Britain’s BIGGEST BANG!

Sparked in a secret bomb depot, it killed 70 people, laid waste to 1,000 acres, and was felt as far away as Morocco. Then came a conspiracy of silence. Now, 75 years on, what really caused...

THE sound of the explosion was like a thousand thunderclaps. The earth quaked, buildings collapsed — and everyone who heard it in the sleepy Staffordshire village of Hanbury and on the farms around twigged immediately what it was.

As a huge mushroom cloud ballooned up into the air, the same terrible thought possessed them: ‘The Dump’s gone up!’

‘There was a blinding flash,’ a villager would later recall, ‘and the ground I was standing on shook under my feet. Lumps of clay as big as railway engines soared up in the sky.’

At least 70 people died on that grim day — November 27, 1944 — in what turned out to be the largest ever blast in Britain, many times greater than anything that happened in the Blitz, and arguably one of the world’s greatest accidental explosions.

The blast was immense, so loud it rattled church spires in Burton-on-Trent, seven miles away, and shattered glass windows

in and Morocco, twitched, detected the The And distant true seismographs rumble yet an Coventry. cause the Geneva thinking earthquake. was authorities heard of as this and far they in tragedy London, away Rome kept had as shrouded many total The surprise. decades. explosion in official didn’t secrecy come as for a

The Everyone Dump in and the area what knew went about on there supposed even to. though they were not

Its very existence was a closely guarded military secret.

Officially it was designated No 21 Maintenance Unit, RAF Fauld, which sounded harmless enough. But this hid its real purpose — as a massive underground arsenal containing tens of thousands of deadly blockbuster bombs, the biggest packed with several tons of high explosives.

Since the outbreak of World War II, bombs had been brought to this quiet corner of rural England from the munitions factories in towns and cities where they were made, and stacked and stored inside a vast labyrinth of subterranean chambers, ready to be distributed to Bomber Command and U.S. Air Force aerodromes across eastern England.

Their ultimate destination was Hitler’s Germany — dropped from the British and American bombers that 75 years ago were devastating the factories and cities of the Third Reich.

Tight security marked the entrance to what had once been an extensive mine, where alabaster and gypsum, the ingredients of plaster, had been dug out since Roman times.

Now the disused workings housed the country’s biggest munitions store and the people of Hanbury were sitting right on top of it, going about their everyday rural lives and with no choice but to turn a blind eye to the potential deathtrap underneath them.

NINETy feet underground — beneath bluebell woods and green pasture — dingy, half-lit tunnels 12ft high and 20ft wide filled with racks of massive bombs snaked out in all directions for two miles.

There were smaller incendiary bombs, too, plus 500 million rounds of rifle ammunition packed in crates — all the essentials to deliver death and destruction, tucked away in the unassuming English countryside.

It was a hive of round-the-clock activity down there, with 1,000 staff — half civilian workers, the rest RAF personnel, plus a contingent of Italian prisoners of war co-opted from their nearby internment camp — supervising the constant traffic of weaponry in and out.

It had the atmosphere of ‘an eerie Aladdin’s cave’, according to one observer, but a few in the know

who realised the sheer amount of high explosive packed in such a confined space feared this was an accident waiting to happen.

They were proved right when, just before 11am one sunny Monday, without warning, the place went up in that monumental explosion, killing, maiming and devastating the whole area — an event recalled by eye-witnesses in a new book, Voices From The Explosion.

Written by Valerie Hardy, who grew up on a farm in the area, it marks the 75th anniversary this year of one of World War II’s littleremembered catastrophes, and one that — while on the other side of the Channel our armies were battling their way through to victory over Hitler — happened on our own shores.

A child of eight at the time, she recalls ‘the terrifying suddenness’ with which the war came to what until then had been a demi-paradise of peace and tranquillity.

The result of the blast in the Hanbury area itself was utter devastation as an entire hilltop was blown to smithereens.

One farm, Castle Hays, directly above the explosion, was wiped out as if it had never existed, replaced by a crater half a mile long and 300ft deep.

‘The whole of Stonepit Hill burst open,’ a local recalled. ‘I saw a tree, roots intact, flying through the air. Stones, bits of fencing and machinery were all jumbled up together. When the blast reached me, it flung me 90 yards into a ploughed field.’ Then came the deadly fall-out. A huge mushroom-shaped black cloud spewed thousands of feet into the air before raining millions of tons of earth, rock, boulders and tree trunks back on the ground.

And bodies, too — of several farm workers caught in the blast (two were never found), along with 200 cattle and sheep that had been grazing on the pasture. A horse flung into the air lay impaled on iron railings.

Fires broke out everywhere. Craters pitted the land as far as the eye could see. All familiar landmarks disappeared. A thousand acres of farmland were laid waste. It looked like ‘hell on earth’, said one eyewitness. Another recalled: ‘The earth was scorched as if in pain. Where once men toiled, women baked bread and children played, there was devastation, a wasteland.’

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the shock burst the banks of a reservoir, flooding the area with six million gallons of water and turning the fallen earth to a sea of sticky, lethal mud, 10ft deep in places, which reminded old soldiers of the horrors they had seen on the Somme in the Great War and hoped never to witness again.

In the village school, the 30 pupils cowered under their desks as the blackboard crashed down and rocks and roof tiles fell around them. To keep spirits up, their teacher, Miss Farndon, led them in choruses of There’ll Always Be An England.

Miraculously none was hurt. Many children, though, returned that night to a cottage where a father caught up in the disaster would never be coming home.

The death toll was greatest at Ford’s Mine and Plaster Works situated next to the dump and still a working mine. Its sizeable workforce were employed in extracting and processing gypsum and cement.

Buildings on the surface — the mill, the smithy, huts where the plaster was rolled out, a couple of cottages — were destroyed. Twenty-six people died there, either trapped in the twisted wreckage of buildings or buried in the deep sludge as water from the reservoir poured in.

The blacksmith was found with his anvil blasted into his back.

Below ground there was carnage, too. Twenty-one men were working