anant_s
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2012
- Messages
- 5,600
- Reaction score
- 92
- Country
- Location
A British Lancaster drops a Grand Slam over Germany. The 22,000-lb. bomb was one of the biggest conventional weapons of World War Two. (Image source: WikiCommons)
FOR 14-YEAR-OLD Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea and the other inhabitants of the Basque capital of Guernica, April 27, 1937 was just another Monday market day. At 4:30 p.m., most of the city’s 7,000 residents were in the streets shopping in the late afternoon sunshine. Although much of Spain had been rocked by civil war for nearly a year, this particular Republican enclave had so far been spared.
Iriondo recalled how suddenly the bells in the local church began to peal, the signal that hostile aircraft were approaching the city. Locals knew the sound well — they’d heard it on several occasions in recent days. But each time, the warning had proved to be a false alarm.
“No one took it seriously,” Iriondo told the German magazine Spiegel in 2012.
He grudgingly took shelter at the urging of an overly cautious elder.
“If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be alive,” he admitted.
Guernica was destroyed mostly by 110-pound bombs.
Within moments, the skies above Guernica were filled with enemy warplanes. No sooner had they appeared than they released three-dozen bombs onto the city centre. Iriondo recalls the relentless earsplitting cacophony of explosions and the violent shockwaves that assaulted his body as the weapons blasted apart nearby buildings. Smoke and dust rapidly filled the dank cellar.
“We thought we would suffocate. One of us tried to light a match, but there wasn’t enough oxygen,” Iriondo told the magazine.
After 30 minutes of hell, the bombardment ended. But the calm didn’t last; the planes soon returned with another deadly payload. By the time it was all over, Guernica was in ruins. Three-quarters of the city’s buildings were destroyed and at least 126 lay dead beneath the debris.
Tragically, the infamous raid would become a blueprint for the massive strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two and beyond. Yet, much of the devastation that day was caused by relatively “light” 110-lb. bombs. The bombardments of future wars would see much heavier ordnance dropped than that. In fact, some of the bombs used later would be so massive they’d make the weapons released over Guernica look like mere firecrackers by comparison. Consider these outsized explosives:
The Gotha Bomb
An assortment of bombs dropped from German Gotha bombers. (Image source: Wikicommons)
The first bombs ever dropped from aircraft were hand-sized weapons. As early as the 1911 Turkish War, aviators tossed the small charges from their cockpits onto the enemy below. During the First World War, air forces began releasing larger, purpose-built ordnance from increasingly sophisticated aircraft. On Feb. 16, 1918, a German Gotha heavy bomber taking part in a raid on England loosed a 2,200-lb. bomb, the biggest in history up to that point, onto the city of London. The record-breaking weapon struck the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.
The SC 2500
A German SC 2500 bomb. (Image source: WikiCommons.)
Twenty-two years later, German bombs would again be raining down on London, the largest of which was the SC 1800 Satan. The 4,000-lb. weapon was designed to be carried by the Heinkel He-111. The Nazi SC 2500 was even larger. At 5,500-lbs, it was the heaviest German free-fall bomb of the war.Upkeep
Follow the bouncing bomb: Britain’s Vickers Type 464. (Image source: WikiCommons)
Britain’s famous Dam Busters used 19 specially fitted Avro Lancasters to deliver the top-secret water-skimming Vickers Type 464 Upkeep bombs onto the Möhne and Edersee dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. The cylindrical weapons weighed in at an impressive 9,250-lbs — enough to blast a hole though several feet of concrete.The Tallboy
A stockpile of Tallboys. (image source: WikiCommons)
The following year, the RAF unveiled its 12,000-lb. Tallboy bomb. The weapons, of which more than 300 were manufactured, were used in nearly three-dozen raids on fortified targets throughout Nazi-occupied Europe including V-1 and V-2 launch sites, railroad tunnels and U-boat pens. The most famous Tallboy target was the German battleship Tirpitz. It was damaged and later destroyed by Lancasters armed with the enormous weapons.
Grand Slam
The Grand Slam. (Image source: WikiCommons)
Even the Tallboy was dwarfed by Britain’s Grand Slam, a massive 22,000-lb. “earthquake bomb” designed to crack the toughest nuts in the Third Reich. A total of 42 of the outsized weapons were used in the final two months of the war. They were dropped on German viaducts, bridges and submarine pens with devastating effect.
Cloudmaker
The T-12 Cloudmaker. (Image source: WikiCommons)
The United States doubled down on the Grand Slam concept in 1944 began testing a devastating demolition bomb known as the T-12 Cloudmaker. The 43,000-lb. weapon was aerodynamically engineered to penetrate deep into a structure before going off. None were ever dropped in anger and the program was discontinued in 1948.
) .
