Ah the dangers of unexpended ordnance

georgew

First Sergeant
Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Location
southern california
From the New York Times, May 1, 1864

"W.J. Savery, his sister-in-law and colored boy were blown to pieces on a small island near his estate, in the parish of Iberville, by a rebel torpedo, left on the island since last August, and out of which he was taking powder..."

Do it yourself EOD - never a smart move.
 
Now for the rest of the story...
"Mr. Savery was calmly puffing away on his pipe as he strived to recover the powder from the rebel torpedo. Witnesses, who reused to be identified, state that embers from Mr. Savery's pipe fell into the torpedo, causing the explosion."
 
My favorite unexploded ordnance story ( don't know if it's really true - if it is, it certainly fits with the above ):
Somewhere on/near a beach kids find some "cannonballs" and decide they'd be perfect to ring the FIRE PIT they'd dug. ( You can guess "the rest of the story"! )
 
I was always amazed at the Vietnamese who would take unexploded B-52 bombs and remove the explosives for use as mines. Some were working with nothing more than hammers and chisels to open up the bombs.

But it really hit home when I read about the submarine torpedos in WWII. U. S. sub captains insisted that dead-on shots would not explode, although a few glancing shots would, unexplainably, explode. Tired of hearing the Bur. of Ordinance dismiss their complaints as "captains trying to justify their bad aim by blaming the torpedo", a test was set up. The found a location in Hawaii with a big cliff, suspended a cargo net from the cliff down to the bottom so as to catch the torpedo, and started firing test shots at the cliff. Those making dead-on shots would not explode, but glancing shots did. When they raised the net, teams would recover the unexploded torpedos and disassemble them to find the root cause of the failures. They found that the firing pin was faulty - when it hit the target it would bend, rather than detonate the primer. But what amazed me was to realize that these demolition teams were attempting to disasemble torpedoes which, as far as they knew, could go off at any moment.

After WWII, German troops were required to stay in France for a number of years, performing "restitution labor" by clearing mines from roads, fields, and forests. It was a dangerous job, and quite a few of them never made it home.
 
My uncle went into the Royal Corps of transport in 1939 and spent the war years driving all sorts of vehicles all over Britain.
He didn't go abroad until 1946. then sent the next two years driving recovery vehicles allover the desert recovering damaged tanks etc. He often said that they never knew whether they were in somebodies minefield until one went off. The Germans kept meticulous records, but no one else did, plus the desert moves so even the best maps might be wrong by a long way by the time the recovery teams went.
 
When I was 8 my friends and I found an un-exploded incendiary bomb from WWII and spent the best part of a day dropping bricks on it from an overpass trying to set it off. Took it back to my friends house and his Dad called the bomb disposal because he had an exact copy of one as an ornament on his fireplace (deactivated) they took it down to the mud flats near our home and blew it up. Guess you could say we were lucky
 
I remember once finding some blasting caps as a kid near a construction site. In those days, the Public Service ads on TV made us aware of such things, and a few of us had the good sense not to mess with them.
Of course, there were always those brave (stupid) souls that would get them and take a hammer to them :help:, just to see what would happen.
This little ditty leads to the following: Q: "What are the last words usually uttered by a moron?"
A: "Hey! Ya'll watch this!"
 
Now for the rest of the story...
"Mr. Savery was calmly puffing away on his pipe as he strived to recover the powder from the rebel torpedo. Witnesses, who reused to be identified, state that embers from Mr. Savery's pipe fell into the torpedo, causing the explosion."


Could you please tell me what your source is for "the rest of the story",
"Mr. Savery was calmly puffing away on his pipe, etc., "
 
Of course, there were always those brave (stupid) souls that would get them and take a hammer to them :help:, just to see what would happen.
This little ditty leads to the following: Q: "What are the last words usually uttered by a moron?"
A: "Hey! Ya'll watch this!"

Or the corollary: "Hey, hold my beer a minute and watch this!"

Never underestimate human stupidity, nothing is foolproof because there will always be a bigger fool to take on the dare...
 
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Yes, looking through 21st century eyes you can say these folks were stupid and fools. But if you put on your 19th century glasses you would see that what they were doing was a very common practice as gunpowder was a very valuable commodity. Salvaged gunpowder could be used in rural households for hunting purposes. Gunpowder was literally putting the food on the table for Americans not living in cities.
 
After WWII, German troops were required to stay in France for a number of years, performing "restitution labor" by clearing mines from roads, fields, and forests. It was a dangerous job, and quite a few of them never made it home.

According to 'Aftermath: The Remnants of War' by Donovan Webster , there are still areas of France that are off limits due to World War One UXOs (and a lot of other places on the planet). A very good book that can be had cheap for those interested.

'In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards; in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones; in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950's, the results of which are only now becoming apparent; in Vietnam, where a nation's effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation; in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life.'

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
It happens after every war, and sometimes it happens with lasting results. I won't comment on our more modern wars, but there is still unexploded ordnance plowed up in France and Belgium every plowing season...and it dates back 100 or more years to WWI.
 
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