the dive master has run out of search engines on the subject and i’m now appealing to the dope on his behalf for answers.
he is a student of world war two history who has pretty extensive knowledge of the war’s events, but this one has us both stumped. he is trying to recall the details of an explosion that occurred during the course of the war. i remember reading about it, but my grasp of the facts is no better.
he believes it occurred somewhere in the pacific theater on an island to a japanese torpedo depot which was up on a hill. the entrance had steel doors on it. a sherman tank fired a round through the steel doors, which detonated the entire dump.
the explosion was dramatic and destructive, on a par with the port arthur explosion in texas some years later. it was believed to be the largest non-nuclear explosion up until that time. it took the entire top of the mountain off.
pretty sketchy, i know, but please, dopers, put on your thinking caps and give the man some answers if you can. many thanks in advance!
Nothing fits in the Wikipedia list of largest artificial non-nuclear explosions:
BTW, that one lists the Halifax blast as the largest. That one, which was in 1917, the Port Arthur explosion, or the Texas City explosion are the ones usually cited as “largest non-nuclear man made explosion”. Are you sure you are not conflating the account of Heligoland with something else? Heligoland is listed as the largest single explosive detonation in history, and probably also qualifies as the largest INTENTIONAL non-nuclear explosion. The Royal Navy was attempting to obliterate an island (it didn’t work):
ETA:
Fauld is on the Wiki list, too. Doesn’t really fit either.
“An M4 Sherman tank fired a shell into a sealed tunnel suspected of harboring enemy soldiers, but which instead contained tons of stored ammunition. The subsequent tremendous explosion threw the sixty-eight thousand pound tank several dozen feet, killed four of its crew and forty-eight other U.S. soldiers and wounded more than a hundred.”
This explosion is not to be confused by the Jap ammo dump detonated by the
USS Tennessee during shore bombardment of Namur, which killed almost an entire battalion of US soldiers.
The film footage that survived the explosion, even though the photographer did not, showed the Sherman tank on a dirt road climbing a mountain/hill, turn left 90 degrees, and about 100 yards ahead were the steel doors.
Japs were firing small arms at the tank and soldiers; the tank returned fire. The doors were pierced by the tank round which detonated the torpedos stored inside.
The massive explosion sent the tank flying over the edge and killed everyone. The camera with the film footage was found intact, showing what happened.
Though not listed in Wikipedia, according to what I read at the time, the destruction of an entire Chinese mountain to make way for the flight path into Macau’s new airport topped Heligoland. I believe it was around the size of Hiroshima, but completely TNT-based. I was in Hong Kong when it happened (1992/3), which is 45 miles away, and the building I was working in shook like it was an earthquake.
Here is a newsreel that appears to recount this event (begins at about 1:05). Though it doesn’t show the explosion, it shows a tank that has been flipped over by the blast. However, in this report, the blast is blamed on suicidal Japanese soldiers inside.