U.S. World War II Bomb Explodes at Japan Airport
The bomb caused runway damage and cancelled 80 flights. Thankfully it did not hurt anyone.
A 500-pound U.S. bomb dropped on Japan in World War II exploded at the Miyazaki Airport on Wednesday.
The bomb caused runway damage and canceled 80 flights. Thankfully, it did not hurt anyone.
Miyazaki Airport is located 702 miles south of Tokyo.
Officials said an investigation by the Self-Defense Forces and police confirmed that the explosion was caused by a 500-pound U.S. bomb and there was no further danger. They were determining what caused its sudden detonation.
A video recorded by a nearby aviation school showed the blast spewing pieces of asphalt into the air like a fountain. Videos broadcast on Japanese television showed a crater in the taxiway reportedly about 7 yards in diameter and 3 feet deep.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said more than 80 flights had been canceled at the airport, which hopes to resume operations on Thursday morning.
“There is no threat of a second explosion, and police and firefighters are currently examining the scene,” Hayashi said.
Crazy.
The Japanese Defense Ministry said the government had found many unexploded bombs in the area.
The Japanese built Miyazaki Airport in 1943 to train the Imperial Japanese Navy flights.
Kamikaze pilots used the airport to take off for their suicide missions.
🚨 A bomb from World War II that was dropped by the U.S. exploded at an airport in Japan, damaging the runway and causing 80 flights to be canceled. pic.twitter.com/IHROp5f9Hx
— BigBreakingWire (@BigBreakingWire) October 2, 2024
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I’ve got to wonder how deep a “dud” 500 lb WWII bomb would penetrate such that no one would notice it was there? Was that area dirt or runway when it was a Japanese AF training base?
We didn’t drop just one regular high explosive bomb at a time. If the airbase were subjected to a bombing run, the space might have been badly cratered from the other bombs before the dud hit. Then the runway got repaired and the bomb was paved over…
Metal detector, a bomb should have been detected, even before more modern tech. Though there may be so much metal in the ground that finding the live bomb would be difficult.
I am pretty convinced it has been known of for quite awhile, especially with the advent of ground-penetrating detection and mapping systems. It was far cheaper and convenient to whistle past the graveyard.
Not sure that’s so, costs money to scan with GP detectors, whether it’s by air or on the ground. But where there’s one dud they may be another, they may want to spend the yen for this site and a few other places that got bombed in WWII.
I know in London they occasionally find a WWII bomb when excavating a building site and in France farmers still occasionally discover a WWI bomb.
Unfortunately I don’t think it’s as easy to GP map through city infrastructure so any cities that have undiscovered unexploded ordnance – sucks to be them.
Who knows? They always seemed to wash up on Gilligan’s Island too.
“As God is my witness, I thought bombs could float!”
How did the Japanese engineers doing the runway construction fail to notice a *bomb* when constructing the runway after so many years? Normally aviation facilities engineers are the most careful out there…
It was probably paved over when the Japanese Navy repaired the strip in 1944.
Most honorable American-san say build runway here.
Because the random schmuck they hired to walk around the field decided that it wasn’t worth the minimum wage and quit.
Now that’s what I call a delay fuse!
People have this weird idea that a ‘dud’ bomb or mine is magically safe. It’s not. The full amount of explosives are still there in the bomb, it just didn’t trigger. So if it gets the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) conditions, it can and WILL explode.
from what I am told, there are quite a few in northern France from WW1 & WW2
The wife and I went sailing around Denmark & Germany (through the Kiel Canal) in 2019. We tied up next to a weird looking Danish navy ship. So, I introduced myself to one of the sailors and asked what kind of ship it was. It was a bomb disposal ship. It’s outfitted with MADs (like what we use to detect subs underwater) and specialty sonar and it spends the year looking for unexploded WWII ordnance…and finds a LOT of it every year. They’ve even found WWI mustard gas shells. They apparently have similar land-based units that do the same thing. The ground is so soft in that part of Europe (probably not unlike where that airport sits), that these 500-lb would simply bury themselves meters-deep into the soil and sit there until some unsuspecting farmer or developer hit it with machinery.
“Quite a few” is quite an understatement –
The zone rouge (English: red zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War.
The zone rouge was defined just after the war as “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.
Each year, numerous unexploded shells are recovered from former WWI battlefields in what is known as the iron harvest. According to the Sécurité Civile, the French agency in charge of the land management of Zone Rouge, 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) of soil in the worst areas.
There’s a Mark Felton video about the German air-dropped “butterfly bombs”, and they’re still turning up. They’re like twice the size of a hand grenade.
Yup. most times the bomb didn’t go off because the detonator was damaged, the explosives inside are still just fine. All it takes is for the triggering mechanism to degrade to the point that it fires, or some external factor to trigger it. Likely they’ll never know what caused it to blow at this particular time.
I wouldn’t say the explosives are “fine.” The problem is that a lot of high explosives will still go boom, but get flaky/sensitive as they deteriorate. It might not even require the detonator to go off. A footfall that it wouldn’t even have noticed 50 years ago is now enough to make the bomb go kablooie.
Obviously Global Warming.
When was the last time you heard of a 1000 year old cannonball exploding during the destruction of a hedgerow in Saxony?
Time marches on at an ever-increasing rate. Five years from now unexploded ordinance will consist of lithium-ion batteries strewn all about as cast-off detritus of a Boolean age of X(Y)² where X is the investment or porportion, Y is the integer or amount of applied change and squaring the result is the derivative of investment in time.
The more things change the faster they revert to the origin, as the double pendulum that is now losing momentum can no longer be chaotic.
1024 was before the introduction of cannon to europe by a few hundred years, and even longer before they started using explosive shells.
Also, I’m pretty sure the amount of unexploded ordinance left after a war is more akin to a form of radiactive decay with some amount being found or detonating every year the rate of depletion of unexploded bombs goes down over time.
Nice math but you are way under-estimating just how many bombs were dropped during the War.
“World War II ended more than 79 years ago. But remnants of the intense airstrikes across Japan keep surfacing occasionally. The Self-Defense Forces reported that during the fiscal year 2023 alone, they disposed of 2,348 bombs, weighing a total of 41 tons.”
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/travel-news/japans-miyazaki-airport-shuts-after-wwii-era-bomb-explosion-87-flights-cancelled/articleshow/113876737.cms
A timely reminder that if you don’t want to be dealing with this for the next hundred years, don’t piss off the sort of people who have access to the “arsenal of liberty.” And that includes Israel.
There’s no I in team, and curiously, nor in ordnance.
I don’t think they can be so sure the public has nothing to worry about
They didn’t know this one was there
I so much want to insert a clip from “Falling Hare” where Bugs Bunny meets the Gremlin, who is pounding the nose of a bomb with a giant sledgehammer, and tells him, “To make these block-buster bombs go off, you have to hit them JUUUUUST right.”
Has Harris-Biden apologized yet?
iran did it!
Russia did it. They were bored because they had run out of their own pipelines.
Long fuse…
Hill 60 at Messines ridge has entered the chat…
This story makes me want to place some dad jokes in capsules in random places for people to find long after my number gets called.
US dud bomb rate in WWII was about 12%.