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  • To most people, mushroom clouds mean nuclear explosions:

  • the threat of radioactive fallout,

  • of mutually assured destruction and of the end of the world.

  • But they don't have to be:

  • any large enough explosion will cause a mushroom cloud.

  • And it's happened in Britain: right here.

  • This crater was once RAF Fauld, an old mining operation

  • converted to an underground bomb storage depot for the Royal Air Force.

  • Underground storage was meant to be safer:

  • one of the problems with munitions dumps is that the enemy

  • just needs to hit them with one bomb and the whole lot goes up.

  • This site seemed perfect: but there was a problem.

  • Because this was built in the 1930s for small bombs,

  • the sort that one person can carry,

  • the sort that you can move on a conveyor belt,

  • the sort that the Army can fire from a field gun across the trenches.

  • That's why these old quarries with all their tunnels and caverns were perfect.

  • But then the Second World War moved on,

  • and bombing became a job for the Air Force,

  • and the bombs got bigger and bigger and bigger, fast: half a ton, one ton, two tons.

  • And the war effort needed many, many more bombs than had been predicted.

  • Rapid changes in supply and demand meant that the underground depots were filled

  • far beyond anything like their original capacity.

  • By the end of 1944, the men here at RAF Fauld were storing stacks of high incendiary bombs

  • outside the mine until they could find space inside.

  • There was a war on.

  • They had to make it work.

  • Monday, 27th November, 1944.

  • The commanding officer was on leave.

  • The officer responsible for the underground stores was also on leave --

  • and it was his deputy's day off too.

  • Everyone who was down in the depot and in charge was inexperienced and massively overworked.

  • According to the official inquiry,

  • someone tried to remove a detonator from a live bomb with a brass chisel.

  • And brass chisels cause sparks.

  • In Morocco, 1500 miles away, seismographs recorded what felt like a distant earthquake.

  • A hundred miles away, people heard a rumble carried on the wind.

  • Four miles away, a shock wave blasted out windows.

  • And here: a mushroom cloud rose into the sky.

  • 4,000 tonnes of bombs had gone up in one terrible chain reaction,

  • the largest explosion ever in the British Isles.

  • This crater was once a hill, with a farmhouse on top of it:

  • no trace of that farmhouse, or the people who lived there, was ever found.

  • The bombs that hadn't immediately exploded were thrown into the air

  • and rained down for miles around, along with millions of tons of debris.

  • A nearby dam collapsed, sending floodwaters down into factories and houses in a nearby valley.

  • The exact death toll will never be known; at least 60, perhaps 90.

  • It took months before all the bodies were recovered, and some were never found.

  • And in the Air Force reports, held classified for years and years after the explosion,

  • along with the names of the dead and page after page

  • itemising every bit of the destruction, there is this phrase:

  • "columns of black smoke and debris rose in gigantic mushroom form".

  • When you're rushed, when you're inexperienced, anyone can get complacent,

  • anyone can cut corners, anyone can make a mistake.

  • Even working with high explosives.

  • Now slowly, over years, the crater was cleared and reclaimed; decades later,

  • what remains is an odd scar on the landscape.

  • About half the bomb store actually managed to survive the explosion;

  • and while the bombs were removed, there are still tunnels and storage rooms hidden under the crater.

  • But after careless explorers started damaging the site,

  • all the known entrances were filled in.

  • And given the warnings about unexploded bombs still in the crater,

  • I'm not about to climb this fence and go any further.

  • There is one little interesting note, though,

  • right at the end of the story:

  • through the late 40s and the 50s,

  • the American military kept asking for records and details of the explosion.

  • How big was it, exactly?

  • What was the damage to the nearby land, and was it by earthquake or by blast wave?

  • What happens if you, essentially,

  • detonate something with the yield of a tactical nuclear bomb underground?

  • Britain never answered.

  • And America went on to make its own mushroom clouds.

  • [Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]

To most people, mushroom clouds mean nuclear explosions:

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イギリスを覆うキノコ雲RAFファウルとハンバリー火口 (The Mushroom Cloud Over Britain: RAF Fauld and the Hanbury Crater)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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