L. Thomas Rouse
20 Year Navy Veteran. Too well read for my own good.Jun 19
What is the coolest military "gate guardian" you know of?
This story may or may not be true. There is some controversy.
At RAF Scrampton, just outside Lincolnshire, they had a Lancaster Bomber
and a 22,000-pound Grand Slam bomb as a gate guard.
During a road project in 1958, the airplane and bomb needed to be moved
to make way, so the RAF brought in one of their standard cranes to lift
what they thought was an empty casing onto a flatbed. Unfortunately, the
crane could not budge the bomb.
Their first thought was that the casing might be filled with concrete,
but then someone had an OMG “what if” moment. An armorer was called, and after scraping through years of paint, he unscrewed the fill port to
find that it was filled with 1944-vintage Torpex.
A larger, more powerful civilian crane was brought in to carefully lift
the bomb onto a heavy trailer. It was taken to a disposal area and
detonated.
A subsequent investigation into how a live 22,000-pound bomb ended up
sitting next to a busy roadway as a decoration/photo spot for several
years turned up nothing, and the display was relocated with an empty
casing in place of its more excitable sibling.
42.4K viewsView 1,821 upvotesView 7 shares
However, this is certainly true!
see also
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54522203
WW2 'earthquake' bomb explodes in Poland during attempt to defuse it
""The deflagration process turned into detonation. The object can be
considered neutralised, it will not pose any more threat to the Szczecin-Swinoujscie shipping channel," said Lt Cmdr Grzegorz
Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish Navy's 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla.
"All divers were outside the danger zone."
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