Posted on 04/01/2016 7:22:11 PM PDT by Morgana
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. Police in Hot Springs, Arkansas, have evacuated about 20 homes after a man mistook a Civil War-era landmine for a cannonball and took it home.
Police say as of about 4 p.m. Thursday that the U.S. Air Force Bomb Squad was looking for a place to explode the ordinance.
Police spokesman Cpl. Kirk Zaner said a Hot Springs man dug up what he thought was a cannonball near Danville. The man put the 32-pound landmine in the back of his pickup and drove about 65 miles home.
After researching pictures of Civil War-era weapons, the man called police to say he thought he found a landmine with a pressure sensor fuse. Zanier says the Air Force bomb squad X-rayed the device and found what could be explosives inside.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Found an article on that.
Wait- La Rochelle still had their U-Boat pens, right? :-)
Well, Dirk Pitt shot a helicopter out of the sky with ordnance aboard the ironclad CSS Texas, which he found in the Sahara desert. (;>)
Combat engineers? Bangalore torpedo?
Arkansas State fans?
Unless a dredge pulls up one the air boys lost off a B-47 at Tybee Island, over by Savannah!
Bigger potential, but really no chance of that one going off, I shouldn’t think. Other than maybe the HE component, which is a lot smaller than in a Grand Slam.
No, the simply called them torpedos. Like I said, Why? I dunno.
Read your history of troops that came across them during the Civil War 1.
The Battle of Franklin was a huge battle in a very concentrated geographical zone. There were so many troops around I have the feeling that there must have been some unit camped near where this was found (close to Leiper’s Fork), but I have never studied it to find out. I’m sure it would be easy to lose one of these little cannon balls and not notice it because they probably had a slew of them.
Franklin in particular, was a shuddering horror. From Samuel Watkins’ book, “Co. Aytch’:
http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/franklin/franklin-history-articles/death-angel.html
Watkins was already a seasoned combat vet at the time.
Yes it was. I have toured both Carnton Plantation and Carter house. Way too intense, but an important part of our history.
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