Sitting on a Bomb

SITTING ON A BOMB

Glancing through a local paper I saw an article dealing with a series about unexploded bombs, their effect and the people who dealt with them. This reminded me of an incident in the early part of the war in 1940.

At that time I was a full time Air Raid Warden (known as the Civil Defence later), our post was near Filton Aerodrome. What is now a large council estate was at that time only half finished with fields across the north district, two long roads ran the length of the fields from the aerodrome to the farm at the rear of the school in which we had our post.

There were many bombs dropped on this waste ground, high explosive, incendiary bombs and also a few unexploded bombs. We thought the Germans mistook the roads for runways and we were delighted when the bombs fell there harmlessly.

Today’s raid had been a bad one, the bombers concentrated on Filton Aerodrome with us getting the odd stick of bombs. As usual wardens were out on their sectors carrying on with the usual odd services which were part of helping the public.

It was a morning raid this time the children being at school, we only had the under fives to deal with. In our school the whole population was in the school shelters within two minutes — not bad for three hundred children. There was no panic as we had a drill each week with the children going from the classrooms to the brick shelters. The children enjoyed this as it meant missing part of a lesson.

One of our messengers reported that there was an unexploded bomb in the sector for which, with another warden, I was responsible. Making sure I had the report form necessary I got ready to go. Finding my fellow warden we set off on our bikes to start getting things sorted out.

We arrived to find a crowd around the spot, we managed to persuade them to go home and those living near the bomb to get ready for evacuation. Then my fellow warden knelt down by the bomb, listened a minute, shook his head and put his head against the bomb, listened again, shook his head and lay across the bomb with his face touching the casing. In the meantime I had started to fill in the form, U X Bomb, 500 lbs. It looked like the new type that we had been warned about in a recent memo from headquarters. Looking up I saw my friend had stood up and he told me that he thought the bomb was alive.

I then went to the bomb, knelt down to listen to it feeling very nervous, with my heart thumping away I couldn’t hear the bomb at all, so I sat on it and leaned my head toward the casing, even then I could not be sure, but suddenly felt a tremor like an electric shock. I realised where I was and what I was doing. I quickly moved and found when I stood up that my legs were very shaky. My friend and I both looked at each other and laughed hysterically; we vowed not to tell anyone what had happened, as we knew we would never hear the last of it.

I managed to pull myself together and finished filling out the form and then we both went back to the post to let headquarters know the position and help with the many tasks the raid had caused. People had to be evacuated and arrangements made for them to be fed and have shelter in the local church halls. There were not many children at the school in the afternoon as they went home as soon as the raid had ended and then many of them went with their mothers to their local church hall.

At approximately 4 o’clock the bomb disposal men informed us that that didn’t think it was safe to move the bomb and that it would be safer to explode it. We helped them to clear the area and a van with a loudspeaker warned everyone that the bomb was due to go off. Half an hour later there was quite an explosion when it went off, demolishing two houses and causing a lot damage in the area, even my house had broken windows and many houses had lost tiles.

As my friend Bill said, ‘who wants to sit on a bomb’. Needless to say we never did anything like that again.

The End

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