WWII Tall Boy bomb explodes while being defused

[Tulio]

In Poland

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-54533860


Saludos,

Tulio

[Pat Carry]

Wow!!

[RyanShort1]

Kind of cool that we got that captured on video.

[junkman9096]

The voice over on the tv report that I watched implied that it went off while mitigation efforts were ongoing. I don't think that's the case. Impressive that the explosive remained viable after all these years.

[p51]

Remember when you used to hear about this all the time on the news?
When I was a kid, you often would hear about a WW2 bomb found when someone was building something in Europe.
At first I envisioned the EOD guys under water right next to the thing when it went off. You'd be lucky to find anything from them if that'd happened. So glad I was wrong about that!

Impressive that the explosive remained viable after all these years.

Explosives generally get more unstable over the time and they always will still go bang.
There's a Belgian EOD unit at Ypres that to this day disposes of WW1 artillery round found by farmers who have plowing the same fields for a century since the war. There are stacks of rusted projectiles found in the ditches with signs in many languages warning tourists to NOT touch them. The locals will stack them into the ditches and call the unit when the stack is high enough. A local farmer in 1988 told me that it's illegal to dig with mechanical means in certain parts of the town due to how many rounds are in the ground there. They shelled the place almost nonstop for 4 years.
One of my instructors at Aberdeen proving Grounds was an EOD guy, the one who went into the airplane tat crashed into the white house in 1994. He told me he responded to a scene where three guy out hunting in Maryland found a large cannonball, rolled it over to their campfire and one guy used it as a seat. One of the guys went to go get something from the truck and then BOOM. Nothing but a crater. It was a Civil War naval round, they determined from what little pieces they found later.

[DoraNineFan]

Quietest bomb ever made. Still impressive.

I'm searching for a video with sound, but newer videos are turning up with music for effect.

[Lon Moer]

I'm a little curious how they "found" it in the canal. ??

[Firebird]

I'm a little curious how they "found" it in the canal. ??

They discovered it during, or rather prior to dredging the canal bed. Given the site being a known bomb site they probably did a dive team survey of the canal bed beforehand.

[Cvairwerks]

Full story is that in preparation for dredging, quite a few unexploded bombs were found. The decision was made to remove all the others within several hundred yards of this one first. The tall boy was determined to be too questionable to even try and disarm and move, so it was to be detonated in place. There never was any real consideration of moving it after divers did a close inspection.

[Firebird]

The raid on the ship was filmed by a RAF Mosquito, and you can see it here (starts about 0:50 into this clip)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt4iqwkTJkQ

and if you look carefully I think that wartime raid film shows this very Tallboy making a splash in water, as there is a splash that is a lot smaller than the other Tallboys that clearly explode, and its a big enough splash to be a 12000lb Tallboy hitting the water and not going off.....and if you freeze frame both films and screen shot it, it does look very close to being the same one....splash indicated by red arrow.
The ship would have been in front of the saw tooth dock structure that has been built since, but the jetty coming down from the two U-Boat pens on the opposite site appears to be roughly the same still.

[Michel Lemieux]

Seems a little extreme to dredge a canal no?

[Kyleb]

Seems a little extreme to dredge a canal no?

Probably trying to keep it accessible for ships with a deeper draft. Certainly the warship in the picture was a rather deep draft vessel.

[shrike]

BDA photo of the raid


You can see the results of the bombs in the previously linked video. Looks like a couple of the Tallboys were delayed fused, as there are some much bigger craters after the fact.