Description
Major Hartley’s “Unexploded Bomb” is a story of high adventure, deadly danger, courage and sacrifice, a historical source document for “Danger: UXB”, a cracking good read and an awful indictment of human behavior. Because, ultimately, its about dealing with a pretty evil act, bombs dropped all across a nation, mostly in civilian places because most of any country is indisputably civilian. Given the initial act, then, this is a book about the astonishingly successful work of the British Army Engineers (and Conscientious Objectors, and others) in discovering, rendering safe and removing German bombs which had not yet exploded, during WWII.
No-one had planned to do this, although bombs were well known weapons, employed by the British themselves. Hartley’s stories are helped by the particular system of arming bombs which the Nazi Luftwaffe chose. It was unlike anything used by anyone else and so the full details of how it worked, how it was used, how it was defeated and how it evolved can be laid out in great detail. Most unexploded bombs in the UK were found by digging tunnels down 10 to 40 feet or more, based on sometimes obscure clues at the surface. The digging was back breaking work, done with a live bomb as the goal and the constant danger of annihilation. It was done by enlisted men, and the Consciousness Objectors mentioned above. Then the officer would descend and attempt to ‘safe’ the bomb. Can there be a higher tension story?
Approximate size of book and weight. All books with be shipped Media Mail, but
we still need to know if it is oversized or extremely heavy.
Dimension: 5 ¾” x 8 ½” x 1 ½” inches Weight: 2.06 lbs.
