ALMOST A year after it ended in Europe, the fallout from the second World War was still frontpage news. Among them on this day in 1946 were reports of US plans to keep Germany and Japan disarmed, instructions to Americans to eat less to provide more food for the rest of the world, and the evidence of Julius Streicher, the fiercely anti-Semitic founder of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, the city he had once ruled.
The London Letter in The Irish Times, a long-time daily feature in the paper written by its staff journalists in London, found an element of nostalgia about the Blitz already settling in around the story of an unexploded bomb near Buckingham Palace:
A little less than a year after the end of the war in Europe, two or three hundred of the bombed, blasted, rocketed, doodlebugged and generally battered British people came to St James’s Park to hear a bomb go off. Deep down under the soil of the park, not far from Buckingham Palace, the 1,000lb German bomb, familiarly known as Annie, had lain doggo ever since the distant night when she fell from the sky.
The bomb disposal men drained the lake, and sank deep shafts before they could pry out her hiding-place. Then, calmly facing death in action all these months after action has officially ended, they set to work to rid London of Annie.
In the course of a little scientific prodding – and let anyone who wants to know just what that is like read the hair-raising account in Mr Nigel Balchin’s novel, The Small Back Room – Annie suddenly started to tick. The bomb disposal men had, of course, the secret clock-stopping device for time-bombs which was perfected in 1940, and used with success throughout the air raids. But they could not apply it, because Annie was upside down, and the fuse was inaccessible without a lot more excavation. Therefore, they roped off the park, and announced that if Annie had not gone off of her own accord by 7pm on Friday they would detonate her themselves.
That is why a couple of hundred Londoners were gathered in the park on Friday evening, standing meekly behind an improvised barrier of green park chairs and gazing at a line of men far away across the dry mud of the lake. They felt a friendly interest in Annie, their tame bomb. The occasion seemed to stir in them a faint nostalgia and a desire to reminisce about more stirring times – “Remember that night down at the Surrey Docks: you couldn’t tell if they were dropping in front or behind . . .”
None of us could see the lieutenant and the sergeant scrambling down the shaft to lay their chunks of gun-cotton on Annie’s ominously-ticking flanks. We could not feel the moment of tense fear or the relief as they climbed out again and headed for cover. We could not see them jab home the triggers to detonate the charges. Somebody said: “Ten past, they’re late.”
Under our feet the asphalt heaved as if a wave had rolled underneath it. A bang hit the sky and rang back. From the trees the pigeons flapped out and wheeled in agitation. The crowd held its breath for a second and then, as the line of men far across the lake broke and moved, it realised that the show was over. And from behind me spoke the voice of Britain: “Well,” it said, “it didn’t make much of a noise.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1946/0430/Pg005.html#Ar00508