Going Off With a Bang
Ken Bland of Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear remembers:
In the summer of 1957, I was an RAF National Serviceman attached to 5131 Bomb Disposal Squadron based at RAF Morton Hall, Lincolnshire. In late summer, I was part of a small detachment whose task it was to clear a bombing range just off the Norfolk coast in The Wash. The range was located at Breast Sand, a tidal beach not far from King’s Lynn.
The primary target on the range was a tank landing craft which had been beached there in 1947. The area around the landing craft was littered with practice bombs dropped over the years. The ordnance still had to be treated with care, as practice bombs still contained a small explosive charge, as well as a certain amount of magnesium known as a spotting charge. When the bomb exploded on impact, the magnesium gave off a bright flash, which gave an indication to the aircrew how good their aim was. Our base when working at Breast Sand was at a World War Two airfield at Bircham Newton, near Fakenham, Norfolk. Our working day varied as we had to take into consideration the tidal system – we could only work for two hours either side of low tide. At all other times our area of work was under water. Getting from the shoreline to the target was not easy as there were large areas of mud flats and mussel beds before you reached the sandy beach. The mud flats had deep gullies carved into them by the incoming tides, so you had to be quite agile to negotiate them.
It was quite pleasant working on the beach and a big change from my fiveyear apprenticeship in the factory and shipyard on Tyneside before starting my National Service.
However, I did have one concern: there were several ranges along that stretch of coast as it was a remote area. Just to the north of us was a rocket-firing range used at the time by the US Air Force. It was quite a spectacular sight to watch the US Sabre and Starfighter planes making low-level attacks and firing their rockets at the target. I just hoped the US pilots were well briefed and did not mistake the landing craft as their target.
Although our main area of interest was clearing all the practice bombs around the landing craft, we also had to check the wider area for any stray ordnance that may have fallen well wide of the target.
This consisted of a visual search, and we were strung out in a line keeping a watch for anything unusual. On this day we were carrying out our visual search and had stopped to knock in a marker post to indicate the area we had covered.
As we were standing waiting to move on, one of the lads along the line noticed a hump in the sand. When he prodded it with his spade, it gave off a metallic clang. After carefully scraping away the sand, we uncovered a medium-size bomb, a real one. This concentrated our search and we spotted another “hump”. This was getting serious. Sighting a line between the two bombs, we eventually uncovered four more along that line.
We knew straight away they were
British bombs rather than German. This was obvious from the tail units and fusing systems as the Germans used a completely different arrangement. How did they get there? We can only speculate. It was considered the most likely scenario would be that a British bomber on a raid over Germany had got into trouble. This could have been mechanical, or the aircraft may have suffered damage from enemy flak or German night fighters. So, after turning back and not wanting to attempt to land a damaged aircraft with a bomb load, it had ditched them into the sea. Only they were a lot closer to the shore than the aircrew may have realised, and there they had remained for up to 16 or 17 years.
As it was a remote area, it was decided to blow them up where they lay. An explosive charge and detonator connected to an electrical cable was placed on each bomb and they were detonated from a safe distance. This was a job for our officers, with yours truly and his mates well out of the way.
My summer of 1957 working on the beach ended with a bang, or six come to that.
Prodding the sand with a spade gave off a metallic clang. We had discovered a bomb.