Wartstein wrote: ↑Sun Jun 06, 2021 7:28 am
Salt 2 again, seen here on a fragment of an US bomb from the (end of) the second world war.
I am lot on my way in the mountains close to the city of Salzburg (my hometown) - close, but they have still many really remote places where very rarely or even almost never humans set their feet. And there one can stumble over remains of WW2 bombs quite frequently, many a lot larger than the one in the pic (I even know two wrecks of US bombers that crashed in WW2 in the mountains around).
One buddy of mine who also likes to explore remote areas in our mountains once even found a live/still explosive bomb that had to be defused then.
Some brief history, for those who are interested in such things:
Salzburg is a city in Austria, and Austria was part of the Nazi Third Reich (in fact Austria was the first country occupied by the Nazis - ("occupied" is technically true, but still more than debatable - but it would go too far to discuss this here))
So at the end of WW2 from October 1944 to May 1945 American bomber formations flew overall 15 attacks against the city, but it was not as severe as in some German cities ("just" around 550 casualties overall) - more destruction and deaths could be avoided, since one Austrian colonel (Lepperdinger) surrendered the city to the US troops on May 4th against the will and orders of his (Nazi) superiors. One example when insubordination was a more than good deed imho...
The pilots did not aim to hurt civilians or civilian buildings, their targets were of strategical nature, like the train station and some production facilities. (Sad, but true: Due to the craziness of the Nazis these attacks where really necessary in order to end the war and their evil regime).
The planes had to stay pretty high though, like 7000 to 8000 meters (23000 to 26000 feet) due to the still existing air defense which made proper aiming difficult considering the equipment back then, there were malfunctions and sometimes they had to unload bombs on their way back in remote areas in order to keep the planes light enough.
Long story short
: This is why there are still not too few remains of WW2 bombs in the mountains around my hometown.