Why German Tankers Called This 'Ugly' British Bomb 'The Gammon of Death скачать в хорошем качестве

Why German Tankers Called This 'Ugly' British Bomb 'The Gammon of Death

September 18th, 1944 — Arnhem. Major Peter Waddy leans out a second-story window as a German Mark IV Panzer rolls underneath. The commander’s hatch is open. Waddy drops something that looks like a woman’s stocking filled with clay. Three seconds later, the tank explodes from the inside. The weapon was the Gammon Bomb — a fabric bag you filled with plastic explosive. Light, flexible, and brutally simple. And in close-quarters urban fighting, it turned British paratroopers into tank killers. The Gammon Bomb existed because its predecessor, the Sticky Bomb, was a disaster — fragile glass, leaking nitroglycerin, adhesive that stuck to uniforms instead of armor. Troops hated it. Captain R.S. Gammon fixed the problem. His bomb used a stretchy stockinette bag and Composition C, a stable plastic explosive. You chose the charge size yourself — a small burst for infantry, a full 900 grams for tanks. Screw on the all-ways fuze, throw, and the bomb armed itself in flight. Impact meant instant detonation. It entered service in 1943 and made its name on D-Day and at Arnhem. Paratroopers dropped them from rooftops, stairwells, and upper floors. German tanks, with thin roof armor and open hatches, were perfect targets. Waddy’s famous kill — dropping a Gammon Bomb straight into a turret — remains one of the most dramatic anti-tank moments of the war. A 30-ton Panzer destroyed by something that looked like a stocking. Ugly? Improvised? Absolutely. But it worked. And in the streets of Arnhem, a bag of plastic explosive was just as deadly as any tank destroyer.