Divers Tried To Defuse Poland’s Largest WWII Bomb – But Then Disaster Struck

A massive bomb is discovered in a busy city. The residents fear for their lives. They flee their homes and take shelter in a mass evacuation center. Yet this isn’t Europe at the height of WWII. It’s 2020, and experts are doing everything they can to try and defuse the Tallboy explosive. BANG! Just like that, the bomb goes off – leaving both the ground and the team shaking.

Shockingly, the bomb had been hiding in plain sight for 75 years – hauntingly close to the people living in the Polish city of  Świnoujście. It was dropped in WWII, when Britain’s famed Dambuster bomber squadron launched a brutal attack on a German ship moored off the coast. And while the majority of the explosives hit their mark, this one sank – undetonated – to the bottom of the canal.

You’d think living near any type of dormant explosive would be enough to jangle the nerves. But this is no ordinary weapon that threatened the population of Świnoujście. Beneath the waters of the Piast Canal lurked a sleeping Tallboy – a device popularly known as an earthquake bomb. And believe us, the explosive is suitably named.

The Allies dropped more than 850 Tallboys on enemy targets during WWII – wreaking widespread devastation across Europe. Yet not all of the bombs exploded on impact. And in 2019 one was discovered during work on the Piast Canal, which sits beside the German border. Military divers then began the painstaking process of defusing the bomb – though, as we know, the process didn’t go to plan.

Yes, three quarters of a century after it was dropped, the bomb beneath the Piatz Canal exploded – just as the experts were working to defuse it. And in the aftermath of the devastating eruption, there was one question on everybody’s lips: how did the device remain so powerful after so many years?