Thursday, March 29, 2012

V-2 found in the UK

After all these years, the UK is still dealing with V-2 rockets.  Amazing.  via the Royal Navy.
Royal Navy bomb disposal experts are making safe a World War 2 German missile unearthed in the mud off Harwich.
A six-strong team from Portsmouth was called out to Essex to deal with the V2 missile – fired at Britain from the continent in 1944 or 1945 as part of Hitler’s revenge for the bombing of Germany.

The wartime weapon – fired from the European mainland in 1944 or early 1945 – is submerged nose-down in coastal mud flats on the River Stour between Felixstowe and Harwich.
Local fishermen are understood to have known about the missile for decades and even used to moor their boats to it.
A six-man team from Southern Diving Unit 2, based at Horsea Island, Portsmouth was called out yesterday afternoon. A 40-metre exclusion zone has been set up.
Lt Dan Herridge, Officer-in-Command of SDU 2 said: “This is not going to be a job that’s done overnight. People don’t think they’ve ever found a V-2 intact like this before but due to the nature of the beast we don’t know whether this one is definitely intact.
“Our guys have never seen anything like this before and probably never will again. It’s a very unusual beast indeed.”
At first the RN team was sceptical because the missiles plunged to earth at more than twice the speed of sound having reached heights of up to 128 miles above the earth’s surface – so normally there was nothing left of them.
But on closer inspection it was identified as a V2. It is submerged nose down and is projecting about two feet out of the mud, around 300ft from the Harwich shoreline. It is not known whether the explosive is still present.

The bomb team led by Lt Herridge is expected to remain at the scene for some time and may need to bring in a barge and dredging gear to get the missile out of the mud.
The V2 rocket was developed by pioneering scientist Werner von Braun – who went on to be a key figure behind the American effort to put a man on the moon.
Built by concentration camp prisoners, more than 3,000 V-2s were launched from the continent at London, South-east England and the Belgian port of Antwerp – with the aim of demoralising the civilian populace.
The missile attacks resulted in the death of an estimated 7,250 people, mostly civilians. Of these, more than 2,750 were killed in London – and another 6,523 injured.
By contrast, however, perhaps as many 20,000 prisoners forced to build the weapons died as a result of the inhuman conditions in which the Nazis made them live and work at the Dora-Mittelbau camp in Germany’s Harz mountains.
This has got to be some kind of evil omen.

Weapons from WW2 are still being found, still having to be dealt with and its been decades after the conflict ended and we're talking about technologically advanced societies where this is happening.

Unexploded ordinance.  The new menace.

4 comments :

  1. Uk bomb disposal experts are some of the best in the world partly due to the practical experience they racked up dealing with a combination of UXO like this V2 and IRA weapons for decades. Its partly why the first remote controlled bomb disposal robots were British designed and built.

    Apart from the rarity of the weapon type this is not massive news in Europe (Uk, France and Germany especially) as construction sites do find UXO every so often. Its hard to conceive now of the amount of ordnance that was dropped in the war and the frequency of duds mean that there will likely be some leftover examples dotted about for a century. I hear the same is true for parts of North Africa where mining and mass battles in the war left a lot of ordnance in the desert.

    Also should be noted the Falklands are still being cleared of mines 30 years later.

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  2. the thing that gets me is that these are all developed countries and we're talking about housing, industry etc being where these UXO's are found. i can understand it being out in the desert. it wouldn't be news to me but in cities?

    that's wild from where i sit.

    but hey...you guys have a handle on it. way to go.

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  3. They've found ammo dumps from WW1 training camps outside of Washington DC that were just buried and abandoned when the war ended. The shells were live and some of them included mustard gas and phosgene.

    The mother of UXO's is the wreck of SS Robert Montgomery in the Thames estuary. She's got something like 1400 tons of bombs aboard and they might still be live. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

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  4. ok.

    i always knew the threat of terrorism was overblown...now i see that if we ever ran up against some guys with brains that they could get everything they need to kill us from our own wreckage.

    Mustard gas!!!!!

    1400 tons of UXO????

    my GOD that's spooky.

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