Butterfly Bomb - Use

Use

Butterfly bombs were first used against Ipswich in 1940, but were also dropped on Grimsby and Cleethorpes in June 1943, amongst various other targets in the UK. They were subsequently used against Allied forces in the Middle East. The British Government deliberately suppressed news of the damage and disruption caused by butterfly bombs in order not to encourage the Germans to keep using them.

On October 28, 1940 some butterfly bombs that had incompletely armed themselves were discovered in Ipswich by British ordnance technicians Sergeant Cann and 2nd Lieutenant Taylor. By screwing the arming rods back into the fuzes (i.e. the unarmed position) the two men were able to recover safe examples to reverse engineer.

The SD2 saw use in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941. Twenty to thirty aircrews had been picked to drop SD2s and SD10s (10 kg submunitions) on key Soviet airfields, a flight of three aircraft being assigned to each field. The purpose of these early attacks was to cause disruption and confusion as well as to preclude dispersion of Soviet planes until the main attack was launched. It was reported that Kampfgeschwader 51 had lost 15 aircraft due to accidents with the SD2s, nearly half of the total Luftwaffe losses that day.

The last recorded death from a German butterfly bomb in England occurred on November 27, 1956, over 11 years after the Second World War ended: Flight Lieutenant Herbert Denning of the RAF was examining an SD2 at the "Upminster bomb cemetery" (some remote sandpits situated East of RAF Hornchurch, where EOD experimental and research work took place) when it detonated. He died of shrapnel and blast injuries at Oldchurch Hospital the same day.

Deaths have also been recorded on the Island of Malta as late as 1981 when Paul Gauci, a 41-year-old Maltese man, died after welding a butterfly bomb to a metal pipe and using it as a mallet, thinking it was a harmless can. The latest find of such a bomb was on 28 October 2009, by an 11-year-old boy in a secluded valley close to a heavily bombarded airfield. This bomb was safely detonated on-site by the Armed Forces of Malta.