sheffield

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A Christmas Box of UXBs in 1940
Sheffield had its first heavy air raid just half a century ago, on the night of
Thursday, 12th December 1940. By Friday morning, 13th, several hundred citizens
had been killed or injured, and many more were evacuated into temporary
accommodation because their homes were in the danger areas around ‘unexploded
bombs’. It is perhaps worth explaining how the problems caused by these so-called
UXBs were dealt with.

Bomb fuses have to safeguard aircrews against premature explosions and allow for
all sorts of mishaps that can occur on a bombing mission. Because of these
complications many fuses, of all nations, fail to work properly, and the bombs do
not explode when they hit the ground. About one in ten of all German bomb fuses
failed. which represented a considerable waste of effort, but they found a neat way
of making these ‘duds’ add to the effects of a raid. A few of all their bombs were
fitted with clockwork timing devices that could be set to detonate the bombs at any
time up to about eighty hours after they were dropped.

These so-called ‘time bombs’ caused considerable alarm and confusion when they
were first used in the early London raids. To avoid unnecessary casualties
government ordered that nearby traffic should be stopped and civilians moved well
away for four days from quite a large area around each suspected UXB. This
disruption, caused by the possibility that any UXB might be a time bomb, was a
troublesome aftermath of every air raid. Sometimes, indeed. a UXB gave more
trouble than if the bomb had gone off on impact.

The UXB problem had not been foreseen before the war, and no provision had been
made to deal with it. but bomb disposal units were quickly set up once the blitz
started. The Royal Engineers were given responsibility for civilian areas and they
soon learned, often the hard way, how to deal with unexploded bombs of all sorts.
But before they could start work they had to be told exactly where each incident was
by the Civil Defence, which usually reported UXBs on the basis that a warden had
heard a bomb as it whistled down but no big bang to follow.

It was often hard to say just where a UXB had fallen in the chaos and noise of an
air raid, and no-one wanted to hang about checking - it was more important to get
people out of harm’s way in case it was a time bomb ticking away and waiting to
go off. Moreover, in a time of great stress it was easy for wardens to make a
mistake, reporting incidents that were not in fact caused by UXBs. Debris thrown
up by exploding bombs often made holes in ground or buildings that looked rather
like the entries of UXBs. It was also quite easy for two wardens to report the same
UXB as buried in two different places.
There were other possibilities of error. A large bomb that does not go off can cause as
much mayhem as a small one that explodes, so may not be reported as a UXB at all.
Even small UXBs that buried themselves in shale or rock just below the soil often
jinked around and threw up debris in all directions, to leave craters that were not
much smaller than if they had exploded. Several such cases were reported as bombs
that had gone off, and not as UXBs. However. we gradually learned what to look out
for, though it was easy to be fooled in those early days.

Civil Defence was authorised to give top priority (Category A) to any UXB near a
vital munitions factory, power station or other place where it could seriously affect
the war effort. Bomb disposers then had to start work at once in the hope of dealing
with the fuse before it worked, if the UXB turned out to be a time bomb. All other
incidents were put into lower categories, and disposers were forbidden to start
digging down to them until 96 hours after they had fallen.

I was Lieutenant in charge of 59 Bomb Disposal Section RE, stationed with thirty
men at Sapling Grove, Halifax. We were still very raw, and had little equipment
except picks, shovels and lifting gear, but I had attended a short course on bomb
disposal - short because there was not much known at that time. However, the
organisation was rapidly learning more about German bomb fuses thanks to the work
of a small group of scientists and experienced bomb disposers in London, who daily
flashed each BD unit with every scrap of news about bombs and ways of dealing
with them.

On that Thursday night we listened to distant rumbles of the raid on Sheffield and were
not surprised next morning when our parent BD Company in Leeds told us to go there as
quickly as we could. Our only truck had just left in dense fog to collect the rations, and
would not be back for hours, so I hired a local bus and took my team to Sheffield, where
we reported to the Southern Division of Sheffield Police, at West Bar Police Station.
Sister Sections from elsewhere in Yorkshire were posted to other Divisions.

We waited all day, ready for action if any Category A incidents turned up, but
luckily there were none, so I sent the troops back to Halifax, since we were
unlikely to have work to do until the four days for other categories had elapsed. I
stayed on, with Sergeant Battersby RE, to start investigating the scores of
‘Suspected UXB’ incidents that had been reported in the Division, and to plan our
disposal campaign according to the difficulty and importance of various jobs. We
were greatly helped by Police Sergeant Buckler who led us from one incident to
another, an essential service because we were strangers to Sheffield and
communications were badly disrupted at first by roads blocked in the raids.

Three hectic days followed, enlivened by a second air raid on Sunday 15th
December. Incidents often took a long time to investigate, especially in big
buildings that had been damaged in the raids. A hole in a roof might show that there
was something inside, but it was not necessarily a UXB (an Austin 7 car was
perched in the top storey of one building, blown up there by blast from a
landmine!).

We often had to move a lot of debris before we found a hole-of-entry into the
ground below, and even then it was not usually the clean round tunnel that
would establish the presence of a UXB with certainty in open ground. We had
been warned that there would not be an unexploded bomb in every incident
reported as ‘Suspected UXB’ but we found a far higher proportion of false
reports than we had expected. Yet we had to be quite sure before we wrote an
incident off, and there were some difficult decisions to make.

Several large time bombs went off during the next few days, two in my own
sector, but fortunately not whilst we were investigating those particular
incidents. Nevertheless, hearing each bang, one could not help thinking ‘There,
but for the Grace of God, went I’!

On the fourth day, people who had been evacuated for UXBs were allowed to go
home again, even though we knew that there were unexploded bombs still buried near
some of their houses. Experience over the whole country had shown that bombs were
most unlikely to go off after 96 hours until disposers were actually dealing with the
bomb fuses, when people might be asked to leave the area again for a short time if
there was any serious risk of an explosion.

Bomb disposal was not glamorous, though it had its highlights of
excitement. Most of the time was spent in digging. Very few UXBs lay
where they could be seen; usually they were buried, often thirty feet
down in wet London clay, but not as deep as that in Sheffield’s rock. Debris
around the hole-of-entry had first to be cleared, before we could start to dig, and it
often took three men several days to open up a shaft to where the bomb lay buried.
The sides of the UXB then had to be carefully cleared until we could see the fuse
pockets, usually a single one for an impact bomb and two in a time bomb. Only then
could the fuses be identified with certainty and treated to make the bomb as safe as
possible for transport. Even then more digging was needed to free the bomb, so that
it could be lifted out of the hole and taken away for final disposal, usually by
blowing it up in a remote ‘bomb cemetary’.

My Section, brought back from Halifax, was billeted in the Church of England School,
Wadsley Bridge, which we shared with Civil Defence. In the next seven busy days we
met many warm-hearted people and did a lot of very hard work under cold muddy
conditions. But there were some moments of light relief. One was when we had to find
an anchorage for our shear legs, so that we could pull a 250 kg bomb out of a deep hole
dug just outside the front door of a semi-detached house. The only way we could see was
to pass a rope through a window of the house next door and tie it round the piano. The
scheme worked perfectly, but I have often wondered whether anyone in Sheffield still
has a piano with our rope marks on its lid?
More seriously, a time bomb with a sticking fuse was taken to Ringinglow Moor,
the nearest place where we could blow it up safely. We rolled the UXB a few yards
from the road and my chaps withdrew, whilst I left my car alongside with its engine
running to make a quick getaway after setting a guncotton charge on top of the
bomb. After lighting the touch I got back in the car but must have been over-anxious
because the gear lever broke off in my hand, leaving the engine in neutral. There
was no time to run, so I lay flat behind a low wall at the roadside; within seconds
there was a colossal bang and a shower of wet black peat completely covered both
the car and me. There was no hurt, except to my pride, but I doubt if many have
been as close as that when a large bomb exploded and lived to tell the tale.

We cleared the last incident on Christmas Eve and went back to Halifax to celebrate
Christmas Day. In all we investigated 122 incidents, and wrote off 91 as false reports.
The other 31 all turned out to be genuine unexploded German bombs, of which 29
had impact fuses. Two were time bombs that had failed to go off but still had their
clockwork fuses in a potentially dangerous condition. We also disposed of a
parachute mine that had fallen in LMS Midland Station and been defused by the
Navy. Sheffield was the Section’s first major bomb disposal exercise, and we felt
quite pleased that we had managed to carry it out without loss to ourselves or
unnecessary damage to the citizens or property of the City.

If they are still around, after these fifty years, I would like to thank Inspector D.
Thorpe and Sergeant E.H.Buckler of Sheffield Police Southern Division for their
stalwart support in an unpleasant and unfamiliar situation.

John Hudson

30th November 1990


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