22,000Lb Grand Slam

[Flying10uk]

The first picture was taken by me years ago at Brooklands and shows a Grand Slam bomb on the left out side what was the motoring club house and the one on the right a part size Tall Boy experimental bomb. The site was taken over by Vickers in WW2 and these bombs were displayed outside for many years before being put under cover in the late 1980s. I believe that Barns Wallis office was on the 1st floor and his office window is between the 2 bombs. This is where he did much of his design work. This is now part of the Brooklands museum and is well worth a visit.

The 2nd and 3rd pictures shows the result of a German mine laying aircraft being shot down over Clacton on Sea, Essex on the 30th April 1940. Amazingly only 2 on the ground were killed but 160 were injured.

[CINDERS]

Thanks 10 it puts it in black and white what the RNVR guys were dealing with and like one fatalist said the explosion is faster than your nervous system you wont feel anything.........I think they contained about 1000kg of high explosive

[Flying10uk]

The large tall building next to the Brooklands Clubhouse contains the Stratosphere Chamber also designed by Barnes Wallis, post war I believe. This was built to mimic high altitude for the purpose of testing of aircraft components at low temperatures and presumably at low pressures. The Chamber itself looks like, in my opinion, a giant diving decompression chamber and there is little room left inside the building because of all the ancillary equipment needed to operate the chamber.

The incident of the mine laying aircraft being shot down may have been what gave the Luftwaffe the idea to start dropping modified sea mines over land normally by parachute and I haven't heard of this happening before the Clacton incident. It is my understanding that the mines used were modified magnetic mines but this I haven't seen confirmed from another source. I believe that they were normally dropped by parachute but there were cases of them being dropped experimentally without. I have heard of cases of the parachute catching on trees and parts of buildings causing the mine to be suspended in mid-air and one can imagine nightmare this would cause the bomb disposal engineers. I do have a slight person connection with this incident in that my family were living only 2 or 3 miles away at the time.

[Peter Laidler]

I can only imagine that a sea mine dropped on land would act as one of those 4000lb block buster things. Just a thin skin packed with dynamite to blast everything open. But without crates of incendaries to set fire to everything afterwards, pretty pointless.

The underground engineers tunnelling the new U-Bahn found plenty of dud incendaries. Mind you, at the same time nearby along the Rhine, they also found an unexploded 4000lb blockbuster too! AND defused it! Mind you an earlier 1000punder killed a few while being defused. Not a job for me!

[Flying10uk]

I thought the idea of dropping the parachute mine was to cause an air-burst explosion and so cause damage over a wide area. I would think that a bomb that explodes below ground will have some of the power absorbed by the ground and the rest of the blast mainly going up-wards in a fairly confined area.

[Paul S.]

... I would think that a bomb that explodes below ground will have some of the power absorbed by the ground and the rest of the blast mainly going up-wards in a fairly confined area.

Actually, I believe it causes a miniature earthquake which causes significantly more damage.

[blurrededge]

The top of my road in East London recieved a parachute mine from Jerry during the war, as evidenced by the 1950's low rise flats at the end and the change in house design half way down the road also there's severe cracking still showing on the Victorian/Edwardian concrete re-enforcement for the road crossing of the Great Northern outfull sewer that runs a hundred yards from my house (sounds worse than it is, the new trendy name for it is the "greenway") I can remember elderly neighbours telling me of the "blooming great 'ole" it left

[Flying10uk]

My father survived being dive bombed with the closest of the stick of 10 bombs landing a matter of a few meters away in the front garden of the bungalow he was living in because the bomb went down along way into the soft soil before exploding. There was a huge crater in the garden and another in the road where the second landed. The bungalow was seriously damaged and had to be rebuilt after the war. My father suffered serious hearing damage which didn't heal. Sadly 4 other people in the village lost their lives because their home had a direct hit.

[Sentryduty]

That is one of the aspects of the Second World War that made it stand apart, the civilian toll was staggering. In modern times, "professional armies" place so much emphasis on limiting collateral damage, that there are instances when it has cost service members lives, through denial of artillery, fast air, and other area effect weapons. However that is necessary the evolution of the laws of armed conflict, and the application of warrior ethics, humanity reaches a very ugly tipping point when unrestricted warfare is conducted without regard for non-combatants.

While no side is ever completely faultless in a war, the conduct of the Axis powers during the Second World War was especially reprehensible. I believe these horrible actions galvanized the majority of the Allied forces and their civilian population into supporting the "war effort". This was probably a different social atmosphere than most modern conflicts where the majority of "folks at home" have never had the war show up on their doorstep, or in the case of Flying 10's father, had an enemy bomb detonate in their garden.

[Seaspriter]

While no side is ever completely faultless in a war, the conduct of the Axis powers during the Second World War was especially reprehensible

Darren, while I do agree with you in the larger sense, I suspect those residents of places that suffered extensive bombing like Dresden in Germany or Tokyo in Japan would not understand.

However, to make your point more emphatic, the horror inflicted on Warsaw by both the German and Russian Armies is chilling. At the Warsaw Rising Museum is a computer generated video shot from the nose of a B-17 trying to drop supplies for the Polish resistance. The city that housed 1.1 million people is GONE -- flattened, bombed out, decimated. What the Germans didn't destroy, the Russians did. Ugly. And the Russians wouldn't let the B-17s flying in supplies to Poland land in "friendly" Russian territory to refuel. So the B-17s had to carry fuel sufficient for a round trip from Brindizi, thus lessening the amount of replenishment supplies for starving Poles. This was how the Russians said thank you in return for the Allies replenishment of guns, aircraft, trucks, etc. to fend off Hitler. Pretty ugly.