Eighty years after VE Day, 60 WWII bombs a year are still being found | UK | News

Eighty years on, the threat from Second World War ordnance is still with us. And the Blitz Spirit, too. When one of the 60 or so unexploded bombs (UXBs) unearthed in the UK each year was discovered at the site of a former pensioners’ centre near Tower Bridge in East London in 2015, a local councillor boasted that it showed “our OAPs are hard as nails, drinking tea on top of a 1,000lb bomb for 70 years”.

In Germany the threat is even greater, with hundreds of tonnes of the million-plus bombs dropped by Allied air forces uncovered each year. Several disposal officers died attempting to defuse a device in Göttingen in 2010. Three years later, 20,000 people had tobe evacuated in Dortmund when a 1,800kg RAF “blockbuster” was identified by the authorities there. While the Blitz is inextricably linked to the capital, with Londoners bearing the brunt of the attack that lasted from September 1940 to May 1941, the scope of the Luftwaffe assault was far more widespread and devastating – lasting close to six years, and now, 80 years on, still a clear and present danger.

Because of its heavy industry, my home town of North Shields, on the banks of the Tyne eight miles east of Newcastle, was a regular target for the Luftwaffe bombers. In the closing months of 1940, Norman Christenson and his friends were having the time of their lives, quickly acquiring an enthusiastic taste for wartime souvenirs of bomb fragments. “Every kid had a box or bag in which they stored their treasured collection of the twisted metal pieces that could be heard clunking on to tiles and roadways at the height of the raids,” he recalled.

“These would be endlessly examined, appraised, swapped and bartered, like so many of the other totally useless things we saved and treasured.” The pride of Norman’s collection was a set of tail fins off a German incendiary bomb. This desire for wartime swag wasn’t confined to North Shields, and it quickly became a double-edged sword. Two men died while out walking on a north-eastern beach when one picked up a mysterious “container” that promptly exploded. The friends left twowidows and nine children.

Indeed, by September 1940, the number of identified UXBs was approaching 4,000. They came in all shapes and sizes, from 50kg to 1,000kg – nicknamed “Hermann” after Luftwaffe chief Goering – and the 1,800kg “Satan”, capable of producing a crater the size of several double-decker buses. The heaviest to fall on Britain during the war was the “Max” – a massive 2,500kg. More common were squat 250kg and 500kg devices. These air-dropped weapons were surprisingly sophisticated, adapting and evolving over the course of the war.

In general terms, they consisted of anaerodynamically shaped metal case equipped with stabilising fins, filled with high explosive through a screw-on plate in the base. Running lengthways inside the bomb was a separate tube containing more explosive to aid the main detonation.

Positioned widthways was the metal “fuse pocket”, containing an electrical fuse held in place by a metal “fuse ring”, screwed on like the lid of a jam jar. There were as many different fuses as there were bombs. The “No15” fuse released an electrical charge when it hit the ground, detonating the weapon immediately. The “No17” long-delay version also released a charge on impact but it ignited enough thermite to melt a wax pellet, freeing a further clockwork fuse to detonate the explosives up to 96 hours later. The “No50” was designed as a booby trap and anti-handling device. Arming itself after hitting the ground, its internal inertia switch was so sensitive that it could be triggered by a passing truck.

During the war, around 8% of these high-explosive bombs falling across Britain failed to detonate, either by defect or design, making them no less deadly. The Ministry of Home Security was soon issuing stern warnings: “The public must keep away until informed by police or military that the danger no longer exists.”

The majority of UXBs were faulty impact bombs but the existence of long-delay fuses sowed further uncertainty. The bombs – many still in place all these years later – buried themselves 20 or 30ft deep in fields or parkland, in the basements of houses, under social clubs – like the one in Southwark in 2015 – or beneath city pavements. Surprisingly little thought had been given to UXBs before the war. Most, it was wrongly assumed, would simply lie in the open, easy to spot and tackle.

Sapper Henry Beckingham, a 19-year-old Royal Engineer, was among those sent on a one-day disposal course. Their “training” complete, he and his teammates were helpfully issued with “a drawing which showed how to deal with an unexploded bomb”, and sent on their way. The recommended technique involved using sandbags to build a sheltered “crawlway” along which the engineer would shimmy before placing an explosive charge next to the rogue weapon to “detonate it in situ”.

The earliest disposal units were almost as rudimentary: three Royal Engineers, two pickaxes, two shovels, a vehicle, 500 sandbags and some explosive charges. These were later expanded to teams of around 15 men. In the early days, they often relied on tools found in most garden sheds. A hammer and chisel could be used to loosen the threaded ring holding the fuse in place. Unscrewed with pliers or by hand, string could then be tied to the fuse itself and pulled out from a safe distance.

As experience was gained, specialist spanners were soon designed to help with the task of removing the various components. The bomb could then be rolled over to tip out explosive from the “fuse pocket”, before the whole thing was loaded on to a truck for removal.

Newly trained Henry Beckingham found himself in the thick of it. “Air raids every night and many during daylight hours,” he said. “There was no time for leisure; we worked seven days a week from morning till late at night.” Over a fortnight that September, his unit of 100-odd Army engineers tackled 470 UXBs. On one occasion Henry spent several days digging in the back garden of a house in East London.

“We eventually recovered the tail fin and knew the bomb to be a 250kg. This spurred us on to more frantic digging because we knew it could not be very far away. Luck was not with us; it had come to rest at an acute angle and the fuse-pocket or pockets were underneath. It was decided to call it a day and to go back the following morning.

“You can imagine our sense of shock and horror when we arrived the next day to find four houses all very badly damaged. It had exploded one hour after we left the scene.” On another occasion, a stick of bombs landed in a cemetery. “We had to start digging. The bodies were stinking to high heaven and the only way we could kill the stench was to pour creosote round the holes.

“We removed the bodies with shovels but they disintegrated as soon as they hit the air. We put them to one side, got down into the ground to defuse the bombs and then shovelled [the dead] back in afterwards.” When it came to UXBs, there were three principal challenges: locating theburied bombs, rendering the fuses safe, then safely removing the explosive filling. Ideally, disposal teams would remove the fuse then transport it elsewhere for examination and detonation, but that wasn’t always possible.

Royal Navy officer Sub-Lieutenant Jack Easton was one of the heroic bomb-disposal men doing his best to deal with the unique stress. “At the back of [our] minds was an acceptance that there probably would be a last one,” he wrote. “In defence of our sanity, we did not dwell on this probability. It was there. But suppressed. If and when the ‘last’ parachute mine came, well it came.”

He remained haunted by a colleague dying on his very first assignment. “No part of him was found, not even a uniform button or badge. He just disintegrated.” In the autumn of 1940, Easton and his colleague Ordinary Seaman Bennett Southwell attended a house in East London where a parachute mine had failed to explode. Easton gingerly eased open the front door. “The thick dust was familiar and eloquent to me now, and I moved cautiously in case a too heavy footfall set the mine mechanism going.” Through a window, he saw the huge parachute mine “swaying gently in the centre of the room”.

Resembling a cross between a bomb, a household boiler and a giant black squid, parachute mines were repurposed sea mines fitted with a 25-second timer. Powerful enough to destroy an entire street, they had strong nose cones to penetrate buildings before detonating.

Easton climbed in through the window as calmly as he could. “The mine hung suspended through a hole in the ceiling, its nose within six inches of the floor,” he recalled. “Standing close to it, I looked up and saw that the parachute was wrapped partly around a chimney pot and caught on an ancient iron bedstead in the room above.”

He began the process of disarming it by the light of a flickering candle. As he tentatively unscrewed the fuse ring, the mine suddenly began to slip. “There was a sound of falling brickwork as the chimney pot overhead collapsed, and I heard the whirr of the bomb mechanism. Unless I got clear, I had seconds to live.

“On such work, one had to plan ahead. When I discovered that the door could not be opened without disturbing the mine, I had decided on a sequence of movements if the mechanism did become active. I grasped and pulled open the door, for it no longer mattered if the mine were disturbed, and ran. I was through the hall in two leaps.”

Sprinting across the road to a surface air-raid shelter, Easton flung himself on its far side. All he remembered later was being “blinded by the flash that comes split seconds before the explosion”.

As he recovered consciousness “I knew I was buried deep beneath bricks and mortar and was being suffocated. My head was between my legs and I guessed my back was broken but I could not move an inch.” He was right about having broken his back, and had also suffered a fractured skull and broken legs. Six streets had been damaged or destroyed.

Bennett Southwell, 27, was not as lucky. Killed by the blast, he left behind a young wife and baby son. Both Easton and Southwell would be awarded the George Cross, one of the highest awards for courage. But bomb disposal was a deadly business that would take the lives of nearly 600 of its practitioners over the course of the war.

The average lifespan of a bomb disposal officer through the Blitz was later estimated at 10 weeks. Their sacrifice was not for nothing. More than 50,000 bombs were dealt with between 1939 and 1945. The traditions of those units, forged in the Blitz years, are alive and well today, with countless wartime UXBs still out there – now accompanied by terrorist devices here in the UK and overseas in places like Iraq and Afghanistan still waiting to be found.

Fortunately for us, the current generation of bomb disposal experts are always on standby to deal with them – men and women still brave enough to make that “solitary walk” towards an explosive device.

• Edited extract by Matt Nixson from Blitz: When World War II Came Home, by John Nichol, published by Simon & Schuster, priced £25 and out now