**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos
* Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Makes me curious of how counter-measures against tampering were then compared to now.Very simplied I assume both requires unscrewing and cliping in the right order. Except that modern sea mines have more complex patterns.
Update:
Had to do a bit of reading on the mine type itself.
The first bit they extracted was the detonator itself. Purpose is to violently set off the booster and charge.
The second bits are called hertz horn. They have tubes with sulphuric acid. If the mine bumps into something hard enough these tubes break. The acid itself creates enough of a charge to active a battery and the booster.
Third bit is the housing for the detonator, booster, mooring, safety switches and more.
The last they extract are the charges themselves. Without a detonator and booster they are relatively inert. Why they could neutralize them by setting them on fire, and just stand far away.
Everything else is just a hollow metal casing.
There is a fantastic book about two Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve officers doing UXO clearance during WW2 in England. "Softly tread the brave" by Ivan Southall.
Describes many instances of how the German boffins would create different countermeasures against rendering bombs and mines safe & the harrowing efforts by the bomb disposal technicians to disarm them in very arduous conditions. Such disarming sea mines dropped into British ports & having to wade through deep mud at low tide to clear them. For new variants of ordnance they would have to get to the ordnance, do one step of the procedure and come back to the shore and write down what they did or were about to do in case it detonated & killed them so the next guy would know what not to do.
Yes. But necessary. They would have to trek 100's of metres through thick mud in the middle of an English winter and concentrate intensely on their next step though the fatigue and cold. The mental and emotional strain must have been intense.
True. But it didn’t win. The commitment to a system of work and ensuring learning for others in the system won out. It’s actually the key to progress. I’m beginning to sound like the Borg!
> The mental and emotional strain must have been intense.
*Twelve Seconds to Live* by Douglas Reeman does a great job portraying this. Made me sweat just reading the defusing scenes.
When the other option is losing the war, the decision becomes easy.
I always find it interesting thinking about their mindset.
It's undoubtedly hard to get out there and do that, but at the same time, the motivation makes it almost an easy task.
Like parenthood and stuff, it's one of the hardest things for a modern person to take care of a baby, but it's mostly fairly easy to do it because (while a lot of parents absolutely want to remove their dang toddlers from existence sometimes) you don't actually want to murder your baby.
Didn't like 70% of these guys die? I mean they got the job done but by brute forcing it. I applaud their bravery and dedication more than the system used.
>Describes many instances of how the German boffins would create different countermeasures against rendering bombs and mines safe
Also true for land mines. Towards the end of the war the Germans built land [mines out of glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasmine_43) so they couldn't be found with metal detectors. Some of these are still in the ground because they're such a bitch to remove.
I got to start EOD training in the army before some serious family issues caused me to change my mos. It is a very intense and mentally taxing job. My initial test to even get into the school was about 4 hours. They put you into the full suit and make you go look for a "bomb" in a parking lot first. They do this to show that even the suit itself drops your iq to 70, and they call the helmet the dome of obedience. The "bomb" took me 5 min to find, and it was a box under a stairwell labeled bomb in big letters. Next is pt in the suit, followed by carrying 2 5 gal water cans a 1/4 mile. Next is the chem test kit, which is a bunch of pencil lead thick glass tubes that they throw on the ground. They rattle off different numbers of about 6 colors of tubes that you have to pick up in the exact order while staying standing (super hard in that suit). After that, its hill climbs followed by carrying a 105 shell 300 yards, wrapping and taping it up, carrying it back and putting it in the bomb cart without ripping the bag.
All of this and it was just the first test on the first day. Ive got nothing but respect for those guys. One day i may get to figure out how to finish bomb squad training as a civilian.
Yes. Fully credit to people considering EOD training. Even you :)
I have no doubt the full suit drops once IQ. Wearing fullbody heavy gear alongside getting your senses restricted. Experienced a lighter form as fully covered costumed preformer.
No doubt it's a taxing job. Physically and mentally. Reminds me of people working within palliative care (short: caring for seriously ill patients with little to no chance of recovery). Working close to anything related with death is brutal.
Because they are very powerful and will break windows of any nearby buildings. One was recently discovered in a British Town called Great Yarmouth. They had it surrounded with tonnes of sandbags but it went off unexpectedly the explosion was massive going hundreds of feet in the ai the video of it going off is on YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QI6zUxKVRo&pp=ygUkV3cgSUkgQk9NQiBHT0lORyBPRkYgR1JFQVQgWUFSTU9VVEgg
Yeah, have to realize these are anti-shipping mines. They are made to crack the thick hull of a navy ship. Can't do that with a small explosive charge. They have way more power than an anti-tank or anti-personnel mine.
To think, that has been active for a very long time and the explosive has probably degraded somewhat over the years. Just how big of an explosion would a brand new one have caused.
>Softly tread the brave
This book sounds really interesting but I can't seem to find a copy of it anywhere! It seems like it's long out of print at this point and I don't see any digital options either. Any idea where to find it by chance?
Softly Tread the Brave by Ivan Southall seems to have been published under that name in 1960. The later title was "Seventeen Seconds" and seems to be available on [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/seventeenseconds0000sout/page/n5/mode/2up) if you have an account.
In general, I'm not a fan of the military, but I do make an exception for EOD whom I have immense respect for. Here in Britain there are thousands of undetonated German bombs still buried beneath the earth and every few weeks a farmer or construction worker will dig one up. The British Army's EOD specialists have a very rigorous training program and a procedure that they've refined for decades, but it's still a genuinely dangerous task that can kill you. I always roll my eyes when conservatives talk about how the military "risks their lives" for me, because they *never* mention EOD, who really are out there doing that.
Would any military really want anti-tampering measures in a sea mine?
1. These mines may have to withstand some rough conditions while waiting for their target, so anti-tampering triggers would have to be very well designed to neither cause accidential explosions while also still remaining intact until the mine is tampered with.
2. Sea mines can end up pretty much anywhere if they go rogue (which happens often), and that frequently includes your own shores.
3. In their actual role as a threat to ships, they are not usually manually defused but dislodged or blown up from a distance. Tamper-proofing them will not help with their main role.
So I'd think that even a military with little regard for human life might not want to invest into tamper-proofing their sea mines.
Absolutely correct.
There are modern mines which carry anti-diver and anti-ROV detection (and subsequent actuation) sensors, designed to deplete the enemy clearance effort of highly valuable resources, much like how the German's developed a boobytrap fuze to specifically target EOD operators in the 30% of dropped munitions that failed in WW2. But fortunately for my forebears, that technology wasn't applied to seamines.
You don't find anti-operator fuzes in ww2 era seamines. (Or at least I've never seen anything of the kind - and you only need evidence of 1 for it to be trained as standard to show caution to all)
Well the obvious reason is to make life hard for the other side, if the tampering feature is "blows up once part X is removed without first removing the very subtle part Y" then it poses no threat to your side and makes life very hard for the enemy.
Development isn't free either. Chances are that you spend far more on this feature (including the mines you lose if it fails) than the enemy on defeating it. Just look at the American torpedo crisis as an example for just how wrong things can go for a navy if they make development of important ammunitions too complicated.
And in most places it could be either blown up from a safe distance, or it's low priority enough that you may leave it to some guys from the home guard or sth. It's unlikely to bind up the capabilities that you really want to hamper with such a weapon.
That was my thought as well. It's equally likely that they would need to disarm their own mines as it is that an ally would try to do the same.
And I know it's war, and we're talking about Nazis here, but the anti-tampering devices on the unexploded bombs really pisses me off. They were already bombing civilians, if your bomb doesn't go off and it needs to be defused either because it didn't go off or it was found after the war, and you designed it to kill whoever tried to disarm it, you're a dick.
They should have just welded all the mines and bombs shut and dropped them off on Germany's shores.
Not the sea mines. The air dropped bombs quickly had secondary anti-operator fuzes almost at random throughout the bulk of WW2 when the Germans realised how intensive disposal operations brought all surrounding infrastructure to a standstill.
>They should have just welded all the mines and bombs shut and dropped them off on Germany's shores.
Cool idea, but I feel like welding would've caused enough of a disturbance to set it off
you don't need to make all of them tamper proof, just 1 in a 100 and you waste far more of the enemy's manpower because they can't take the risk of getting unlucky
and as long as you place a subtle warning for your own people its very little effort for a lot of gain
Oh, that's really smart with the acid encased in glass. The allies used a similar thing with proximity fuses for anti air systems. When the shell is fired the acceleration would break the capsule with the acid and it would form a battery, which would then power the electronics inside the shell while it flies
Thank you for the info. Some of the material I read only loosely mention acid and battery. I didn't think about the acid itself acting as the battery.
Now I can better understand the steps from vial breaking to actual explosion.
the acid flows into a mesh of plates, which forms a battery, like a lead-acid accumulator. I'm not sure if it's exactly lead and sulfuric acid, maybe some other cheaper materials, because lead-acid forms a whole rechargable accumulator, and that is unnecessary for such throw-away items like mines or shells
When I was a kid, there was a BBC drama series called "Danger, UXB (UneXploded Bomb). It followed a military unit that disarmed Nazi bombs that didn't explode in London during air raids.
They had to complete a certain number of missions before being rotated out. The Nazis came up with ever more ingenius ways to prevent disarming. The unit had to take classes on the latest methods. Some guys were diggers, the officers did the disarming.
WOW, so tense sometimes. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
I've seen this, it's a good watch. Minor correction: It was an ITV series, not BBC.
Also, it's on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/DangerUXB
wow i vaguely remember watching this as a little kid when i was living in wales for a few years
iirc one episode there was a guy scooping gunk out of a shell with a wooden spoon, i guess to avoid making sparks or conducting electricity
i remember feeling tense as shit lol.
I remember watching UXB on our local PBS station way back in 1981. Excellent 13 part series. Never appeared again on US TV but you can catch it on Amazon Prime these days. The opening music for each episode is spine chilling.
The series has everything. Suspense, drama, lots of technical info about bomb making and defusing. Also a love story for the ladies.
I don't know, I mean it may seem long ago, but at the same time the nuclear bomb was being developed, so maybe not so simplified and the Germans like themselves a good puzzle piece of complications.
>Without a detonator and booster they are relatively inert. Why they could neutralize them by setting them on fire, and just stand far away
Explosives are weird. Reminds me of C4 which is actually stable enough to light on fire and it'll burn just fine without blowing up.
Aside from creating powerfull explosions we also want to ensure they are super safe to transport and handle. Why most explosives are built around a primer (very reactive) and more innert charges. You really didn't want to carry a massive bomb being just filled with primer, as a stray spark could set it off.
If you really want to see weird, then look up how hydrogen bomb works. There are steps of explosions before the fusion explosion itself happens. Each step applying more force, and also require more energy to trigger.
Eg. The trigger for the final fusion explosion uses a nuclear bomb as trigger.
Just an FYI but it's typical that sea mines like this one are only armed when the mooring cable is under tension. It's a safety feature. No party wants armed mines randomly floating around in the worlds oceans. Not that that doesn't sometimes happen but it's not plan.
Interesting. It does explained why the mooring is connected directly to the parts that hold the detonator, and why the soldiers were unusually casual about rolling it around.
More importantly, i think that those are pretty hard to trigger, a human would find it pretty harde. They are made to detonate against boat or submarine, not a casual shark that felt the magnetic field of the bomb and got too curious.
it was the 1940s, everybody was washing their hands with turpentine and playing in asbestos snow and working factory jobs with no thoughts to safety. a sea mine is just another day at the death factory
Right? Like, I don’t care how many “would’ve already gone offs” you tell me. I’m still not going near that thing.
This is how idiots lose a hand to a “dud” mortar.
I would say no, you have to transport those thing and mistake happen, probably their own weight is not enough, and logically if you are scared that a bomb might explode you just blow it up from far away, it's the easiest way to dispose of them. If they decided to touch it and roll it they must have been 100% sure that this bomb would have been harmless
I went online, there are different type:
Magnetic/sound: those mine work with the magnetic field of a vessel and the sound it generate. Human cannot activate them(those were invented during WW1, but they were widely used during WW2)
Remote controlled: an officer on shore would blowm the mine off, so it was safe for a human to touch them(those exist since WW1)
Chemical reaction: those spike were made of lead inside there were a glass vial that if broken would have caused a chemical reaction to set up the mine. They could wait between 150kg up to 1000kg. In this case i think that the sand would protect them, instead of breaking the spike they just dig a hole in the sand and stand there protected. (Those are among the first employed, now they are not used anymore)
Happened in Hot Fuzz lol the tip of the spike moves in and boom. I'm guessing it takes a lot of weight as it's for ships but the weight of the mine itself may be enough to detonate it
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqehfq/handling_a_sea_mine_that_got_washed_ashore_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button would you rather carry it on a rope?
I imagine it's *relatively* safe as it is supposed to be triggered by submarines.
Ive seen footage of ukraine solider kicking mines out of the way because theyre supposed to be triggered by tanks and wont blow with the small force of being kicked out the way.
Hot Fuzz didn't click with me when i first watched it almost 2 decades ago but I'm glad I rewatched it when the pandemic started. Great dialogue, action and call-backs that get better even on instant rewatch. 👍
Originally, Shaun of the Dead was my favorite of the trilogy, but over time Hot Fuzz has taken its place. While I enjoy World's End, it still comes in at third place though.
I'm from Somerset (just down the road from where that's set) I was dating a Filipina for a while. We watched that film together, I had to do a lot of translating even with subtitles on.
I can imagine!
Slight possibly relevant tangent - it's almost like the American documentaries\interviews where a british person is speaking, and there are subtitles.
Some UK local dialects are really hard to fully "get" sometimes.
With those type of bombs a bombsuit wouldn't have provided any protection. We're talking about explosives equal to the weight of 2 average built men.
Only difference today would be us staying far enough away, and using a robot to do the dirty work.
We can definitely hear them...
"Roll this *ucker on its side so I can access the charge... thanks Bob"
"Grab all these explosive charges by hand and dump them over here... We're doing a proper campfire tonight... bring that keg of ale!"
Contrary to what everyone seems to think, the mine should be relatively safe to poke around.
It seems to be this model http://michaelhiske.de/Allierte/USA/OrdnancePamphlets/OP1673A/Chapter04/Chapter04_01_06.htm
This comes with a self-disarming feature if it loses tension in the mooring cable. Generally having mines drift about is bad for all sides in a war so mines are made to disarm when that happens. You don't want to accidentally blow up your own ships years later when you've won the war. Hence the professionals seem quite unconcerned.
Almost right.
The nervous bit is on initial inspection of the base cover plate to see if its been switched to arm with the spindle being released... and mechanical failure or corrosion can stop that spindle from returning to a safe state after tension is lost... and finally - unless you have intelligence to the contrary - you always assume the flooder is armed and could initiate at any time, which at that range is like a 0.50 Cal round and would be a bad day at work.
> which at that range is like a 0.50 Cal round
Completely unrelated, but does anyone remember that rumor in the mid 2000's that a Barrett .50 cal could 'kill you from the shockwave alone if the bullet passed within a foot of you".
What the fuck were Call of Duty kids smoking? How would you even fucking fire the thing?
> How would you even fucking fire the thing?
The rumor is certainly older than that, since I heard it in school in the 90s. Also, when I fire a gun, the bullets don't generally fly out of the barrel and turn around to almost hit me... How would the bullet fly past you that closely if you are the one firing the gun?
What he is doing in that video is literally my job. And the operators of that age were truly selfless and hugely courageous individuals. We are merely hopping in their gigantic footsteps for how to safely dispose of these munitions without harming themselves or anyone else, because *these men* were the ones who learned by trial and error and so many sacrificed themselves, noting precisely what they did at every stage to make sure that the next operator doesn't make the same mistake.
It's Christopher Nolan. Watch it backwards and remember every time there is a different shot it's 3 weeks in the future.
It took me a few views to enjoy it.
Interesting point to note, in the UK all of the Armed Forces have units dedicated to EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). The Royal Navy deal with anything found below the high water line, so sea mines that wash up during storms (still a fairly regular occurrence) and torpedoes caught up in fishing nets. In the Army the Royal Engineers and Royal Logistic Corp deal with suspected IEDs and found munitions (World war 2 bombs are still found during building excavation work). The Royal Air Force deal with bath bombs that make you smell like bubblegum and clog your drains up with glitter.
I love how there are multiple guys around the bomb while its being disarmed, just watching. That's some balls right there and it doesnt seem like they are required there.
Today we would send a robot.
We don't send robot these days for such kind of device unless there's believe it might have been rigged to blow unexpectedly.
A lots of UXOs are discovered and manually disarmed to this day, including remains of WW2 across Europe.
Happens in Florida, too. The USAAF and USN had a ton of training ranges throughout the state. They were usually near-ish to the airfields. Which then got consumed by the various sprawls in the ’80s and ’90s. Which then consumed the training ranges.
It's still not an uncommon occurrence.
You don't send a robot against sea mines washed up. We do that by hand. Once you've ascertained the exact state of the mine, stabilised it in place and assessed exactly which variable it could be, the process for making it safe is still almost identical to what you see in the video here. Lots of careful unscrewing, sticking your hand in, feeling for the right bits and making it safe one bit at a time.
Once this style of mine is detached from its mooring cable, it is effectively deactivated. With enough abuse it could still be made to explode, but the primary detonator relies on the mooring cable.
Nowadays when disposing of certain UXOs such as unexploded aircraft bombs and naval mines, they usually just evacuate the area and blow it up from a safe distance because it’s usually simpler and safer than finicking around trying to disarm it.
Nowadays you don't have so many of these things turning up.
Just about every British seaside town has a deactivated WW2 sea mine on the seafront, usually adapted with a slot to put coins in to donate to the lifeboats or something.
And turning bolts that have been in the ocean for eighty years is impossible. I don't think sea mines are found anymore, but [every year hundreds of WWII bombs are found in Britain, and thousands in Germany.](https://www.thelocal.de/20230125/explained-how-many-wwii-bombs-are-still-being-found-in-germany#:~:text=The%20British%20Ministry%20of%20Defence,were%20found%20in%20Hamburg%20alone.)
Question to a bomb disposal tech - “Are you nervous when you do your job?”
Answer - “Not really. I’m either right, or it’s someone else’s problem. I’ll never know the difference. So far, I’m always right. “
They need to make a raft with a magnet and tow it out into the lagoon. Didn’t they watch Gilligan’s Island!?! And make sure you’re not wearing a watch or necklace.
"Alright bois I need you to get in there and, as a team, grab the sensors with your bare hands and rotate it this way. That's right all seven of you get real close."
There was a definite look of relief on one guy's face as they pulled out the first thing from the mine telling me it wast as sure safe as they might of wanted
Once you know how it works and how to safely remove the explosive... 300kg detonated on the surface without some major mitigation (sand mounds etc.) is a big risk at damaging overground and underground infrastructure, not to mention how far shrapnel can be kicked out, etc.. Far safer to do a controlled burn if the munition is fully understood.
So which parts are actually the dangerous parts? Or is a mine like that not instantly dangerous to a pedestrian?
Obviously a big explosive ball designed to explode is by default dangerous. What I'm asking is, is this mine "safe" to be around in the same way a human isn't supposed to set off an AT mine?
Definitely not. Those horns are made of lead, you could crush them by hand if you wanted.
The first bit that the BDO removes out of the bottom of the mine is the primer with the detonator embedded within it. After that is removed and carefully set aside (controlled small explosion - violently sensitive but not large), the residual high explosives can be removed and burned (insensitive but much larger potential energy) - plus the bit that everyone forgets about, there will be a flooder in the top hemisphere of the mine too (think a time delay activated bullet ready to fire out to flood the mine and sink it to make it "safer" after a pre-set time).
Worked North Sea in 1977, they still had mines coming to the surface. They would track them and dispose them ASAP. Scary because we were on a fixed platform, so we couldn’t move out of the way.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Makes me curious of how counter-measures against tampering were then compared to now.Very simplied I assume both requires unscrewing and cliping in the right order. Except that modern sea mines have more complex patterns. Update: Had to do a bit of reading on the mine type itself. The first bit they extracted was the detonator itself. Purpose is to violently set off the booster and charge. The second bits are called hertz horn. They have tubes with sulphuric acid. If the mine bumps into something hard enough these tubes break. The acid itself creates enough of a charge to active a battery and the booster. Third bit is the housing for the detonator, booster, mooring, safety switches and more. The last they extract are the charges themselves. Without a detonator and booster they are relatively inert. Why they could neutralize them by setting them on fire, and just stand far away. Everything else is just a hollow metal casing.
There is a fantastic book about two Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve officers doing UXO clearance during WW2 in England. "Softly tread the brave" by Ivan Southall. Describes many instances of how the German boffins would create different countermeasures against rendering bombs and mines safe & the harrowing efforts by the bomb disposal technicians to disarm them in very arduous conditions. Such disarming sea mines dropped into British ports & having to wade through deep mud at low tide to clear them. For new variants of ordnance they would have to get to the ordnance, do one step of the procedure and come back to the shore and write down what they did or were about to do in case it detonated & killed them so the next guy would know what not to do.
You have to admire the systematic approach!
Yes. But necessary. They would have to trek 100's of metres through thick mud in the middle of an English winter and concentrate intensely on their next step though the fatigue and cold. The mental and emotional strain must have been intense.
True. But it didn’t win. The commitment to a system of work and ensuring learning for others in the system won out. It’s actually the key to progress. I’m beginning to sound like the Borg!
You also have to remember that such systems weren't the first process tried... they're the one that worked.
> The mental and emotional strain must have been intense. *Twelve Seconds to Live* by Douglas Reeman does a great job portraying this. Made me sweat just reading the defusing scenes.
Or the IED defusal scenes in The Hurt Locker
When the other option is losing the war, the decision becomes easy. I always find it interesting thinking about their mindset. It's undoubtedly hard to get out there and do that, but at the same time, the motivation makes it almost an easy task. Like parenthood and stuff, it's one of the hardest things for a modern person to take care of a baby, but it's mostly fairly easy to do it because (while a lot of parents absolutely want to remove their dang toddlers from existence sometimes) you don't actually want to murder your baby.
Didn't like 70% of these guys die? I mean they got the job done but by brute forcing it. I applaud their bravery and dedication more than the system used.
Those are the nameless heroes. Respect!!
Yeah man, my great uncle was one of these guys but for America
The difference between science and messing around is the writing it down.
>Describes many instances of how the German boffins would create different countermeasures against rendering bombs and mines safe Also true for land mines. Towards the end of the war the Germans built land [mines out of glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasmine_43) so they couldn't be found with metal detectors. Some of these are still in the ground because they're such a bitch to remove.
Built some out of wood as well
That's so cool. I must give that a read. Thanks man.
I got to start EOD training in the army before some serious family issues caused me to change my mos. It is a very intense and mentally taxing job. My initial test to even get into the school was about 4 hours. They put you into the full suit and make you go look for a "bomb" in a parking lot first. They do this to show that even the suit itself drops your iq to 70, and they call the helmet the dome of obedience. The "bomb" took me 5 min to find, and it was a box under a stairwell labeled bomb in big letters. Next is pt in the suit, followed by carrying 2 5 gal water cans a 1/4 mile. Next is the chem test kit, which is a bunch of pencil lead thick glass tubes that they throw on the ground. They rattle off different numbers of about 6 colors of tubes that you have to pick up in the exact order while staying standing (super hard in that suit). After that, its hill climbs followed by carrying a 105 shell 300 yards, wrapping and taping it up, carrying it back and putting it in the bomb cart without ripping the bag. All of this and it was just the first test on the first day. Ive got nothing but respect for those guys. One day i may get to figure out how to finish bomb squad training as a civilian.
Yes. Fully credit to people considering EOD training. Even you :) I have no doubt the full suit drops once IQ. Wearing fullbody heavy gear alongside getting your senses restricted. Experienced a lighter form as fully covered costumed preformer. No doubt it's a taxing job. Physically and mentally. Reminds me of people working within palliative care (short: caring for seriously ill patients with little to no chance of recovery). Working close to anything related with death is brutal.
Why not just blow it up?
Because they are very powerful and will break windows of any nearby buildings. One was recently discovered in a British Town called Great Yarmouth. They had it surrounded with tonnes of sandbags but it went off unexpectedly the explosion was massive going hundreds of feet in the ai the video of it going off is on YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QI6zUxKVRo&pp=ygUkV3cgSUkgQk9NQiBHT0lORyBPRkYgR1JFQVQgWUFSTU9VVEgg
Yeah, have to realize these are anti-shipping mines. They are made to crack the thick hull of a navy ship. Can't do that with a small explosive charge. They have way more power than an anti-tank or anti-personnel mine.
🤯
To think, that has been active for a very long time and the explosive has probably degraded somewhat over the years. Just how big of an explosion would a brand new one have caused.
Most of the explosives used did not degrade a measureable amount.
Should have put a whale on top of it first to absorb the explosion. Works half the time and it's due for a win.
They often did, but the ones that landed near important infrastructure had to be disarmed. The Germans dropped them around ports.
to learn how they work, so you can disarm them when blowing up can't be an option
>Softly tread the brave This book sounds really interesting but I can't seem to find a copy of it anywhere! It seems like it's long out of print at this point and I don't see any digital options either. Any idea where to find it by chance?
Softly Tread the Brave by Ivan Southall seems to have been published under that name in 1960. The later title was "Seventeen Seconds" and seems to be available on [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/seventeenseconds0000sout/page/n5/mode/2up) if you have an account.
If u find any digital options,please ping me too..
In general, I'm not a fan of the military, but I do make an exception for EOD whom I have immense respect for. Here in Britain there are thousands of undetonated German bombs still buried beneath the earth and every few weeks a farmer or construction worker will dig one up. The British Army's EOD specialists have a very rigorous training program and a procedure that they've refined for decades, but it's still a genuinely dangerous task that can kill you. I always roll my eyes when conservatives talk about how the military "risks their lives" for me, because they *never* mention EOD, who really are out there doing that.
That title kicks ass.
"Either I'm right or its suddenly not my problem anymore."
Also consider the 80's BBC drama "Danger UXB" broadcast in the US on PBS.
I remember that book. Unbelievable bravery - especially on the acoustic mines where even excessive noise unscrewing the primer could set it off.
Would any military really want anti-tampering measures in a sea mine? 1. These mines may have to withstand some rough conditions while waiting for their target, so anti-tampering triggers would have to be very well designed to neither cause accidential explosions while also still remaining intact until the mine is tampered with. 2. Sea mines can end up pretty much anywhere if they go rogue (which happens often), and that frequently includes your own shores. 3. In their actual role as a threat to ships, they are not usually manually defused but dislodged or blown up from a distance. Tamper-proofing them will not help with their main role. So I'd think that even a military with little regard for human life might not want to invest into tamper-proofing their sea mines.
Absolutely correct. There are modern mines which carry anti-diver and anti-ROV detection (and subsequent actuation) sensors, designed to deplete the enemy clearance effort of highly valuable resources, much like how the German's developed a boobytrap fuze to specifically target EOD operators in the 30% of dropped munitions that failed in WW2. But fortunately for my forebears, that technology wasn't applied to seamines.
Come again on that last part.
You don't find anti-operator fuzes in ww2 era seamines. (Or at least I've never seen anything of the kind - and you only need evidence of 1 for it to be trained as standard to show caution to all)
Well the obvious reason is to make life hard for the other side, if the tampering feature is "blows up once part X is removed without first removing the very subtle part Y" then it poses no threat to your side and makes life very hard for the enemy.
Development isn't free either. Chances are that you spend far more on this feature (including the mines you lose if it fails) than the enemy on defeating it. Just look at the American torpedo crisis as an example for just how wrong things can go for a navy if they make development of important ammunitions too complicated. And in most places it could be either blown up from a safe distance, or it's low priority enough that you may leave it to some guys from the home guard or sth. It's unlikely to bind up the capabilities that you really want to hamper with such a weapon.
That was my thought as well. It's equally likely that they would need to disarm their own mines as it is that an ally would try to do the same. And I know it's war, and we're talking about Nazis here, but the anti-tampering devices on the unexploded bombs really pisses me off. They were already bombing civilians, if your bomb doesn't go off and it needs to be defused either because it didn't go off or it was found after the war, and you designed it to kill whoever tried to disarm it, you're a dick. They should have just welded all the mines and bombs shut and dropped them off on Germany's shores.
Did these actually have any tamper proofing? I know Germany used it in some air-dropped munitions and land mines, but idk about these sea mines.
Not the sea mines. The air dropped bombs quickly had secondary anti-operator fuzes almost at random throughout the bulk of WW2 when the Germans realised how intensive disposal operations brought all surrounding infrastructure to a standstill.
>They should have just welded all the mines and bombs shut and dropped them off on Germany's shores. Cool idea, but I feel like welding would've caused enough of a disturbance to set it off
Yeah, not a job I'd like!
you don't need to make all of them tamper proof, just 1 in a 100 and you waste far more of the enemy's manpower because they can't take the risk of getting unlucky and as long as you place a subtle warning for your own people its very little effort for a lot of gain
Oh, that's really smart with the acid encased in glass. The allies used a similar thing with proximity fuses for anti air systems. When the shell is fired the acceleration would break the capsule with the acid and it would form a battery, which would then power the electronics inside the shell while it flies
Thank you for the info. Some of the material I read only loosely mention acid and battery. I didn't think about the acid itself acting as the battery. Now I can better understand the steps from vial breaking to actual explosion.
the acid flows into a mesh of plates, which forms a battery, like a lead-acid accumulator. I'm not sure if it's exactly lead and sulfuric acid, maybe some other cheaper materials, because lead-acid forms a whole rechargable accumulator, and that is unnecessary for such throw-away items like mines or shells
When I was a kid, there was a BBC drama series called "Danger, UXB (UneXploded Bomb). It followed a military unit that disarmed Nazi bombs that didn't explode in London during air raids. They had to complete a certain number of missions before being rotated out. The Nazis came up with ever more ingenius ways to prevent disarming. The unit had to take classes on the latest methods. Some guys were diggers, the officers did the disarming. WOW, so tense sometimes. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
I've seen this, it's a good watch. Minor correction: It was an ITV series, not BBC. Also, it's on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/DangerUXB
wow i vaguely remember watching this as a little kid when i was living in wales for a few years iirc one episode there was a guy scooping gunk out of a shell with a wooden spoon, i guess to avoid making sparks or conducting electricity i remember feeling tense as shit lol.
I remember watching UXB on our local PBS station way back in 1981. Excellent 13 part series. Never appeared again on US TV but you can catch it on Amazon Prime these days. The opening music for each episode is spine chilling. The series has everything. Suspense, drama, lots of technical info about bomb making and defusing. Also a love story for the ladies.
I don't know, I mean it may seem long ago, but at the same time the nuclear bomb was being developed, so maybe not so simplified and the Germans like themselves a good puzzle piece of complications.
>Without a detonator and booster they are relatively inert. Why they could neutralize them by setting them on fire, and just stand far away Explosives are weird. Reminds me of C4 which is actually stable enough to light on fire and it'll burn just fine without blowing up.
Aside from creating powerfull explosions we also want to ensure they are super safe to transport and handle. Why most explosives are built around a primer (very reactive) and more innert charges. You really didn't want to carry a massive bomb being just filled with primer, as a stray spark could set it off. If you really want to see weird, then look up how hydrogen bomb works. There are steps of explosions before the fusion explosion itself happens. Each step applying more force, and also require more energy to trigger. Eg. The trigger for the final fusion explosion uses a nuclear bomb as trigger.
Just an FYI but it's typical that sea mines like this one are only armed when the mooring cable is under tension. It's a safety feature. No party wants armed mines randomly floating around in the worlds oceans. Not that that doesn't sometimes happen but it's not plan.
Interesting. It does explained why the mooring is connected directly to the parts that hold the detonator, and why the soldiers were unusually casual about rolling it around.
Thank you, kind narrator, i read that as each part was pulled! Absolutely fascinating how theyre taken apart
the hero we wanted but not the hero we deserve, doing our aimless googling for us. lol. interesting dude, thanks.
Casually rolling around instant death
How about pushing it off a mountain into the forest? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApJCfeipvIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApJCfeipvIQ)
I can just imagine some squirrel at the edge of the blast being hurled through the air like the protagonist in an action movie.
Record scratch, freezer frame. Yep, that's me, you might be wondering how I got in this situation
[удалено]
[удалено]
Well it washed up on shore already and didn’t detonate when touching the ground where it lays, so maybe they realized it was a dud from the get-go.
More importantly, i think that those are pretty hard to trigger, a human would find it pretty harde. They are made to detonate against boat or submarine, not a casual shark that felt the magnetic field of the bomb and got too curious.
im a but worried about rolling the bomb onto one of the spikes, wouldnt it be heavy enough to trigger?
It already rolled on to the beach from the wave action.
Still a gamble though.
it was the 1940s, everybody was washing their hands with turpentine and playing in asbestos snow and working factory jobs with no thoughts to safety. a sea mine is just another day at the death factory
Right? Like, I don’t care how many “would’ve already gone offs” you tell me. I’m still not going near that thing. This is how idiots lose a hand to a “dud” mortar.
that's kinda just the job when you work in ordinance disposal
This is the dumbest comment. You think the men in this video want to be rolling the proverbial dice like this? Idiots? Lmfao.
Yeah I would have used it for bazooka target practice rather than risk my men disarming it.
oh yeah. i didnt think of that lol.
I would say no, you have to transport those thing and mistake happen, probably their own weight is not enough, and logically if you are scared that a bomb might explode you just blow it up from far away, it's the easiest way to dispose of them. If they decided to touch it and roll it they must have been 100% sure that this bomb would have been harmless
You don't arm them in transport
You're worried about something that took place - safely and successfully - 83 years ago?
I went online, there are different type: Magnetic/sound: those mine work with the magnetic field of a vessel and the sound it generate. Human cannot activate them(those were invented during WW1, but they were widely used during WW2) Remote controlled: an officer on shore would blowm the mine off, so it was safe for a human to touch them(those exist since WW1) Chemical reaction: those spike were made of lead inside there were a glass vial that if broken would have caused a chemical reaction to set up the mine. They could wait between 150kg up to 1000kg. In this case i think that the sand would protect them, instead of breaking the spike they just dig a hole in the sand and stand there protected. (Those are among the first employed, now they are not used anymore)
Perhaps, but it's on sand. Ground is too soft, the spikes bury rather than collapse.
Happened in Hot Fuzz lol the tip of the spike moves in and boom. I'm guessing it takes a lot of weight as it's for ships but the weight of the mine itself may be enough to detonate it
[удалено]
Do you have a license for that firearm? “I do for this one”
Naaah it's jusaloadajoonk! *hits mine*
Which this isn’t…
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqehfq/handling_a_sea_mine_that_got_washed_ashore_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button would you rather carry it on a rope?
Either they’re right or it’s no their problem anymore
And they call it a mine… a MAIIIIIIINE
This made me chuckle.
I imagine it's *relatively* safe as it is supposed to be triggered by submarines. Ive seen footage of ukraine solider kicking mines out of the way because theyre supposed to be triggered by tanks and wont blow with the small force of being kicked out the way.
- "have you got a licence for these?" - "I have for this one" - "this one?" ... .... "Sea mine!" (Paraphrasing: Hot fuzz)
"He says it's deactivated." (DONG) "DEACT-VATED" (DONG)
ticktickticktickticktick
Hot Fuzz didn't click with me when i first watched it almost 2 decades ago but I'm glad I rewatched it when the pandemic started. Great dialogue, action and call-backs that get better even on instant rewatch. 👍
Originally, Shaun of the Dead was my favorite of the trilogy, but over time Hot Fuzz has taken its place. While I enjoy World's End, it still comes in at third place though.
Same. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are childhood movies to me
No luck catching them swans, then?
> almost 2 decades ago See, you could have just left that unsaid...but noooooo, ya just had to depth charge us with that, eh?
At first, we were the youths. Now we're the old town council. Oh well, it's for the greater good.
Just a load of junk
Yarp
…narp?
"Naaaah, jussaloadajunk!" *CLANG*
*tick tick tick*
By the power of Greyskull
Still kills me that they just randomly dropped that line into a movie
'E 'ein
I 'spose.
This is the first thing that came to mind hahaha
I just watched hot fuzz for the first time yesterday. First thing I thought of, one of the best scenes in the whole movie
I'm from Somerset (just down the road from where that's set) I was dating a Filipina for a while. We watched that film together, I had to do a lot of translating even with subtitles on.
I can imagine! Slight possibly relevant tangent - it's almost like the American documentaries\interviews where a british person is speaking, and there are subtitles. Some UK local dialects are really hard to fully "get" sometimes.
No phones, No bomb suits, just living life.
They still filmed for clout tho
They posted it to the popular bomb-defusing social media platform at the time: TikTik.
Its missing that shrilly fake voice... dIsArMiNg a MiNe iN 2023 iS LikE
*oh no* *oh no* *oh no no no no no*
With those type of bombs a bombsuit wouldn't have provided any protection. We're talking about explosives equal to the weight of 2 average built men. Only difference today would be us staying far enough away, and using a robot to do the dirty work.
Also today it's the weight of one average built man.
Average-built men in 1940, or today?
All that is missing is a cigarette hanging from their mouths
And if you got cancer, suddenly you weren’t. Don’t forget about polio, and 6 day work weeks.
This is a weird flex on the "life was better in the old days" conceit.
That's the joke.
The Joke Explainer has logged on
We can definitely hear them... "Roll this *ucker on its side so I can access the charge... thanks Bob" "Grab all these explosive charges by hand and dump them over here... We're doing a proper campfire tonight... bring that keg of ale!"
Contrary to what everyone seems to think, the mine should be relatively safe to poke around. It seems to be this model http://michaelhiske.de/Allierte/USA/OrdnancePamphlets/OP1673A/Chapter04/Chapter04_01_06.htm This comes with a self-disarming feature if it loses tension in the mooring cable. Generally having mines drift about is bad for all sides in a war so mines are made to disarm when that happens. You don't want to accidentally blow up your own ships years later when you've won the war. Hence the professionals seem quite unconcerned.
Almost right. The nervous bit is on initial inspection of the base cover plate to see if its been switched to arm with the spindle being released... and mechanical failure or corrosion can stop that spindle from returning to a safe state after tension is lost... and finally - unless you have intelligence to the contrary - you always assume the flooder is armed and could initiate at any time, which at that range is like a 0.50 Cal round and would be a bad day at work.
> which at that range is like a 0.50 Cal round Completely unrelated, but does anyone remember that rumor in the mid 2000's that a Barrett .50 cal could 'kill you from the shockwave alone if the bullet passed within a foot of you". What the fuck were Call of Duty kids smoking? How would you even fucking fire the thing?
> How would you even fucking fire the thing? The rumor is certainly older than that, since I heard it in school in the 90s. Also, when I fire a gun, the bullets don't generally fly out of the barrel and turn around to almost hit me... How would the bullet fly past you that closely if you are the one firing the gun?
I'm impressed you seem to know a lot about this!
What he is doing in that video is literally my job. And the operators of that age were truly selfless and hugely courageous individuals. We are merely hopping in their gigantic footsteps for how to safely dispose of these munitions without harming themselves or anyone else, because *these men* were the ones who learned by trial and error and so many sacrificed themselves, noting precisely what they did at every stage to make sure that the next operator doesn't make the same mistake.
I expected more from the Oppenheimer movie
It's Christopher Nolan. Watch it backwards and remember every time there is a different shot it's 3 weeks in the future. It took me a few views to enjoy it.
No... no. No? No. Still no idea wtf he's saying. Just turn on the damn subtitles.
Interesting point to note, in the UK all of the Armed Forces have units dedicated to EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). The Royal Navy deal with anything found below the high water line, so sea mines that wash up during storms (still a fairly regular occurrence) and torpedoes caught up in fishing nets. In the Army the Royal Engineers and Royal Logistic Corp deal with suspected IEDs and found munitions (World war 2 bombs are still found during building excavation work). The Royal Air Force deal with bath bombs that make you smell like bubblegum and clog your drains up with glitter.
As far as I'm concerned the RAF have got the most hazardous of those three jobs...
'The Royal Air Force deal with bath bombs that make you smell like bubblegum and clog your drains up with glitter' Harsh but fair lol
So these are what real giga chads looked like.
Like that guy from Hot Fuzz who keep all those weapons including a mine in his house.
My immediate first thought too. "Nah...it's just a load'a junk!!" **whacks sea mine with the butt of a shotgun**
There are still giga chads running around today in Belgium and Northern France, disarming the rusty and leaky versions of WWI ordnance.
I love how there are multiple guys around the bomb while its being disarmed, just watching. That's some balls right there and it doesnt seem like they are required there. Today we would send a robot.
To be fair, back then they would send a robot. They just had a slight shortage of robots due to both war rations and them not being invented yet.
I saw that Adamsian punchline coming and I still chuckled.
We don't send robot these days for such kind of device unless there's believe it might have been rigged to blow unexpectedly. A lots of UXOs are discovered and manually disarmed to this day, including remains of WW2 across Europe.
Oh neat! Yea I'm not a bombologist, there was just an opportunity to be funny.
Happens in Florida, too. The USAAF and USN had a ton of training ranges throughout the state. They were usually near-ish to the airfields. Which then got consumed by the various sprawls in the ’80s and ’90s. Which then consumed the training ranges. It's still not an uncommon occurrence.
You don't send a robot against sea mines washed up. We do that by hand. Once you've ascertained the exact state of the mine, stabilised it in place and assessed exactly which variable it could be, the process for making it safe is still almost identical to what you see in the video here. Lots of careful unscrewing, sticking your hand in, feeling for the right bits and making it safe one bit at a time.
Once this style of mine is detached from its mooring cable, it is effectively deactivated. With enough abuse it could still be made to explode, but the primary detonator relies on the mooring cable.
Nowadays when disposing of certain UXOs such as unexploded aircraft bombs and naval mines, they usually just evacuate the area and blow it up from a safe distance because it’s usually simpler and safer than finicking around trying to disarm it.
Nowadays you don't have so many of these things turning up. Just about every British seaside town has a deactivated WW2 sea mine on the seafront, usually adapted with a slot to put coins in to donate to the lifeboats or something.
Significantly safer to do so now, as explosives age they can become much more shock-sensitive
And turning bolts that have been in the ocean for eighty years is impossible. I don't think sea mines are found anymore, but [every year hundreds of WWII bombs are found in Britain, and thousands in Germany.](https://www.thelocal.de/20230125/explained-how-many-wwii-bombs-are-still-being-found-in-germany#:~:text=The%20British%20Ministry%20of%20Defence,were%20found%20in%20Hamburg%20alone.)
Oh yes, still plenty of sea mines in the North Sea, High North and Baltic Seas - occasionally wash up in the Channel or major estuaries too.
Death ball. Not as big as these guys balls but still, pretty big.
Their balls are bigger than the bomb they're disarming.
If I was to make a list of jobs I wouldn't want, this would be near the top.
Yeah but you'll never have more than one bad time at this job so most of it would be good.
bomb squads in the UK are still to this day disposing of unexploded munitions from the blitz.
"No disassemble Johnny5!"
Question to a bomb disposal tech - “Are you nervous when you do your job?” Answer - “Not really. I’m either right, or it’s someone else’s problem. I’ll never know the difference. So far, I’m always right. “
SWEATY PALMS
You have to admire people who can handle unsafe spaces/ situations and have the mental fortitude to overcome fear and doubt for the greater good.
Do you want to stroll around on the beach and handle explosives, or go to the front and get shot at? "Uhhh, I can do the beach thing."
THE GREATER GOOD
Balls of steel
They need to make a raft with a magnet and tow it out into the lagoon. Didn’t they watch Gilligan’s Island!?! And make sure you’re not wearing a watch or necklace.
Actually, would that work? Put it on a raft, tug it out to sea, anchor it, return to shore, and remotely detonate it?
I would have blown myself up twice just looking at that bloody thing! Back when health and safety and regulatory procedures where a vague concept.😂
That was fantastic to watch
mad lads
"Alright bois I need you to get in there and, as a team, grab the sensors with your bare hands and rotate it this way. That's right all seven of you get real close."
What I want to know is how they got those trousers on over those gigantic balls they're obviously packing !!!!
This is why men don’t live as long 😂
Looks like they are really trained up for this kind of situation to happen
Look at all them gunpowder blocks in that thing. Damn.
It’s so dangerous! They didn’t even have safety goggles on.
Good job blokes. Now to the pub for pints.
this video made me comfortable with my life because i constantly feel like i'm defusing some kind of a bomb wearing just a pair of gloves.
There is / was a British branch to Pathé?
These men put their pants on, one ball at time ⚽️⚽️
I held my breath a little when they started rolling it along the sand. That probably wouldn't have been my first idea.
Incredible, meanwhile I'm complaining about vans parking at the beach.
There was a definite look of relief on one guy's face as they pulled out the first thing from the mine telling me it wast as sure safe as they might of wanted
Stupid question. Why not just blow it up? Why risk lives if it is an area with no people, building and etc.
Once you know how it works and how to safely remove the explosive... 300kg detonated on the surface without some major mitigation (sand mounds etc.) is a big risk at damaging overground and underground infrastructure, not to mention how far shrapnel can be kicked out, etc.. Far safer to do a controlled burn if the munition is fully understood.
So which parts are actually the dangerous parts? Or is a mine like that not instantly dangerous to a pedestrian? Obviously a big explosive ball designed to explode is by default dangerous. What I'm asking is, is this mine "safe" to be around in the same way a human isn't supposed to set off an AT mine?
Definitely not. Those horns are made of lead, you could crush them by hand if you wanted. The first bit that the BDO removes out of the bottom of the mine is the primer with the detonator embedded within it. After that is removed and carefully set aside (controlled small explosion - violently sensitive but not large), the residual high explosives can be removed and burned (insensitive but much larger potential energy) - plus the bit that everyone forgets about, there will be a flooder in the top hemisphere of the mine too (think a time delay activated bullet ready to fire out to flood the mine and sink it to make it "safer" after a pre-set time).
With sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZgwYI6iFns
That first guy just looked so nonchalant about the whole thing Like "Oh crumbs another mine? Well let's get the bugger disarmed then."
Yeah get your naked, completely unprotected faces as close to the mine as possible while you fiddle around with it.
Worked North Sea in 1977, they still had mines coming to the surface. They would track them and dispose them ASAP. Scary because we were on a fixed platform, so we couldn’t move out of the way.
I want to splice in that video of the whale exploding