Spitfire redux: The WWII guns firing after 70 years buried in peat

[Melvadius]

In an interesting addendum to the story discussed here a few month back as the BBC reports Irish military armourers have apparently stripped down the six Browning machine guns recovered from this Spritfire crash and by reassembling the best preserved bits managed to fire one of them again. A real testament to their skill and determination as much as the original quality of the weapons build.

 

NB The BBC article includes video of the test firing.

 

An excavation at the site of a 1941 Spitfire crash in a bog in the Irish Republic uncovered huge, remarkably preserved chunks of plane and six Browning machine guns. After 70 years buried in peat could they be made to fire? They certainly could, writes Dan Snow.

 

...continued

[caldrail]

Peat does tend to preserve things but I'm a little dubious about stories like this, especially after someone reported recovering a WW2 pilot from his crashed plane in a peat bog.

 

In technical terms, the original quality of the gun is not necessarily important. Much depends on circumstance and a poor quality weapon can survive if conditions are right. For a recovered weapon to function all that matters is that the metal is relatively free of corrsion and that the action of the gun has not been cold welded, corroded, or damaged by the initial event (or indeed events afterward). My worry would be that the strength of the gun had been compromised by shock loads - that will cause the weapon to fragment explosively when fired. I wouldn't trust the period ammunition at all.

 

That said, there were some weapons in WW2 that I wouldn't trust fresh from the factory, such as the pressed steel german replicas of the Sten gun (MP3008)

[Melvadius]

In this case the pilot ejected and landed safely so finding him wasn't an issue.

 

As the video points out the Irish armourers cobbled together one gun from the best preserved (ie undamaged) bits of the others and then used modern ammunition in a remote firing set-up with the operators hiding in a slit trench behind the weapon as it was test fired.

 

Possibly not quite the image of a gun firing again after 70 years buried in a peat bog but probably the best that could be expected in the circumstances after the plane impacted with the ground at several hundred miles an hour.

 

NB you could see the deterioration to the original ammo belts in the video.

[caldrail]

Talking about ammunition, the's a ship load of it in the Thames Estuary. A wartime cargo vessel moored outside of London and apparently foundered in bad weather. It's still there today, blocking a river channel, full of decaying WW2 munitions. Experts believe that a detonation would be as powerful as a minor atom bomb. I think that assumes that every shell will explode at exactly the same time mind you, but it's a worry nonetheless.

[GhostOfClayton]

Talking about ammunition, the's a ship load of it in the Thames Estuary. A wartime cargo vessel moored outside of London and apparently foundered in bad weather. It's still there today, blocking a river channel, full of decaying WW2 munitions. Experts believe that a detonation would be as powerful as a minor atom bomb. I think that assumes that every shell will explode at exactly the same time mind you, but it's a worry nonetheless.

 

It's a serious concern. Anyone who has walked around the crater caused by the Fauld Explosion would be gobsmacked by the size of the thing. And this was probably caused by a spark (some 'bright spark' had decided it would be a good idea to remove a detonator from a live bomb using a brass chisel rather than a wooden batten!) Anyway the resultant explosion was heard in London, and the crater is HEE-OOJ!

[caldrail]

Big bangs aren't anything new. When Nelson caught the french fleet napping off the coast of Egypt in 1789, one of Napoleons flagships caught fire, and resulting explosion from both magazines stuffed full of gunpowder was heard fifty miles away. The entire battle stopped for ten minutes because everyone present was completely stunned by wwhat they'd witnessed. The rudder of the ship, a sizeable slab of wooden planks weighing more than a ton, was found on the sea bed five miles away. That poem "The boy stood on the burning deck"? That comes from this incident.

Edited November 15, 2011 by caldrail