A Look at EOD At War During 1945
The accident sparked a lively debate on which method or delivery vehicle (ship/barge or aircraft) should be used to transport military munitions to sea for disposal. The debate started by a letter written by the father of a Navy Lt that lost his life in the unfortunate incident. In his letter to the War Department Dated October 30, 1945, Mr. King protested the use of ships in the delivery of munitions to be dumped at sea due to the amount of handling necessary to load and transport the munitions out to their final disposal location. He questioned why aircraft bombers were not used as the delivery means to dispose of munitions at sea.
"Dealing with unexploded bombs, the most hazardous job behind the front lines was handled jointly by British and American bomb disposal crews. Strictly speaking, the RAF [Royal Air Force] personnel removed duds and time bombs striking British fields and installations, and the AAF [American Air Forces] handles those landing on U.S. Army sites. But owing to the density of U.S. installations in the war-torn England, American and RAF bomb disposal crew usually worked together.
The bulletin outlines a special EOD diving, recovery and disposal operation in the Tokyo Bay in 1956. At the end of WWII the Japanese hastily dumped thousands of munitions including CWM filled ones in nearby waters. In one instance they dumped 177 mustard filled bombs in a shallow water area ranging in depth from 30 to 40 feet. After being submerged for over 10 years they were almost forgotten about until Japanese salvage divers happened upon them when they were searching for scrap metal. The U.S. military was brought in to assess the situation. They decided that it would be best to recover the bombs and dispose of them "properly" by dumping them in much deeper waters.
The two images below are examples of the types of images that were donated. The first image taken in August 1952 at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts shows two EOD soldiers training on a 150lbs bomb at the bottom of a large pit. The second image taken in July 1942 shows members of an EOD unit being trained in Puerto Rico on the process of uncovering buried UXO.
UXOInfo.com is very excited about the information donation and we look forward to posting the data for all users to access. If you have any unclassified images, documents, and reports on UXO that you would like to donate to our free on-line UXO document library and UXO photo gallery please email them to information@uxoifno.com.