大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War by Anne Thomas on behalf of Donald Anderson and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions.

I am hard of hearing because I got blown up three times while I was in the army. I don't have a pension because one was the Luftwaffe when I was off duty, one was friendly fire from the Navy and one was my own fault.

The last is now enshrined in the RE bomb disposal manual and this is what really happened. Smaller bombs falling on to soft soil sometimes go off without cratering or even breaking the surface. This can produce an underground chamber the size of a large room full of carbon monoxide, called(by the French) a camouflet. Digging down to ventilate it and make it harmless is difficult, because the workers are reducing the thickness of the lid and can't tell when it might give way. This would drop them into an asphyxiating atmosphere from which it would be very difficult to extract them in time.

We used an earth augur such as is used for making post holes. If too big a bite is attempted it becomes impossible to withdraw it for another bite. When this happened I took a wisp of straw and tossed it into our hole. The result was an explosion which blew our augur feet into the air and rocked us all back on our heels.

The noise attracted the attention of a senior officer from another arm. So that he would comprehend, I told him that we were working in clay with flints , which was true, and a spark must have ignited the gas, which wasn't. On my next visit to bomb school, I could hardly keep a straight face when our instructor warned us "Augering should never be used in clay with flints as a spark may cause detonation" This sounds fairly plausible, but so far as I could discover, has never happened. However the warning may still be found in later editions of the manual.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.