Hacker News Comments on "Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams" Amazon Repository

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Hacker News Comments on
Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams

James Owen · 1 HN comments

HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams" by James Owen.

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Amazon Summary

Autumn 1940: the Front Line is now Britain itself. Cities are blitzed night after night and even after the bombers have turned for home, a deadly menace remains: thousands upon thousands of UXBs. Buried underground, their clocks ticking remorselessly, unexploded bombs blocked supply routes, emptied hospitals and left families refugees. Dealing with this threat soon became Churchill's priority. This desperate struggle became a battle of wits that pitted German ingenuity against British resourcefulness, including such extradinary figures as Robert Davies GC, who saved St Paul's Cathedral, and John Hudson, the modest horticulturalist who mastered the V1.

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Nov 30, 2022 · btilly on Using rats to clear land mines in Cambodia

How the bomb disposal experts first learned their craft is insane. https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Uxb-Heroic-Story-Disposal/dp/0... has the story.
Short version, the person working with the bomb would call out what they saw, then do what the partner said. The partner had a book and was out of the blast radius. They recorded it all, and if the bomb blew up would write down not to do THAT again!
Eventually they learned to somewhat reliably disarm the bombs by this type of trial and error. And then the other side would add better booby traps to stop them from succeeding.
Crazy.

⬐ midoridensha
The way to do that safely (for your own people) is to use enemy POWs to disable the bomb.

⬐ eCa
Which of course is a war crime.

⬐ hef19898
And of course, it absolutely happened during WW2.

⬐ actionfromafar
Denmark did it with captured German soldiers, so also after WW2.

Hacker News Comments on Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams

Hacker News Stories and Comments

Hacker News Comments on
Danger Uxb: The Heroic Story of the WWII Bomb Disposal Teams