BIG BOMB Found in Germany....

[mc2NY]

My first thought was that Uwe had secretly bought a Firebird X and hidden it in a time capsule in the Rhine


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/koblenz-germany-evacuated_n_1123716.html


This might explain why MesseFrankfurt used to fly the world music media in for a press conference around Thanksgiving each year and herd us onto a boat that floated us down the Rhine River from Frankfurt to Heidelberg, while we ate dinner. I guess the water level was too high to get rid of us....

[TBird1958]

Interesting, not that far from where my late Tante Ida lived...... I visited there in 1970 

[Pilgrim]

That is what David Letterman would call a "big-ass bomb."

[Dave W]

That is what David Letterman would call a "big-ass bomb."

That's what Inspector Clouseau would call a "bewmb" 

[uwe]

Can anybody explain to me why you insisted on bombing a river? We didn't have submarines hidden that far down south you know?  Maybe an air mine to block the river?

Trouble with these bomb defusing crews is that the know-how and experience is slowly dying away. Back in the fifties and sixties they had a lot more incidents on their hands and that bred huge amounts of experience. Who would apply for becoming a bomb defuser these days? While enough are still being found (and sometimes tragiccally go off, killing constructuon site workers, the defuse teams otoh are generally careful enough for nothing to happen), it's hardly a job for the next thirty years as the bombs do become gradually less and less.

Koblenz has a lot of military logistics today and my guess is that those already existed pre-Bundeswehr, hence the heavy bombing there.

[Pilgrim]

Can anybody explain to me why you insisted on bombing a river? We didn't have submarines hidden that far down south you know?  Maybe an air mine to block the river?

Simple.  Some of them were U of Washington grads.

[Denis]

Can anybody explain to me why you insisted on bombing a river? We didn't have submarines hidden that far down south you know?   Maybe an air mine to block the river?

Without seeing it, my guess is a bomb that big would have been destined for use against a dam. They were typically really big! It's possible that it was ditched in the river if the targeted damn had already been blown up or if the bomb was nonfunctional at the time.

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

[TBird1958]

They don't say if this a bomb or an aerial mine, both the RAF (in Europe) and the USAAF (in the Pacific) engaged in aerial mining campaigns in the latter half of the war. The Rhine had quite a bit of barge traffic so not too surprising to find one resting in the mud.

[uwe]

Aerial mine from the RAF AND reg bomb from USAAF. Both were successfully defused on Sunday.