Posted on 10/27/2011 4:44:47 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
BERLIN (BNO NEWS) -- German authorities on Thursday evacuated more than 20,000 people after an unexploded World War II bomb was discovered in the city of Halle, officials said.
The unexploded 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) wartime bomb was discovered by a man digging a ditch. At least 20,000 people, including all 500 patients at a local hospital, were forced to evacuate the area, the German dpa news agency reported.
Local police chief Bernd Wiegand said everyone within a radius of 800 meters (0.5 mile) was ordered to evacuate. Six schools and the city's hospital had to close as a result.
(Excerpt) Read more at wireupdate.com ...
I hope it’s not a type 17 fuze
Responded to a bunch of these while stationed in Europe over the years.... Farmers an construction crew find Uxo all the time. As well stuff washes down from the slopes or up on the beach. Thousands of these calls yet size of potential frag zone dictates publicity ...... Stay safe.
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By dud you mean that the explosives are harmless. NO it had a fuze mechanism that did not properly function the first time so it has been sitting in the ground all these years alert & ready to go BOOM if someone decides to disturb it .
Heck the French still are losing around 8-12 people a year to accidents with unexploded ordnance from world war one,especially dangerous are the chemical shells because they often still have real chemical weapons inside like liquid mustard gas.
The French have a org. called the Bureau of Deminage the stuff that really scares them are the poison gas shells from WWI since many of them still contain more than residue of active chemical weapons like mustard gas which is really an oily liquid.
Also the french lose about 8-12 folks a year to accidents with old ordnance, old WWI artillery shells have a habit of sometimes going boom when smacked by a disc type plow pulled by a farmer.
I wouldn’t say the bomb was a dud just that the fuze was a dud & I bet that the inside machined parts of that fuze are still as bright & shiny & ready to go as the day it left the factory . So the real interesting part will be figuring out what the fuze type is & how to render IT inert.
One thing separates Dresden from other much more severe bombings. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Had he not written it Dresden would have just been a footnote. He also had the German numbers as the death toll.
I read one some site where the writer was trying to point a finger at America by saying that the firestorm was so severe from the Dresden bombing that people who were trying to escape were sucked back into the flames and that such a thing had never happened before in wartime. Problem with that was it did. Most notable was the burning of Richmond in 1865 during our Civil War.
‘’reap the whirlwind’’ Indeed they did.
Funniest damn book I ever read. “Listen, Billy Pilgrim say’s he became unstuck in time...;;
I thought evacing 20k pops was overboard is all.
It was because when the Norden Bombsight was tested and approved, they did the testing in Arizona where the weather was clear MOST of the time. In central Europe the weather is CRAPPY MOST of the time. Also to destroy a target you had to have ALOT(sometimes over 600) B-17/24s to get the job done and even then sometime you had to do it again and again. All of those bombs and you will have a fair share of duds.
Lots to consider ..... Gas lines. Flammable manufacturing processes, size of the uxo to be rendered safe etc...
Agree with ya based on data provided by the presstitutes.
Overkill...
Thanks, I’ll check it out. The RAF also did a number on the German city of Rostock.
“..or maneuvering by the pilot to try to keep from getting shot?”
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“Hey Mack. Let’s drop the load over that farm - not as much flack as over the city with the ball-bearing factory.”
This is so interesting! I used to be married to an optical engineer from MIT. He talked about stuff like this. There’s so much about WWII that most people never knew. This is a great thread—thanks for filling in some of the blanks.
Whoa—seriously? Eight to 12 people a year from WWI bombs? That’s incredible. Counting my blessings; no matter how much I poke around in the flower and tomato beds, I’ll never disturb a mustard gas bomb.
Thanks for the info. I really didn’t have a lot of knowledge when I made my post. I read a book about an American woman who was in Dresden during the bombing, and who made it out alive. My recollection was that she either heard from others that it was US planes or actually saw US planes. She had not one scintilla of blame or animosity toward them, however. She perfectly understood that what they were doing was trying to win the war. She accepted their role as that of needing to destroy the city, and she saw her role as needing to get out alive.
I place no more blame than that woman did; anything that sped the end of the conflict—which itself, as long as it lasted, cost so many US lives—is a good thing. Lives lost in Dresden meant lives saved elsewhere, and likewise Hiroshima. We didn’t start the war but we needed to hasten its conclusion. Dresden played a part in the hastening, which again, is a good thing.
My brain cannot conceive of over 600 bombers on one run. Or am I reading this wrong? No wonder it was such a long, hard war. You wish you could go back in time and give them a few thousand Tomahawks. Amazing, too, that it took so long to learn to use the bombsights. Or is it that the Norden type simply couldn’t be made to work in Europe no matter how much training the bombers received?
What an intriguing thread; there are some brilliant people posting on it—for which I’m indebted.
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