Around the start and runway of Eindhoven Airport, a large search has started for non-depleted aircraft bombs from the Second World War. Specialists are looking for bombs on and around the airbase. That is not surprising when you see how often the airport has been bombed by friend and foe. It is a site with many faces and surprises.
“Thousands of bombs fell here. And a part was blind -goer, which means that the projectile has never exploded,” says Adjutant Ton. (Due to safety, no surname is mentioned by defense staff, ed.) He points to the display case. It contains miniature models of German bombers, a Heinkel and Dornier.
Perhaps that was the devices that the very first bombs alternated in Eindhoven. Already on May 10, 1940, the first day of the Second World War in the Netherlands. And so it went on for years.
Residential area
Ton shows a map of ‘Fliegerhorst Eindhoven’, as the German Luftwaffe called it. The airport itself was somewhere else in the war, more to the east, where the residential area of Meerhoven is now. In the construction of that neighborhood, some twenty years ago, excavators brought out one blind -goer one after the other.
The area where the current airbase is now located was also used in full during the war for, among other things, storage of ammunition. Ton knows the site as a former land traffic leader and Vogelman (someone who monitors and drives the birds on the jobs, ed.) Like no other. He drives a ride on the roller track, they would now say the taxi job. “Here it is still like in 1944.”
He points to blackberry bushes. There is a German practice bomb of concrete. There are more. “There are about five hundred broken practice bombs further on,” he says.
On the south side of the base, the silence is interrupted by an airplane that rises. “This forest is untouched. All Salamanders species do one but also all owl species. You will also find the wasp thief, Havik, De Buzzerd and Kestrel.” Ton is barely talking or a bird of prey circling. “A calling buzzard”.
Americans
The Allied bombing became more severe in the course of the war. Such as a week after D-Day, mid-June 1944. Sixty American liberators appeared in the airspace. They threw around eighty thousand kilos of bombs in the northeast corner of the airport.
But the Germans had hid their things well under the oak and birch in the wider area. Five German bunks have never been demolished. “Here, for example, the Germans hid the ammunition of their on -board weapons,” says Ton.
August 1944 was extreme. During an attack, 120 British devices threw their bombs, in Strijp and around the Trudo Church. This month alone, hundreds of thousands of kilos of bombs fell at the airport. “Horrible and unimaginable, just the sound. I don’t even want to imagine it,” says Ton.
Bomb craters
It must have been devastating. The Allies made aerial photos afterwards. More than a thousand craters are visible on one of those photos. The airport seemed like a moon landscape. According to the history books, German aircraft crews had to close the craters with a shovel after such an attack.
When the Allied liberators approached, the Germans destroyed everything and left. The Allies discovered 1650 bomb craters on the site. Blind people sometimes dropped seven meters deep into the ground, not visible with the naked eye.
Salamanders
After the liberation of the south it became a lot quieter. But on New Year’s Day 1945 the last major air raid of the Luftwaffe was and the airport was last under heavy fire. The war changed the site permanently. “Now you still see bomb craters on satellite cards”.
Ton drives to a fire pond from after the liberation, close to the new track. The pond was laid out by the English. “It’s full of salamanders here.”
There are not only traces of the Second World War. On a winding road is a gun setup from the Cold War, also with bunker.
This site houses many more secrets. “So here is a burial mound. Eleven in total. This one is from 1750 BC.” According to connoisseurs, these are the best -preserved burial mounds in the country. Perfectly protected, such as on all defense areas. Because nobody can reach it. “
You can find aircraft bombs everywhere
Eindhoven airport, Volkel and Woensdrecht had a hard time in the war, but not as bad as Gilze-Rijen. “Of all the Luftwaffe flying fields in the Netherlands, Gilze-Rijen acquired the dubious honor to get the greatest tonnage allied trees over him,” the book says ‘Airports in Wartime’ by Defense Institute NIMH.
Bombers also dumped their deadly weapons in other places. At intersections, military convoys and trains, or if they got into trouble. That explains that those blind people are sometimes in the weirdest places. Until they pop up during excavation work. Like Gilze-Rijen, in 2012, that was three heavy thousand pounds. And in 2015 at Eindhoven Air Base.
Sometimes they are dismantled. This can be done by removing the igniter (s). The bomb can then simply be drained safely. Sometimes the bomb is too unstable and is blown up on the spot under a large mountain of sand.
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