erm, i don't think they need to be reminded who dropped the bombs on them...

What kind of really ignorant moran doesn't know that Iraq and Iran and Al-Qaeda dropped the bombs on London during 9/11?

I think they planted this bomb story, as a way of papering over the WMD lies. That Saddam guy was way crafty.

Maybe the Brits don't, but this was in the NYT, and some of us over here surely do need to be reminded...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/education/27history.html

Typical pro-Nazi media bias. You know that liberal = organic food = Nazis, right? It's true because a guy wrote it in a book.

Hell, it's just bad writing. Not everything's a conspiracy.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aj2kKlLthb1g&refer=uk

Muslims dropped it, Dan.

This happens all the time in England and Germany, really nothing newsworthy

I didn't say it was a conspiracy...

And I love you, Fnarf.

Can it be automatically assumed that it was dropped by the Luftwaffe? If so, then perhaps "dropped by Germany" is unnecessary. Sort of like assuming that a bomb ticking means it might explode.

"In the meantime, invading and rebuilding England will not only free the English people, it will also make the royals aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on England will make it clear to our friends and enemies in Middle Europe (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves."

Dan Savage, July 31, 1939.

The British can be subtle. When I was in London the Tube train was delayed. A voice came on the sound system and said: "There is a body under the train". Someone had killed themselves. The announcement was a recording. The general reaction was "oh, well these things happen."

As John Cleese (in Fawlty Towers) said when he had Germans visiting,

"Don't mention the war!"

Why would it have to be pointed out that this was a German bomb?I mean,that's pretty much junior highschool history,innit?Or am I witnessing an American desperately insisting:"See?Other nations throw bombs as well!Other nations start wars,too! It's not just us!!!"Only that was before any of us were even born.As Jon Stewart said at the beginning of the Dan-Savage-approved war in Iraq:"You know this war is a bad idea when GERMANY doesn't want to fight."(And no,Dan,if you can't get over middle-of-fast-century,I'm not getting over Dan-Savage-five-years-ago.)

Oh,Christ!"middle-of-LAST-century"!

I love you too, Dan. Even (especially?) when you're wrong sometimes. Heardja on the radio today, talking about going to Heaven.

So, who the fuck was it? The filthy A-rabs or the goddamn nazis?

ANSWER ME!!!!!

Oh come now Dan, its impolite to point fingers at the imperial aggressors of yore. After all, 60 years from now when they find an old US scud missile in Baghdad, the American people wont want to be reminded of the war any more than they want to be reminded of it now.

You're all terribly, terribly wrong. It was Barack Hussein Obama and his terrorist allies what done dropped that bomb there.

And the British, lest we forget, remember everything.

2,000+ lbs. sounds like a lot for a "bomb" dropped by the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. So I did a little noodling and found out, yeah, 250 kg/551 lbs. is about as big as German aerial bombs got, and was about all a Heinkel He-111 bomber could carry.

So it's most likely a V-2 rocket warhead: 977 kg/2,150 lbs. That started in the Fall of 1944.

I bring this up because, well, since we're making jokes about terrorism, this was a terror weapon. The Germans really couldn't hit anything on purpose with it, so they aimed for London, which was doable. The missile came out of the sky from 55 miles up, at 4x the speed of sound, nobody heard it coming, then it burrowed into the earth about 20 feet and the ton of explosives went off, seeming like an earthquake to the people around the block that was demolished.

I mention all this because the terrorist behind all this, Wernher Von Braun, uh, yeah, he worked for us after the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Operational_history

Hey, it's not like he was an A-rab. They're irrational beasts and can't be reasoned with. But this guy, he made himself useful! Rocket to the moon! etc etc.

(Nothing I write above implies that burning German cities to the ground wasn't a li'l terroristic, too. We were all crazy then.)

I'm an American living in Dresden, Germany. About a month ago they found an unexploded bomb and evacuated several buildings and closed nearby roads while it was defused. There was also no mention of where the bomb came from - which I thought was strange because both US and British planes participated in the bombing of the city near the end of WWII.

Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down?

That's not my department.

On a serious note, I think it's something quite amazing and inspiring to look at the changes in Europe over the past 70 years. They still find bombs like that all over London, and all over Germany, every year. Yet today the two countries are close allies, and the E.U. has brought a level of cooperation and peace nearly unheard of human history. Germany is deeply committed to democracy and even pacifism; who'd have thought that 70 years ago? The changes are actually breath-taking, it you think about it. That bomb is only 70 years old, but it feels almost like 700.

Er...what's your point Dan? That the American Times readership might not know whose bomb that was without being told? Maybe they needed to be told what that ticking noise signified too.

I wouldn't read too much into this. The British are the masters of understatement--in the late 1940's the war was referred to as the "recent unpleasantness" (according to my father who was there at the time). They know perfectly well who dropped those bombs, but 60+ years later with Hitler dead and rotting in hell and modern Germany as a friendly ally committed to democracy, what's the point?

It's like in the "old days" in this country (the 1940s), you could wander about the countryside and find arrowheads. Further ironical examination of this matter, I'll leave to gentle reader's intellect.

I found it odd in a recent article about the weather that they neglected to mention the sun rose from the east. What? Does the sun just rise any which way it wants?

Another thought about those old bombs:
We're finding them now.
They might become... chemically unstable... as the decades go by, and go off by themselves? Ugh.

BTW, Dan, people in Vietnam continue to die from our dud bombs, too. Except in their case, it's because they're not necessarily bomb squad experts, but they are seeking out unexploded ordnance for the steel casing ($) and the high explosive (good for fishin'!)

Oh, and French farmers occasionally go kerblooie! from old landmines and unexploded ordnance... etc etc.

Last I head, about 400 bomb squad members in France have died since 1945. And they didn't even get to kiaa Juliette Binoche.

If anyone is interested in delving into the history of this topic, there was a great British TV mini-series released in 1979 called "Danger UXB" about teams of manly military men who specialized in defusing these things. Its available at Scarecrow for example. The lead was played by Anthony Andrews, just prior to his famous role of Sebastian Flyte in "Brideshead Revisited".

According to one Professor Bernard Quartermass, it was deliberately buried by Martians approximately five million yeas ago.