Danger UXB!

[Steve Nelson]

Looks like some unexploded RAF ordnance has turned up in Germany. By the description (three meters long and 3,000 lb) I'm wondering if it's a "Cookie."

SN

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/11/30/142970011/45-000-told-to-evacuate-german-town-before-wwii-bomb-disposal

[Cubs]

I wonder what the original target was? Doesn't sound like a general purpose bomb to me.
Anchored ship? Google didn't turn up much.

[The Inspector]

Why bother to dig this creaky fossil out of the mud? shield it from the land side and shoot it in the water seems like 98% of the blast would go into or over the river, what's in danger? a few dozen carp?
The 8 AF @ the end of the war had a 60% CEP of around 900 feet using the NORDEN, so I would guess this British bomb would have been dropped @ night and its intended target may have been half a mile (or more) away in any direction from where it landed.

[Pogmusic]

By the size, it does sound like a Blockbuster/Cookie.

[shrike]

I wonder what the original target was? Doesn't sound like a general purpose bomb to me.
Anchored ship? Google didn't turn up much.

There may well just have been a pressing need to the make the airplane lighter in a hurry. In that case "down there somewhere" becomes the target for today.

[Pat Carry]

KA-BOOM!!

[cooper9411]

Every year the National Guard is finding unexploded ordnance in and around the southern shore of Lake Erie. Camp Perry was the site of ordnance testing for years and they would shoot it out into the lake and some of it never exploded or fizzled out before getting to far from shore.

[The Inspector]

This past Spring when Alaska Summer Cruise ships started using the former Navy Pier 91 on the north end of Puget Sound in Seattle, the Navy and Sheriffs divers first had to go recover dozens of old naval shells either dropped while loading or pitched overboard dating back to WW1

[cooper9411]

Most of the time they only clean it up because a civilian knew about it. I read somewhere that there was still unexploded ordnance scattered throughout the South Pacific Islands as well as the Aelutians

[JDK]

Koblenz was area bombed during the war, and the Cookies were not aerodynamic or aimed at a point target.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_bomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koblenz#Modern_era

There's no real point in using USAAF 8th AF accuracy as any measure for Bomber Command; early in the war (before US participation, up to 1941) Bomber Command was incredibly inaccurate, later in the war they could be very accurate, and used aids like H2S and Pathfinders and Markers that made day or night irrelevant. But that's not germane here - the object of the raid would almost certainly have been an area bombing one, and let's be honest and recognise there were USAAF area bombing raids as well.

Regards,

[The Inspector]

JDK,
I was just using that metric as a focal point because I figured someone would eventually ask, and it also points out that even with intense training, group bombing, and the vaunted NORDEN bombsight accuracy wasn't what you would expect. Bomber Command did indeed use carpet or area saturation for the vast majority of it's missions, and since it's very difficult to see specific aiming points or indexing items like buildings in the middle of a dark night when the sky is full of unseen fighters and buckets of flak. The standard British bombsight wasn't the best and was very fiddly to make operate correctly, so a fair amount of night bombing was on the 'that looks right enough, bombs gone'.

The Germans figured out how to minimize damage by erecting two sided concrete structures in a gridlike setup miles from a city and lighting big, smokey fires, since the RAF flew single sorties and not tight formations, the bomb aimer or pilot would pick out the set fires a long way out and correct course to bomb a swamp or open field leaving the target city pretty much unscathed. It wasn't until much later that outfits like the famous 617 Sqn using Mosquitos became 'pathfinders' and used specific to the day, colors of flares to outline targets just ahead of the bomber streams and 'on target' accuracy went up, the pathfinders were instrumental in pin pointing the launch rails and control buildings for V-1 buzz bombs

[Pat Carry]

Would there still be unexploded ordinance (mines for instance) on or adjacent to the invasion beaches in Normandy? To find every mine in that area would require a search of every square inch of all the bluffs and beach area. Thats alot of searching.

[The Inspector]

The French Army has a special detachment that is tasked with recovering unexploded WW1 rounds including 95 year old chlorine gas shells that farmers and others excavate.
Wasn't it estimated once that during WW2 only 1 in every 10000 rounds fired hit what it was aimed at?

[ZRX61]

I read somewhere that there was still unexploded ordnance scattered throughout the South Pacific Islands as well as the Aelutians

Judging by the recent pics I saw, there's mountains of the stuff still sitting there..

[Pat Carry]

The French Army has a special detachment that is tasked with recovering unexploded WW1 rounds including 95 year old chlorine gas shells that farmers and others excavate.
Wasn't it estimated once that during WW2 only 1 in every 10000 rounds fired hit what it was aimed at?

In a book I read a few years ago called "Walking the Trenches" or something similar to that, the author did mention about the army picking up unexploded ordinance. The farmers make piles of the shells here and there until they can be removed. After almost 100 years the stuff is still turning up. After all this time are the shells still dangerous or has the powder been ruined by moisture?