NEWSLETTER NO. 3- Jun 2004

The front page of a newsletter can be used for many purposes - but it is not often that a History Society can report something that is not only history but also a current piece of news! Many will have seen the record in The Courier at the beginning of June about the unearthing of a bomb in The Dens south east of Wadhurst; below is the offending object. After a patch of ground had been cleared with a digger for a new vegetable patch, the owner's daughter-in-law was rotovating the ground, when she hit a large lump of metal; Glynn Greenfield began to clear around it and exposed the front end [to the right of the picture]; the metal was corroded but there seemed to be a hole about 11/2" by 1", which looked like a hole for a fuse that has been removed. Further clearance revealed the full length of the bomb - about 31/2 ft and 10" diameter. There was no evidence of fins and the back end was open; the front end was extremely heavy. The police were called - and arrived in 20 minutes; to inspect it, Glynn moved the bomb and concluded it weighed around 250 kg.

Although the explosive had clearly been emptied from the bomb, the Royal Logistics Corps bomb disposal unit was called in for advice. Their assessment was that the bomb was almost certainly a penetration device or 'bunker buster'. It lacked any sign of a hook on the front end, which suggests it was carried by a Stuka, in a rack under the wing ; other German bombers had their bomb loads hanging vertically in the belly of the airframe. The aircraft was probably on an attack mission against pillboxes or the nearby railway line; the date - early in the war around 1940 when the Germans were thinking of invasion and bombing our defences and transport systems.

The RLC have not been able to find any records of the defusing of this bomb but it was not unusual for bombs to be steamed out close to where they fell - and then left to rot away. But this one has some unusual features: the casing has corroded in places to expose the construction of the body of the weapon, which looks more like a fragmentation weapon designed to produce shrapnel on explosion rather than a deep crater so the RLC has taken the casing for further research and will report any interesting findings.

There are surely many more such bombs around so, if digging deep near the railway, watch out!