Any ex Army/bomb disposal types here?
Discussion
silverfoxcc said:
sunbeam alpine said:
I'm involved in agricultural contracting in West Flanders and we pull loads of these out of the ground every year. Most farmers have a small pile of them awaiting collection and disposal. In over 20 years I've not had one go off under our machines. Although there are stories of farmers experiencing it, I've never met one.
I suppose if they had been blown to microns,you never would....or am i reading that wrong?A few years back I was fortunate enough to be on a farm when they unearthed a whole intact section of WWI trench which had probably been buried by a huge explosion. Luckly, there weren't any bodies, but whe we explored, we found lots of (very rusty) equipment, including Lee Enfield rifles. One day later, the whole site was closed off to the public.
Edited by sunbeam alpine on Tuesday 17th October 18:46
sunbeam alpine said:
I'm pretty sure I'd hear if someone got blown up, and I work over the whole WW1 region.
A few years back I was fortunate enough to be on a farm when they unearthed a whole intact section of WWI trench which had probably been buried by a huge explosion. Luckly, there weren't any bodies, but whe we explored, we found lots of (very rusty) equipment, including Lee Enfield rifles. One day later, the whole site was closed off.
That must be sobering to experience. When I found the ordinance I'd come across a school field trip earlier nearby and they all had long wheel dipping sticks for pushing deep/exploring the ground? I explained where the shell was and if they were keen to look from a distance ...Although mainly to be aware...A few years back I was fortunate enough to be on a farm when they unearthed a whole intact section of WWI trench which had probably been buried by a huge explosion. Luckly, there weren't any bodies, but whe we explored, we found lots of (very rusty) equipment, including Lee Enfield rifles. One day later, the whole site was closed off.
I also came across abit of earth erosion on the old German front line that was on the high ground in the woods overlooking the British front line - it looked like it had exposed an old German trench (or bunker?)
No one's called me a blithering idiot yet
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I have just returned from Iraq where I was passed this video of a soldier disposing of IED’s.
https://youtu.be/Lhe_v0levUA
https://youtu.be/Lhe_v0levUA
Ruskie said:
I have just returned from Iraq where I was passed this video of a soldier disposing of IED’s.
https://youtu.be/Lhe_v0levUA
That reminds me of one of my fireworks parties back in the 80's when we were allowed to set off mortars. https://youtu.be/Lhe_v0levUA
I enhanced them with stage pyros.
The neighbours weren't amused.
TooMany2cvs said:
BruceV8 said:
Less good is that every few years or so one of these functions while being handled and everyone is horribly killed to death.
"functions"...That's euphemism of the day, that is.
I was at Carver Barracks with 33/101 Engineer Regiments (EOD) for 7 years, and we occasionally got "walk-ins". The barracks had previously been RAF Debden, a USAAF fighter base for most of the war. So our "walk-ins" tended to be very boring stuff like live .50" rounds. Sometimes a few bits would come out of the ground on the airfield itself too. Usually empty cases or fired rounds up near where they'd had a ground firing range for adjusting the machine guns in the fighters...
...sadly, despite a '1944' head-stamped round being a "cool" souvenir of the wartime history of the base, any such 'finds' resulted in a call to the local Ammunition Technical Officer and removal for destruction. Most of the stuff brought to us was by the families of newly deceased locals who'd "had them since the war". Usually on a mantelpiece or lying around in a shed.
Not so long ago, on a mountain bike ride on a local MOD training area, a friend found a Barmine. He knew it was a Barmine because it said as much on it. The fuse was also set to "armed". He took some convincing that it wasn't dangerous though, despite it saying "Drill Mine, Anti-tank..." and it being made of a fetching shade of blue plastic. It had probably "fallen off the back of a lorry" (literally!) so I propped it against a tree so it could be found and recovered. There's also a Mk 7 anti tank mine on a local heath, still mostly buried with only the fuse-well cap visible. But that, again, is a 'drill' mine because it has a concrete body, not a steel body.
Working at an EOD unit, and an RE one at that, I was lucky enough to have business with the (mostly civilian manned) Explosive Ordnance Clearance Group. There's a lady who works (worked?) there who's job is running the archive, and converting all the hand marked maps of bomb sites in London and the south east into digital form. It was fascinating watching her work, with all these old maps spread out on a table, covered in pencil marks and notes. Over the years stuff had been re-marked onto modern maps, but when digitising the data it all had to be checked and re-checked against original source material.
This if from the National Archives public internet material... http://bombsight.org/#10/51.5040/0.0597 ...zoom in and explore to see where bombs fell during the Blitz. On the original material the notes record type/size of bomb, and any information regarding the type of aeroplane that dropped it. From that, along with the location of craters, it's possible to predict the location of the ones that didn't explode with reasonable accuracy, as each plane would carry a certain number, loaded in a certain way, and they'd fall in a certain pattern.
I've been out 5 years now so don't have any access to this material, but similar maps existed of British defences, especially mined beaches, but as ever the information on these 70-odd year old maps was only as good as the people doing the recording.
And OP? I wouldn't consider yourself to be daft. One of our troop after the 1991 Gulf War decided he was taking a grenade back as a souvenir. He unscrewed the fuse, buried only the fuse in the sand, and pulled the pin, hoping to explode the fuse and to be able to screw the fly-off lever back into the body to gain a Free From Explosives chit to get it home. Several problems arose. Firstly, the fuse is only the fuse. The body is still filled with explosive. More pressing a problem, though, was that we now had a grenade fuse stuck in the sand with no pin in it!!! The silly arse had buried the handle too, so it hadn't "flown off" and activated the fuse and detonator/primer. If it had have gone off with him dicking about with it, it may well have taken his hand off or taken his sight away. Oh, and the NCO who was determined to take an Iraqi pistol home, but couldn't get it unloaded/stripped down as it was clogged with sand. As he battered and bashed away at it in the back of the APC, a shot rang out. There had been a round in the chamber and it had fired inside the vehicle, resulting in a ricochet and some holes in the thermal insulation pads around the engine bay. Fortunately for him it had been pointing inside an empty vehicle, because the crew were all milling around outside. Two examples of cosmic levels of idiocy from soldiers who'd only just been to war and were allegedly "at the top of their game"...
yellowjack said:
TooMany2cvs said:
BruceV8 said:
Less good is that every few years or so one of these functions while being handled and everyone is horribly killed to death.
"functions"...That's euphemism of the day, that is.
t RLC driver who was farting about with a grenade detonator. Went off while he was d1cking about with it in his cab & turned the windows of the bedford a bit pink. Forever known as 'fingers' having lost 2 & a half of them. M0ng.CharlesdeGaulle said:
Sa Calobra said:
Why the hell would you dick around dissembling ordnance?
If you've ever meet (some) soldiers you'd know the answer to that question. Just because, is the answer. Ginetta G15 Girl said:
IroningMan said:
In the case of grenades you'd do it in order to have a safety pin to put through the zipper of your combat jacket 'because nails'.
Somewhat illegal now and totally in breach of the post Range Declaration.As a kid we used to dig around in Elie (Fife) Here. The point used to be an old range, at the butt end ( towards the sea) we would dig for bullets - I have (or rather had, damn it) lots of different varieties mostly 303 jacketed though. We could also find lots of spent casings in areas where people would have been firing from. I guess the "I have no live rounds...." didn't apply back then.
As an aside, I learned to drive at 15, on the sand tracks round the point.
As an aside, I learned to drive at 15, on the sand tracks round the point.
My Grandpa told me a story about how the lower ranks would pull the pin on a grenade, start counting and throw it just before it got to 5 seconds.
Guess how they found out the time between pulling the pin and it detonating had been shortened to 3 seconds.
Guess how they found out the time between pulling the pin and it detonating had been shortened to 3 seconds.
- this was during WW2 and he may have made it up for all I know.
Sa Calobra said:
Why the hell would you dick around dissembling ordnance?
Grenades, in general, are designed to be disassembled. To a point.The grenade body is in one crate (well, many grenade bodies together). And the fuse/detonator assemblies are shifted in another crate. I can't remember now, but I'm pretty sure they are in different "Compatibility Groups" for Dangerous Goods transport regulations. The separation makes it safer to transport and store them as it mitigates against many of the risks a complete grenade presents. It's pretty much the same with anything from mortars to 1000lb bombs - fuses/detonators/primers are stored separately and fitted at the last moment as part of battle preparation.
If you don't use the grenades you prepared, they can be repeatedly assembled/disassembled and the components stored in their original shipping crates. In fact, practice grenades use pretty standard fuse/detonator assemblies for a bang without the high explosive/shrapnel effects. They are hollow, with a hole in the bottom for the expanding gases to escape freely...
It's forbidden, technically, but many soldiers straighten out the ends of the split pin, to make it 'easier' to pull the pin. "Dicking around" with ordnance is very much frowned upon, and straightening out the pins is dangerous if the fuse assembly needs to go "back in it's box".
Soldiers also like to have a few safety pins. Many reasons. Mainly "because nails" (and someone they look up to has one in their zipper) like has been said before. But sometimes a safety pin (or a variety of them) can be useful in disarming tripwire activated flares or mines (both 'ours' and 'theirs').
In the story I told a few posts up, the young lad in question was naive (to the point of stupidity). We'd been stripping out ammunition and assorted other guff from Iraqi tanks after the Gulf War ended. Various types of tank shells, heavy machine guns and ammo, small arms and ammo, and satchels of grenades in most of the turrets. All had to be unloaded and taken for destruction so that the tanks could be 'corralled' and stored long term out of Saddam Hussein's clutches.
There was all sorts of talk of taking 'souvenirs' home. We've all seen 'war trophies' on the Antiques Roadshow. It's nothing new for a soldier to want to keep a memento of his time at war. In fact there was a thriving mini-industry in making large brass shells "Free From Explosives" and turning them into other stuff. Ashtrays, desk tidies, etc, if you could find a friendly REME armourer and lathe. People were getting AK47/74s deactivated, and certificated. Pistols too. But it was getting silly, with idiots (7 Armd Bde, we're looking at you here...
) shipping back vast quantities of ex-Iraqi weapons, some properly declared, some functioning and smuggled. So when it was time for us (4 Armd Bde) to ship out, there was a blanket ban on taking anything like that out of theatre. Exceptions were made for deactivated weapons for the wall of Regimental Headquarters, or the officers' and sergeants' messes, and for large pieces as 'gate guards'. Searches were made of kit by RAF police before we got on 'planes home, and at Emden, in Germany, vehicles were subject to random searches on being unloaded at the docks.So back to the naive young lad trying to "FFE" his grenade. It was an enemy grenade, and he was sufficiently thick/naive to believe that by destroying the primer/detonator he could then reassemble the fly-off lever, reinsert the pin, take it back with him and pop it on a shelf at home. Things didn't go to plan, and he got what our troop Staff Sergeant used to refer to as "a damned good scudding". Then we had to drive an armoured vehicle over the assembly to make it go 'pop!' safely, and everyone else was sternly warned "not to dick about with ordnance" from then on. I've got some more photos somewhere (on print paper though) of the process of unloading the enemy vehicles at collection points. My printer/scanner is dead at the moment though, so these (that were already scanned) will have to do for now...
ZSU 23/4 Anti Aircraft system. An absolute nightmare to unload/clear. The towed AA gun behind our AVRE in the background may even be the actual gun now at the Royal Armouries collection at Fort Nelson. Link to Flickr account (not my photo)... https://www.flickr.com/photos/megashorts/410090218...
Looking for the "light at the end of the tunnel". Checking to see that there are no 'nasty surprises' or hidden booby-traps in the barrel/breach of the main armament of a captured T-55.
Bottom left - grenade fuse assemblies. Bottom centre - various grenade bodies. White 'bag charges', empty shells. Centre - tins/cases/crates of various ammuintion for small arms and heavy machine guns. Top - mainly 12.7mm heavy machine guns. Some electrically triggered (hull and coaxially mounted with the main armament) and some thumb-triggered (mounted on top of turrets). The shell at top right is a SABOT, where when fired, the 'sleeve' on the pointy end is discarded, and a metal 'dart' far smaller in diameter than the gun barrel flies to penetrate the armour of it's target.
More pictures available online, search Google for "enemy equipment collection point... https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=isch&q=ENE...
I doubt it will ever be the same as the WW1 stuff still being found 100 years on, because of the smaller scale of the war and because not many people are farming the Iraqi desert, but there's an awful lot of ordnance and equipment buried or simply abandoned out there that will probably never be worth recovering, so it'll sit there rotting slowly away for decades to come.
yellowjack said:
TooMany2cvs said:
BruceV8 said:
Less good is that every few years or so one of these functions while being handled and everyone is horribly killed to death.
"functions"...That's euphemism of the day, that is.
I was at Carver Barracks with 33/101 Engineer Regiments (EOD) for 7 years, and we occasionally got "walk-ins". The barracks had previously been RAF Debden, a USAAF fighter base for most of the war. So our "walk-ins" tended to be very boring stuff like live .50" rounds. Sometimes a few bits would come out of the ground on the airfield itself too. Usually empty cases or fired rounds up near where they'd had a ground firing range for adjusting the machine guns in the fighters...
The above photos remind me of a story my grandfather told me a few years ago (one of many from a very enjoyable afternoon spent with a few glasses of malt).
He was groundcrew during the war, based in Kent at various airfields working long hours on Spitfires. At some point, the squadron was issued an upgrade where two of the 303browings in each wing were replaced with a single 20mm cannon. The planes were set up on the ground based firing range to zero in the guns to a set range (by this point in the war about 100-150 yds). One of the cannons experienced a stoppage..... a senior officer (not specified who) climbed up in front of the cannon loudly exclaiming it was jammed and wouldn't fire, giving it a firm wobble/shake/bash. Whereupon it did then function as intended. He spared me the gorey details, but I imagine there probably wasn't much left!
It must have been quite shocking for him to see, he would have been all of 21 - 22 at the time.......... mind you, he saw all sorts of horrors, most of which he barely if ever spoke about. He is pretty well adjusted considering all that went on, though alas age is starting to take his memories now.
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