How a wartime message from Hitler ground city to a halt...
IT plummeted from the sky to rain death and destruction on the hardy wartime souls of inner city Birmingham.
Fortunately for anyone near Priory Road in Aston during the Blitz, the deadly German bomb failed to explode.
Instead it waited 76 years to wreak its havoc when it was discovered by construction workers – shortly after 9.45am on Monday – sparking a full-scale evacuation of homes and businesses nearby.
A 500-metre cordon was set up and Army bomb disposal experts called in to examine the explosive – a Luftwaffe SC250 bomb.
Weighing 250kg, it was one of the largest unexploded German bombs discovered in Britain since the war.
Unfortunately the cordon encompassed the nearby Aston Expressway, M6, and Cross City train line – sealing the fate for thousands of commuters, rail passengers and lorry drivers for two working days.
It may have been more than 70 years old but the unexploded bomb was far from a mere relic – though few expected Birmingham’s major traffic artery to be closed for two whole working days.
The Army bomb disposal experts are called out across the country to deal with World War II grenades, mortars and bombs on an almost daily basis.
But high explosive, air-delivered German bombs are the most dangerous and must be handled with great care because they are fitted with a variety of different fuses.
Some of the fuses were designed to detonate on impact while others featured a time-delay.
Old bombs become more unstable over the course of 70 years due to chemical degradation within the fuses. Normally, once a fuse has been neutralised, a bomb still has to be destryed and are often relocated to a remote site and detonated with modern explosives.
But due to the size and corroded nature of the Aston bomb, the Army decided it would have to be destroyed on site.
The bomb could have been dropped during the massive air raids of either November 19 or 20, 1940, according to city historian Prof Carl Chinn.
And he warned it was clear many other bombs remain hidden below ground across the city.
He said: “This area was bombed very heavily.
“Birmingham was a major munitions centre – there was General Electric, Kynoch, while Dunlop made so many of the tyres that were needed.
“In Aston there were also smaller factories and workshops, next to back-to-back homes.
“It’s most likely that it was dropped on November 19, the worst raid in Birmingham, or the next night, when Queens Road was destroyed by a huge bomb.
“Queens Road is right by where this bomb was found and it was dropped from 40,000ft – imagine the velocity and the power. “This is low-lying ground, it’s soft. “If it doesn’t go off, it’s going to go into the earth.”
Although not the first attack on the city, November 19 marked the first of several heavy bombing raids on Birmingham.
It saw 441 bombers from Hitler’s Luftwaffe attack, killing 450 people and badly injuring 54 others.
Factories damaged in the raid included Lucas Industries and the GEC works, while more than 50 workers were killed at the Birmingham Small Arms Company factory, with rifle production halted for three months as a result.
The following night 200 bombers returned for another heavy raid, dropping 118 tonnes of explosives and 9,500 incendiaries, causing widespread damage.
A third consecutive major raid followed on November 21/22, causing 600 fires and destroying the city’s water supply.
The vast majority of unexploded bombs (UXBs) unearthed today were dropped on Britain during the war, though other old shells have been found close to former munitions factories.
But it is impossible to know how many are still out there, said Matt Brosnan, a historian at the Imperial War Museum.
“The Luftwaffe dropped 24,000 tonnes of high explosive on London alone in 85 major raids during the war,” he said.
“Clearly, not all of those would have exploded and they could have buried themselves tens of feet below the surface. So we simply don’t know where they are.”
Most of the bombs are unlikely to explode, Mr Brosnan said, but their threat should not be underestimated and deaths have occurred over the years.
An excavator driver died at the hands of a buried RAF bomb near Bonn, in Germany, in 2014.
“The risk is in their unpredictability,” Mr Brosnan added. “They are inherently unstable and still contain explosives, which is why they are treated so seriously and have to be disposed of properly and safely.”
Most bombs stumbled across are discovered by builders digging foundations.
As far back as 2009, the Construction Industry Research and Information Association estimated that between 2006 and 2009 about 15,000 devices, including grenades, had been removed from construction sites.
Mike Luedicke, deputy commander of the Army’s UK bomb disposal unit, who co-ordinated the Birmingham operation, said that the Aston device had been a particularly complex case because the fuses were on the underside, pressed into the earth.
He said: “Our process of identification and diagnostics has been a real challenge. We need to either magnetically or chemically freeze the fuses to essentially put a handbrake on them”.
Because of difficulty, the Army unit built a bunker of 250 tonnes of sand over the top of the rusting device.
“Eventually the bomb was detonated shortly after 3.30pm on Tuesday after lying dormant below a patch of wasteland for 76 years... and two days of high drama.
The controlled explosion was huge, throwing clouds of sand and smoke high into the air and damaging a nearby building.
The blast echoed throughout the city – and maybe back down the years – another small act of defiance from Birmingham seven decades after Hitler’s Blitz.