubbish when you are dealing with explosives that have lain for 70yrs at around 10 degrees centigrade?
Good job done!

OAP

These threads look to be in at least fair shape. (Nonetheless, I suppose one takes a deep breath before tugging on the wrench!)
https://images.scribblelive.com/2016...9abf229f93.jpg

(As a note, the images I've posted are from the augsburger-allgemeine.de site.)

Well done you three! Now go have your Christmas diner and a good stiff drink! Its a strange world when one of my kin may have dropped that beast, and now we are congratulating you, maybe there is hope for us yet!

would they have sprayed WD/40 or similar into that thread?

FISH.

Great pic and well done to the EOD guys :)

Indeed BZ boys
Hope you get a beer for your efforts

Another good pic Vzlet. Yes, it does look in good shape! But hey, that is an explosive detonator that contains unstable picric crystals and would kill you if it went off! Crazy guys.:eek:

OAP

They weren't wearing proper bomb disposal protective clothing. ;)

Just as well the fuzes lacked 'Vorsprung Durch Technik'

Very good point but, I guess, when they'd unscrewed them, they guessed they weren't suddenly going to go.
Personally, I'd have gently disposed of them ASAP.

Hope the Christmas celebration with their families was enhanced by their bravery.

Reminds me of the episode of Auf Wiedersehen Pet when they find an unexploded bomb on the building site.

Oz (proudly) "That's a British bomb!"

Herr Ulrich "Yes, it did not go off."

I wonder if our "three musketeers" would care to write a short account of just how they accomplished this very dangerous piece of handy work? Again, well done!

One doubts you would be able to find the street, let alone the team if it went off, so rather a pointless exercise in donning it.

I think the little caricature at the end of Basil's post explained that.

Well dine to a group of very brave men. Lost in admiration

I wonder what the evacuation area would have been for a bigger bomb, the 8000 or 12000?

As an aside, I read a translation of a German intelligence report. They correctly named the 12,000 lb bomb but did differential between the HC bomb and the Tallboy.

They said it could be dropped from low level, 50 feet or more or high level at 20,000.

I am interested as well clunck. The secrets of bomb disposal can be hot property. However, in this type of case, I presume that the knowledge is unclass. I do wonder though, whether they use some method of disabling these fuzes or, if they rely upon the effects of time to degrade the function? It would seem to me to be pure folly to disturb a viable fuze unless it was disabled, which is what I expect they actually did before removing them from the bomb. Brave men!:D

OAP

Purely as an aside, I notice that fuze appears to be the preferred spelling on here, whereas I would use fuse myself. I have seen an old buttons where fusiliers was spelt fuzileers, but that was from about 1780. Has the 'z' spelling come back?

Early in the "Blitz" (September 1940) a large German UXB was found close to the foundations of St.Paul's Cathedral. A Bomb Disposal team led by Lieutenant Robert Davies (RE) dug down, found it, dug it out and took it away in a truck for disposal (it does not seem to have been de-fused !!).

At the time, my Civil Service "Line Manager" had been a Sopwith Camel pilot as a Captain in the RFC. His comment at the time: "I'd give that. bloke a whole bucketful of VCs !" (Same applies to these three lads, IMHO).

Later, Davies was awarded the George Cross for it. (Wiki has the story: Google "Robert Davies (GC)").

Two months later, I volunteered for aircrew duties in the RAFVR (but I'd already made up my mind to do that anyway).

Danny.

TTN, wouldn't know, but for what it's worth as an RE when wearing the Combat Engineer hat and playing with bang I always used the spelling Fuze. But when wearing the Electrician RE hat I always used the spelling Fuse to describe a device used to prevent bangs!

Either way, the team that did that job certainly had some gonads. Wonder if we could claim on the warranty and get a refund from the fuze manufacturer as they didn't work as described back in 1944?

Going back to the fuse (or fuze), didn't this bomb have three? Were fuses particularly unreliable at that time or was it a "design feature". I have read that some fuses were deliberately set on a time delay to hamper clear-up operations. If that's the case here, this one worked especially well!

One German bomb had an anti-tamper device which activated as the pistol was unscrewed. The RAF bomb disposal man calculated that if you could unscrew and extract the pistol faster than the pistol could activate the fuse . . .

Accordingly he loosened the pistol and then fastened a drive belt from his motorcycle to the pistol. The bike drive was engaged and the pistol flew out - so I was told :)

TTN, yes you would be quite correct to use "fuse" for domestic electrical protection devices. However, explosive-train detonators and similar weapon initiators are generally termed "fuzes". Blame the Romans!:ok:

OAP

Distinction noted ... I shall try to remember that! ;)

I seem to recall that all old 1950s RAF manuals used fuze as the spelling.

Well it's been an education. I'll stick to changing fuses and leave fuzes to those who know what they are doing!

In his book 'Braver Men Walk Away', Peter Gurney -- who was Head of the Explosives Section of the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch until retirement in 1991 -- refers to 'fuzes' throughout.

I seem to recall that even after the fuze is removed, 70 year old high explosive has a bad habit of becoming somewhat unstable.
So was removing the bomb from the site an issue? And what do they do after that - take it to a remote location and blow it up?