Butterfly bomb - nasty

there were contact, delayed action and anti-handling versions, and duds of all three. Fortunately they never knew how successful it was - if enough had been dropped on the crops it could have seriously impeded the harvest.
Even into the 1950s they could be found hanging in the trees. When the Danger UXB series was shown in the '70s a whole new crop of people found out what they had as a souvenir.
 
Read a book on the battle of britain that mentioned them. Had some sort of anti tampering device in them that meant you pretty much had to blow them up in place. There was an interesting first hand account of a kid who had one land in their house, and they were moved out so it could be detonated, and they didn't have a wall on one part of their house or a ceiling on their kitchen for the rest of the war.
 
From what I read, some of them had a jiggle switch that used mercury in there, allegedly, defusing them involved building a clay dam around them, and pouring liquid nitrogen in there, which supposedly froze the mechanism, allowing them to remove the fuse, I would rather take a rifle and shoot at it until it went off from about 100 yards away. :eek:

Edit: does not sound likely, I would imagine liquid nitrogen would be a scarce commodity in wartime England.
 
My grade 12 history class took a trip to the Military Museum in Calgary. They showed us a inert bomb. It looked like a butterfly, and was a bright green. The sole purpose was to look like a toy so kids would pick them up and lose an arm/leg. They were not really powerful enough to blow a person up, just to maim the person. They had a fuse that was armed by shock, so they would drop them out of a plane, they would hit the ground and the shock of hitting the ground would arm them. They would also flutter down, like a butterfly. Brutal, really brutal.
 
The Israelis used quite a lot of CBU on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and these things were a problem for years after. They were small enough to get moved around by the heavy winter rains draining down from the high terrain around Mt Hermon.

We had a couple of vehicles detonate ones which had collected in puddles on the tracks and could not be seen. This required vehicle and foot patrol routes to be re-prooved as mine free every spring.The Syrian populace suffered considerably from these as well with people being killed and maimed and numerous sheep and donkeys being killed.
 
fat tony said:
WTF is the use of the landmines ban when our guys are getting killed by ieds :mad: :jerkit: the treaty is not worth a fcuk. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Terrorists don't observe, honor or follow treaties. Personally, I think these sort of treaties that can limp-#### our war fighting ability are BS. Hit them hard with everything you have.
 
Having Canada signing on to the landmine ban agreement as engineered by "landmine" Lloyd Axworthy and his liberal cronies was nothing more than a self-deceiving publicity stunt.

Landmines are a terrible and insideous thing,but they do exist and can produce a great tactical benefit on the battlefield.If using mines in connection with other obstacles in a defensive position, or employing air and artillery delivered mines to support your scheme of manoever in the attack offers any possibility of achieving the objective and saving our own troops in the process,then they should,and no doubt, will be used. The US and some of our potential adversaries are obviously more realistic about this.
 
Well, in the unlikely (?) scenario in which Canada is invaded in force by the foreign devils, the USA ( I know, Canadians should be doing this job) :redface: will be there with cluster bombs and mine dispensers, imo - we all know that plans for the defence of Canada are quite a dark secret (thank the lord for that).
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom