A Blast from the Past

Last year I posted a little piece on the 80^th anniversary of the Blitz, the air assault on the UK between September 1940 and May 1941.

https://billwhittlecom.wpenginepowered.com/the-blitz-80-years-on/

Last week we had a more concrete reminder of that time.  Workmen at a building site in the city of Exeter, in England’s West Country, had a nasty shock and lucky escape when they discovered this unexploded bomb. Even eight decades after it was dropped it still posed a deadly threat. Bombs like this can explode if disturbed, or even just spontaneously.

The 2.78 m/9’ long, 1,000 kg/2200+ lb bomb was an SC1000, nicknamed the “Hermann” by Luftwaffe crews, after the generously built Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe. Of the 1000 kg weight between 530 and 630 kg would be high explosive (40% Amatol and 60% TNT). It would have been dropped during one of the nineteen raids on Exeter between 1940 and 1942. Below is a Heinkel HE111 with a Hermann bomb slung from its fuselage.

The bomb was found at a property in the St David’s area in the north of the city, near the University. It was most likely a dropped during the raid on the night of the 23^rd/24^th April 1942 when 2 waves of 20 bombers hit the city, especially the Pennsylvania area, very close to where the bomb was found. 73 of the 265 people killed in the Exeter Blitz died on that one night.

[The Exter suburb of Pennsylvania gets its name from a Quaker banker, Jospeh Sparkes, from Pennsylvania, USA, who built the first development in the area in 1821.]

At first a 100 m/109 yd area was evacuated. This was extended to 400 m/430+ yd when it was decided by the Royal Navy bomb disposal team to detonate the bomb. In total some 2,600 homes and 1,400 students were evacuated. It’s not unusual for unexpolded bombs and other ordnance from the Second (and even the First) World War to turn up across the UK and Europe. In the kast few years Hermann bombs were found in London (2008), Szczecin, Poland and Belgrade, Serbia (both in 2013).

For those of you who like a good bang, here is the best of the various videos of the detonation. It’s from a water meadow on the other side of the River Ex, about 600/700 yards away and you can see the shockwave hit just after the explosion.

https://youtu.be/6zIc882ulMc