Explosion at RAF Fauld, 1944
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- čas přidán 26. 11. 2023
- During the Second World War the allies spent, roughly, a staggering 3 and a half trillion (2023 adjusted) US dollars on munitions. Those munitions had to be manufactured, stored, and transported, creating notable risk to everyone in their path. That risk became all too real in rural Staffordshire, UK, on November 27, 1944.
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I live not far from Fauld crater and had friends running the public house in Hanbury. I have taken my children many times for a walk around the crater and to the memorial stone. I really appreciated this episode, thank you.
There is a photograph of a mushroom cloud over Metfield in Suffolk when the ammo dump went up.
Was just thinking you could cover this the other day!!! We’re from Draycott in the clay just over hill and me great grandad said it blew him a good 2 metre!!! You’re a legend btw😂
been to it... its like an optical illusion. you look at the tiny miniature trees in it... and then your head flips. and you realize theyre Not miniature at all...
🎉wales is far west & strsight east is london town!north reearst so
where is fauld?
@@stanpolchinski8956near Derby pretty much slap bang in the middle of the country👍
As a 12 year old in 1980 I went into the crater . Back then it wasnt fenced off and not overgrown and you could get a better perspective of the size of it. The train rails were still in the crater and were twisted and bent beyond recognition. There was a cross shaped memorial of stones placed in the crater. Back then there were rumours that not all all of the munitions dump had exploded and that the military had been working in the accessible parts of the dump. You can't access the crater now . As someone else commented, it remains an eerily silent place. Great video and respectful of those killed.
My late Father was in the RAOC( The Royal Army Ordnance Corps) in the late '50's. While stationed in England it was a popular pursuit to make wee knick-knacks from spent casings and shells. Some kid wanted to make a "Fire Dog", I think it's called. A receptacle for fire tongs and poker to sit on the hearth of a coal fire. This bright boy got a 25Pdr H.E projectile and was hell bent of removing the fuze and boiling out the Amatol. He got as far as setting about the fuze with a hammer and chisel! They found his teeth.
bizarrely i have a 25pdr shell casing that used to sit next to our coal fire with a poker in when i was a kid. my grandfather was a train driver in the war in Staffordshire im pretty sure that's where he got it.
Willie found some dynamite, couldn't understand it quite, curiosity never pays, It rained Willie 7 days.
Listing the victims in silence after the story is classy. Love this channel!
How can they conclude it was someone using a brass chisel on a bomb when brass tools are used as they don't spark and any witnesses would have been vaporised in the explosion ?
Thank god someone else was wondering the same! They use non ferrous brass tools and hammers for weapons work or explosive environments work because they don't emit sparks. So a brass chisel or hammer wouldn't have initiated a bomb unless he hit a percussion cap or detonator and started the firing sequence that way!
They were never going to blame higher management so they hypothesised and came up with the story. Might have happened that way but we’ll never know. I did an explosives course at RAF Cosford and heard about this story. If they knew bad practices were happening there it certainly should have been stamped out and personnel trained to prevent it with SNCO/Officer oversight.
My father and his Basuto Troops, had an above ground ammo dump, somewhere not far from Tripoli. It went BANG! He described being chased by an 88mm anti-aircraft round, tumbling end over end. Well, as I'm here to tell the story, you know he survived his "Brown Trouser" event.
We rightly remember the men and women who served in action, but it is too easy to forget that many back home also risked health and life, working in factories with hazardous materials, or the great shipyards, all of them targets for Luftwaffe bombers, and yet they all worked on to "do their bit" and contribute to the eventual victory. Without their efforts the front line couldn't have operated.
Too true. My Grandmother worked, handling Cordite in R.O.F Bishopton. A large Royal Ordnance Factory outside Glasgow. The brief, and dangerous work she undertook there permanently damaged her health. Exposure to Nitroglycerine caused her to suffer Angina until her death. It was common practice for workers to smuggle bits of Guncotton out to chew or sniff. This acted as a primitive vascular dilator, similar to medical nitroglycerine which she was ironically prescribed. If you want a real wartime horror story, look into "The Boots Gasmask Workers".
Yes, it is often forgotten, even by those who have served in the military, that "civilians" are always there, doing work directly or indirectly for the military. Some of it is dangerous, and much of it highly skilled. Yet some think unless you're wearing a military uniform and serving in the forces, you're somehow not working for "King and Country" etc, and not worthy of recognition. In WW2, the number of civilians killed and injured whilst doing important "war work" was excessively high. Many of them young women raising families, ordinary people determined to do their bit. A country needs more than soldiers to keep it running.
Modern warfare isn't just won on the battlefield, but by industrial production. Every worker in a factory was also on the frontline
And often it's the jobs that are done by women that get forgotten, even if they were at more risk than many soldiers- not all soldiers fight at the front. @@another3997
I remember reading somewhere that for a significant period after Dunkirk, the most dangerous and deadly job was being a firefighter. I imagine this was a result of fighting the Blitz but Im only speculating
The crater is still imposing, even after 80 years of erosion and the growth of vegetation. Thankfully, due to the deliberate seperation of areas, the majority of the ordinance didn't explode, otherwise it would have been much, much worse. The site and remaining tunnels at RAF Fauld were actually still used by the military until the late 1980s. People still sneak in to the to the now sealed off. In WW1, part of one of the biggest national shell filling factories, situated at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, exploded. A number of people died, the damage to the site was extensive... yet the very next day, nearly everyone was back at work producing shells, and shorty after, hit record production. The whole site, not any individual person, was even considered for the Victoria Cross. Not all heroes wear a military uniform.
I had never heard of this until now. Thank you.
I worked at Fauld as an apprentice electrician in 1966, we were installing earth leakage strips, copper strips to all the buildings in case of lightning strikes. My late father told me of the disaster as he was stationed at R.A.F. Stafford at the time and heard the explosion there.
Stayed in Tutbury in digs whilst we were working and people still remembered the day of the disaster.
Believe after we completed the work the Americans moved in, don't know what it is now.
Thanks for telling us of this mostly, forgotten episode.
A tad concerning that to the one worker a standard 500 lbs bomb exploding wasn’t really anything to get worked up about.
I see we are expected to start our Monday morning off with a bang today.....🤔😳😉
I had never heard about this explosion before today. What a horrific event. I grew up in a small town of only a few thousand people. I can only imagine the devastation if it would have happened to us. Thank you for listing the names of the casualties.
All towns and areas of England pronounced perfectly, thank you History man.
I'm from Tutbury. A UK village 3 miles from Fauld. I'd often walk around the crater as a child with my dad. Very overgrown & fenced off due to risk of unexploded ordinance. There's a memorial in Italian marble with the names of Italian POWs ... Great video. 🇬🇧
Thanks for this. My late mother, who lived and worked in Stafford (about 20 miles wet of Fauld) throughout the war had never heard of the incident, and refused to believe it until I showed her the story in "After the Battle" which you refer to. You don't appreciate the devastation until you actually stand on the crater rim - and the fields surrounding it are still pitted and unever to walk on all these years later.
The destruction was terrible - the village postman, doing his rounds, disappeared and wasn't found until a month later, when a farmer wondered why the crows were congregating in the top of a tree, some distance from the scene...... You will know of the similar Silvertown explosion, in London during the Great War?
I live just a couple of miles from the site and walked around the perimeter just a few weeks ago. Still eerily quiet and you cannot access the crater due to the risk of unexploded munitions. My mother lived about 6 miles away in 1944 and they felt the house shake when the explosion happened.
Plenty of animals in the crater though - H&S gone mad again?
I never knew about this...WOW! Thanks History Guy. Well done
I knew it from Tom Scott, who visited the site (as he does).
Snd even to this day its a closed off area as no one truly knows what went off and what is still viable explosive is buried in there
My dad served in World War II, primarily on bases in England but also in Germany after the surrender; He didn't talk that much about the war but I rember him saying that somebody one the base had the bright idea of unloading trucks full of munitions that supposedly weren't armed yet by backing up the truck quickly with the tailgate open and slamming on the brakes, so that all the shells spilled out on the ground. This went on for a few months until one day a bomb with a fuse in it was accidentally mixed into the load of unarmed shells. I don't remember him saying how bad it was or if anybody was seriously injured or killed..... like many people involved in the war, he didn't talk about it all that much even though he himself never saw actual combat and didn't seem to suffer any PTSD.
My father served in Italy during the war. And they had done the same thing Trucks full of unfused Back as fast as you can and slam on the breaks! He said 1 day a depot disappeared!
That's reminiscent of the case in Canada, where a live anti-personnel grenade got mixed up with Drill/Dummy bodies during an instruction class during training. Several dead, many injured and shenanigans when it came to Court.
Reminds me of the Port Chicago disaster in California; munitions literally dropped on a dock during unloading, kicked, shoved around.
The wiki mentions a Navy officer refusing to go back there after he saw how they were doing the handling, sure he'd get vaporized when somebody finally managed to cause an "earth-shattering kaboom".
😢 *¡sadly even military veterans sometimes exaggerate their experiences by not discussing them since they would expose themselves as liars!* - i am a former N.J.R.O.T.C. cadet and a former active duty u.S. Army 11B10 infantryman during the cold war period* 😢 - 3:22 pm Pacific Standard Time on Monday, 27 November 2023 that is exactly 79 years since the Monday, 27 November 1944 RAF Fauld explosion
My dad also served in Britain during the war and was in Germany before the surrender.
My mum remembers this happening. She was a kid in school (4miles away) and the teacher blamed the noise on a chimney falling down. I suspect a chimney HAD fallen as a result of the explosion rather than it being the cause of the noise although my mum can’t remember seeing a fallen chimney.
Many buildings around that side of the town of Burton and area had cracks in them from this explosion.
Fallen chimneys are spectacularly unimpressive and easily overlooked.
@@1murder99 there certainly were a number of chimneys that fell that side of Burton - and there could have been one fallen at the school my mum was at - but the point is, the noise from the explosion 4miles away, was much more than /just/ a chimney falling despite the teacher trying to reassure the kids that was all it had been.
I grew up learning of this explosion because so many of my mums generation had stories about it, and houses with cracks dating back to it.
Teacher may have noticed a newly fallen chimney amongst the roofs outside the school.
@@mnoliberal7335 exactly - that’s what I explained to my mum, but as I say, she never saw evidence of it and had grown up thinking the teacher had been deliberately lying to cover up what had happened - without thinking that maybe the explosion had caused a chimney collapse and the teacher was just mistaken thinking that had caused all the noise.
I know which school my mum was at, but I’m not sure how to find records of which buildings suffered what damage to try to get to the bottom of exactly why the teacher told the kids what they did, but I think my guess is at least logical and plausible :)
In Iraq, in 2003 after Saddam's fall, the US 101st Airborne Division came into possession of an Iraqi munitions dump codenamed "Jaguar North". This was ACRES of individual, semi-buried bunkers, primarily filled with mortar & artillery shells.
They had only a single engineering platoon available to guard the place, and it was a hell of a problem because the Iraqis would keep sneaking in and stealing the shells...Not for any nefarious purpose, but because they wanted the shell's brass obturator rings for scrap metal sales on black market, which was serious money for them. So they would sneak in, break into these bunkers, and lay the shells out on the dirt...and then commence hammering & chiseling the obturator rings off LIVE shells.
Apparently the engineer platoon would occasionally hear a "BOOM!" out in the middle of the night, and in the morning they'd find one of the locals spread all over the place after he hit a mortar or artillery shell Wiley Coyote-style.
I am not sure if this qualifies for a Darwin Award.
If hammering live ammunition shells does not qualify for a Darwin Award, then nothing does.
Allahbooms
Thats one way to make and turn yourself into scrap
@@markrix But not scrap METAL.
Arabs have completely different attitude towards basic safety than the average American/Euro.
If there’s no fuse and primer installed, you can go ballistic on most ammo. Still wouldn’t recommend it though.
My Grandfather : Alfred Lowe, worked there in the stores at the time, by luck, he was off work that particular day
Such incidents were often not reported to keep the news away from the enemy/
Thank you for sharing...
The mind boggles at how they came to the conclusion it was down to a Numpty with a brass Chisle.!?
The government has to blame the little guy!
@@coreydarr8464 exactly... governments are always responsible yet always blame someone else...
Time for change
@@richardlilley6274 New boss=Old boss.
@@Pygar2 yeah power corrupts people '
and always plenty of others lining up to bribe one's in power or kill them if bribery doesn't work...
Give a man an hammer'
And suddenly he sees everything as a nail !
That's an amazing piece of forgotten history
I live near Fauld and was was born and brought up on a farm in Sudbury (very close). My maternal grandfather was actually based at Fauld during the war and had not long been off duty when it “went up”. Some family farming friends farm at Castle Hayes Farm with land right up to the crater which enabled my brother and I to ride a mountain bikes right in the crater. Now it is largely very overgrown.
Pictures don't do it justice, the hole was +100 ft deep and+1,000 ft wide, making it the size of nine football fields in size!
The poor fellow, with the brass chisel certainly paid a high price
Burton Upon Trent in Staffordshire, has a high quantity of gypsum dissolved in the water and the town became a huge centre for brewing beer as a consequence.
I thought brass tools were sparkless... I used to have an 18lb brass sledgehammer back in the day for that purpose...
There is an account of this in (if I remember correctly) Time-Life's WW2 book series. I think they mentioned brass and wood tools, and quite a lot of Italian POWs would not stop smoking even with the safety signs explained to them.
Yea, they rushed to judgement when they said 'a brass hammer caused a spark". Brass tools are used in potentially explosive atmospheres all the time in industry. I have used them for probably 40 years and I've never seen a spark, no matter what material you used it on!
@@randallmarsh1187 Yes, that's what I thought. If he'd said 'steel chisel' that would have made sense, but in places like that there wouldn't have been steel chisels anyway. Another poster above said they had heard it suggested that it may have been a known electrical fault. Knowing how things work here in the UK, sadly, it makes sense to me that a dead worker would be blamed rather than the organisation blamed for not sorting out a known fault.
From the description section of Tom Scott's video, the report actually said:
"in all probability the work of chipping out the C.E. [composition explosive] Exploder from a 1,000 lb M.C. bomb, using a brass chisel, was the cause of the explosion. It is known that C.E. will explode easily if struck between brass and steel surfaces".
I don't know if that's true, but it appears they gave more thought to it than just "brass causes sparks".
The wartime wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery is sitting on the seabed in the Thames Estuary outside London. This is no ordinary wreck as it has on board 1400 tons of unstable high explosive. If it goes kaboom, then a small tsunami could travel up the Thames and reach London.
czcams.com/video/wP1kq9H7TYg/video.htmlsi=rv4Wzm0p_O3-ShhW
We have quite a bit of gypsum here in western SD... reportedly it's attractive to rattlesnakes as it's easy for them to dig burrows in.
This same thing happened in Port Chicago, in the San Francisco Bay, while WWII was raging. 11million pounds of munitions exploded, nearly leveling the whole port.
Thank you for remembering this incident . I feel it is largely forgotten now although many who live locally will have some knowledge of it . The reason the whole dump did not go up was because of a series of brick built blast walls of some 30 foot in depth . The cause of the blast will never be known but it has been suggested that some Italian POW's had been seen removing fuses from live rounds with a hammer . Whether that was sabotage or lack of training/instruction nobody will know .
Grateful for a thoughtful and dignified manner of the episode as always .
Keep up all the hard work of research and content of each video .
Always appreciated and I look forward for each new upload .
I visited the Fauld crater two months ago its hard to express the size of the crater even though it is now covered in trees but still fenced off due to the fear of unexploded bombs
Initiated by a brass chisel which caused a spark? 😮 Oh no! I always thought brass was used precisely because it didn't spark. I've always pounded my high explosives with brass sledgehammers thinking I was safe. I'm switching to foam rubber hammers from now on.
In the 1980s we had a neighbour who experienced the explosion first hand and explained it to us and the extent of the damage
Glad to see this. Having lived local to this area it is a good subject for you to cover. Thank you for the detail you provided.
I remember as a kid trying to find the crater, we couldn't - which I suppose says something about my parents navigational skills!
Just happened to watch this episode on what’s turned out to be its’ 79TH Anniversary! Wow! 😮 What a coincidence! Though this disaster occurred long before I was born, it still made an impression on me …
Not a coincidence exactly, I did deliberately release the episode on the anniversary.
Thank you for that. The families, I’m pretty sure, appreciate that people will remember their sacrifice.
Some friends of ours got married in Hanbury. We made a quick diversion to the crater as I'd learned of this incident in early 2000s
A small but important correction. You state it was supposed that a brass chisel caused a spark, I have worked in an ammo depot, all the tools in use were made of brass the reason! Brass unlike steel cannot generate a spark.
I live not too far from Fauld (10 min drive), been to the crater a few times. It's worth seeing.
Shades of the Halifax explosion in 1917. Very interesting video and yes, this should be remembered.
6 AM at the mango farm. My wife picking "My way" on the ukulele and coffee ready. Time to enjoy THG
Looking at the photos of the mine crater, you can see it's surrounded by fields of smaller size craters, to me this shows that much of the ordnance stored there was thrown into the air by the initial blast and detonated after falling back to the ground in the surrounding debris fields. One huge blast that contained a hell of a lot of smaller blasts from individual bombs going off all around the area would create that type of moonscape that looks like a scene from WW1.
This is the first time I have heard of this tragedy.
I've always said no picture does the site justice. It's not until you are there that you get a sense of the sheer size of the crater.
The scary thing is that there is still a significant amount of ordnance left in the tunnels.
I worked in a hotel in Tutbury back in 1978. After lunch service I would often go and walk around the local castle and also the adjoining church. It was there that I noticed a number of graves with the same date. At the time it was hard to find any information about what happened and I could not find where the crater was.
What a horrible disaster. I have never even heard of it until now.
While it still existed, one of the standing tasks of RAF Bomb Disposal was to visit the site on an annual basis, just to check if any buried UXO had made its way to the surface, which is something that it occasionally does.
I live near Fauld and have visited both the crater and the nearby pub.
When I was younger there was a local myth that it had been hit by a V2 rocket. This is obviously incorrect for two reasons:
1. The V2, like the V1, was completely unguided. It was a case of pointing them in the general direction and firing them off.
2 The V2 did not have the range to reach Fauld. The nearest to Fauld that one ever got was near Luton, some 90 miles to the south east.
Good video. More please! 🙂Subscribed. 👍
Shame on the person who sowed the canard that it was a V2
@@charlesburgoyne-probyn6044
Not sure about the word "canard", it was more of a rumour or a theory.
You need to keep in mind that the explosion happened during the strict censorship of wartime, a time when the capabilities of the V2 were not fully known to the military, let alone the general public.
Doubtless when folk were discussing what had happened some people would wonder if one of the new "Wonder weapons" was responsible. Which is exactly how rumours and conspiracy theories begin.
The Corsham underground MOD complex probably deserves an HG sometime. It includes part of Box tunnel, and reaches as far as Bradford on Avon. Reputed at one time to contain BR 9f steam locomotives as a strategic reserve. Unfortunately, that was just a gricers dream...
Thanks and blessings THG.
Doesn’t that complex include Turnstile, the Cold-War government HQ bunker?
@@GorgeDawes Yes, That was the Farliegh Rise entrance. When I first visited it in the 80s, it was derelict, and the favorite entry for trespassing.
I think Tom Scott found that many comments on his video of the event queried the statement that brass causes sparks, so he quoted the report more fully in the video description.
"in all probability the work of chipping out the C.E. [composition explosive] Exploder from a 1,000 lb M.C. bomb, using a brass chisel, was the cause of the explosion. It is known that C.E. will explode easily if struck between brass and steel surfaces".
(edit) I dug a bit deeper. We can't be sure (of course) that this was the cause, but an eyewitness had seen worker using a brass chisel, when the regulations were to use a wooden batten.
I remember my grandmother telling me of the time she lived in Lewiston,Idaho during WW2. There was an explosion in the direction of Hanford, Washington. The news reported an explosion at the Naval Weapons storage base in Idaho, which was in the opposite direction.
They had Itaiian POWs working in a munitions plant? No problemo!
My gran worked in Burton-upon-Trent hospital at the time of the explosion. Some of the windows were broken. And she remembered the ambulances leaving the place. Ive been to the crater myself a few years back. There's a monument to the killed Italian prisoners that were working there at the time.
I'm a United States Marine. The metal on our uniforms is brass. This, we were told, was because brass is too soft to make a spark. This made it safe to wear in powder rooms and ammo magazines. Since as far as I know, my drill instructors never lied to me (yes, I'm still convinced that I am 9 feet tall, bullet-proof and invisible), I find it odd that they blamed the explosion on someone using a brass tool in the storage area. Unless he was causing two harder metals to move against one another.
Another excellent video! I am surprised that scientists for the Manhattan Project didn't show up, like they did for the Halifax explosion.
The Halifax explosion was in 1917 so I guess they had to have made a time machine before making a nuke.
I looked for a couple minutes and couldn't find what explosion you might have been thinking of.
Could he be referring to the "cover story" for the first atomic test: that a munitions depot had blown up? @@ACME_Kinetics
@@Gail1Marie
Has to be it, although the scientists wouldn't have had to travel for that one. I eliminated the 100 ton pre-Trinity calibration "tower test" and actual nuclear explosions when I'd looked.
Clovis News-Journal, Jul 16 1945 has just such a cover story on page 6. Funny how "cover" stories can work.
And by Sept 17, the US Army was inviting reporters to Trinity site (which is worth a visit, open 2x yearly) to prove Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe.
Thanks for solving this.
My husband and I visited Trinity Site on the 70th anniversary of the first test. If you ever go, plan to stay in Socorro. It's still at least an hour's drive to the site after that, so get an early start (we're talking 0500 early). The McDonald ranch house (where the finally assembly was done--not in a tent as shown in "Oppenheimer,") was part of the tour. It was about three miles from the site, and it wasn't destroyed (but had very thick adobe walls). The other thing I'd highly recommend is visiting the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque first. You really get a feel for how electromechanical the first bomb was. And BTW, the Very Large Array radiotelescope west of Socorro is also open the first Saturday of the month, so you might want to visit that too as long as you're there.@@ACME_Kinetics
@@ACME_Kinetics I swear I remember them showing up to check out some giant conventional explosion for effects studies. I might be thinking of the Galveston explosion. :P
Good Monday morning History Guy and everyone watching...
This got the attention of the top US brass that knew about the Manhattan Project. The British obviously didn't want to talk about this, and couldn't understand why key US Army officers wanted all the details of the damages and effects.
Tom Scott did a video on this as well
You're right, I have never heard of this before...
I thought the whole reason ONLY brass tools are allowed in powder magazines such as on warships, and most fixtures in them were made of it was specifically because Brass DOESN'T cause sparks?
I can understand banging on a bomb fuze with a hammer and chisel setting it off, especially if it was jettisoned and possibly damaged or partially armed, but setting it off due to causing a "Spark" is almost literally impossible.
(Not criticizing you THG, Just that the inquiry is bogus and the "investigators" were likely either inept, covering their own asses, or most probable; both.)
Besides that inconsistency that is the fault of the inquiry, not you; great video as usual THG.
I live on Vancouver Island now but I was born in Kingstone a small village a couple of miles away from fauld the crater is huge but what's scary is it's believed that only about one third of the munitions actually went up... some people think it's a ticking time bomb if you'll pardon the pun
Correct me if I am wrong but a bronze chisel does not create sparks. Unless you use it on a fuse?
I only know what the report said.
I was a Naval engineer, we had bronze tools for used in places where flammable vapors may have been present. Wrenches and hammers but now I wonder if I ever saw a chisel. Thanks. @@TheHistoryGuyChannel
Brass will not create sparks against steel. But chiseling on a fuse sounds inherently dangerous regardless of the tools used.
@@TheHistoryGuyChannel This came up a lot in Tom Scott's video of the event, so he quoted the actual report. You've probably seen vastly more of the report than I have, but the bit Tom quoted didn't mention sparks. It said the explosive was known to detontate when struck between brass and steel, which may or may not be the same thing. Elsewhere I found that the approved tool was *wood.*
I appreciate you and thank you for making content.
As an Ex-Ammo troop I know the most dangerous thing about a bomb is the Fuse. I don't know why they would have mixed the 2 together in storage?
These were bombs that had been jettisoned and needed to be refurbished. The fuse was being removed with the chisel.
Same old answer; expediency, ambivalence & convenience. The Holy Trinity of 'accidents'.
@@HM2SGT just following orders
@@mito88 🤷 Too ignorant to know better
Agreed. It should have never gone in the mag fused.
Different times.
Notice all the hundreds of smaller craters around the main crater, caused by shells that only exploded after being blown out by the bigger blast.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this.
THG you rock! Peace
Excellent videos as always!! Many thanks 👍
I have visited the Lochnager and Hawthorn Ridge mine craters on The Somme Battlefield in France. I have also visited the Fauld crater,. It is only 30 miles away from where I live, and it makes the previous two, even though they themselves are huge, look like golf bunkers.
As far as I am aware, it is still the largest conventional ordnance explosion the world has ever seen.
Thank you, THG, for the informative and heart-felt retelling of this tragic tale which has been clearly under-reported.
Must have been one Hell of a Bang , liked the rolling Obituary at the end.
do the photos show artillery ammunition only?
I had the pleasure visiting the crater that was RAF Fault a few years ago. Quite an experience.
I have visited the crater and also read Nick Catford's excellent book on the subject. There are a number of videos on YT on the subject, but this is the best one I have seen. Great work.
wow never knew about this THANKS HISTOR GUY!!!!!
An excellent history of an event that took place about 25 miles from my home. Well done for getting ALL the place name pronunciations right!
Defusing a bomb in an ammunition storage facility housing 14,000 tons of explosive munitions. That must rank as one of the dumbest acts by a human being in history. Also being an military veteran, I concur with relectric69; the military always lays the blame on those who can no longer defend themselves. To this day personnel deployed to active service overseas often find themselves being billetted next to ammunition storage facilities. RIP to all those who died in this most appallingly preventable disaster.
Wow. Thanks for this video. I'd never heard of it, only of ammunition accidents in the US during the war, most of which were at ports. For what it's worth, 4k tons of TNT is about the size of a small tactical nuke. Being a little bit underground may have dampened the blast a little bit? I'm not sure.
At 8:38 I thought I was having a psychedelic flashback!
Massive amounts of explosives and forced labor, what could go wrong?
Right... not a single mention of forced labor. Not a single document of forced labor... but here you are with entitled ignorance.
The POWs were paid. After the armistice of Cassibile they were no longer enemies.
Respect to the Yank for pronouncing Staffordshire correctly.
But not Ilkeston.
😢 *¡sadly even military veterans sometimes exaggerate their experiences by not discussing them since they would expose themselves as liars!* - i am a former N.J.R.O.T.C. cadet and a former active duty u.S. Army 11B10 infantryman during the cold war period* 😢 - 3:22 pm Pacific Standard Time on Monday, 27 November 2023 that is exactly 79 years since the Monday, 27 November 1944 RAF Fauld explosion
Thank you for the lesson.
I grew up near the Umatilla Chemical Depot. There was always the worry that an accident could release chemical weapons upon the local population, but the only accident came from when conventional munitions were stored there; there was an accident in one of the bunkers and vaporized some soldiers, but no civilians were injured or killed.
I am impressed and grateful for the way you list the people who perished in disastrous events. For some it may be the only way they are remembered publicly long after their deaths. That is a kind and humane thing to do.
as you walk towards the hole, you find increasingly alarming lumps of rock...
Looking at thumb nail. What could possibly go wrong?
I like the stein in the upper left, the Robin Hood or bandit one…right out of 12 O’Clock High!
thanks
First time I hear o this despite coming form the UK.
A serious matter handled with appropriate sensetivity.
Joseph Warren is history that deserves to be remembered.
Back in the 1980's, I visited Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire, where another Bomb Dump had been constructed in the Bath Stone Mines. There was little left, since thieves had been in and stripped copper cabling and anything they could sell. However, the air conditioning and diesel generator were still there, along with a transformer that still served the village. (or had until someone tried to hacksaw it open) Originally, the munitions were stacked in cave like structures to try and ensure that there was separation to minimize the damage should an accident occur. Then they put in the air conditioning and put vent holes in the back of every cave, thus removing this simple safety measure. A Fire Point consisted of a bucket of sand.
Walking the crater you really get the scale of the blast the cock inn in nearby Hanbury has the story on the wall plus is a nice place for a post walk tipple 😊
I love this channel, espcially the credibility. However.... Brass tools are used to prevent sparks. Air force Fire crews have fancy sets of brass wrenches and so forth. Probably your source material mis-spoke, the unfortunate soldier was probably using a steel chisel INSTEAD of a brass one. Anyway, I just mentioned this because I understand these comments boost your business. Keep up the great work.
Always been interested in the Fauld explosion story as I used to drive past frequently to take the more scenic route to get from the A50 to Stafford via Abbots Bromley and Blythefield reservoir, if you drive from Hanbury to coton in the clay the crater is on the left but if you look to the right the hill appears to have a flat top, rumour has it the top was sheared off by the force of the explosion.