Anybody know what this is?

[Pistolero]

Not mine - showed up on Fox News, a kid took it to show and tell in
England. Apparently some left over WW2 item.

My guess is an incendiary submunition, but no real idea. I thought somebody might
know what it is. Some sort of a plastic looking fwd section, perhaps inert?

Holes for flames to escape for an incindiary? Germans dropped huge quantities of
incindiaries over English cities.

 

[462]

Not anything I've ever seen before.

Being very familiar with napalm, the canister needs to open up, to spread the stuff, while white phosphorus ignites it. Whatever it is, I doubt that it's an incendiary devise.

 

[Pistolero]

It looks small to me, although no scale other than the burlap weave. I est 2" diam, which makes me think submunition,
and AFAIK the only submunitions in WW2 were incindiaries.

Bill

 

[Pistolero]

BINGO!

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/german-incendiary-bombs

Bill

 

[fiver]

you'd think it would have a nose piece to set off the flame.
or I guess it could just shoot out the end from a chemical action.

 

[Pistolero]

IIRC, they had a chemical fusing delay system that set them off , not sure if impact or when
the submunition left the canister, maybe a pin in one of those holes.

But as an EOD friend once explained when I said I was amazed at how brave he was -"Hell, the
damed thing was broken and didn't work when it was new. It is pretty unlikely to have healed
up after 70 years." Kinda made sense to me, but I still don't want to be around UNEXO. EVER.

We were talking about him helping out on an uncovered German 3000 lb bomb in a schoolyard
in England when he was stationed there.

Bill

 

[fiver]

I remember seeing film where 4-5 big bombs would come out then a cluster of about 15 little ones then a few more big bombs would come out again.
I didn't put together they were 'fire bombing' a city watching it.

 

[462]

Okay, I was wrong.

I reckon a lot changed between the 1940s and 1968-1969.
A 750-gallon napalm canister is what I was familiar with.

 

[freebullet]

If he brought it to show & tell they should have included the boys story about it.

 

[RBHarter]

Little tidbit about the other side .
In and around Berlin they do 350-400 detonations per year of UXO . It's mostly ours from WWII . We dumped some huge number of tons of ordinance on Berlin from 1/1/45-VE . I don't remember the tons number but being in the business I do remember that almost immediately I and the boys added up rail cars . Without locomotives the cars would have stretched from more or less Reno to the west side of the Bonneville Salt flats . With locos it would have easily reached Salt Lake . That's a lot of bombs 500-750# at a time .

 

[fiver]

I recall a remark someone made about ordinance in france after the wars there.
they said something like 400 square miles of france is uninhabitable because of all the ordinance and chemicals still in the ground.
then I thought about it a bit more, states like Utah are about 400 miles from top to bottom.
france can't be much bigger than that.

 

[Brad]

Much of the trouble ground in France is from WW1. Lots of chemical weapon shells left in the ground.
Utah is 84K sq miles, France is 248K.

 

[RBHarter]

Yeah 40 sqmi is only 5×8 or 4×10 miles .

I used to live in a county just a few 1000 miles smaller than Maryland .

 

[Pistolero]

We spent part of a week going over the Somme WW1 battlefield last June. They are pretty well
recovered, mostly wheat and barley fields now, but LOTS of military cemeteries, EVERYWHERE.

One huge crater, they left and it is a war memorial now. Several recently (last 10 years) discovered
bodies in the immediate area were repatriated. The crater is from a mine, hundreds tons of
explosives in a tunnel under the German mines. They detonated it and another one like it about
a mile away to start the assault on July 1, 1916. That day 30,000 British soldiers died. The crater is
about 150 yds across, unreal.

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/somme/memorial-lochnagar-crater.htm

They apparently leave WW1 shells that they plow up in the spring by their mail box to be picked
up by the authorities, the reverse of mail delivery.

If you get a chance, and you have to go online and look for it, see the documentary, recently created
from Imperial War Museum footage, restored wonderfully - They Shall Not Grow Old.

Really, really well done.

Bill

 

[Pistolero]

This kind of incendiary, from reading about it by Churchill and others was a submunition that landed on roofs
and such and spewed out flaming debris a few feet around it to set fire to houses.

Ours were similar in concept, I think smaller sticks, no fins and spewed out the ends. Burned down a
bunch of German and more Japanese cities.

Bill

 

[Brad]

The Imperial War Museum is a pretty impressive place. The area dedicated to the holocaust is sobering. Equally sobering in ways is the extra exhibit we saw on people who won the Victoria Cross, the British version of the Medal of Honor. Seeing a description of the actions and in some cases actual remnants of equipment or weapons leaves you speechless. The bravery and selflessness of so many in combat is amazing.

 

[Brad]

This kind of incendiary, from reading about it by Churchill and others was a submunition that landed on roofs
and such and spewed out flaming debris a few feet around it to set fire to houses.

Ours were similar in concept, I think smaller sticks, no fins and spewed out the ends. Burned down a
bunch of German and more Japanese cities.

Bill

We used a couple kinds. Some used napalm and dribbled fire. Some used magnesium which also is excellent st igniting almost anything flammable. It is also very difficult to extinguish. The US interspersed a few traditional bombs to destroy water mania, block roads, and kill firefighters. With the traditional wood construction in Japan their cities were literally a tinderbox.
We bombed Hisoshima and Nagasaki with a atom booms because larger cities were already largely destroyed by firebombing.

 

[popper]

Copper disk, acid in glass bottle. Wrapped a bunch up with a droge chute to spread them. Bouncing Betty was the real nasty.

 

[Pistolero]

We are going to the Imperial War Museum in Sept. Going to see some historic races at
Goodwood, drive some race cars on the track (before the races) and see a lot of naval
stuff around London and Portsmouth.

Bill

 

[Pistolero]

Yes, 462, the targets were way different. In WW2 both sides were burning cities, and in
Vietnam and Korea, we were attacking troops in the open and in bunkers. So, napalm made
more sense, nothing very flammable in the jungle, way different than a city.

I just wondered if some EOD guy had been trained on old WW2 ordinance. Apparently they
are, since it is still found laying around.

I guessed close enough that a Bing search found it.

Bill