Tallboy bomb neutralised in a flash! - video

This afternoon (Tuesday, 13 October), at 2.30pm, a deflagration operation was carried out on a Tallboy bomb found at the bottom of the Piast Canal.

Although the operation was described as extremely dangerous and the angles were planned for 3 to 5 days, the mine divers of the 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla dealt with the problem in no time. The giant aerial bomb, a leftover from Allied air raids during World War II, posed a serious threat. The specific operation of the Tallboy bomb and the amount of explosive could have caused serious damage. In turn, the detonation itself would have been felt within a radius of several kilometres.

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The deflagration process turned into detonation. The object can be considered neutralised and will no longer pose a threat on the Szczecin – Świnoujście fairway. The mine divers were all outside the danger zone. All assumed safety measures took into account the possibility of the deflagration process passing into detonation. The applied method did not carry any risk for soldiers and people involved in the operations – informed Grzegorz Lewandowski from the Navy

A dangerous colossus

The found Tallboy aerial bomb is a monster weighing 5340 kg. During the Second World War, only the Avro Lancaster was capable of dropping bombs of this type. However, this heavy, four-engine British bomber had to be specially prepared to carry the Tallboy. For this type of mission, the armament and armour of the aircraft had to be dismantled in order to maximise the weight of the machine.

Dangerous find was discovered on 16 September 2019 by employees of the German company Seaterra, which specialises in finding objects of this type. The company at Checking the bottom of the canal, ahead of the planned deepening of the Szczecin-Swinoujscie waterway, was employed by the Maritime Office in Szczecin.

Due to the fact that the British Tallboy bomb was located 100 metres from Karsibór ferry crossingThe explosion resulting from its detonation would be felt over a radius of several kilometres. In addition, mechanism of action The Tallboy was designed to transfer all the energy of the explosion to nearby objects, destroying them as if in an earthquake and making their repair very difficult and highly uneconomic.

Although the problem may not be limited to one bomb. Tallboy is probably a remnant of a raid carried out on 16 April 1945. At that time RAF aircraft attempted to sink the German cruiser Lützow, which was in the channel. As a total of 14 bombs of this type were dropped, some of them may still be lying on the bottom.