I read somewhere once about soldier in WWII who had a Japanese bomb dropped near him, that failed to detonate. Then the soldier noticed something about the bomb, perhaps words painted on it, which made him realize the bomb was made from metal from a car or truck he or his father used to own, that had been sold for scrap years before.
I could find nothing on Snopes, or urbanlegends.com, or even with Google.
I think this story was claimed to be true, but I cannot rule out that perhaps I read it in a work of fiction.
And it could have been German bomb, or even a war other than WWII.
My questions are:
Anybody else hear this story?
Is it possible? Would they make a bomb casing from scrap metal, without re-forging it and wiping out any distinguishing characteristics?
I’ve heard the story, with the variation that the beer can printing was still visible on the ordnance. As I recall, it was one of those cautionary tales being told against the opportunists and profiteers during the war. You never know who is going to try to make money off the scrap metal drives by selling it to Our Enemies.
I rejected it as untrue based upon the manufacturing process scrap metal goes through before it can be feformed.
My uncle used to joke about this subject. As a teenager he said he collected scrap metal to send to Japan. During WWII he was an anti-aircraft gunner on the Enterprise. He said that all the metal he collected as a kid was thrown back at him by the Japanese during the war.
Sounds like there was a specific effort before WWII some time to collect scrap for Japan. It give’s the story a bit of credence, I suppose. But there’s still the problem of the metal not being re-forged.
My dad’s uncle was in the US Navy during WWII, serving on a Navy scrap barge.
He said they used to take weekly loads of scrap metal collected at Victory scrap drives out to sea… and dump them. The drives were too successful, he said, but they just kept doing them for public morale. This may be just as apocryphal as the car door bombshell. I have no cite… except this one of Rita Hayworth after sacrificing her bumpers for Victory.
Yeah, the metal was melted down and made into bullets, planes, whatever. In answer to the OPs question, I don’t believe there would have been any way to identify a particular piece of metal as being from any particular place. My uncle was just commenting on the irony of collecting metal for Japan and then having it returned as bullets and bombs.
It was something like words that they had painted on it when it was part of the truck or car, that made it identifiable. As previously stated, I think it’s unlikely it wouldn’t have been re-forged, which makes me think this is legend.
I recall reading about something like this happening in world war one-
the british and the germans were both making artillery shells so quickly that sometimes household objects would be added to the casings as shrapnel without being melted down- silverware, clock gears, wind-up toys- even false teeth. These would explode over enemy lines, where the enemy would collect the scrap for use in their own shells-meaning that those objects might return to their original owners in a lethal manner.
Same thing happened in the civil war, where junk was used in cannons when grapeshot ran out
That raises the possibility that what ID’ed the bomb was not the casing, but perhaps some chunk of shrapnel. That neatly sidesteps the re-forging issue.
Appears to be a first-hand account of such an event here:
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TSgt. Allan #14
Letter #14 “Destination New Guinea”
The anti-personnel bomb ole’ Tojo used appeared to be a regular 50 pounder, but the nose fuse was activated by a three or four foot long “broomstick,” which, in mental image, made it look like a swordfish. The “stick” was the first thing to touch the ground, and the fool thing exploded about eight or ten inches above the surface it hit. It left a slight depression in the ground, about six inches deep and about three or four feet in diameter. All the shrapnel was above ground, and was mostly old nails, bolts and nuts, rocks, other odd pieces of scrap steel, and, of course, razor blades. In one little hole I once found a small piece of steel, with "U.S. Navy"stamped on it! These things would cut a person’s legs off if he was not in a trench or his head off even if he was in a trench with his head sticking up looking around at what was going on! I imagine all that iron and steel was sent to Japan (via our scrap) in the years between the wars!
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